Saturday 6/30/01
I did this fan modification to my Power Mac G4, and it's noticeably quieter. Another thing I might do is actually cut out the fan grille -- the turbulence of the air passing through the cut-out slots can cause vibrations, which are amplified by the "sounding board" of the metal bracket.
Ann Hell (also known as Angel Ortega) has some interesting MP3s of goth-industrial type music. The diverse list of influences (from Marc Almond to Sinead O'Connor to NIN to Claude Debussy) is impressive in and of itself, but really, the music is all you need to hear. Of the sixteen tracks availble for download, I particularly enjoyed "Save Me from Heaven," in which religion becomes a newscast read by a robot. Really.
Entirely subjective roundup of recent interesting software releases for Mac: Mozilla 0.9.2 (with "top 25" bugs fixed); iCab 2.5.2 (with improvements to JavaScript and CSS); MP3 Rage 3.5 (fixes for Napster protocol problems); Outlook 2001 (golden master release); IPNetSentry 1.1.3 (lpd and SOCKS triggers for intrusion prevention tool); Ogg Drop 1.0a1 (drag-and-drop Ogg Vorbis audio encoder).
Friday 6/29/01
The recut version of Apocalypse Now due to be released to theaters this August is titled Apocalypse Now Redux. I thought this was silly because it's actually longer than the original version. But it turns out that redux doesn't meant what I thought it meant. Though it looks like "reduced," and I always assumed it had something of the same sense (maybe "in brief"), it actually means "brought back" or "returned." To discover that there's a mere two-syllable word you don't know the meaning of when you've been writing as long as I have... it's embarrassing.
Robert X. Cringely lives outside a DSL service area, so he found a willing person within the zone, bought them DSL, and set up a 10-kilometer AirPort (802.11b wireless Ethernet) connection from their house to his.
I first read Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was in college, well over a decade ago -- that was the last time, as well, so when I ran across it at Borders a few weeks ago I thought it might be time to revisit it. This time through, I was shocked by how much of the actual philosophy I had forgotten. The only real thing I remembered about it was the plot, in broad outline: that it involved a man and his son, a motorcycle trip, and, oh yeah, the Phaedrus character. (Stop here if you haven't read the book.) What is particularly interesting about my memory is that I thought that the revelation that Phaedrus was the narrator's former self came rather later in the book. The narrator's riding companions early in the book had completely fallen out of my mind, as had Phaedrus's re-awakening at the end.
The philosophy parts of the book were much more memorable this time around, since I've done some reading on that subject since the last time I read Zen. I'm not entirely sure what I think of it; I have very little patience with anything that can't be apprehended by the senses, and much of philosophy seems to me to be the sort of thing that can't be proven or disproven, so there's little reason to believe or disbelieve in any of it. Philosophical concepts may even so be useful tools for understanding the world around us, but they could also be useful tools for misunderstanding the world if you choose the wrong one to apply to the problem at hand. Still, I had to admire Pirsig's skill in weaving together the various threads of his narrative, and the ideas were thought-provoking. I think I'll check out the sequel next.
The edition of Zen I read has a new introduction in which he reveals that he made an error about the Greek meaning of "Phaedrus" (uncorrected in the actual text), along with a typeface change toward the end of the book that makes it clear that Phaedrus, Chris's true father, has returned. The book is up-to-date enough to mention a Web site which deals with what has come to be called the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ). Although Pirsig himself does not seem to be materially involved with the site, it nonetheless contains a number of interesting essays and links.
My good friend Dean Esmay is looking for a job. He's an excellent writer, manager, and trainer and has an MCSE. Somebody in the Midwest needs to snap this guy up, fast!
Thursday 6/28/01
If you're a Mac developer and don't yet have a CodWarrior shirt or mug, what the heck are you waiting for?
Some people at New York University have come up with a graphics technology they call image analogies. The basic idea is that you tell the software that a source image is "like" a result image, and it abstracts the differences between the two. The differences might be the effect of a simple filter like blurring or embossing, or you might "analogize" a painting against a blurred version of itself to extract the brushstroke information. After this has been done, you can then apply the abstracted analogy data to other images. While this has obvious implications for turning photographs into painted-looking "artwork" (they do have compelling examples based on a Van Gogh style, among others), it also has potential applications for resolution enhancement and even makes possible a completely novel technique the developers refer to as texture by numbers. In texture by numbers, the two comparison images are a photograph and a manually-created abstraction with primary colors corresponding to the important features (e.g. rivers) of the photograph. The extracted "difference" material is then applied to a second manually-created abstraction's matching primary colors, thus allowing you essentially to paint with textures. See, for example, this series, where the technique is used to twist an island into a pretzel. Best of all, the software (including source) is available for download, although the pre-compiled binaries are available only for Win32 and Linux.
I want this as a Photoshop filter. Now. (Props to Metaforage)
A CD-ROM containing eighty-two "hacks" written for the Hack Show at last week's MacHack conference (along with source code, papers, and presentations) is now available for purchase. The price is $19.95 (plus shipping); they'll begin shipping July 10. A "historical" CD containing 700MB worth of material from the fifteen previous conferences is also available for the same price.
Wednesday 6/27/01
Interarchy 5, the upcoming major update of a popular Mac FTP client (used in the maintenance of this very site), will include an "FTP in Finder" feature that makes FTP sites into icons on your Mac desktop, allowing you to manage them using tools like the Finder. Yes, it'll work with both "classic" Mac OS and Mac OS X. Thanks to MDJ for the tip-off.
When I started this site last week, I was a bit nervous about finding something to post every day. Today I've posted four separate times. Guess that worry was unfounded, eh?
Added a download page for things you can download from this site. Right now I've just got the recent CueCat decoder on it, but more will come soon.
I neglected to mention, in my note below about the recent improvement of my commute, that when it rains, all bets are off. And it was raining this morning. As a Midwest native, it seems logical to me that when you live in a place where it rains all the frickin' time, you might eventually learn how to drive in the rain, similar to how you eventually learn to drive in the snow if you live in Detroit. Apparently there is a flaw in this logic, but it beats me exactly where it is. Combined with Seattleites' natural propensity to disdain the use of their brakes until it is absolutely necessary to stop, their inability to drive in rain made the drive downtown more of an adventure than it needed to be.
Sigur Ros, however, goes well with rain. Another point of reference for their sound might be Cocteau Twins crossed with Bark Psychosis.
Interesting thread on MetaFilter about obesity. The thread started with a report in Nature that a human virus has been found that, when injected into chickens and mice, causes obesity. Obesity may in fact be contagious, although of course it may also have other causes. The thread, naturally, soon turned to discussion of social and political issues affecting overweight people. I've battled the bulge for years and this thread contains a lot of good posts from fellow travelers on that road.
Cat linked to me yesterday and posted about some CDs she bought that I recommended, so it's only fair to note here that she was the one who tipped me off about the new Afro-Celt Sound System disc, Volume 3: Further Into Time. This disc features the vocal talents of Peter Gabriel (on a bouncy tune that sounds a little as though he's ripping off his own melody for "Biko") and Robert Plant (on a track that has so far failed to make much of an impression on me). Nevertheless, this is very pleasant music to listen to on a drive to work, or sitting in front of a computer working on marketing collateral, which are the two modes in which I've experienced it so far. Recommended. As those who know me are aware, I need little excuse to buy a CD; I bought a Sigur Ros album with little more provocation than seeing Jason Kottke mention it recently. (That one's still getting under my skin, but in general I like it. My initial impression: sort of a cross between Radiohead and Godspeed You Black Emperor.)
Speaking of the drive to work, school's out in Seattle, and it has made a noticeable difference in the commute. I habitually go into the office around 10 AM to avoid as much of the rush as I can, but traffic has been noticeably smoother this week regardless. When I hit the downtown area at 9:45 I don't actually need to take the express lanes to avoid stop-and-go traffic. I'm easily saving six minutes a day (each way), which means I save about an hour per work week. Over the summer, I'll save more than an entire working day of traffic. The bad news is, it'll get worse when school starts up again in September.
Tuesday 6/26/01
I'm working on my AppleScript for posting to this site (and keeping the archives up-to-date). Some things may get a bit... odd... now and again. Do not adjust your set, they will return to normal shortly. (Yes, the script will be available when it's done.)
Completely true story #1. It happened a long time ago, back when I was
working at Quality Computers in Michigan.
I'm sitting in QC's video production suite fiddling with some graphics. Sam, the main video guy, has gone to answer nature's call. One of the guys from the warehouse walks up to the open door of the suite and says:
"Salmon?"
I just look at him blankly. He's not holding any salmon that I can see, so it's not an offer to share his food with me or anything.
"Salmon?" he repeats.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why he's asking me about fish. "What?"
After a few rounds of this -- him saying "Salmon?" and me asking "What?" and him getting progressively more annoyed with me -- he finally loses all patience and blurts out:
"IS SAM IN?"
"Oh. No, he's in the can."
Here's a brutally funny smackdown of the "Lady Marmalade" video (from the film Moulin Rouge, as performed by four female stars du jour), among other current MTV-era cultural artifacts. I like Baz Luhrman's films (at least, I enjoyed his Romeo + Juliet) and I plan to see Moulin Rouge, but damn, this was hilarious.
And here's Andy Ihnatko talking about MacHack. Ihnatko is one of my favorite technology columnists. He's got legitimate geek cred (he once used AppleScript to program a robot to chase his housemate's cat out of his room), and his humor is always spot-on. But while many other columnists would be content merely with being humorous, Ihnatko often displays geniune insight into the industry, and he has a beautifully lucid and lively writing style, which I sincerely envy.
Monday 6/25/01
Geez, I'm loquacious, aren't I? This one will be brief.
My friend Dean sent me an article today via e-mail with a subject line of "Now THIS is interesting." And damned if he wasn't right! Some folks in California think that the pyramids may have been assembled using kites. They think this because they have in fact managed to lift a four-ton obelisk using only the power of a 15 MPH wind. No shit.
Sunday 6/24/01
What is probably my favorite Futurama episode ("Luck of the Fryish") was on again tonight. There are funnier episodes, to be sure, but this one is unique for its surprisingly touching ending. It was not at all what I expected the first time I saw it, which is why I like it so much.
When I bought my first Dolby Pro-Logic receiver (a Sony), it came with this enormous remote control, with three sets of buttons to control tape decks and VCRs, plus a separate set for controlling your CD or Laserdisc player. (There was no DVD then, which tells you how long ago this was.) It came pre-programmed for Sony equipment, but the cool thing is, it could learn the remote control signals for other brands of equipment. There were a ton of buttons I didn't even need with my setup, so I was free to re-program them for functions I did need. The remote wasn't very ergonomic at all (all the buttons were these tiny rectangular thingies) but it worked great. I sold that receiver when I got a DVD player, and the remote went with it.
The remote controls that come with today's consumer electronics just aren't as functional. Many claim to be "multi-brand remotes," but what that means is that they have a large library of pre-programmed codes for various brands of equipment. You can tell the remote you have a JVC television, for instance, and it'll magically control that device. If you're lucky. Unfortunately, on these sorts of remotes, there are always functions that don't work right for some devices, and some devices that just aren't supported. My Philips DirecTV Receiver with TiVo is generally not supported by any of these devices -- it's too new. The DirecTiVo comes with a remote of its own which will control the power and the volume of my TV, but it won't control my receiver or my DVD player, and besides, I hate that remote. Its shape is far too symmetrical (I have on many occasions picked it up without looking at it and whacked several buttons before I realized I was pointing it the wrong way). Also, there are no orienting bumps on the directional pad, so moving through the menus can be an adventure, with occasional sideways detours when you meant to go up or down.
So the search was on for a remote control that could control my entire home theater system, preferably one that could learn codes from my other remotes if necessary. I also wanted one with real buttons (touch-screen remotes, frankly, suck -- though they look cool) and the price should be reasonable, say under $75, which rules out a lot of the high-end "home theater" remotes. First I tried the RCA RCU810, a frankly gorgeous $50 piece of hardware that will tempt nearly any A/V geek. The buttons are backlit with a beautiful soft blue color and there's also a backlit LCD display that tells you exactly what device it's controlling at any moment. It has both a group of navigation buttons (for menus) and a group of media control buttons (for pausing, rewinding, fast-forwarding, etc.). Some remotes use one set of buttons for both functions, which is a real pain with DVD or the TiVo. The remote does have the ability to learn a new signal on any key, which is good because naturally it wouldn't control the DirecTiVo out of the box. Unlike my earlier Sony remote, the RCA works both ways: you can specify the brand of equipment you have and it uses the codes from a built-in library, or you can teach it codes from another remote if none of the codes in the library work. You can even select codes from the built-in library to get most of the buttons working, then teach it only some of the buttons. All of the remotes I tested in my quest, in fact, had both built-in libraries and learning functionality. Unfortunately, this remote ran out of memory when I still had five or so buttons from the DirecTiVo left to teach it. What the fork? Looking in the manual I found it had enough RAM to hold something like 20-30 learned functions. Is RAM so expensive these days? Back to Good Guys it went.
My next try was the $40 Radio Shack 15-1994, a clone of the One-For-All Cinema 7 with a different (improved) button layout. This didn't have an LCD like the RCA, but it also had very nice backlighting for all its buttons, and I really loved how it felt in my hand. Unfortunately, it too balked at learning all the codes needed for the DirecTiVo. (The manual says that only three buttons can learn functions from other remotes, but you can actually program almost any button on the remote, as long as you don't try to do more than 20-30 signals.) The built-in codes wouldn't control my Panasonic DVD, either, so I'd need to learn that device as well. Now, this turns out to be a very hackable remote. Not only are there a number of undocumented functions, there's a mysterious 6-pin connector inside the battery cover, and some people have reverse-engineered the protocol well enough to actually begin programming completely new codes into it, although the software for doing so is PC-only and rather primitive at the moment. Ten years ago I would have enjoyed the challenge of getting this remote to do what I want, but right now I just want something that works without a lot of futzing. I'm keeping this one because I like its feel and I think that someday, I'll be able to get it to do what I need it to do, thanks to the hackers. But it's not the remote I need now.
So at the very last I turned to the Sony RM-VL900 remote ($60). I have a disinclination to buy Sony products, because so much of what I've bought from them has been mediocre in performance from day one, or else has broken shortly after the warranty ran out. In a word, crap. That's why I bought the JVC iArt flat-screen TV instead of the Sony WEGA, it's why I bought an Aiwa receiver to go with the Panasonic DVD player (only later finding out Aiwa is actually owned by Sony), it's why I got the Philips DirecTiVo instead of the Sony model even though the Sony had a couple of nice features over the Philips, and it's why I bought a Canon DV camcorder instead of a Sony.
The Sony remote doesn't have backlighting on most of its buttons (only the device select buttons light up, although the other buttons do glow in the dark for a time after the lights go down). Its layout is not as nice as the Radio Shack's and it doesn't feel as nice in my hand. (The Radio Shack remote has a special texturized rubber coating, almost like suede, and the buttons are easy to navigate by touch alone.) But the Sony remote has enough memory to learn a new remote control signal for every single button in every single mode. And the remote is easy enough to navigate by touch that I don't miss the backlight that much -- not that I ever watch television completely in the dark anyway. So, despite my disdain for Sony, I must admit that this is the best remote currently available for my needs. If Radio Shack would only add more memory to its 15-1994, I'd be all over it, but at this point Sony wins the battle thanks to its superior memory capacity.
Saturday 6/23/01
Finished Matt Ridley's Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters today. This is a book I'd had sitting on my shelf for some time, because for some reason I thought it was going to be a lot lamer than it turned out to be. The book's gimmick is that it literally has 23 chapters, each of which ostensibly discusses a gene found on one particular chromosome in H. sapiens. Such a catalog sounds pretty boring -- who really cares what chromosome the gene for green eyes is on? I bought the book despite my skepticism because I'd read the same author's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature and liked it a lot.
I needn't have worried. There are enough genes on each chromosome to allow Ridley to write about basically anything he wants to in each chapter, which, of course, is exactly what he does. Genome turns out to be an excellent layman's tour of what the human race knows of its own genetic makeup, as seen from virtually every possible angle. History of genetic research, the influence of genes on things like sexual orientation and intelligence, prion-transmitted diseases, language and other instincts, the fight against cancer and AIDS, frankenfoods, and much more. One thing I really appreciated was Ridley's level-headed approach to the potential dangers and ethical issues of genetic engineering. (By "level-headed approach" I mean, of course, that his views largely coincide with mine.)
I also learned a lot of other fascinating and sometimes scary things. For example, an incredible amount of our genome is composed of copies of a single "junk DNA" sequence that has no known function in the human body. Also, there's a prion-caused disease called "fatal familial insomnia" (in the same family as "mad cow" disease) which causes you to be completely unable to sleep for months -- and then you die. There's no way to kill the agent that causes it, because it's not alive to begin with -- it's basically a twisted-up protein -- and there's no cure. (I imagine the end comes as a relief, but just reading about this disease gave me the willies.)
Read Genome now, because this field is moving so quickly it's possible that large parts of this book will be obsolete before you know it. Now to finish The Glass Bead Game...
Friday 6/22/01
Got me a CueCat barcode scanner today -- the USB model, which works with a Mac. Digital Convergence (the CueCat people) do have a Mac driver, but it's designed to do one thing, and one thing only. Whenever you scan something, it takes you to a Web site with more info on that product. Digital Convergence generates barcodes for printing in magazine ads, but theoretically you can scan anything and get more info. For instance, if you scanned a Campbell's Soup can, you might be taken to this page, or maybe this page.
What Digital Convergence doesn't tell you is that the CueCat looks to your computer just like a keyboard and can thus, in theory, be used to scan barcodes into any program. It supports a pretty good range of barcode formats, too. In an attempt to keep the scanner from actually being that useful, the CueCat obfuscates the barcodes using a modified base64 encoding and an exclusive-OR operation, so the output of the CueCat must be decoded. Fortunately, lots of people have done good detective work on the 'Cat, so within a couple hours I had written a "driver" for it that captures the data sent by the CueCat, decodes it, and "types" the cleartext into whatever program is frontmost. It requires Westcode Software's OneClick, so if you have that, you can download the "driver" here. It's not perfect (depending on what program's in front, some of the CueCat's data might go to the application before the script "wakes up" to decode it -- Microsoft Word is especially bad about this, naturally) but you may find it useful anyway. It works pretty well in a lot of programs. Hey, whaddaya want for nothing, a rubber biscuit?
With apologies to David Lowery: what the world needs now is another lame Weblog, like I need a hole in the head. Nevertheless, here's mine. Many's the time I've wanted to share something with the world, and had no really appropriate venue in which to do it. Actually, that's not true -- I hang out on Usenet and MetaFilter -- but I'm just arrogant enough to want all my miscellaneous commmentary in one place with my name on it, dammit.
I wanted to make it a fancy and full-featured site, with all kinds of cool features, but I recently realized that if waited until I had the time to build that, it'd never happen. So I just decided to throw it up, make it moderately nice-looking (you can do a lot with a simple style sheet!), and worry about expanding its functionality later. So here it is. Enjoy.
