Tuesday 4/30/02 §
Max Headroom, an intelligent and short-lived science fiction series from 1987, will be broadcast on TechTV of all places, starting this Friday at 6 PM Eastern. Too bad there are only 14 episodes. (frytopia)
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NASA has a 108-page handbook for technical writers covering grammar, punctuation, and capitalization, available on their Web site for free. If you're considering a career in technical writing, this might be a good resource to have. (Interconnected)
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Wow, I get almost as many visitors to this site when I don't post something as when I do. That's kind of scary.
Unfortunately, this is one of those posts that apologizes for not posting -- a blog cliché. I haven't had the time the last couple of days to do the kind of in-depth surfing that results in good links. The drought will likely continue a bit longer until I finish a project I'm working on.
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Sunday 4/28/02 §
US Robotics has doubled the speed of 802.11 wireless networking ("WiFi") while remaining backward-compatible with the original 11Mbps speed. (The new 54Mbps standard is not backward-compatible with slower-speed devices.) I wonder if they're calling it X2. (Blah Blah Blog)
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Saturday 4/27/02 §
Good Slate article on the attempts that have been made (and are being made) to film the reality-twisting science fiction of Philip K. Dick. Richard Linklater, director of last year's visually arresting indie film Waking Life, may be tackling A Scanner Darkly.
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Friday 4/26/02 §
Passage is the latest paperback issue from Connie Willis, and it's a worthy effort. The story's about Dr. Joanna Lander, a doctor who investigates near-death experiences (NDEs). She meets up with Richard Wright, a researcher who has discovered a way to induce simulated near-death experiences without actually requiring any physical danger. (Thankfully, at no point do the two fall in love, although they do become close.) With a diminishing roster of volunteers, they study the activity of the human brain in the throes of a NDE. Circumstances force Lander to become a subject in the experiment herself, and as she has one NDE after another, she notices that she's always going to the same place -- and eventually she realizes that it is a very specific place. Going much further would take us into spoiler territory, so I'll just say that this novel is not a fantasy, at least not the type of fantasy you'll probably think it is after Willis reveals where Dr. Lander goes on her mental excursions. Although Dr. Lander's NDEs give Willis a chance to indulge her penchant for historical depictions, the story remains rooted in the present day.
The supporting cast amply demonstrates Willis's mastery of the finer points of characterization. Maurice Mandrake is a self-promoting spiritualist who writes popular books about NDEs; the two main characters spend most of the novel avoiding him. This sort of character is rather a Willis trademark, but thankfully Willis has reined him in a bit compared to the characters in her more comic novels. There's a disaster-obsessed little girl with a faulty heart and an optimistic mother, a longsuffering neice of an Alzheimer's victim (who just happens to hold a key to unraveling the mystery), and Dr. Lander's brave E.R. nurse friend, all of whom practically step off the page. The title turns out to have not merely a double but a triple meaning, and the two main settings (the hospital, and where Joanna goes on her NDEs) are, metaphorically, mirror images of each other. Very neat.
Unfortunately I found the ending disappointing, due to an audacious plot twist which of necessity moves the viewpoint from Joanna to her partner-in-research, Richard Wright. Willis is a fine writer, but even she can't pull a completely satisfying ending out of the disruption she introduces into her story. I salute the author's ambition but must declare the ending a failure. Still, there's much to enjoy here. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and your jaw will probably go slack at in utter amazement at least once.
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Thursday 4/25/02 §
I'm not quite sure what to make of a spam e-mail I received with the subject line "2 White Teeth Make the Perfect Smile." Personally, I think it takes more than two. I suppose they hope I'll be curious enough to open it and read it.
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The photo printer I've been waiting for. Seven ink colors, 2880 X 1440 DPI, 4 picoliter droplets, 80-year print longevity, paper size up to 13" x 44". $699, due in July. (MacMinute)
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I know a couple people who will be very happy to hear this: the second season of ABC's reality series The Mole, hosted by studmuffin newscaster Anderson Cooper, will return this summer. It was canceled after just three weeks last fall, due to a certain event that gave Americans enough real reality to temporarily sate our collective appetite for fake reality. (Fresh Hell)
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Great piece about obituaries in Chicago Magazine. Read it quick before they replace it with something else next week. (Romenesko's Media News)
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E-mail is a critical application for many of us, so it makes sense to find the best e-mail program you can. Unfortunately, once you've used a given e-mail program for a while, you get a bit of lock-in, because switching requires importing all your messages from your old e-mail program to your new one. Sometimes this just doesn't work right and sometimes it doesn't work at all, and when it does work it can consume an inordinate amount of time. One solution is to use only programs that can import and export standard formats (such as Unix "mbox" files).
Another interesting idea is to run an IMAP server on your computer. Unlike POP3, IMAP keeps your e-mail on the server, rather than downloading it to your computer. You can even create folders to categorize your e-mail using IMAP, and these will appear no matter what IMAP client you use. So you can use any IMAP-compatible e-mail program and switch as often as you want -- without ever having to export or import your mail. And while IMAP is usually slower for reading mail since your client has to get the message from the server before it can be displayed, in this case the server is on your computer, so it's about as quick as reading it after a POP download.
As a bonus, if your home Mac has a full-time Internet connection, you can also read your e-mail at work, or vice versa. If you read a message, it's marked read on the server and will appear with that status no matter where you read it from. If you have server-side filtering rules to move spam to a particular folder, the messages move to that same folder in every mail client you use; you don't have to reinvent your filtering rules all the time.
Mac OS X comes with most of the software necessary to make this possible -- the only thing you need to install in imapd. Here's how to set it up. I plan to try this soon. (Boing Boing)
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Wednesday 4/24/02 §
Scott over at Edgecurve has some cool Aqua icons for Mac OS X.
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Moby C: the world's largest Polaroid camera. (wood s lot)
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Just after six last night, a co-worker came around with a couple unclaimed tickets to a Mariners game, so I made my first pilgrimage to Safeco Field. Man, that is a hell of a ballpark. The seats were great (15 rows from the field, just a couple sections to the right of home plate), and the game itself was a pitching duel par excellence which the Ms won 1-0. Pitching duels are not really that fun to watch for the casual fan, such as myself, but the top of the ninth was a bit of a nailbiter as we wondered whether McLemore's single run, scored off an error, would stand. Next time I go I'll probably take the bus, but I didn't have the time to figure that out last night, so I got reamed. Sure wouldn't want to pay $50 (ticket price plus parking) for a game, though.
The last game I saw before last night was the seventh-to-last game at Tiger Stadium back in Detroit. Now that ballpark had a special ambience. Venerable ballparks always do.
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TextArc is "an alternate way to view a text" in the same way that a Segway is "an alternate way to walk" -- a completely overengineered but extremely cool technology. (BrainLog)
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Tuesday 4/23/02 §
This Japanese gallery of animated tessellations is Escher come to life. The negative spaces are just as important as the positive spaces. (Boing Boing)
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The crack is back.
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The Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical explains that "neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity. ... NTs find it difficult to be alone. ... Autopsies have shown that the brain of the neurotypical is typically smaller than that of an autistic individual and may have overdeveloped areas related to social behavior. ... Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10,000 individuals may be neurotypical." If it's going over your head, they kindly explain the joke. Don't miss the DSN entry for Psychiatry Disorder; it's a scream. (memepool)
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Monday 4/22/02 §
In 1995, Wired's America Online forum tracked down Elwood Edwards, whose well-known voice welcomes millions to AOL every day, and had him record another ten sound files for use with the service, including "You want fries with that?," "Spooooon!," and "Stop touching me!" I would certainly never suggest you use these for any nefarious purpose.
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Following on the heels of that last link: does anyone out there want to buy my 5GB iPod? It works perfectly, but I'm itching to have something with more storage -- either a 10GB iPod or the forthcoming Nomad Jukebox 3, if it has decent Mac support. The Nomad's about the size of a portable CD player, making it significantly larger than the iPod, but its feature set looks mighty tasty (20GB, dual battery bays for up to 22 hour play time, headphone surround processor, recording capability) and it shares the iPod's main advantage: FireWire. Decisions, decisions. Anyway, if you want the iPod, make me an offer via e-mail (click above).
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My iPod has run away from home and is taunting me with postcards of its travels. Well, not really -- these pictures incorporate many different iPods in famous places. iPods bond closely to one person and do not wander off like, say, garden gnomes or college mascots. (120degrees)
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Did You Ever Have AŹDream Like This? Giant hybrid crops. Rabbits the size of Buicks. Early "photoshopping" from the dawn of the twentieth century illustrates tall tales on postcards. (cheesedip)
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Saturday 4/20/02 §
Heh. Cool desktop photo: an x-ray of a PowerBook G4.
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Friday 4/19/02 §
A very nice article by Bruce Fraser on sharpening images using Photoshop. (Don't miss the sequel.)
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A glossary of terms useful in critiquing science fiction. (Flutterby)
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Anyone out there doing authenticated SMTP on Mac OS X? I figured out where to turn it on in sendmail.cf, but apparently, in order to actually get it to work, one needs something called SASL, which, naturally, isn't installed by default. I discovered a Web page that talks about getting SASL to work on Mac OS X, but the instructions want you to install fink (a Linux-style package installer for Mac OS X) and then patch the SASL source code before compiling it (shudder).
It would have been ever so much easier if they'd just included a checkbox that says "Allow authenticated SMTP," don't you think?
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Hexoddities -- hexadecimal numbers that happen to have "incidental semantic content to weird humans." (Scripting News)
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Michael Swanwick's Periodical Table of Science Fiction features a new science fiction story based on a different element each week. This week's element: Technetium. (rebecca's pocket)
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The luminous art of Thomas Wilfred and the passion of a man who collects and maintains it. (peterme)
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Thursday 4/18/02 §
I predict that this audio clip (1MB MP3) will be widely linked in the next few days by Web designers. Seems one of this guy's clients replaced the site he did with a different design, and let's just say that he did not like the new design much. Something like this happened to me last year after I got laid off, but I didn't call up my former employer and bitch about it. Once they've paid you, dude, it's their site, not yours. Get used to it and stop being such a crybaby; it's extremely unprofessional. (Straight, No Chaser)
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How's your math? Good enough to win a candy bar? Word problems take to the street. (Defective Yeti)
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Eagle cam! Watch an eagle's nest live on the Internet. Way cool. (Absolute Piffle)
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Wednesday 4/17/02 §
Fans of botched machine translation and Apple's World Wide Developer Conference might enjoy this article translated from the Spanish: World-wide conference of Developer. It's good to know that "Mac OS X has a much more ample range of fans that Mac OS 9.x." (Matt)
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Some good tips on using a monopod to take pictures. (randomWalks)
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Tuesday 4/16/02 §
You see the ads on late-night TV making outlandish claims for the latest miracle product. Does It Work? (leuschke.org)
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Twenty Faces is a Textism feature that reviews twenty typefaces commonly used in books. What it's missing is a sample of each font used for actual body text (rather than just the alphabet and the numerals). And I could stand to be illiminated on what, exactly, makes most digital Palatinos ugly enough to drive a man to television -- my design sense isn't illuminated enough to pick out such details, and I'd really like to be able to.
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Monday 4/15/02 §
Photographs of the outsides and insides of abandoned buildings in the city where I grew up -- Columbus, Ohio -- including the state penitentiary. (Also, it looks like, at least one place in Cincinnati.) Looks like it's a Geocities site, so if it overruns its bandwidth, try again later. Also don't miss The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, which is a similar site about another place I lived for ten years. (Bifurcated Rivets)
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Medieval Macabre is an astonishing collection of medieval "illustrations of devils, demons, witches, and monsters," 223 in all. (wood s lot)
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Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity has an incredibly complete and detailed (verily, one might well call it anal-retentive) overview of the issues involved in getting a progressive-scan signal out of a DVD player, and the possible visual artifacts you might see in your player, followed by two separate roundups of DVD players with progressive outputs. I was shocked to find that most DVDs, even those made from film, are in fact encoded interlaced with 3:2 pulldown. I had assumed that films would simply be encoded at 24fps progressive, and that the player would do the interlacing and pulldown when the film was played back on a television that needed it. Instead, progressive DVD players must have complicated de-interlacing circuitry with two modes (one for film, one for video). Doing it the other way would be so trivial, and would eliminate virtually all the problems discussed in this article. (BrainLog)
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Friday 4/12/02 §
Robot tongue. (zoloft take me away)
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Pascal's Wagers. (rebecca's pocket)
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The goodies I need to finish assembling my dedicated Web server came from New Egg today. Two 40GB hard disks, which I intend to set up in a RAID 0 configuration, along with another couple of 256MB DIMMs. Got my copy of Windows 2000 Small Business Server yesterday thanks to a certain someone who escorted me to the technology wonderland known as the Microsoft company store. I'll be talking more about setting up this machine in the near future; it'll probably be my weekend project for the next month or so.
I'll be doing something kinda odd with the Web server setup (I want to run Apache as the main server, with an instance of IIS firewalled from the outside and accessible only via Apache''s mod_proxy -- I do need ASP for a project I've got planned), so if that sort of thing interests you at all, check back to see if I manage to figure that out and if so, how. I'll be loading on MySQL, MS SQL Server, PHP, Perl, Python, Apache, Ruby, and whatever else I can come up with in an attempt to bring the server to its knees. Suggestions welcomed.
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Build a pocket headphone amplifier yourself for about $20. (inflight correction, in a roundabout way)
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Thursday 4/11/02 §
Looking for a public library near you that has a cat in residence? You really can find anything on the Web. (Camworld)
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Today is my semi-birthday. I am 67 half-years old.
It happens that Lauren's birthday is offset exactly six months from mine. Which makes today her birthday. Go wish her a happy one.
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Wednesday 4/10/02 §
I didn't hear about this until just now, but keyboardist Pete Bardens, formerly of the progressive rock band Camel and also a member of the short-lived Alan Parsons Project spinoff Keats, died of cancer January 22. His 1987 solo album Seen One Earth was not well-received by critics, but the track "In Dreams" did receive some airplay (it sounded almost more like Pink Floyd than Pink Floyd themselves did in those days) and if you don't recognize his name from anything else, maybe you heard that song. My appreciation of Camel came late and they're by no means my favorite prog band, but Bardens was certainly a talented guy, and he was only 57. Bummer.
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Fed up with stupid laws that demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of technology and a disregard for basic individual freedoms? You may soon be able to put your money where your mouth is by contributing to the American Open Technology Consortium (a proposed public-education organization) and to GeekPAC (a proprosed political action committee dedicated to political advertising and lobbying).
It's a call for individuals to reassert their technological rights, which is a noteworthy development. It's hardly certain that it'll have any effect, but it's certainly interesting. (Doc)
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"Now I know all about ghosts." Charles Bonnet Syndrome can make you see things. Weird, vivid things. (MeFi)
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Today, I watched a squirrel sneak in through the open window of the third-floor apartment directly across from my office. Then I watched that squirrel get chased around (and eventually back out the window) by the cat that had been watching it closely from the moment it stepped on the window ledge. That squirrel's a rodent Spider-Man, climbing the brick walls like he's made of Velcro, so he was able to escape unscathed once he made it to the window. Apparently he once managed to abscond with an entire Twinkie still in its plastic wrap before the tenants brought in the cat.
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Tuesday 4/9/02 §
An interesting interview with Drummond Reed, CTO of the company I work for. In it Drummond talks about the digital identity infrastructure that will be needed to guarantee privacy, security, and trust for the next generation of Web services.
For those who aren't following this little corner of the technology market, "digital identity" revolves around the digital representation of individuals and companies online and the rules by which they interact. In a broad sense, this covers things like single sign-on (where signing on at one Web site is enough to grant you access to others), privacy (allowing you to control what personal information is exchanged with others and how it may be used), e-commerce (allowing merchants to get access to your shipping address and payment information from a "digital wallet" so you don't have to type it in), and the like.
OneName's technology, XNS, is intended to be a robust, open technology for digital identity. Microsoft's Passport and the Liberty Alliance spearheaded by Sun Microsystems are the two most visible players, although a lot of lesser-known companies and organizations are working to provide solutions to the issues involved. Digital ID World is a good source for news on this growing technology sector.
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A guy in Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood got $500 from a telemarketer just for complaining about a call he received. The type of call he received is illegal in the state of Washington, but it's rare that a company pays up without being taken to court. (Obscure Store)
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Famous Wayne Nelson runs for mayor, then city council of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada. (New World Disorder)
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Have you ever been inundated with advertising everywhere you go? You will. And the company that will bring it to you? AT&T. From Hawthorne to Hard-Sell recounts the birth of broadcast advertising.
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William Sleator's autobiographical novel, Oddballs, is available online for your reading enjoyment. Funny stuff. (geegaw)
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My good friend Dean Esmay now has a weblog. Dean's a smart guy and a conservative. He's new to the whole blogging thing, but I think you'll find he's catching on quickly.
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Cray Inc. has unveiled the world's largest RAM disk: 224 GB of solid-state storage, with a data transfer rate of 80 GB per second. That's two to three orders of magnitude faster than hard disk systems. It doesn't appear to be Mac-compatible, but imagine editing some digital video on that bad boy, or using it as a Photoshop scratch disk -- for everyone in your company. Price is not listed, but you do the math: PC133 256 MB RAM sticks are currently about $85, and you'll need 896 of them, plus a bunch of other circuitry to tie it all together. I'd wager it'll set you back at least $100K. (MacInTouch)
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Monday 4/8/02 §
Two simple games implemented entirely as QuickTime movies. The Solitaire one is 24K. Text Invaders is 16K. Sweet. (Bifurcated Rivets)
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The Beer Can Theory of Creativity. "Was Einstein a seven-pack, or was he a regular six-pack like most of us, but one in which the plastic thingy melted and resolidified in a truly exceptional way?" (abuddhas memes)
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Stunning photographs of the Northern Lights from Iceland's Sigurdur Stefnisson. (misterrogers)
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CaCaCadence. (wood s lot)
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Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' ... (source code) (sylloge)
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I can't claim to understand Super Nervous Information Office, but it sure is pretty. (Don't overlook the links at the bottom under Midnight Feast.) (inflight correction)
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New portable Web browser technology, code-named ThunderHawk, from font foundry Bitstream, aims to bring a robust surfing experience to PDA users while maintaining full text legibility. (CommonMe)
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Tits are on the decline in Britain. (The Other Side)
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Toast. A large picture of a toaster made out of more than 3,000 slices of toast is the means by which the toaster reproduces its own image. (Lauren)
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Friday 4/5/02 §
If your child seems different from the other children, he or she might have ADD or ADHD. Or he or she might be an Indigo Child, a being from another planet come to raise our spiritual consciousness to a whole new level of cosmic vibration. These children need special upbringing to realize their full potential, and of course the first thing the parent of one of these special children needs to do is whip out their credit card and buy the official books. Because nothing says you care about your children quite like consumption! (Orchid's Daily Dose)
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To go along with yesterday's link on simulated societies, here's one on simulated evolution of languages. It's a bit dry, but it does have a pretty decent backgrounder on various theories at the beginning to help orient you. (leuschke.org -- damn, that guy keeps posting some excellent links)
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In Washington, DC, there's a mania for license plates with low numbers, which are distributed by the city's politicians as favors. Unfortunately, there are only 1250 of these plates, which means there is no plate that is truly 1337. (GirlHacker)
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How a cast-off t-shirt went from a charity thrift shop to the hands of a 71-year-old African man. (GlennLog)
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Thursday 4/4/02 §
Arthur Andersen employs 85,000 people, all of whom are now tainted by the actions of a few. A different angle on corporate malfeasance from Saltire. (Doc)
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Spend some time reading Jonathan Rauch's article on artificial societies in The Atlantic. Then read the MetaFilter thread about it. Then, for a much-needed bucket of cold water dashed over the entire field, be sure to read From Complexity to Perplexity, a Scientific American article from 1995. (sylloge)
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A found alphabet in photographs, at Textism.
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Jerry Halstead converted a Mazda 626 to electric power, and uses it for short commutes (it only has a range of about 30-35 miles). Ken Norwick did the same with a Saturn. Both have documented their experience in detail on their Web sites.
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Wednesday 4/3/02 §
Microsoft's .NET may be coming to Mac OS X by way of the Mono project for Linux. I've been reading about ASP.Net recently, it's a pretty amazing framework for interactive Web development. (Hack the Planet)
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The untold history of Flash. (girlhacker)
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The computer game Myst will be the basis for a four-hour miniseries to air on the Sci Fi cable channel, according to a report at the D'ni Guild. Hm. I can't decide if it'll suck or not. (dangerousmeta)
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A new version of the Mac OS X browser OmniWeb is out. Download it here since the main server's overwhelmed. CSS support is much improved from previous versions; it's still not perfect, but it's usable. I've had a couple of crashes trying to load my own site (ow!) but this browser is very much worth checking out for its robust feature set. Customizable URL completion, for instance, lets you set up custom keywords for automatic searches at your favorite sites. The cookie handling is swell. There's also pop-up ad blocking, text antialiasing, and a spelling checker that works in TEXTAREAs. (Thanks Warren)
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Tuesday 4/2/02 §
Excessive intake of silver can turn your skin permanently gray. The condition is called argyria, and it's real. Beware of quacks selling colloidal mineral supplements. (Cruel; thanks moz)
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Washtech.com has an interesting article about the security of Verisign's data center, which houses one of the Internet's root DNS servers, plus the DNS servers for .com, .org, and .net. Okay, their customer service sucks, but they do seem to know how to run a data center. (BrainLog)
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Monday 4/1/02 §
You can read Neal Stephenson's first novel, The Big U, online in its entirety. While it's pretty crude compared to his later work -- or even his second novel, Zodiac -- it does give hints of what would evolve into Stephenson's signature style with its smug, snarky tone, a collection of smart and engaging characters, and a plot laced with absurd, over-the-top situations played completely straight. Stephenson's difficulty with endings extends to basically the entire second half of this novel, but it's still a good bit of fun. This book was out of print for while, and the author has been quoting as saying he hoped it stayed that way, but it's now available again for you Stephenson completists.
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Today's the day traditionally reserved for practical jokes and pranks. One of the best tricks is to secretly untie your victim's shoelaces, then tell them their shoelaces are untied. They won't believe you, of course, which means the joke's on them!
Saw a made-over school bus on the road to work this morning. It had been painted red, and part of the sign on the back that originally said UNLAWFUL TO PASS had been broken off or painted over, so it said AWFUL TO P. That bus should see a doctor.
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