Friday 8/29/03 §
Dynamic Bullet Time in Flash. (leuschke.org)
Comment?
Thursday 8/28/03 §
After being blind for 43 years, Mike May had an operation in 2000 that partially restored his sight. This is his diary. (Little Mean Fish)
4 comments
Wednesday 8/27/03 §
For the first and probably last time in history, a cartoon character (Homestar Runner's "The Cheat") is described as defying Linnean classsification. (Thanks Warren)
1 comment
Bought a Western Digital 160GB drive at Best Buy for $100 after rebate to replace the older (5400RPM) 80GB Maxtor I had previously stored all my MP3s on. When I originally copied my MP3s to the old drive a couple weeks ago, it took over four hours. When I copied them to the new drive, it took 40 minutes. Ssssssmokin!
Comment?
Tuesday 8/26/03 §
Speakeasy today informed me that they have today lowered the price of my DSL by $10 a month. Thanks, Speakeasy! Now if I can just get Verizon to stop billing me for their DSL service that I canceled four months ago...
2 comments
The 2004 Toyota Prius is a 5-door hatchback and gets 59 MPG in town ("just" 51 MPG on the highway), despite being larger than the previous model and having a more powerful engine. The New York Times reviews it positively and mentions that next year, Toyota will offer a hybrid powertrain in the Lexus RX 330 SUV. I wonder what kind of fuel economy that behemoth will get after being electrified.
Comment?
Monday 8/25/03 §
Sterling Ball, president of Ernie Ball (the world's leading maker of premium guitar strings), gives an interesting interview about his company's switch to open-source software after an employee sicced the Business Software Alliance on them. (Flutterby)
Comment?
Sunday 8/24/03 §
Behold the power of Cocoa and Interface Builder: Widescreen NetNewsWire. (Thanks Warren)
Comment?
Friday 8/22/03 §
The Canon EOS-10D is beginning to be priced more reasonably after this week's announcement of the 300D "Digital Rebel."
6 comments
Walking back to my car from last night's photo excursion in Ballard, I was stopped by three very drunk individuals who insisted I take their picture. Fortunately there was still enough juice in the camera to run the flash. The woman indicated that they sell Real Change for a living. I imagine they are very good at it.
9 comments
Thursday 8/21/03 §
Microsoft's staff sociologist is trying to make sense of the way people interact on the Internet. Good freakin' luck, is all I have to say. (interesting-people)
Comment?
Wednesday 8/20/03 §
With Canon's new EOS-300D "Digital Rebel," I could have a 6 megapixel digital SLR and a 28-135mmm image-stabilized lens for about $1300 ($900 for the camera, $400 for the lens). It's $100 more and two fewer megapixels than the Sony I'm lusting after, but I'd get better depth-of-field control and much lower image noise. Either camera would be a significant step up from the Canon PowerShot G2 I have now, of course. I could have the Canon next month, while I'd have to wait until November to get my mitts on the Sony. As an added bonus, buying the Canon would let me continue my habit of buying cameras made by actual camera companies and also would not break my informal Sony boycott. (I've had so many Sony products die on me that I haven't bought a Sony product in some time, and I certainly wouldn't buy a DSC-F828 without an extended warranty.)
8 comments
Tuesday 8/19/03 §
Hey, 65.161.73.250, you've got a virus -- or if you want to get technical, a worm. Today alone, it has sent me something like a hundred copies of itself (including a couple dozen bounces generated by the copies it has sent with my e-mail address on the From line). I've blocked your IP address from sending me any more, but I just thought you might want to know.
Comment?
"Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh..." When he was a kid, Paul Lieberman liked to hang out at a summer camp his uncle owned. He remembers that one kid named Sherman had a particularly lousy time at camp. Sherman's father happened to be a game show producer who had taken to writing novelty songs, and the rest, as they say, is history. Lieberman, now a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, tracked down the boy in Camp Granada on the occasion of the song's fortieth anniversary. (Obscure Store)
Comment?
Friday 8/15/03 §
Sony Cybershot DSC-F828. 7X zoom Zeiss lens with zoom ring, 8 megapixel 4-color CCD sensor, optional raw image format, and a CompactFlash memory slot in addition to the proprietary Memory Stick slot. Plus it has the same goodies as the F717, such as a tiltable LCD, hologram focus assist, and "night shot" mode. All for around $1299. <tone voice="Ben Stein">Wow</tone>
I had heard rumors of this camera and might have considered it even if Sony had insisted on making me buy new Memory Stick media for it, but the fact that I can continue to use my CompactFlash cards rockets this camera to the top of my "short list." The FujiFilm FinePix S7000 Zoom is also on my short list; it has a bit less resolution than the Sony (the 12 megapixels is a marketing gimmick, it's more like 6) but it is significantly less expensive. The Minolta DiMAGE A1 is also interesting for its image stabilization, but it's only 5 megapixels. It may also be that Canon and Nikon are planning to blow my socks off soon, which I wouldn't mind at all. One way or another, though, I expect to have a new digital camera by Christmas.
3 comments
Thursday 8/14/03 §
Douglas Cone, Tampa millionaire, led a secret life as Donald Carlson, Tampa millionaire. As Carlson, Cone had a second family with a former employee eighteen years younger than his real wife, including two children. What is most astonishing is not that a man could stoop to such deceit, but that he managed to maintain two lavish households twenty miles apart for nearly thirty years without anyone suspecting a thing. The two families' children even attended the same prep school, and both women served on the school's board of trustees. (The school has a library and a football field named for Cone and Carlson, respectively.) Cone's secret only came out when he married Hillary Carlson less than two weeks after Jean Ann Cone, his wife of more than fifty years, died at the age of 75 this past spring. (the null device)
2 comments
Monday 8/11/03 §
Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski recently rescued a kitten. Awwww. Further news and cute pictures here. (the relocated GirlHacker)
Comment?
I've pointed to her before, but you really should be reading the ShortWoman. She's at her best when she expresses raging incredulity at idiocy, and fortunately there are plenty of targets of opportunity these days.
Comment?
Mickey Mouse Trying to Commit Suicide. Playing suicide for laughs? Disney? They actually published this in newspapers back in 1930.
Comment?
Self-Defence with a Walking-Stick. The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions. Reproduced with period illustrations from Pearson's, January 1901. (speedysnail)
Comment?
Sunday 8/10/03 §
The Internet Encyclopedia. An article I co-authored with Drummond Reed of OneName Corporation will be in Volume 1. (Check out the contributor list. I feel like Steve Martin's character in The Jerk when he finds his name in the phone book.) I hadn't realized this was going to be a pricey hardbound reference set; usually, when a computer book publisher calls something an "encyclopedia," they mean something more along these lines.
1 comment
Friday 8/8/03 §
While we're on the subject of planes, why not rearrange the seats in airliners to provide more space for passengers? (TRIZ, by the way, is the Russian acronym equivalent to the problem-solving methodology TIPS, or Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving in English.)
4 comments
On July 23, 1983, an Air Canada 767 ran out of fuel at 26,000 feet and became an unpowered glider. In the ensuing emergency landing, almost everything that could go wrong did. But incredibly, none of the crew nor the 61 passengers were seriously injured. The true story of the Gimli Glider. (Ticking Away)
2 comments
Sunday 8/3/03 §
Sony's readying a new 4-color CCD (image sensor) for its digital cameras, which they claim will allow cameras to capture color more naturally. Image sensors in most digital cameras use "Bayer pattern" mosaic filters that allow each pixel to capture only one primary color of light, usually one red, one blue, and two green pixels for each group of four. Some cameras use CYM mosaics rather than RGB, but the principle is the same. Software in the camera interpolates this data so that each pixel position has red, green, and blue data. This means that a certain amount of blurriness is inherent to digital camera images. (There are ongoing attempts to fix this, and allow each cell on the image sensor to capture full color information.)
Since Sony's new cyan patch will replace a green patch, it should also offer marginally better low-light performance (cyan lets through more light than green). This is definitely a step in the right direction; Sony's second sample image does look much more natural, although I think a lot of people would prefer the highly saturated colors in their first example.
3 comments
Saturday 8/2/03 §
For some unknown reason, I have started receiving Forbes, a magazine that tells people with extra money where they should invest it. Maybe my TiVo told them that I, like the publication's late founder Malcolm Forbes, am rich and gay. Wrong on both counts, guys.
The August 11 issue has an article on a research chemist at Pfizer, Harry Howard, Jr., who has invented a "revolutionary" fast-acting antidepressant that can take effect in as little as a week. (Prozac, the original and still-popular SSRI drug, can take two or three months to kick in.) This article isn't online yet, but when it is, I'll try to remember to link to it.
Throughout this two-page article, I kept expecting to see some mention of GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil, because Paxil can also have a noticeable effect in a week -- or even less. When I was on Paxil, I started feeling better the afternoon after I took my first dose, and while I suspected it might have been a placebo effect, my doctor said it wasn't impossible that the drug actually began acting that quickly. (He prescribes it precisely because of this characteristic.) It's my understanding that Forest Labs' new Lexapro also acts more quickly than most SSRIs -- typically in a couple of weeks. What's more, the patent on Paxil will run out in 2006 at the latest (possibly as early as 2004 if a legal challenge from a GlaxoSmithKline competitor succeeds), so it will be available in relatively affordable generic varieties soon. Surely generic Paxil (paroxetene) and Lexapro are worthy of mention in an article about a new fast-acting antidepressant, as they will likely be the new drug's main competitors, but inexplicably, Forbes doesn't mention them.
I don't mean to say that this new drug isn't newsworthy. It's possible, even likely, that Pfizer's new drug -- elzasonan -- has significant advantages over Paxil and Celexa. I'm not very familiar with Celexa, but Paxil's withdrawal symptoms range from mildly unpleasant to extremely unpleasant (fortunately, mine were at the "mildly unpleasant" end of the scale). Other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) don't have the withdrawal issue, but they all have other side effects, the most notorious of which is sexual dysfunction (i.e., delayed or blocked orgasm). My ability to enjoy music virtually disappeared while I was on Paxil, and that bothered me far more than the sexual side effects did.
Since elzasonan isn't an SSRI, but rather an entirely new type of drug called a serotonin autoreceptor antagonist (say it with me: SAAhhh), Pfizer undoubtedly hopes that it will have fewer, or at least different, side effects, ideally eliminating that nagging orgasm problem. But the Forbes article focuses entirely on the fast-acting nature of the new drug and the brilliance of the chemist who created it when neither is particularly noteworthy. I'm sure Mr. Howard does great work, and the fact that he doesn't have a doctorate is an interesting biographical detail, but he is far from the only smart person employed in the pharmaceutical industry, and I wouldn't buy Pfizer stock just because he works there.
Of the SSRI class of drugs, Prozac and Luvox are already generic, and the patents on Paxil, Celexa, and Zoloft will be expiring in the next year or three. And two other popular non-SSRI antidepressants, Wellbutrin and Serzone, are already beyond patent protection (Serzone's, in fact, just ran out last March). The only currently-available antidepressant with a long patent life ahead of it is Lexapro, and since Lexapro (escitalopram) is merely half of a Celexa (citalopram) molecule, it's not out of the question that a legal challenge could get that patent thrown out as being insufficiently novel. Once a drug is no longer under patent protection, anyone can make it, and the original developer will find it much more difficult to make money selling it. So it's not surprising that the major drug companies have new, patentable antidepressant drugs in the pipeline. For these drugs to be profitable, though, they'll have to be better than the existing (generic and therefore less expensive) drugs. That's the real story. Forbes seems to think that Pfizer really has something with elzasonan, but in my judgment, the article just doesn't make the case.
I can't say I'm at all impressed with this article; it seems very shallow, almost as if the writer, Robert Langreth, did too much of his research by reading Pfizer press releases. (And if an article on a topic I know barely enough about to fact-check seems shallow, I have to wonder about the other articles in the same magazine. They seem reasonable to me, but what do I know?) If investors are getting their tips from Forbes, I begin to see why the stock market occasionally experiences "corrections."
8 comments
Friday 8/1/03 §
The server that hosts this site will be down briefly tonight or possibly tomorrow for some modifications. The second hard disk is coming out; I need it on my Mac and got a FireWire case for it. A smaller hard disk will be going in as the second drive. Also, I'm replacing the IDE and floppy cables with round versions, upgrading the thermal paste on the heat sinks to a silver-based product, and installing an adapter so the speed of the CPU fan is not controlled by the motherboard. All for cooling's sake, of course; I want the server box to be as reliable as possible. I haven't had any reliability problems yet, but I'm going to be moving it to the closet once I get that area cleaned out a bit more, and airflow will be slightly more restricted there.
Too much information? I am sure it is.
2 comments
If you ever find yourself in the hospital with a terminal condition and can't find anyone willing to help you end your pain, refusing to eat is apparently not a bad way to go, according to a new study. (Follow Me Here)
Comment?
Check out these clever "no glasses required" 3D images. They're just animated GIFs that switch back and forth between two images, but some of them are nonetheless surprisingly effective at simulating a sense of space. (Warning: some noodity.) (Linkfilter)
Comment?
