Quartz Composer

...is pretty neat. Some blogger was raving about FlickrFan, which lets you display images from an RSS feed as your screen saver. It sounded pretty cool, but needing a whole application seemed like overkill. I really wanted Google Photos Screensaver, but it requires Windows. I tested out Quartz Composer instead, which is like Yahoo Pipes. It lets you start from a screen saver template that's a simplified version of the "RSS Visualizer" screen saver. I got something working according to the testing interface though when I view it through Desktop & Screen Saver in System Preferences, the caption display isn't synchronized with the image.

If somebody is bored, would you mind putting
http://martin.davidssons.com/Image%20RSS.qtz in ~/Library/Screen Saver and testing it out to see if you get the same results? Try http://static.flickrfan.org/ap/rss.xml as the URL. Thanks

God Jul

Merry Christmas — CajunSwedish-style

JO on The Office

I never thought Jan-Ove Waldner would get a mention in any mainstream US media. Today I found out Dwight and I share at least one hero.

insta-deck

Earlier this year at Startup School I noticed quite a few speakers using very simple slide shows, namely a piece of text and a big image of sorts. One speaker even admitted that he created his slides on a whim by searching Google Images. I told myself I'd create a quick-and-dirty utility to create this type of presentation.

This is where I was going to say that last I checked, Google Images doesn't have an API but it looks like they have an experimental one now (more info). Anyway, Flickr has an API, and you could argue that it has more "interesting" images. The other part of the equation is the slide show framework itself. There are probably plenty out there, but I went with S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System by Eric Meyer. Put the two together and you get insta-deck. It needs a better name, but it's quick-and-dirty, as promised. There's no edit functionality, because that would just slow you down. I'm sure there are plenty of bugs in there instead.

Here's an example of what it produces. Share your creations/problems in the comments.

For Arun and Ben

S4B

thresh

I go to my seminar today and find out that a guy called Lyle Fong is presenting. He's talking about his company, Lithium, as one of a series of speakers talking about Software as a Service. He begins by giving some history, mentioning the fact that he and his brother used to be professional gamers. Seeing the oldskool PGL logo gave me instant flashbacks of high school. Lyle went on to talk about his brother who even won a Ferrari. I immediately raise my hand and ask, "Was that Thresh?" "Yes," he says. "Oh My God" I said, out loud, accidentally. Everyone in the room must've been looking at me like I was some kind of freak, but this was the brother of the guy who won John Carmack's Ferarri in the Red Annihilation tournament! I must've spent hours watching Quake demos from that tournament. Thresh's real name was Dennis Fong so it started making sense. Lyle was in the clan Death Row with him which was impressive in itself. I used to go play laser tag and use "Thresh" as my alias. This was a big day in my life.

Oh yeah, they're both serial entrepreneurs running multi-million dollar companies. Whatever.

Update: For Alex... the final game of said tournament on YouTube. Watching the demo in the actual game is way more enjoyable though.

Earthquake

First one I've ever felt. Scary/exciting.

Japan

Jag har inte varit särskilt bra med kommunikationen men jag hoppas att ni hörde att Melanie och jag hade planer på att åka till Japan. Nu har det varit en vecka sedan vi kom tillbaka så jag tänkte öva lite Svenska och bättra kontakten med resten av familjen.

Dag 1

Som sagt, vi flög från San Francisco till Tokyo på lördagen. Vi korsade datumlinjen så vi anlände inte förrän Söndag eftermiddag och sökte genast upp hotellet. Det blev ett äventyr på en gång men vi hittade det till slut och vandrade omkring för att hitta lite mat innan vi gick och la oss.

Dag 2

Måndag morgon åt vi frukost, vilket bestod av ris och soppa, och fortsatte in Till Tokyo. Det var ju en del andra som också ville in till Tokyo på en måndags så vi fick trängas i tunnelbanan. Videon som följer visar precis hur det var. Melanie och jag var nära på att säras.





Inne i Tokyo så gick vi först till palatset som bara är öppet två dagar om året så vi gick runt utsidan. Därifrån fortsatte vi till Ginza, ett shopping center, packat med kända märken i stora byggnader. Apple, till exempel hade en butik med fyra våningar. Vi besökte också "Sony byggnaden." Dom hade utställningar av deras nyaste kameror, TV apparater, datorer, o.s.v. Vi såg också den märkligaste övergångsstället jag någonsin sett, som ni ser på bilden.



Det regnade en del i Tokyo vilket hejdade oss lite grann men på eftermiddagen drog vi till fiskmarknaden som ska visst vara störst i världen. Vi missade morgonens auktioner men det fanns fisk så det räckte även runt kl. 16.





Vi åt sushi till middag mitt inne i marknaden. Sushi i Japan har inte samma invecklade förberedning som i USA. Oftast är det en skiva fisk på en boll av ris men det smakar gott ändå.

På kvällen gick vi förbi Tokyo International Forum som var bara ett stort konferens anläggning men arkitekturen var läcker. Sen gick vi tillbaka till hotellet. Det hände förstås andra saker där imellan men det tar vi en annan gång.

Dag 3

Vi for till Kinomoto nästa dag för att besöka ett par vänner vi lärt känna i North Carolina. Dom bor i Japan och jobbar som engelska lärare. Kinomoto ligger söder om Tokyo ute på landet. Vi åkte "Shinkansen" dit. Shinkansen är Japans version av X2000 kan man väl säga.



Först ut i Kinomoto blev ett besök till Hikone Slott. Mycket annorlunda från slott man är van vid att se. Slottet hade även en trädgård som följde det traditionella japanska temat. Här försöker jag se ut som en typisk japansk turist.



Middag den dagen blev Koreansk BBQ med vännerna David och Kyle. Mycket kött både då och för övrigt. Det kan inte vara många japanska vegetarianer.

Dag 4

Vi åkte skidlift upp ett berg för att skåda världens tredje äldsta sjö som heter Biwako. Vi tittade in i en tursit affär där jag hittade en ask med kakor som hade så kallad "Engrish." Engrish är otroligt dåligt översatt Japanska till Engelska som förekommer överallt och är ofta blir det svårt att undvika skratt när man läser det.

På eftermiddagen blev det ett besök till ett tempel, bland annat. Det fanns massvis av tempel. Vi såg säkert 10 stycken tempel veckan på resan.

Dag 5

På torsdag tog hade vi en Sushi lunch innan vi tog tåget till Kyoto för att hälsa på den tredje kompisen, Megan. Hon bor i en förort som heter Kameoka och har bott där i 3 år nu. Vi kom inte fram förrän kl.17 så det blev middag med hennes kompis John som bestod av en slags pannkaka. Det hände inte mycket annat den dagen.

Dag 6

Följande morgon tog vi en båtresa ner floden i Kameoka. Det var mycket vackert, trots det dystra vädret. Floden slingrade dig genom berg och det tog ca. två timmar att flyta hela sträckan. Väl framme så åt vi lunch. Jag hade sill med nudlar. . Efterrätt blev soja glass. Vi såg en bambuskog och två till tempel innan vi åkte till Kyoto. Där gick vi omkring allt möjligt innan det var dags för karaoke, ett måste i Japan. Det var inte alls vad man var van vid. Dom få gånger jag har varit med om karaoke så har det varit inför en stor grupp. I Japan fick man ett eget litet privatrum med rum för 6-9 personer kanske. Där fanns det tusentals sånger att välja på genom ett ganska avancerat system.

Dag 7

Vi spenderade hela dagen tillbaka Kyoto. Det blev lite shopping, mat, och spel. Vi gick till en jätte arkad fullsatt med personer av alla åldrar. Det var kul att se killar som lirade olika spel med otrolig förmåga. Min favorit var "Beatmania" där det gäller att slå knappar i särskild sekvens. YouTube hade ett exempel:



Själv körde vi Taiko trumning vilket går ut på samma sak som Beatmania men istället för 14 knappar så finns det bara en stor trumma. . Vi satte oss vid ett vattendrag för att vänta på middag. Det var Megans födelsedag så många av hennes vänner dök upp. Vi satt på golvet och lagade vår egen mat som måste vara ganska vanligt eftersom vi gjorde just det på minst tre olika tillfällen.

Dag 8

På söndag gjorde vi inget annat än att resa. Vi tog ett lokal tåg from Kameoka till Tokyo (30 min), Shinkansen från Kyoto till Tokyo (3 tim), tåg från Tokyo till Narita flygplats (1 tim), flyg från Tokyo till San Francisco (9 tim) men ändå så kom vi fram innan vi lämnade Kyoto.

Fler bilder hittar ni på http://flickr.com/photos/songhilde/ och http://flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/. Oftast var det jag bakom kameran så ni hittar inte mycket med mig.

För övrigt så såg man en del saker gång på gång:

Mumintrollen
Trollsländor
Smala bilar
Japanska toaletter
Varuautomater

My Review of iRobot® Roomba® 400

Originally submitted at iRobot

The iRobot Roomba is an intelligent and effective vacuuming robot that cleans floors routinely so you don't have to. Roomba's powerful vacuum and counter-rotating brushes automatically adjust from carpets to hard floor surfaces to lift dirt, dust and debris. Includes charger.

iRobot® Roomba® 400iRobot® Roomba® 400

I <3 Robots

By Martin from Mountain View, CA on 7/16/2007

 

4out of 5

Pros: Covers Entire Room, Hassle Free Operation, Cleans Under Furniture

Cons: Loses Charge Quickly

Best Uses: Hardwood Floors, Small Rooms, Carpeted Rooms

Describe Yourself: Renter

My Robot's Name: Cam

I live in an apartment where most of the floor is carpeted with a kitchen and bathroom with vinyl floors. The Roomba handles either surface very well. The threshold between the carpet and kitchen is a little high, so "Cam" did get stuck once while crossing over, but other than that my experience has been great. It covered the entire floor. The layout is pretty irregular to begin with and once you throw in furniture all around, it's pretty amazing that it covered so much ground and how nimble it was in tight spots. You'll have to watch the video for a better idea.

Low profile

Tags: Using Product, Picture of Product

Roomba

Tags: Review, Irobot, Vacuum, Roomba

(legalese)

quid

Person 1: "What's a quid?"
Person 2: "It's like a dollar"
Person 3: "Like a buck"
Person 4: "It's like 2 bucks"
Person 3: "No"

O Hai

googlz

Review of Nikon D200 Digital SLR Camera, 10.2 Megapixel, Interchangeable Lens, Nikon U.S.A. Limited Warranty

Read more reviews at Buzzillions.com

D200 Digital SLR Camera- (Camera Body)
To satisfy the requirements of passionate and demanding photographers - Nikon Introduces their highly anticipated Nikon D200 digital camera. The Nikon D200 is a high performance digital SLR camera combining brand-new technologies with advanced features inherited from Nikon's venerable D2X professio...

It's good as it get

On 3/26/2007, from Canton, OH, dkhai said

 

5out of 5

Reviewer Tags:

Pros: Comfortable Controls, Small Lag Time, Bright LCD, Quiet, Strong Construction

Cons: Slow Sensor

Best Uses: Photojournalism, Documentary, Travel, Fun

Describe Yourself: Hobbyist/Enthusiast, Casual user

Bottom Line: Yes, I would recommend this to a friend

Reviewer Comments: I love it

Image Tags: Using Product

Image Tags: Using Product

Originally posted at Adorama (legalese)

94041

I've moved. Melanie and I are moving to Mountain View.

On the topic of vCards (the link above is to mine), I just used FacebookSync (OS X only), which is pretty leet. Finally something to replace my crappy greasemonkey script for this purpose.

Buzzillions!

Startup school

Went to Startup School today. Personal highlights:

1. Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, steps up to the podium to connect his laptop and the Stanford Google map appears on the screen. Always nice to find out that stuff you make is actually being used. If Internet celebrities use it too, that's even nicer.


2. The current founders of the Y-Combinator program get on stage in the last session of the day and one of the guys looks like the Bill Gates icon on Slashdot (i.e. android). He says "I'm Justin from justin.tv." Intrigued, I visit the site and I'm presented a live stream of his point of view, being a view of the crowd I'm sitting in. Surreal.

Is there really no YouTube uploading utility available for Mac OS X? Something like Flickr Uploadr would be nice.

http://foureyedmonsters.com/neutrality/

Universal Binary

I once watched a video from Apple that explained how to compile universal binaries. Either the video wasn't thorough enough or I can't follow instructions but I wasn't able to roll out a universal binary until I got a tip from Dexter from the Philippines:

If I recall, you have to go to Project -> Edit Project Settings. Then go to the Build tab. From there, look for Architectures, then click the Edit button below and just make sure both PowerPC and Intel are checked. Of course, I believe you have to make sure its enabled for, at the least, the Release Configuration.

Thanks Dexter!

My review of Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000 with PS/2 &amp; USB Interface, Black &amp; Silver

Originally submitted at Adorama

Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000 with PS/2 & USB Interface, Black & Silver

Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000 with PS/2 &amp; USB Interface, Black &amp; SilverMicrosoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000 with PS/2 &amp; USB Interface, Black &amp; Silver

It's ergonomic!

By Robert from Millbrae, CA on 1/16/2007

 

4 out of 5

Pros: Ergonomic, Nice Extra Features

Best Uses: Writing, Laptops, Office Computers

Bottom Line: Yes, I would recommend this to a friend

See the video!

Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 Review

Tags: Review, Keyboard, Ergonomic, Powerreviews, Robert

(legalese)

My review of Casio Exilim EX-S600-SR Digital Camera, 6mp, 3x Optical, 4x Digital Zoom with 2.2&quot; inch LCD Screen - Sparkle Silver Finish

Originally submitted at Adorama

Casio Exilim EX-S600-SR Digital Camera, 6mp, 3x Optical, 4x Digital Zoom with 2.2" inch LCD Screen - Sparkle Silver Finish

Casio Exilim EX-S600-SR Digital Camera, 6mp, 3x Optical, 4x Digital Zoom with 2.2&quot; inch LCD Screen - Sparkle Silver FinishCasio Exilim EX-S600-SR Digital Camera, 6mp, 3x Optical, 4x Digital Zoom with 2.2&quot; inch LCD Screen - Sparkle Silver Finish

My mom can use it

By Arun from Millbrae, CA on 1/11/2007

5 out of 5

Pros: Nice Features and Settings, Simple Controls, Great Resolution

Best Uses: Travel, Portraits, Outdoors, Everyday

Bottom Line: Yes, I would recommend this to a friend

See the video!

Casio EX-S500 Review

Tags: Arun, Powerreviews, S500, Review, Casio

(legalese)

My review of The North Face M's Denali Jacket

Originally submitted at Evogear

The classic. The North Face Denali is the ultimate all-around fleece jacket for any cold weather adventure.

The North Face M's Denali JacketThe North Face M's Denali Jacket

If only it prevented the common cold

By Gautam from Millbrae, CA on 1/10/2007

 

5 out of 5

Sizing: Feels true to size

Pros: Comfortable, Good Fit, Durable, Lightweight

Best Uses: Casual Wear, Office, Travel

Describe Yourself: Comfort-oriented, Trendy, Stylish, Practical

See the video!

Men's Denali Jacket Review

Tags: Jacket, Denali, Gautam

(legalese)

Photos

I was not very diligent when it came to taking pictures this holiday. Fortunately Melanie and Brian were better in that department.

SVUG

Alpha and beta are just Greek for a and b. They were, anyway, until 1994, when Netscape accidentally turned "beta" into a World Wide Web buzzword by giving away over a dozen beta versions of its browsers in three years. For Web hipsters, using Netscape's buggy beta features shifted from an option to a requirement. If you don't remember pounding your keyboard over Finnish sites that locked you out with "go install Netscape 2.0b3," you weren't really there.

Valleyway might have lost Nick Douglas, but with posts like this one it doesn't matter too much. Somehow, sometimes, this blog has the ability to make me feel not so bad about throwing away hundreds of dollars in rent. Also, Megan, their party correspondent is super nice so I guess I'll stay subscribed. Melanie will never let me forget that fabulous Christmas party that Vinnie threw, where I met Megan. And Julia :)

I'll be on east coast time next week.

Analog Devices

Driving through San Jose with Melanie, we pass a company called Analog Devices.

Me: Analog Devices... what kind of applications are better done with analog rather than digital?
Melanie: Clocks.

I should have known better than to ask the electrical engineer who is my girlfriend.

Portal

Brandon just pointed me to Portal, an upcoming game from Valve. It didn't make much sense to me why Valve would put its engine behind a puzzle game that's illustrated in the instructional video in the first few seconds of the above link, but it made total sense towards the end. Looks like it could be a very cool game.

Free discreet MIDI ringtone!

It feels like I write about something whenever I've spent too much time on it, thinking someone else might do the same stupid thing I tried to do. This time it happened to be searching for a better ringtone. The preloaded ones are never good and I've missed one or two calls when the phone is in silent/vibrate mode, even in my pocket. I ended up trying to make one but I was surprised how difficult it was to find software for OS X that sequences MIDI files. Download.

Portals

TechCrunch points to a screencast by Kris (on Flickr, ironically) showing an upcoming feature on Zoomr called Portals. It's pretty neat. Would've been perfect for some notes I added to some pictures on campus (e.g. this one) a while back.

Hibernate Mapping Diagram

If your hibernate.mapping.xml file is the most up-to-date documentation you have, try this XSL document to get a visual feel for how your database tables are related. Put the <?xml-stylesheet ... ?> directive in your mapping file and try opening it in a browser. I'd be surprised if it works in anything other than Firefox 1.5 (it needs to have canvas and XSL support). The XSL is pretty nasty because I wanted to include some portions of scrip.taculo.us to enable you to position the tables manually. Once the tables are in place, try hitting the '#' link in the top-left corner to connect everything together with "arrows".

Facebook RSS

They still don't support it, so here's an attempt to make that happen with the newly launched API. I wish it would at least expose the time a profile was last modified but that's probably like asking for them to publish emails and mobile phone numbers too. If you're daring, just login with your Facebook email/password. I don't know how/if other RSS clients handle HTTP authentication, but NetNewsWire does it very well.

[...]

Just the basics. What would be useful? Photos? Wall postings? Thanks goes to Ken K. for some help with the login procedure.

Update: the script is broken so I removed the link to it. I suspect the 'News Feed' feature is 10 times more useful anyway. See comments for more.

Not sure how I missed this in the 2 or so years of Java web programming I've done, but it's pretty huge: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-2004/jw-0712-threadsafe.html. Basically, never use instance variables in a servlet!

The moderators at work will sometimes send out outrageous reviews they come across. This is my all time favorite:

MA STAR VANS R REAL SNEAKERS PIMPEN!!!!

By JHANAY AKA NAY-NAY BKA BOSSY CHICA(unverified) from RANCHO CODOVA on 7/3/2006

Pros: Comfortable, Durable, Stable, Warm
Cons: Stains Easily
Best Uses: Cold Weather, Travel, Casual Wear "JHANAY HARRIS GOT A PAIR", "GO DUMB USA BY JHANAY", "GET HYPHY IN THEM"

THEY R SO COMFY WHERE EVER U GO EVEN ON BUSSINESS TRIPS AND I WHERE THEM WHEN IM AT A SIDE SHOW GOIN DUMB U FEEL THEY NOT ONLY 4 ROCKERS THEY 4 PPL WHO LIKE HIP HOP LIKE E-40 KEAK DA SNEAK TOO $HORT MAC DRE(REST IN PEACE)ECT.
(0 of 0 found this review helpful)

Mad props for being able to throw "hyphy" and "bussiness trips" in the same post.

All you people who have ever bought anything from Performance Bicycle, go write some reviews ;) Tell your friends.

I took a quick poll to prove a point - nearly everyone in the room was a product of public school education (myself included). So the opportunities weren't isolated to higher education. (Mr. Jobs followed up to make the reality more painful - showing how few of us were sending our children to public school.)

Jonathan Schwartz, Lunch with Prime Minister Tony Blair

Firebug

Firebug is an awesome Firefox extension for web development that I've been late to discover. Recently I found out you could modify the source of a web page in place with the "Inspector" tool. It's handy for tweaking HTML/JS/CSS without having to redeploy/reupload/reload the page or whatever, and also helps when ordering wireless service from Cingular. I tried to get off a family plan and create my own account, but Cingular didn't want to let me register under a different zip code than my family's. The zip code was set in a readonly text input. Firebug allowed me to wipe the attribute, submit the form, and have it my way. Kind of like a disposable greasemonkey script. Never thought I'd use the extension in that context. Thanks Mr. Hewitt for helping me avoid make a call to Cingular support.

Java image manipulation

Achieving anti-aliased images through the standard Java libraries was very non-obvious. No matter what rendering hints or interpolation I used in either the java.awt.image or javax.media.jai packages, many edges came out jagged. Finally I found a solution, so I'll send some search engine juice their way, because I generate so much of it.

Update: If you're processing non-sRGB images, expect lousy performance on non-windows platforms (due to lack of hardware acceleration support).

You've all seen the transparent desktop pictures. All of you might've seen this as well but I'll post it anyway because it takes the prize.

The academic year is over. What a struggle. Work starts tomorrow.

Lately, I've been getting quite a few emails requesting the Facebook vCard greasemonkey script. Maybe one every 2-3 days. I didn't think there was actual demand for it. I wish Facebook would just change their policy. Of course they don't have to... they get all the traffic they need without having to listen to its users at this point.

Campus eateries. After a year on campus, I only knew about half of these.

I just found out that some kid in Probability took notes using T_EK, every single class, and made it available to everyone. Brilliant. Thank you, Joel G.

kill -9

Some of you liked Monzy's So much drama in the PhD that I put on a mixtape a while back. If that includes you, know that he just released a new single, called Kill Dash Nine, and performed it live last Friday. See his blog for other nerdcore tunes.

JogaTV and Zlatan

vs. Ronaldo
juggling gum

Ironically on YouTube.

In iTunes, why is there not an option when you listen to a [radio] stream to "Buy This Song"? They must know the artist and song since it's being scrolled in the display. I could be one click away from giving them 99c. Instead, it's a couple of clicks and having to copy/paste information. That and I don't have 99 cents to give them for music.

At one of today's BBQs, Paul raved about XGL/Compiz. This demo gives you an idea of what it does. I don't know how long it's been around. He claims the novelty of the effects hasn't worn off after 2 weeks, but he's also an ubergeek. Most of the usuable stuff already exists in OS X I think.

Robert Scoble points to MapCruncher, which looks very similar to what Steve and I put together except its for MSN Virtual Earth instead of Google Maps. Speaking of which, we "went live" last week.

Another funny Valleywag post

I just had a remarkable interaction with a website. I participated in a focus group for SayNow last quarter, and they asked me to try out their beta. So I did. Part of the sign-up process was to register my phone number. The verification step did not involve the usual typing in a text notification code. Instead, it called me up, asked me to speak my name, and that was it. The cool part was that the web page echoed the exact state of the phone call. The box said "dialing" then switched to "began call" as soon as I picked up and then switched to "speak your name" when the voice instructed me to do the same, and finally "thank you" when I hung up. It was fascinating.

Steve and I generated some Google maps for various schools today:
UCLA
Cornell
Washington
Wisconsin

Via Subie: Loose Change

...and since I'm fixing some bad HTML that the Blogger widget always seems to cause...

Via Jawed: Pinkey the cat

There's a guy who works at Meyer Library who looks just like Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us.

In some vending machines you can put in a bunch of nickles/dimes, hit the "never mind button," and get back most of the change in quarters. Didn't know that.

The dude next to me and I are both scouring MySpace. He's twice my age. I hope he's doing it for class too.

Valleyway puts up some pretty funny posts every now and then. This is one of them.

Stanford Campus Map

Stanford prefers MapQuest, that's a good one too.

Google maps is the best, tru dat... double true!

Guessing

I sat in on a class this morning that I might have to take. It's called the Theory of Probability. For fun, the professor had each person in the class guess the number of cocoa puffs in a bowl. The person with the best guess would receive a copy of the textbook.

I had recently read The Wisdom of Crowds, which starts with a story from decades ago where the crowd at a farmers market performed a similar task, except it was guessing the weight of an oxe. The average of all guesses was one pound off the true weight.

The professor may have also read the book because after everyone was done guessing, he brought up the same story. I was one of the last people to announce my guess, so I gave a rough average of all the counts given up to that point thinking maybe this crowd was as wise as the one in the book. But as the professor said, this group of Stanford people did much worse than a bunch of old English country bumpkins. The mean was ~280 and the true count was 522.

Rewards

This is cool. Time to setup that real/virtual currency exchange.

Came across an optical illusions blog and re-discovered people taking pictures of stuff behind their monitor and making it their wallpaper. Hadn't see the hand-holding-calculator one before.

I just spent a couple of days programming Cocoa for OS X. Before that, I completed a team project using Python for S60 Nokia phones. Both made it very easy to create good looking results on a platform I had no prior experience on. I feel spoiled. My webpage has links to screenshots.

Nerf Rifle

Eventually MAKE: will start posting these instead of myself :)

Nerf Rifle

Via Gogglemarks, which links to a higher resolution video.

"SkyBlue Technologies is yet another small, fun, intense, and well-funded startup from the Stanford CS department"

Seen in an email on the cs-careers mailing list. We get at least two of these a day, but still... what kind of pitch uses the phrase "yet another." That doesn't send a very strong message.

I had the fortune of riding in a DB9 today. The automatic shifter is mounted on the panel above the radio.

For the first time since starting to use the Blogger Dashboard widget, I'm seeing the same behavior Matt wrote about, that the writing area doesn't scroll. Instead it increases the height of the widget. Poorly done.

One more week until this quarter is taken care of. Two more weeks until Las Vegas. Three more weeks until Melanie.

CC

A quick video intro to the Creative Commons license that I hadn't seen before. Nice graphic design.

P2P lending

Prosper -- "an eBay for services"

PyThong

When I was first introduced to Python, I'd have the hardest time spelling the word. I'd spell 'Pythong' half the time. Another guy on the group I was working with had the same problem.

Today, I was going to look up some documentation and I did it again so I inadvertently went to pythong.org and got something unexpected. They were nice enough to link me to my intended destination. It must be a pretty common slip.

Fightswitch

Ryan's latest invention.

Top Gear

I haven't watched it yet but my bet is that it's entertaining: Top Gear Winter Olympics

Blogger Widget

Just testing. Other widgets are available too.

Wired for Speech

I'd just gotten out of a lecture that was partly about how fine tuned our minds are to detecting human speech, picking it out from ambient sounds, etc. I sat down about 20m from a pair of guys, just close enough to hear that they were speaking. I couldn't actually make out any of their words, but it sounded like Swedish. I don't know how to describe that, whether it was which syllables were emphasized or the pace of the conversation or what, but I listened closer and finally heard a word that possibly could've been Swedish. So I walked up to them after finishing my lunch, hoping I was correct or I'd look like a fool, and sure enough, they were from Sweden. This wasn't the first time something like this had happened. Just as our minds are easily able to pick out human speech, is the same true for distinguishing languages of human speech?

I saw the owner of this bike on my way to campus this morning. The iPod was blaring in full effect, coasting down the bike lane.

Update: The professor of the above lecture said today that we are able to distinguish our native language from other languages when we turn 4 days old. Remarkable.

ICMP echo request

valhalla:~ mhdavids$ ping www.sfcu.org
PING www.sfcu.org (192.216.246.33): 56 data bytes
36 bytes from cardinal-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.212.2): Communication prohibited by filter
Vr HL TOS  Len   ID Flg  off TTL Pro  cks      Src      Dst
 4  5  20 0054 8677   0 0000  30  01 8b0a 192.168.1.101  192.216.246.33

What is that all about? Never seen that kind of response from the ping command before.

Facebook announcement pricing

One of the few ways that Facebook makes money, as far as I know, is through their announcements panel. I clicked on an announcement to make an announcement, and found out that it would cost me $15/day to announce something at Stanford. It's variable depending on the school. What determines this rate? The most expensive school is Penn State ($22/day). Does that mean it's based on the number of registered users?

Nass

By the way, MarsEdit is not free. My 30-day trial expired recently.

One of my professors this quarter, Clifford Nass, is the best lecturer I've ever had. Maybe I should say he's the funniest ever, but funny is good, and thereby he's the best. His impression of a rich, white, educated male is even better than Dave Chappelle's. I need to bring in my camera to class and tape this guy. Some of you might've heard him on NPR yesterday. He said he was going to be on one of the programs.

Email is so popular, despite what I think is a pretty bad way of doing certain things it frequently is used for between people. Obviously the social interface is great, but isn't there a way to improve group discussions via email? Something like a temporary news group... to figure out tonight's dinner plans... or decide which color shirt we want to go with for the intramural basketball team.

Update: The NPR bit I talked about showed up in my ITConversations podcast feed. He's not nearly as entertaining as he is in lecture.

Trivia

On Friday we had Trivia Night with the CS graduate students. Out of categories such as history, art, computer science, science, the only category our team won (or even placed in for that matter), was TV. Also, I think I must've nailed Madonna's Die Another Day a good 10 seconds before anyone else while the intro was played back. That and accurately guessing CHiPs theme song were my lone contributions for the night. What.

Nokia N70

I show up for a mobile prototyping tutorial series and they hand me a brand new Nokia N70 phone to play with. The the camera is impressive:

Ning

Ning is a neat idea but its components are pretty incomplete for being a mash-up "playground." For an example, I put together swivel, which is a silly app to explore the squared circle pool. except I wasn't able to use Ning's own implementation of the Flickr API because you can't retrieve tags. Wtbad. Also, is it just me or is the site sloow?



Update: I switched out the API I was using (phpFlickr) to a new one (phlickr), and it was still rather slow. I've found it much faster to query all photos, instead of a specific group. I don't have any hard evidence that this is the source of the lag, but it's better now. I wanted to try to speed things up since I got a couple of responses from some friendly Ning people. I suspected it was my app rather than Ning itself because other pages loaded fairly fast. Try it again.

3 Step Plan

Something I made last night for an upcoming party that wasn't used so I'll put it here for other Roy Lichtenstein fans to enjoy.

Of course in this blogger theme it doesn't quite work.

Columns

What are the advantages of laying out text in columns? Are there any? I'm trying to think of some but I'm drawing a blank. I find it annoying having to move my focus down a line every 5 words, and then have to scroll up the entire page every time I get to the bottom of the first column (<12" screen). Then why are columns so prevalent in papers? I need to know.

Update: Found this link to answer some of my questions: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000618.html. The findings agree with my preference since I'm a slow reader.

MarsEdit and Meetro

Testing out MarsEdit some more. I guess after NetNewsWire was acquired, they made MarsEdit free? It sure beats going through blogger.

Also wanted to help out the people over at Meetro. Here's the low down:

Meetro has now launched its Mac private alpha and is looking for people to participate. We plan on distributing it to the first few hundred people that email us at mac@meetro.com So reserve your spot now! Also, please include the city/state you reside in as well when contacting us.

Meetro is a location-aware IM client, compatible with the major protocols. I can't say much more since I haven't installed the alpha yet.

Also, woah.

Atherton

I've been biking a lot lately, out of necessity. Getting to school is a 5.5 mile ride, so I must average ~65 miles a week? Until Brendan pointed it out, I didn't I know that practically all of my commute is through the most expensive ZIP code in the country: 94027 (Atherton). It would be easier to tell if these driveways weren't 100 yards long with gated entrances :) Another cool part (and probably related) is crossing Sand Hill Rd, home of the venture capitalists that pump out 40% of that kind of funding in the US. I think that's the number I heard.

People

On Fridays I have a seminar called People, Computers, and Design. Last Friday I got to see a presentation by Blake Ross and Asa Dotzler on what sets the Firefox project apart from other open source projects when it comes to thinking about users. Blake is an excellent speaker and their slides were good examples of what slides should be. They would almost deserve a mention on Presentation Zen.

I've come to realize how many great people I've had the chance to see or even meet in a couple of months on campus. A brief list of notables:

• Terry Winograd, Larry Page's old advisor (and now my advisor)


• Brian Behlendorf, once president of the Apache Software Foundation


• Mark Zuckerberg, producer of the Facebook


• Dan "Monzy" Maynes-Aminzade, "So much drama in the PhD" rapper


• Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media


• Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun


• Don Knuth


• Sergey Brin and Larry Page


• Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com

And the list goes on.

Google Search Keys

I updated the greasemonkey script to play nicely with other scripts that register keypress event listeners on the document. Guillermo pointed out to me that it was breaking the Qwikify script. Quirksmode had a nice entry on the topic.

Chuck Dynamite

My roommate had already seen this so this is probably not new to anyone but funny anyway. Chuck Dynamite

Also, I wish I was daring enough to toss my camera. And way can't I use a URL like: http://www.flickr.com/photos/friends/tags/some_tag ?

Dregs

Today, I compiled a piece of code with an error on line 1337. It wasn't very elite.

Flock

What can Flock do for me?

VGMap

I was hoping one day to write about this stuff because I would've created it. Somebody else had the same idea I did: overlaying vector graphics on Google Maps. I'll just strike it off my idealog and go back to occupying my time with reading about cool stuff instead of doing it myself :/

Day 2

I don't know if this applies universally, but if you ever fire up Pine to check your email, and all your messages disappear from your other IMAP client, try issuing the respool-email command from the terminal you opened Pine in. Scary.

Last year, in my technical writing class, I had to write up a mock proposal to some person/organization. I happened to address mine to Brian Behlendorf because of his involvement with the Apache Software Foundation. My proposal had something to do with the Apache web server. Anyway, today, I sat in front of him as he gave a talk on software as a service. Cool. Another random note is that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.com fame is strolling around campus recruiting people. The newspaper ran an article on him and how his company is providing substantial salaries to students who leave school and go work for him instead. They're doing pretty well I guess.

In class, we were given examples of logical reasoning patterns. One of the basic ones is that if x is greater than y, and y is greater than z, then x must be greater than z. Except it doesn't always work out in the English language due to its ambiguities. The example was if bad sex is better than nothing, and nothing is better than good sex, then bad sex must be better than good sex.

Nollning

The CS department loves Google. I think the company came up at least 10 times during the "Welcome to Stanford" presentation.

One of the questions asked was who traveled the farthest to get here? "India" says one student (many others could've said the same thing). "Okay, is anyone from somewhere farther?" asks the professor. "Pakistan" says another student. Pwned.

I met a guy from University of Washington. He got his BS in EE and explained that at UW, the CS and EE departments are basically the same. He presumed it was the same at Stanford because he saw EE professor teaching CS courses. So he applied to the CS department only to find out that the departments are very much not the same. Now, he doesn't know what to specialize in since nothing deals directly with hardware. I think it's pretty cool he still got accepted.

It was an enjoyable day, apart from the time wasted by students asking questions that had either been covered in the presentation or already been asked before!

By the weekend I'd met enough people to start hanging out with some of them. I've still met more Swedes than Americans: 4 vs 2. Other than that there are plenty of Indian, Chinese, and French students. We've been hanging out at the on-campus bar which is fortunately rather good because there's not much else around the campus area that we've found yet.

This weekend we

• Got an early buzz going thanks to Google (again) putting in a couple of hundred dollars towards beer, bread, cheese, salmon, and other snacks. Somebody forgot to buy the wine. It's a weekly thing so maybe next time.


• Watched the women's volleyball game. Great atmosphere. A+++


• Watched the men's soccer game. Not quite as cool.


• Grabbed a free dinner at some freshman event. They introduced the fall sports teams and taught us some of the cheers they use. They're supposed to reflect the "intellectualism" here. You have "traverse the field, traverse the field... increase the aggregate yardage" or "pursue them, pursue them... make them relinquish the ball." Or Shannon's favorite: "hit them with the axe, hit them with the axe. where? in the neck, in the neck, the neck, the neck, etc."


• Assembled the road bikes and used them to get to campus for a change. Shaves a lot of time off the commute when you actually have gears to use. I normally ride a fixed gear.


• Played some killer 4v4 beach volleyball. At NCSU if I'd ever done that, I'd have girls laying out all around me. At Stanford, the girls lay out in front of the bookstore.


• Cooled off in the pools at the Avery Aquatic Center.

Next weekend: football and problem sets?

Clouds

Clouds
Originally uploaded by martin.davidsson.

I came out of the bank and saw this in the sky. Must've been what Mr. Searls blogged about because it's been raining fairly heavily this afternoon.

Presentation styles

I watched some of Dick Hardt's keynote at the 2005 OSCON. It's hard to not pay attention to this style of presentation--for me at least. Sort of reminded me of one of the last presentation Lawrence Lessig did. They both happened to take place at OSCON. I'll have to try to go one year.

Dashboard Sleep Widget

I like to listen to stuff when I go to bed. The stuff is usually played from my laptop. The problem is that I don't want the laptop to play music all night. Nor do I want it to cut off before the audio is done playing in case I happen to be listening to a Spanarna episode. Now there's a Dashboard widget to meet my needs. I'll call it Sleeper Snooze for now. Somebody pointed out that there's already a "Sleeper" widget on apple.com.


You might find it more useful for other things such as putting the computer to sleep after your 37 minute download complets and you're already out the door.

Anyway, some links that came in handy while doing this for the first time:
Dashboard Programming Guide (everything from style guidelines to javascript callbacks)
Debugging Dashboard Widgets (especially if you have to use an Objective-C cocoa plugin)

Problems/Todo:
The (X) to close the widget positions itself offset from the corner.
Implement buttons using the -apple-dashboard-region controls.

Update:

Now compiled for OSX 10.6: http://sites.google.com/a/davidssons.com/martin/files/Sleeper.wdgt.zip

Source also available at http://github.com/emtrane/Sleeper

Meebo

Goodbye AIM Express.

RDU-PHX-SJC

Mom: Eddie?
Eddie: Mom! We are on high alert here. I almost killed you right there! You do not even realize.
Mom: Okay, nevermind.

It loses something in writing but if it makes me laugh after I have to get up on six (!) hours of sleep, it's funny. America West in short: 43 min early, Airbus plane, good movie (Mr. and Mrs. Smith). The drawbacks were that you had to rent headphones and buy breakfast. Being early wasn't all that great. It extended my layover and my luggage was flown to San Jose with an earlier flight so when I arrived at my final destination I thought they'd lost my luggage.

On the topic of quotes, I overheard this on the TTA bus in a discussion about doing away with daylight saving(s) time:

We can't get rid of it because..... the VCRs automatically switch their time over. That would be so confusing.

If you're looking for a large luggage piece, I'd recommend this one from Atlantic. I've only used it once so the only thing I can't speak for is durability but the rating on that ebags.com link can. I also saw a crew member with an Atlantic bag which must say something.

I bought my $5 Caltrain ticket with a $20 bill. I got $15 of change in coins. Luckily it was in one dollar coins but it's still pretty weird. Also fortunate is that the busses accept the coins so now it's pretty handy to have the coins for fare instead of having to mess with feeding bills into the machine. It cost $6.50 to get from SJC to the major road outside of our townhouse which is about 25 miles. Not bad.

gWifi

There are at least 150 wireless hotspots on TTA's 302 bus route between Cary and NCSU. Made me wonder if there is a Google Maps / Wifi location mashup. Of course there is: gWifi. It's pretty lacking, however. If I happened to have a GPS device hooked up to my laptop on the bus this morning, I should be able to upload the resulting log of captured signals and coordinates for others to benefit from.

Prediction Markets

I want to see this but for songs instead.

Apple Cider Vinegar

My mom drinks this stuff, for whatever reason. I think it's supposed to be a wonder drug within the world of alternative medicine. It was sitting out on the counter today when I got home, so I had a glass. Bad move. It's awful. Now you try it.

Selectors

CSS3 has a lot of crazy selectors, like E:nth-child(n) meaning an E element, the n-th child of its parent. I need something simple/basic like E < F meaning an E element parent of an F element, and I need it in CSS2.

I have a blender here

...but it's not mine. I know Tommy brought a blender over earlier this summer to make milkshakes, but I thought he got it back. Is anyone missing a blender?

There's some Swedish text on the apple PowerBook and iBook power adapters. "The device should connect to a grounded outlet." I guess Sweden is the only country where all outlets aren't grounded? I was trying to see if, electronically, the power adapters are the same. They aren't.

Moment of Zen?

Facebook vCards II

This Greasemonkey script will place a link in the top left corner under the "Poke Him/Her!" link of a facebook profile page called "Get the vCard". The link will prompt you to save a document (opening with Address Book doesn't work for me). Unfortunately I don't know how to control the file name so you'll have to add the .vcf extension or the address book won't accept it. Also unfortunate is the fact that the address book doesn't recognize URI's for photo values. Supports name, birthday, screenname, phone, mobile, and website. E-mail is notably missing because it's hard to do OCR in JavaScript :) This is sloppy, rough, and contains OS X-only extensions but should be faster than manually adding contacts if you happen to be using Firefox on a Mac.

Another update: script is updated to include photos. Unfortunately, it relies on an external service, and I've been told that photos don't show up in Microsoft Outlook.

And again:

I’m an engineer at facebook and I’m writing to ask if you would be willing to take down the link to your facebook vCards utility (located at http://martindavidsson.blogspot.com/2005/08/facebook-vcards-ii.html). Even if your intended use of such a script is noble, we’re starting to see larger numbers of scrapers who are taking scripts like yours and modifying them to less legitimate goals. In any case, the undertaking you describe on your site is (and has always been) against our terms of service. We'd obviously like to resolve this without getting the lawyers involved if possible, so please let me know as soon as you've taken the script down so that our legal department doesn't get all fired up about this.

One more:
Lately I've been getting at least one random IM/email per day from a person asking about this script. It's getting tedious mailing it out. Facebook, clearly people want this feature. Give it to us. Until then, the rest of you can download the grasemonkey script.

Update IV:
Neil M. sent me an updated version of the script back in April, which I'm just now getting around to uploading. Pretty lousy on my part, but you can find his update at the same link as above.

Facebook vCards

Have any OS X users seen new entries popping up in their address book from thefacebook.com? I have a couple of entries that I know I didn't enter myself, and I know they're from thefacebook because the homepage field of the contact is set to that person's facebook profile page. Not all of "my friends" on the site have entries in my address book though. I can't find any kind of export link on the site. I've even asked support and they haven't gotten back to me. What's the deal?

I haven't been keeping up with people's information so it would be useful to have this kind of functionality. Maybe greasemonkey can help me out.

Conference Calling

Seen over on the MAKE blog:

HOW TO conference call with Google Talk
Open up a copy of google talk on all computers with which you wish to conference. After one copy is opened make a new shortcut for google talk but at the end of it add /nomutex. If you installed it to the default folder then your shortcut should read "C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe" /nomutex. Open 2 instances of the software on every user's computer. After this start a chain: User 1 should connect on one instance to user 2. User 2 will connect on his second instance to user 3. User 3 will connect using his second instance back to user 1. With this chain everyone is connected to everyone. Or install Skype.

Hitting the high notes

At Mojo's, because people have discovered half-off sushi is the thing to do on Tuesday nights:

Adam: You know how they say a thousand monkeys can't create a Shakespeare? Well, there's also a theory that given enough resources, you can randomly generate, say, Hamlet. So a guy tested it. He wrote a program. It wrote Hamlet in four days.

Me: Really? That's incredible. I mean, consider the number of possibilities.

David: Yeah, like: "Look! We got it! Oh wait... That's a 'k'."

atom+safari

If you're publishing an atom feed but Safari only shows the title with a big "No Articles" make sure that you don't have the xmlns attribute in the root <feed> tag, no matter what the specification says :(

Ryan returned from Ireland the other day and retol...

Ryan returned from Ireland the other day and retold some excellent stories, as always. The coolest topic was the game of Hurling. I looked up some movie clips to learn more. I think I've seen it on TV before but didn't know it was called Hurling. The second movie has some cool clips of "free taking." The county of Cork supposedly has one of the better teams in the country--Jordan, you should check it out.

I found one of my sister's books lying around the house: ttyl. I wish it had search-inside-the-book because it's pretty funny. The whole book is a series of IM conversations, and the pages are basically screenshots of chat windows.

Tommy threw another sweet party last night in honor of Arun's birthday/departure. Good bye and good luck Arun. You need to send out a copy of the video Josh put together, unless it's mostly serious people giving sentimental and personal goodbyes.

Hope, cure, future

Anyone interested in seeing the Jimmy V Celebrity Golf Classic with me? Sunday, August 28 in Cary. The list of celebrities isn't stunning but the parents are out of town so we have a couple of tickets that aren't being used.

94305

Stanford is pretty. Silicon Valley was made for biking. The weather is consistent.

And they have teh market.

The next couple of years should be a good time.

Baby Name Voyager

People who read Freakonomics (and people who didn't, I guess) might appreciate the Baby Name Voyager. Just heard about from a recorded conference session so it must be fairly old but perhaps some will find it novel.