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 :/