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.