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 & USB Interface, Black & 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 & USB Interface, Black & SilverMicrosoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000 with PS/2 & USB Interface, Black & 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" 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" inch LCD Screen - Sparkle Silver FinishCasio Exilim EX-S600-SR Digital Camera, 6mp, 3x Optical, 4x Digital Zoom with 2.2" 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.

Garage Opener

Garage Opener
Originally uploaded by martin.davidsson.

Testing Flickr blog integration.

In the 6 years of living here (on and off), I hadn't noticed how poorly the garage opener design was. Why limit it to two columns instead of using the familiar layout of a mobile phone. There is plenty of available width. It must take me twice as long to punch in the PIN as it would on my phone. I'll just have to do it often enough to train the muscle memory.

Blandat

Finished my first book ever: A Short History of Nearly Everything. Everything here means astrology, geology, physics, chemistry, taxonomy, zoology, etc. Thanks to amienowheels for letting songchilde borrow it.

Does anyone need a car? How about a 2004 Silver Toyota Corolla. Less than 30,000 miles. Say $12,000. Strike now and I'll throw in the auxiliary input adapter, i.e. you can listen to your MP3 player through the car stereo!

Does anyone have an apartment in the Palo Alto area? 3BR... ~$2000/mo. Need to move in by mid-September.

I always wondered what the 'FT' in MSFT (Microsoft's stock symbol) stood for. I mean MS must be MicroSoft... so what's FT? I recently became the last person to figure out that it must be MicroSoFT.

Anyone ever heard of SkillFusion? Just curious, and if so, what do you know about it?

Occasionally, NetNewsWire will "stick" on certain posts. When I advance to the next unread post, the title changes, but the entry body displays the content of the previous post. After about 20 seconds the body will update to display the correct information. Lazyweb? (as if I have that luxury)

I'm tired.

Requests

NetNewsWire needs to be able to display posts in chronological order, the reverse of arrival order. And if it is able to do so, I need to know how. It also needs the prefetching functionality of the Google Accelerator, for when I use it offline. Most of the more interesting posts include a link to some other document that I can't retrieve.

I got an e-mail from a guy about a mobile social network. He got my e-mail through some site that tracks community wireless groups. I [re-]started such a group after noticing there wasn't anything in the RDU area when I was interning at a company that dealt with setting up wireless networks. All the group ever entailed was a mailing list and I don't think anyone has posted on it in a while so I'll post the note here instead.

My team has created a project called Meetro that is a location based community building software of sort. You could also call it a social network. It works completely off of wifi networks, so we're looking to work
together with as many of the community projects out there to spread the word.

I fulfilled his request because of the latest news item on the page:

We've launched! Three cheers to the entire team for their herculean+ effort. We're off to get shitfaced. See you cats in the morning.

)(

If you ever want a laptop with excellent wireless antennas, get an HP/Compaq. My dad has an HP; mom has a Compaq. They blow away the 12" Apple PowerBook (from 2003) with an Airport Extreme. Despite the addition of two wireless networks in the neighborhood from last summer, I can't get a consistent connection from inside... even with the aluminum foil. Looks like it'll be another summer of trading mosquito bites for bandwidth. Also, dad switched cellphones with me until his mobile gets unlocked, so there goes the Flickr activity.

RDU-EWR-ARN

Just to drive home my point about Continental...

1. The agent at the gate had promised us that our flight had been rescheduled and arranged. Nothing else to do. I call to confirm the day after and the agent had in fact done nothing at all.


2. After one hour in the air the pilot announces they're having some rudder difficulties and decides to turn around, just to be in the safe side. The return and switching of planes delays us another 5 hours, in addition to the 3 days we'd already been set back.

Either way, check Flickr for some low-res pics or davidssons.com for some better--but less frequently updated--photos.

Work hard. Fly right.

Next on the list of people needed to started an epidemic is the Maven. I was reading about Mavens as Melanie and I were sitting at the gate waiting to fly to Newark and then on to Sweden.

Mavens are incredibly well-informed about markets and very helpful in assisting others in their purchases. I know a guy who watches automobile prices like a hawk and makes a nice profit on just buying and selling cars. He'll buy a BMW/Porsche/SAAB/whatever when he spots a good price, drive it for a few months, and then turn around and sell it for a profit.

After a few chapters we board the plane but soon the pilot says "Don't throw anything at me but we've been delayed by four hours." The flight was eventually cancelled due to inclement weather at Newark. They can't do anything about that, but the way they handled the situation was far from graceful. I'll pretend to be a maven by spreading my advice to use another airline when you fly. Fly SAS, or NWA, or any airline that uses Airbuses.

Beach weekend

We're down in Wilmington for the weekend. Others will have better write-ups in their livejournals so I won't try to compete, but I will say that Tommy's house is very hospitable.

I began reading Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point on the way down. I got as far as the chapter about connectors. Connectors are people who bring other people together. In the chapter he describes an extraordinary connector who goes to great lengths to keep up with all of his acquaintances... sending out birthday cards and trying to get in touch with friends from his childhood. Reminded me of my attempt I described in my last post, but I don't really have any of the other qualitifes of a connector. For an example, Gladwell had a sort of quiz he would use to quickly identify such people. He had a list of 250 last names, randomly drawn from the Manhattan phone book. He would ask the person to go through the list and count the number of people he/she was acquainted with that had a last name in the list. If the count exceeded say 50, the person was most likely a connector. I don't think I counted more than a dozen.

My dad just emailed me an MP3 recording of a voice mail that my physician's office left me at home. Another cool feature of VOIP I guess. I logged onto their website to confirm my appointment and I find out that I can view the lab results of my blood tests. Also cool. I don't know which surprises me more: seeing these features come around or the fact that it hasn't happened earlier. With Internet reaching 75% penetration in US homes, maybe we're approaching a tipping point in the market of bringing household activities online :)

Skriv gärna namn och e-mail adress!

I just returned from a party thrown by Matt. Thanks again Matt. He thinks my blog is dorky which is hard to deny. I guess I just don't use it to speak my mind about things other than what I deal with on a daily basis. This post will be a little different, but I'm staying true to the dorkiness by blogging on a Friday night.

I met a lot of nice people, two of which I share a mutual friend with. 1) Both I and "Leeway" (I don't know how to spell is name but that's what it sounds like) know Chethan. They know each other through ultimate at Cornell. I got to know Chethan through Americana at NCSU. 2) Both I and Simon know TJ. They know each other from being students at Georgia Tech. I met TJ at IBM earlier this year. The small world phenomenon never gets old. Surprisingly, the one person at the party who expressed an interest in social networks came off as the most socially inept person there. Reminds me of Dr. Doyle speaking about Marvin Minsky and how he noticed that students would always be most interested in the aspects of AI that they didn't handle very well themselves in real life. Clumsy students who fumbled around were interested machine vision, for an example. Minsky was always worried about the students who said they were interested in general intelligence.

I'll close on another random note. Eight years ago I got confirmed through the Swedish church. It took place over 3 weeks in the summer before high school started. At the end of the three weeks, I asked people to write down their email address in my bible that I just happened to come across. If I can get just one response, that would be neat.

Fixing web applications

Informative read. There are at least two items mentioned that I now need to address with our web application at work. Speaking of which, before that link popped up in my RSS reader, I was trying to figure out why our web application would call the homepage twice for one page load in the browser. Turns out <link rel="home" href="..." /> was causing it. I don't know why but both Safari and Firefox were causing the associated Struts action to execute twice. Fetching the page with wget, however, resulted in the expected behavior.

Another page had a more severe problem. It would hit the homepage 8 or more times for every load. I traced down the cause of this problem to a simple JavaScript statement that preloads an image. It just hit me. The images no longer exist and so multiple 404s must've been firing (the 404 pages happen to share the homepage's Struts action). I'll leave in the strikethrough text for my co-worker(s) to laugh/scowl at.

Random note: if you google for rel link="home", the web application I'm talking about shows up as the third result. Odd.

OJB to Hibernate 3 Migration

I've spent far too long on this already so I'll make this brief but still try to help others out who want to go through the same process.

To convert your repository_user.xml file to a hibernate mapping file, try using this stylesheet. It's not completely automatic. I still had to add inverse="true" attributes in a few places were we're using bi-directional associations (see section 2.3.6 of the Hibernate Reference Documentation).

I also needed to tweak a few proxy attributes because we're using Castor XML which turned out to make things much more difficult. Hibernate uses CGlib for what it calls proxy generation. The problem is that it changes the class signature of the original class it's proxying for. When the modified classes get sent to Castor it complains about illegal/invalid characters because the class name is now suffixed with $$EnhancerByCGLIB$$. I had to patch the Castor source with a hack. Still looking for a long term solution.

Before all that mess I spent some time trying to figure out why Hibernate wasn't reading my JNDI datasource resource. It complained about an empty driver setting and a null URL. For those issues, refer to this helpful forum thread. Not the solution I was hoping for but it works.

Update:

I'm posting the change I made to Castor in response to a comment but it's pretty embarrassing :) These lines went below line 1293 of org.exolab.castor.xml.Marshaller in version 0.9.5.3 (notice the second if condition):

            if (!containerField) {
                //-- Make sure qName is not null
                if (qName == null) {
                    //-- hopefully this never happens, but if it does, it means
                    //-- we have a bug in our naming logic
                    String err = "Error in deriving name for type: " +
                        _class.getName() + ", please report bug to: " +
                        "http://castor.exolab.org.";
                    throw new IllegalStateException(err);
                }
                if( qName.indexOf("$$-enhancer-by-cGLIB$$") != -1 ) {
                    return;
                }
                handler.startElement(qName, atts);
            }

Lovely solution, right? Hope it helps you, Michael.

Greasemonkey scripts for Greasemonkey scripts

It turns out that you can in fact modify a document that contains nothing but a javascript file. So if you set the @include directive to *user.js and do something like

var href = "http://www.example.com/stuff?" + getDataUri( document.documentElement.innerHTML ); document.documentElement.appendChild( aLinkUsingThatHref )

, you'd be ready to redistribute your own scripts. It even seems to work for Platypus generated scripts, despite the fact that the URL isn't in the form scriptname.user.js.

Grandmothers Skyping

There was a link on the Skype Journal to a post about somebody's grandmother using Skype to communicate. I have to brag a little about my own grandmother. She's been Skyping for almost a year now, and sometimes she even initiates the call! OMG.

Queues

I read a lot of other feeds out there. I at least skim all of the entries. I'm able to because the feed reader stores state and doesn't lose it between restarts. Many posts link to either other people's blog entries or web pages in general. I click the link and a new tab opens in my browser and remains there until I read it. For whatever reason, I rarely read it directly but queue it up for later instead. This becomes problematic when the browser crashes or I'm forced to restart the browser and it's been so long since I opened up the tabs that I don't care about losing them. Except that I do. I need a system to queue up tabs like this. I need a bookmarklet that forwards the page to a service that re-publishes the page to RSS and places it in a feed that I subscribe to so that I eventually will read it. Because then I'll be sure to revisit the topic as I make my way through unread items in my reader. The reader (NetNewsWire lite) is able to display HTML so maybe I can get away with escaping the entire page's content and serving that up in RSS.

Notebooks on night stands

My dad (XFN link!) once told me to always keep a notebook by my bed for times like these. I've tried going to bed but random thoughts are keeping me up so I'll jot them down on my notebook. My notebook just happens to connect me to the Internet.

I was experimenting with data URIs a few weeks back and learned you could create separate documents on the fly. My experiment created an inline OPML XML file based on a blogroll-like listing that you could save and import in your favorite reader. I thought it could lead to cooler things, like create a bittorrent of larger downloads where the site didn't already make them available. Tracking and seeding this file was still necessary, however, which put an end to those plans. Now that there's a trackerless version of BitTorrent, maybe this is possible?

Platypus

I haven't seen this anywhere other than on the O'Reilly Radar so I'll give it some more visibility (thanks to my awesome Google PageRank): Platypus.

Creating scripts for Greasemonkey was pretty simple, but now it's ridiculous. When this gets out there's going to be an explosion in the number of scripts. I activate the extension, click around one the screen a little, and suddenly I have a customized page (within reason). In some ways, the whole web just became a portal.

Now we just need an easier/integrated way to share these scripts with the world. I wonder if you can write a greasemonkey script that modifies another greasemonkey script to insert a link. Ideally, the link would submit the title, description, and target pages of the script (pulled from the standard comments) along with the script itself to the repository of scripts.

Oh! And then... (this is like the 3rd edit of this post), we need an easier way to discover greasemonkey scripts that people have published. I need something to alert me when there's a greasemonkey script available for the current page I'm on--similar to the RSS auto-discovery feature.

And then... we'll do it all over again for Trixie.