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.