Archive for the 'Random' Category

I found this post from Richard Perlman to be particularly poignant. In context, it is in response to the arrest of a software developer in Japan that authored P2P file sharing technology that includes stronger privacy protection.

So, let me understand. In Japan if you develop software that MIGHT be
used to violate copyright laws you can be charged with a crime and be
arrested. Yet, in the USA, if you manufacture guns that MIGHT be used
to kill someone you are essentially immune from criminal prosecution
and, based on recent court cases, even from civil action — and if the
congress has its way, you will soon be fully immune for any liability
from the uses of your products.

We do indeed live in strange times in which intellectual property seems
to be more sacred than human life.

Strange times, indeed.

When I read the headline that Geothermal plants are shaking up a California town, I was fully expecting yet another quackery-hits-mainstream-press bit of stupidity. Instead, it appears that there is a connection between geothermal energy production through the use of water injected into the thermal sites and an increase– significant increase– in the number of quakes within the region.

I wonder what the geothermal plants do to protect against earthquake damage? In any case: Odd.

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MacDevCenter has an article on Objective-C unit testing using OCUnit. A good read.

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As appeared in the pontifications of my Subversion post: if you just need the Subversion client, Martin Ott (of SubEthaEdit fame) has made statically linked packages available that contain just the client bits. See Martin’s weblog to download.

Speaking of SubEthaEdit….

It has been quite a while since an update or any noise in that community. Not that the app doesn’t “just work” as is… but, what is up, anyway?

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Food

A few days ago, I made steamed curried brussel sprouts with elephant garlic. Very tasty. Very toxic. Oddly, Janis (Joplin — my dog) totally digs curried brussel sprouts. Very strange.

I had a few leftover. So, for breakfast I made a scramlet (scrambled omelette) that contained smoked tuna [farmer's market comes through again!], spicy yummy cheese [pepper cheddar of some kind], and curried brussel sprouts. A “throw together whatever I can find” breakfast.

It was surprisingly tasty.

Tomorrow, I’m going to try my hand at Jambalaya with crab, shrimp, and jalapeno-chicken sausage. Should be interesting. Fortunately, I have the exact same cast iron dutch oven as in the 40 year old cookbook. (Fortunate in that I have no idea what I’m doing and am grasping at any correlation between recipe and reality that I can.)

With my wife out of town, I set out to explore the local restaurant scene; something that is not so easy with a 3.5 year old in tow. In particular, I wanted to find a decent Japanese restaurant. And that I did: Furu-Sato has proven to be an excellent dining experience. Very friendly folks– both working their and as customers– and the food is excellent. Nice web site, too.

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I was quite amused to note that Return to Dark Castle is now available. I used to play quite a bit of the original Dark Castle on my Mac Plus way back when. RtDC is quite a decent version of the game.

In other gaming news, I picked up a GameCube under the theory that there are a number of games aimed at the younger crowd. I also picked up the Sonic and Zelda anthologies (the first N games of each series). I never played the Zelda series and only a little bit of Sonic.

It surprised me just how bad the original Zelda really was. Now, that is a completely unfair statement because I’m comparing it to everything that was inspired by the original game. The criticism is aimed more at the game play and UI than at the story or gaming concept. To succeed at Zelda, you have to solve “puzzles” where the solution appears to be 100% invisible — i.e. you have to, say, “burn the 4th tree from the left of the screen 3 north and 4 west and 1 south and 2 east from the start” where there is absolutely no clue anywhere in the game that that is what you need to do.

Zelda II is much better, but still has its moments of “what? huh?”.

Thank goodness for FAQs.

Sonic is as Sonic always is; the ultimate ZEN game. That is, to maximize points, you have to just go go go with no regard for what is coming next because you can’t see it! But the faster you go (learning the occasional hiccup/exception), the more points you get. Seriously — Sonic seems to be all about trusting in “the flow” of the level design. And the level design is generally pretty amazing.

It strikes me that Sonic is going to be a whole new– and spectacular– gaming experience on a really high resolution large screen where you can see about 10x more of the level than in the original games.

NASA’s Natural Hazards site collects various current events happening at a global scale. The site presents a global map with icons denoting different kinds of world events for which NASA has made satellite imagery available. Click through to find the images and an informative write-up of the event.

ThinkGeek has some geek undies for valentines day that have HTTP server response codes printed on them. (Thanks, Fred!)

They include 200 OK and 403 Forbidden in a nice little heart shaped box.

I dunno about 200 OK. When I was still in that mode of thinking (single and desperate), I would much rather have found 100 Continue. Alas, 401 Unauthorized was much more likely.

307 Temporary Redirect could be useful for times when the system is down. Or, maybe, 305 Use Proxy.

Open relationships could probably use 303 See Other. I tried an open relationship once, it degraded into 301 Moved Permanently.

201 Created. Could be good, could be bad. Good for us, now I have a 3 year old son who totally digs legos.

402 Payment Required is illegal in most places.

If there is a 409 Conflict, it can often lead to 410 Gone.

Every man’s fear is 411 Length Required or 417 Expectation Failed. Many of the emails I receive promise that in a few short months, I can receive 413 Request Entity Too Large instead.

Sometimes, all the signs say go but 503 Service Unavailable. Of course, many people fail to recognize and act upon the signs and then 408 Request Timeout.

Most importantly, 405 Method Not Allowed really does mean 406 Not Acceptable!

What if the weapons of mass destruction Bush is so desperately searching for really were in Iraq at one point because the US sold or gave the weapons to Iraq a couple of decades ago? I’m sure it has been discussed ad nauseum while I wasn’t paying attention.

The US certainly has a long history of covertly supporting various random nefarious factions with a an enemy of my enemy is my friend attitude.

Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

Nor will it surprise me when the WMD or Osama magically resurface in the weeks prior to the election.

Some excellent photos of decay in progress.

Wardrobe malfunction, my ass.

So, if you look beyond the events surrounding CBS, MTV, and Janet Jackson’s Right Nipple (nice metal work!)….

Did anyone else notice the cool “bullet time” effect that was employed throughout the game and the very close to real-time production pipeline that had to have been behind it?

Neat stuff. When the really long pass in the second half was completed for a touchdown, we pretty much assumed that said effect would be used twice in the playback. And, guess what, it was…

I would bet that next year’s superbowl will have “realtime-bullettime” effects. In the interim, I am confident that we can all “enjoy” said effect across an ever increasing range of shows and employed with an ever decreasing amount of budget or effectiveness.

Update: Shows how much I watch football. Apparently the “bullet time” stuff has been around for a while. In other news, good to see that NBC is upholding this country’s fine morality standards by putting up a censored slide show the uninvited guest at the half time show. Kind of like throwing a rock in the river to try and stem the flood after the dam already broke.

Speaking of standards….

So the FCC has launched an investigation into the whole halftime show. Apparently, the whole thing was just a collection of nasty sexual depravity that no one would have noticed without that catalyst that is an exposed boob. Throughout this, the FCC, CBS, etc.. have been acting all surprised that something so distasteful could happen in an otherwise totally family friendly show.

Huh?

Clearly, everyone at the FCC must have PVRs with which they skipped the commercials. Farting horses? Advertisements for shows about sexual predators preying upon children? Mike Ditka throwing footballs through tires while talking about drugs to allow the impotent to screw like crazed weasels? Oh, no, wait, that was a different drug that promised 36 hours of effectiveness but where it was mentioned that one of the side effects could possibly be a four hour erection requiring immediate medical treatment? I would love to have heard the explanation that some parents gave their kids after being questioned about that one.

But where are all folks protesting said “party drugs”? Or does the “moral majority” honestly believe that drugs that combat impotence are solely aimed at folks that either can’t reproduce because of natural causes (is sex after menopause a sin because there is no chance of reproduction?) or aimed at people trying to spawn?

God forbid they actually discover the channel change button. During any given bit of primetime “family safe” television programming on basic cable there is a plethora of wonderful material like glorified brutal killings, marketing of overconsumption and greed directed at kids, implied sex acts that leave little to the imagination, overmarketed/overhyped lies being portrayed as “news”, sporting events that might as well be a study in the benefits of performance enhancing drugs while also rewarding the poorest sportsman like behavior around.

All of that and one little boob w/a bit of metal on it causes all this commotion yet there is zero reaction all the filth, crap, violence, degradation, lies, and nastiness?

Pathetic.

Bush and the FCC are pushing to allow for much larger fines when accidental boobage and other such nefarious events happen. The fine is currently set at $27,500 per incident. In the case of CBS, they could face a fine of $27,500 per affiliate — I believe there are around 200 affilliates. $5,500,000 may sound like a hefty chunk of change. It isn’t. It is peanuts. Consider that Viacom’s stock opened up over a point on Monday. In other news, Janet Jackson’s new single hit the wire on Monday morning at 7am. The claim was that it was released ahead of schedule due to “unauthorized copies circulating on the Internet”. What a crock of crap.

As much as I might believe that the “moral barometer” applied to determine what is and is not acceptable on public media is completely broken, I am all for the FCC having the power to fine an entity such as CBS/Viacom/MTV to a degree that it prevents such gross and disturbingly effective ploys to market product by violating the rules with the express purpose of causing a big stink.

create your own visited states map

[red is visited, "green" is not]

Sadly, if I were to create the world map version, it would be rather devoid of visited countries (UK, Canada, Grand Cayman, Bahamas, pfffft…). It is on the todo list to fix that.

Mother Goose & Grimm has always been a funny and often slightly irreverent cartoon.

Lately, the humor has been very much akin to the Far Side. I’m referring to the Jan 11, 2004 cartoon specifically. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to provide a perma-link to the cartoon.

Here is a collection of images designed to make your eyes bleed or explode (or some combination of the two).

Some are more effective than others.

I found that this one breaks my head.