Fridge Idea

I don't know if they have this (I'm assuming they don't because I've never heard of it), but I think that they should have a power socket inside fridges. I suppose this would lead to people doing stupid things (like running their computer in there), but I think it would be really useful for other reasons (for instance running a small fan or air de-odorizer). For all of us not buying this new amazing fridge, they should make a air de-odorizer (possibly with fan) that sits between the light socket and the light. You might have to mess with your door opening thing to keep power flowing to the whole assembly.. or better yet, a air cleaning thing with fan, bright LED light, and motion sensor to detect when you open the door so it can turn the light on. That shouldn't be expensive, so I can afford it and stick it in my fridge, which stinks.

Evil

It used to be that the word 'Evil' seemed to be reserved for stories and cartoons and the like. You know, fiction. You had your bad guy (the best of which rated as the 'evil bad guy') in your made up story that takes place in the distant past, or the remote future, or in a galaxy far, far away.. you get the point.
Maybe I'm imagining it, but it just feels like people are using 'evil' in reference to the real world more and more recently. The fact that this has happened so much that I'm noticing it through the sleepy daze and general not knowing what is going on-ness that is me disturbs me just a little. Again, I could be completely off base here, but what with the "axis of evil" (I can't help but give that a halloween leer when ever I say it in my head - as terrible as that is), Google's pledge not to be evil, and 'evil video games rotting our children's heads', it's like evil is everywhere. I almost feel like using a permanent marker and lableing a couple things as 'good' to balance things out.
Someone tell me that I'm just being wonky on a monday morning.

The thing about no power

Having experienced 2 weeks of not having power in my apartment, here is a list of things that I both liked and disliked about it. (Normally, I would not post this, but it might serve as a happy reminder of an almost forgotten world, minus the stinky fridge)

+ Candles

• Playing with fire, always fun


• Reading books / writing by candlelight is an interesting experience. Candles are definately a mood setter. Do it the way they did it before electricity, and be glad for lightbulbs.


• Playing with wax, also, always fun. (Less fun when the lights do come back on and you find it everywhere)

- Flashlights

• Large Maglights are blinding! I worry for the eyesight of my various pets


• Depending on the flashlight to find the matches to light the candles kinda blows when you forget where you put the flashlight

+ The Sun Rises and Sets

• Being forced to plan events that require good light around the natural cycle of the day is also something I'd recommend trying out. It's kinda cool to actually pay attention to the sun, and revel in its wonderful brightness every once in a while.


• Everythings quieter with no electricity. Listening to the crickets and such at night, and the birds in the morning is really relaxing.

+ No Computers

• Of course, I had access to the internet at work, but you don't realize how chained you are to your computer til you can't turn it on.


• Doing all the stuff you've been neglecting, noticing the thousands of projects that you meant to do and have completely ignored in favor of the thousands of computer projects that you keep meaning to get around to. (procrastinate much?)


• No monitor glow fatigued eyes

- Stinky Fridge

• If anyone knows how to get the smell out a fridge and freezer thats already been scrubbed with baking soda and 409, with more baking soda strewn about for good measure, let me know.


• Cleanup's a pain

Python and Puzzles

Amongst my recent searching for something pythonic that I don't remember, I stumbled across this:
The Python Challenge
which is based off of this:
The Riddle - notpr0n
(which I must investigate at a later time)
Also, in my googleings, I found this
Python Puzzles
which looks interesting as well.

I started the python challenge, and got through the first couple, spending only a couple minutes on each (less for the first one). You basically use the riddle given by the page, and put the answer in the url for the next puzzle. (You can also see the long explaination of the solution to the last puzzle) I have to admit that my solutions were a bit simpler than theirs (such as using 'chr( ord('k') + 2)' as opposed to some mapping scheme using a string.trans() that I didn't see the documentation for in the python quick guide), but everyone's different. If you know python, or any programming language, check it out. (The faq says that only 2 of the challenges are python specific)

Interesting Finds

Its a bit technical to explain, but if you have a *nix computer, and you look around in your named service config files (/etc/named.conf), you'll notice that 'localhost' refers you to a file at ( /var/named/chroot/var/named/localhost.zone) which contains the following information:

$TTL    86400
$ORIGIN localhost.
@              1D IN SOA       @ root (
                               42           ; serial (d. adams)
                               3H           ; refresh
                               15M          ; retry
                               1W           ; expiry
                               1D )         ; minimum

                1D IN NS        @
                1D IN A         127.0.0.1

Note the line with the number 42 and (d. adams) in the comment.
I find this highly amusing..

In case of Fractal Obsession, break glass.

Now, that is a nice Fractal. My next step should be to determine what program created that and make sure that Rachel never gets her hands on it, for the sake of her hard drives.

Juicy Opera Tip

I was just given an awesome tip: In Opera, in order to find things on the page, go to a website and type "/" followed by your search term. A little box pops up in the bottom left corner showing your search term, and it will highlight the first match on the page. Using F3 or Ctrl-G will cycle through the matches. Hitting return if the match is a link will follow that link.

Very useful, nifty little tool. I'm feeling more and more liberated from my mouse as we speak.

Opera Review, Part 3

Fifth Day

I've noticed that I'm not using all the nifty and keen features as written about above. I'm reading a review of OS X 10.4 on Ars Technica, and what I want to do is keep opening links in new tabs (I mean pages) in the background, but I keep forgetting that I can until after the fact. This leads me to believe that more than a week is necessary for my Opera tryout. Also, I still notice that the UI is using much more space than I would like. This isn't helped by the fact that I can't seem to get Opera to keep track of the fact that I'm registered. (UPDATE: I realized when I used my laptop at home that Safari always opens new tabs in the background, which is why I'm not used to specifying it.)

Also, in this article (which is very good, if you are interested in OS X reviews), I find that even though all lab PC's come with QuickTime installed, Opera doesn't seem to recognize this fact, and prompts me to download and install QuickTime all over again.

Sixth Day

I like the way Opera displays forms. It’s nice and rounded. (This may be a property of the skin that I'm using) I appreciate browsers that attempt to make things a little nicer looking.

www.mac.com doesn't display properly either. I sent did the report a site problem thing, but I find it discouraging that this is the second major site (also www.blogger.com) that does not display properly. I doubt that the .css or html for the sites are wrong, so it makes me question Opera's rendering engine.

Seventh Day

I noticed today that Opera highlights the little website icons in the quick links toolbar as you scroll over them. It uses a transparent shade of yellow which looks decent for most icons, like Slashdot and ArsTechnica.

I also noticed that loading psu.dailyjolt.com/courseevaluator.html causes Opera 8 on Windows to die horribly and quit unexpectedly. This will be fun when Opera comes to PSU next year. I submitted a bug report.

Another thing that I've noticed is that Opera opens pop-ups within the Opera window, instead as a new window, which is nice 99% of the time. It definitely helps me keep things organized, which I like, and it keeps popup pages from getting away from you. Pop-ups also get their own page, so they are easy to track down and close. Also, I’ve noticed that Opera does an excellent job of not allowing unwanted pop-ups. Although it doesn’t notify you when it blocks a popup (not that I’ve noticed, at least), I haven’t gotten any unwanted pop-ups yet.

While we're on the subject, Penn State's WebMail service uses a pop-up to browse and upload attachments, but in Opera, it loads as a new page instead of a pop-up window, which is rather disorienting, and may cause users to get confused.

Finally, I'm loving the fit to width option. Basically, Opera does its best to eliminate any sideways scrolling. (Much of this is lessened by css, but it still happens enough to want a feature for it.)

Conclusion

I like Opera. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it does have a couple features that make it worth using over other browsers. Judging from my first week of using it, it would probably take a month before I started to take advantage of all Opera’s features, but the first week has been positive. Overall, I like the idea of Notes, fit-to-width is a very nice feature, I like the way Opera implements tabbed browsing, and Opera feels secure and professional. Area’s for improvement: the GUI could be put on a diet, and the RSS Feed section could use a makeover.

Opera Review, part 2

Second Day

Woah, cutting and pasting a URL dug up a cute little gem: Paste and Go. There's even a keyboard shortcut for that. I can feel myself being more productive already.

Sadly, for some crazy installed on lab computers reason, I lost the fact that this copy was registered and it looks like I'll have to reregister it every time. Hmm, must look into this further.

I like the fact that each tab has its own close button.

Trying to make this whole thing into a blog entry is a mess.. the blogger.com page for posting loads all wrong and the buttons don't work. The little BlogThis popup seems to work okay though. I did a Report this site thing, so maybe it'll get fixed, considering blogger.com is used by a lot of people.

Third Day

I discovered that you can open a new link in a new page (Opera's term for a tab), and you can also open it and have it load in the background, which is the behavior that I always want. I usually browse a page, and open interesting links for looking at after I'm finished with the current page.

Fourth Day

Searching a page for text was kind of disappointing. One of my favorite features of Firefox is that the page search was integrated into the bottom of the window, which reduced clutter and meant that nothing was covered up by the search window.

I've also decided that I like the fact that the navigation bar (with the reload, stop, address bar and google search) is below the tabs names. Visually, it links the navigation bar with each tab individually, which is more appropriate than other browser's behavior which has the tabs as the lowest bar before the page.

Opera Review, Part One

Intro

I work at Penn State University, as a Computer Lab Consultant. Next year, PSU is making an agreement to make Opera available in the labs, plus a free license to every PSU faculty, staff, and student; so some PR from Opera came and gave a presentation to those interested. I went, got an overview of the Opera browser, a free mouse pad, a free t-shirt, and a complimentary registration card.

I figured, I might as well learn Opera, since users next year will no doubtedly have questions, and it has some interesting features. Since I have a sad, sad blog that sees no action, I'm going to do a write up about it.

The browsers I normally use are Firefox on Windows and Linux, and Safari on OS X.

First Impressions from the Presentation

The folks at Opera had a fancy poster up claiming "The fastest browser on earth." We asked about this, thinking maybe they had some insanely fast rendering engine or something, but the presenters admitted that they had just been wondering about that themselves. They decided that its not necessarily faster rendering than other browsers, but it definitely made the user more productive. If that is true, then Opera is definitely worth my time.

Sessions seem really cool. (I know that you can get those in Firefox, but I'm not one to go searching out cool plugins and install them, I have enough to do)

The fast forward and backward buttons are intriguing. If the fast forward actually does a decent job of slideshowing stuff (I look at a lot of galleries), then that would be awesome. If the fast backward skipped you to the first page you saw on a particular site (determined by domain name), that would be sweet, but they gave me the impression it took you to the first page viewed in that particular tab.

Built in RSS feed support might be very useful, since I look at a lot of blogs when I have free time.

I was impressed by the application size being small, and the interface looked pretty clean.

The trashcan seems like an excellent idea, as do the Notes.

They claim to work closely with w3c, I asked about what their goals were for rendering pages: according to how w3c says they should be rendered, or according to how designers meant the pages to be rendered, using any of their hackish css and html tricks. They said they strive to do it right, you can also report a website as being rendered incorrectly.

Bookmark nicknames, and a easy to use bookmark search looks useful.

Day One

Downloading took a minute, because I had to find a server that wasn't already too busy. Installation was clean, quick, and easy.

Registering took me a while, since I had to search the opera site up and down to figure out that I should put "---" for the organization, otherwise the serial number on the card they gave me wouldn't work.

Importing Bookmarks from Firefox. Under File: Import, they have options to import from IE, Netscape, Konqueror, and a couple others, but no Mozilla or Firefox. What the heck? Since Netscape looks like a repackaged Firefox, I choose Netscape, and it seemed to import my Firefox bookmarks fine. Now to recreate my bookmarks toolbar and get rid of Opera's default bookmarks. The trash thing is pretty handy, but where are the bookmarks that are just in the Bookmarks menu, and not organized into folders? It took me a while to accidentally click on the grey area underneath the trashcan, which shows the top level.

Bookmarks incident aside, my first impression of the GUI is that its kinda bloated, which is something that I hate. I'm very picky about my screen real estate, especially because I need to keep an eye on a chat client for work. I messed with the toolbar settings and got rid of the Main bar. Also the Start bar, which is really annoying when it pops up underneath the address box. I think I'm the only person in the world that actually uses the Status menu regularly, so I enabled that, but its almost twice as thick as it needs to be. Curious if I could find a skin that minimizes the size on these buttons, I downloaded Freestyle, which does help a lot.

Cruising right along, browsing some of my normal pages, checking the mail, I stumble across something else.. Ctrl-T, which I'm used to opening a new tab in other browsers, prompts me to save a bookmark. What’s the keyboard command for opening a new tab? Search of the Opera help tells me Ctrl-N. Makes sense, but this reminds me of OS X changing some of finder's keyboard shortcuts around.. its going to take a bit of getting used to, particularly if I continue to use Safari at home.

I tried signing up for an RSS feed, drunkenblog.com, which went relatively well, although the fact that Feeds seem to use the same app as Mail, but there are two different menus for them is odd. In fact, I'd rather that Feeds have their own simplified app that doesn't feel like the mail app, or at least doesn't have a quick reply and mail icon.

I also checked out some mouse gestures, which are cool.

All and all, the interface is going to take a bit of getting used to. I like some of the features I see, but its odd to me (especially when Firefox made such an effort to be easy to switch to) that I have to re-teach myself how to do some things. Maybe the effort will pay off with increased flexibility.

Burningbird - A Speck of Dirt

Burningbird - A Speck of Dirt is an amazing little story. Definitely go read it.

Sayin"hey" from the edge of the world (AKA Brooklyn)

Checking in from my long absence, so long in fact, I totally forgot my login. Oy.
So now I have a job, at the link above. I photoshop their images together on a background I whipped up, tweak ebay titles, do html, data entry... ebay research... you know, just all the Stuff Rachel does.

Ahh, yes. A job.

Oh wait, now I'm free-time-less.
Crap.

So I have been heard from sparingly indeed.
Some madness has happened in the interim, like Linden going to Pycon : ), and I'm starting to eat only raw food.
Yes, this sounds totally insane to me too. But it makes me feel amazingly better after only one day of doing it. I forgot to take my Oh-crap-I'm-itching-all-over-again pill, and nothing happened! o_o
More info on my latest health/diet madness:

www.eatraw.com

I bought a bunch of their stuff, and it's all a bit odd but definitely tasty and filling so far. I bought this absolutely bizarre-looking green bar they have, made of "spirula" algae (!!), and I have yet to work up the bravery to try it.
I found out about this crazy phenomena of raw food because of Mike's contant O'Reilly watching. Carol Alt was on there (was a VS model, supermodel, etc - I had no idea who she was, but Mike & Tony knew plenty *sigh*). She wrote a book called Eating in the Raw, and was on promoting it a while ago, & eventually I picked it up on half.com.
Now, there are definitely a few things she says that are out-and-out wacky (ie, it's a short drive from NYC to PENNSYLVANIA to buy raw dairy from the Amish!!), but the science sounds, well, sound, because she co-wrote it with a couple of doctors. And so far, I feel amazingly great!

In Other News,
I came up with a TOTALLY INSANE tetris related idea. I don't want to go into details here because I have this odd feeling it'll get jinxed, and I want to keep my invention in the family, as it were, at this juncture. (I have no idea if ANYONE else would care anyway, but I want to sit around secretively thinking to myself "Eeeexcellent" *steepled fingers* for a bit longer. Yet more evidence that I am simply cracked... )

MyCatHatesYou

MyCatHatesYou dot com
Good site for some laughs. Plus I love cats.

PyCon DC 2005 Home Page

PyCon this year was great. We showed up at about 4pm the third day of sprinting, so it was hard to attach ourselves to a group, however we jumped in with Bruce Eckel's Adapters and Interfaces Sprint. Having read the PEP's the night before, we all talked about what we thought they were, why we would want to use them or not, etc. Plus we got to meet some very smart people (more on this later).

The con proper was great. We managed to make it to all three keynotes (waking up at 6:30 in the morning, yawn) and of course the SubEthaEdit crew were back, with a couple newcomers. There is something very satisfying/fun/educational about taking notes in real time with other people. I heard people say that notetaking using SubEthaEdit at conventions is common, but PyCon takes the cake for number of people/quality of notes. (The Google keynote notes were not going to be published online, yet we easily transcribed his slides, took note of what he said, almost word for word, got all the audience comments and did an excellent job of the Q & A session) All our notes can be found at Ted Leung's site here: [http://www.sauria.com/~twl/conferences/pycon2005/]. If you've never used SubEthaEdit, the coloring of the text corresponds to who typed the text. (I was light blue for the Google talk) Notice how collaborative it is. People form kinda unspoken rules of SubEthaEditing, usually a couple people will line their cursors up in order, ready to take the next lines of notes, one or two will go back and spell check or fix organization, someone will fill in the quotes section or links section if needed. It's super cool.

A [supercool] group of us are working on Fuse (maybe this well be renamed), which will be a cross platform Editor similar to SubEthaEdit. The project info can be found on the mailing list, wiki, or the BerliOS site.

Anyways, my general feelings on PyCon are that the conference is a great way to meet people and learn a lot of stuff, the python community is really awesome, in general, there is a lot of fun to be had. Unfortunately I always feel so stupid when I go. Almost everyone there is very, very intelligent. Most, if not all, seem to be involved in open source (which takes some intelligence to begin with), plus they use/helped create python (which also makes you smarter than the average joe), plus they're coming to the conference. So I get to mix in with the cream of the cream of the crop, which is a little depressing to me because, although I love Python dearly, I'm in college and hardly have the time/chance to use it, and I don't have anywhere near the experience in programming that the others have, and I've never worked on an open source anything (besides my dinky game which is released as open source, but I wrote by myself).

Ah well, it's still a lot of fun, and I'm not about to let a lot of really smart people deter me from going anywhere. :) [maybe by next year, they won't have such a step up on me]

Google SMS

Google SMS is also hella cool. Basically you send a text message like "movies: showtimes 16801" to 46645 (GOOGL) and get movie times back. Check it out the link for different examples.

Infra Red Webcam

Infra Red Webcam is amazing. Even if you're not interested in the process, check out the photos at the end comparing things.
I want to do this sometime..

Jef Raskin - Robot Rules the Rugs

A cute article by Jef Raskin, who passed away recently, about the Roomba (Rachel, this is for you). He also wrote a book called "The Human Interface" which dad bought and I skimmed, but would really like to read, and was Employee 31 at Apple.
Something that warms my heart is that he graduated from Penn State. (See?) :)

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (See-Through Loo)

(See-Through Loo)
Hahaha.. :)

Cabinet National Library

What Craziness is this? Its some sort of harebrained idea by some guys with magazines, but its really cool. Next time I'm roadtripping, I'll make sure to go there.

Octopus Arms May Point Way to New Robot Designs

This is a fascinating article. Basically the idea is that an octopus has 8 long arms, and the way that they control them easily and still do complex things without getting tangled may lead to designs allowing robots to have long flexible arms. (Like Doc Oc of Spiderman)

An interesting thing is that once an octopus grabs some food, it makes the arm into a "semi-ridgid structure that bends to form quasi joints. Just as a human arm has joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist that allow our arms to bend and rotate, the octopus bends its arm to forming three segments of roughly equal length."

Thats pretty cool.