It was a boojum

Still here?

2007-08-23T11:41:00.000-04:00

If you are looking for the website of Matthew Katz, this isn't it any more. I'm over at my new domain. Mine, all mine!

Moving the site

2007-04-12T07:27:00.001-04:00

I've bought a domain, hosting, and installed wordpress.

It was all very easy.

I've imported all of my old posts from this sight, and over the next couple of days I'll be importing your comments over.

Take a peek at the new site I'm making over at http://www.MoreLightMoreLight.com

I'll be adjusting my feedburner feed to point to the new site as well.

Soon I'll stop publishing here, but I'll be posting over there.

Lost Photos of NYC

2007-04-10T15:21:00.001-04:00

Sam works for the New York City Store now as Marketing Manager.

There is a book signing tonight at the City Store that I'm going to go to. Eugene de Salignac was the official photographer of NYC bridges for thirty years at the beginning of the 20th century. His work was carefully filed away in the archives and forgotten about. Recently, Michael Lorenzini found 20,000 glass plates of Eugene's and published them in "New York Rises - The Photographs of Eugene de Salignac".

I suggested to Sam that she tell the Dead Programmer about the signing and he's coming! I'm excited - Michael's writing is some of my favorite - it's always a pleasure when he updates and I see something new in my feedreader.

The Nanny State

2007-04-10T15:10:00.001-04:00

My coworkers were chortling behind me about some hilarious commercials. 

I couldn't help but remember that once upon a time seat belts were after-market add-ons.  When the legislation came out requiring them in cars, the same kind of folks were saying the same sort of things.  Security and Liberty are always a balancing act - you can't ever trump one with the other.

GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself

2007-03-28T13:15:00.000-04:00

GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself
They subscribe to Google's AdSense program and serve ads.
As the ads earn money, the money is automatically used to buy shares of stock in Google (GOOG).
Anyone who visits the site can become a shareholder in their corporation (GTTP Ltd - Google To The People Company). Therefore we all become shareholders, in effect, of Google.
They calculate that ~~they~~ we will fully own Google in 202 years.
Sweeeeeeet.

This feels distinctly like art to me.

Bankruptcy! Losing money on prosper.com

2007-03-19T16:53:00.000-04:00

I lend money on prosper.com. It's a peer to peer lending service.
I just got my first default. Poor old henryjr declared bankruptcy and with it disappeared $93.52 of my money.

Overall, I'm up $263.89 but a couple of other folks are 3+months late on their loans. This is the part where it gets a little scary.

We are hiring

2007-03-12T09:10:00.000-04:00

My team is hiring developers again. If you or someone you know wants to work in midtown in the financial industry, get in touch.

.Net, C#, Web Service, SQL, XML, ADO.NET, Object Oriented, Design Pattern, Excel programming is a plus
You'll be talking to customers, so be able to speak well. In other news, I've been racking my brains for a way to screen resumes for team players without having to look for the words "Team Player" - I think you just have to find that bit in the interview.

Blogger thought I was a spam blog

2007-03-12T09:06:00.000-04:00

Don't know what made me look like a spam blog, but I had to get reviewed by a human to turn posting back on.

Phone is now back on!

2007-03-02T19:46:00.001-05:00

Phone is now back on!

Give me a ring!

Dream

2007-01-09T15:51:00.000-05:00

We're in Columbia, South Carolina, throwing a large dinner party. It's in a very big house, like my parent's house but bigger and unfamiliar. Some of the guests have arrived, and it's nice time as we wait for the rest to arrive. It's getting later and later and the last guests have not arrived.

I walk down to a central shopping area like 5 Points to see where our guests are. The streets are empty of the shoppers, strolling couples, and teenagers that usually pack this place. Instead, in some of the windows are people who look off. They are in the shape of people, the right bits, but they are lumpy or lopsided, like straw dolls. They are distorted like poorly made puppets and they stare out of the windows with skewed eyes that don't blink or look around.

I am too scared to investigate or go into the shops, and I return home to tell my people what I've seen and to protect them.

When I get home, we figure out that there are aliens among us, that they have begun infiltrating. They begin as appliances and small home electronics. These aliens understand the general shapes of things, but not their purpose or uses. Their larval forms are crude approximations. So one might begin as a television, but not understand that the screen should be smooth and square, not wavy or slanty. A toaster might have too many slots or the slots might be too small. Things might have too many knobs or other suspicious features. When the appliance has grown large enough, it can shape itself as a person.

Given that I've seen a large pedestrian area already taken over, it stands to reason that these must grow quickly and that they must be harmful to people.

We find a cable box sitting on top of a television that has no LED's on the front and isn't plugged in. When I move towards it, the cable box skitters away, dragging its power-cord tail behind it. It scuttles towards a couch and I leap towards it, bashing it with a poker or baseball bat. Smashed, it is full of tightly compacted meaty muscle and guts. My guests and I begin searching the house for other aliens.

A man who looks like Robert Stack is at the party, a hard-bitten WWII veteran who tells us that we are all going to die. We aren't organized enough. If this had happened during his generation, the party would have split up into organized squads and scoured the house top to bottom, starting at the attic and sterilizing it. Then they would have secured it militarily and made sorties out to find other people and begin killing every alien.

Instead, we are going to eventually try to negotiate with them, or understand them. This is going to get us killed. Understanding is for when you've already won and are dealing with harmless remnants.

This Robert Stack guy is a bastard, but he feels right and we feel doomed.

Get my Wallet for Free

2006-12-28T14:34:00.000-05:00

If you like the wallet I posted about in November, good news.

I stumbled across an instructable about how to fold your own Tyvek Wallet.

It's not as nice, but it's also not as twenty bucks.

BOCCE: Old Dirty Barristers Almost Win It All Again

2006-12-18T12:09:00.000-05:00

We're good. I know it. We only lost one game this season, and that one was in the finals against our arch-rivals BocceLism. They get to have the threepeat championship and we get to be second place for the second season in a row.

Next season we will have to go Tonya Harding on Lism.
Photos of our crew flamboastin and toastin when I get em.

Math Everywhere: How Many People at a Good Party?

2006-12-15T14:28:00.000-05:00

Doing some last minute shopping for Sam and ran across Apartment Therapy's post on Party Density.

Seems like they've got it down. I'm having a dinner party on December 25th, I'll have to check the math for the space...

The unanswered question, of course is how many people you should invite to achieve good density of people who actually show up. One strategy of mine is to make my invitations personal if possible rather than sending out a mass evite. People I like will tell me if they are coming or not and I know what's going on that night.

I don't throw barnstormers in my living space anyway. I'd rather throw them at other people's apartments and pay for food or liquor and they provide the space and the cleanup the next day.

NASA being slowly dismantled

2006-12-10T19:43:00.000-05:00

Thought my pals might want to read this entry I found from Bruce Sterling about the Planetary Society's campaign to fight for the mission and budget of NASA . It was bad enough when this administration removed "to understand and protect the Earth" as a primary goal of NASA. It just gets worse, and because there isn't a clear bodycount, it isn't going to be big news.

Go check out that article and then maybe give the planetary society a donation and sign their petition. I'm going to give them $20 and sign the petition. If you email me what you've donated, I'll also match what you've donated.

Vail Vacation

2006-12-10T13:37:00.001-05:00

Snow Waves, originally uploaded by snarkhunt.

Finally broke down and went to the hoity-toity Vail with some fellas.

Vail is really swank, really huge. We definitely went too early in the season because the legendary back bowls are packed snow. Coming here mid February when the bowls have been filled must be incredible and I'd be willing to go back here for a trip during that season. Even though we were here in the early season we were able to get some really good soft runs in through the trees.

Also - for the future - there are real, honest cliffs here that you can jump off of. I did not, because I am not that nuts.

Bloggy Blogroll welcomes....

2006-12-06T12:21:00.000-05:00

Nate!

Nate and I have been geeking out together in NYC. He and Claudia took me and Sam to Brazil for carnival. He actually writes long entries in his blog that are worth reading if you are techie.

Hint hint, Acton. HINT.

In Praise of Lost Time

2006-12-04T23:58:00.000-05:00

Here's a common sci-fi trope. A character is obsessed with the future and science and all the advantages it could bring. This blinds that character so that they don't see that they are losing their essential humanity.

Moral: All that dirty stuff that is unpleasant is also part of what makes us human.

I don't buy it. My cube mate Yoni said to me a few days ago, "You'll miss your body when it's gone." I don't buy it. It seems to me that we can definitely point out the things that we don't want any more of that are essential bits of humanity. Lets get rid of them even though they are essential bits of humanity.

Example: I just got 2 wisdom teeth pulled. How's that for some unintelligently designed hardware? I didn't stay awake for the procedure, even though that might have contributed to my character, even though those moments were mine, and they might have changed who I am...

I didn't want those pain-filled uncomfortable moments. I'd rather trade them for other moments or just turn them down flat. And, thanks to the modern miracle of general anesthesia, I didn't have to have those moments. Next, we've just got to nail down the details on the recuperation.

Bocce: Old Dirty Barristers Undefeated

2006-12-04T09:46:00.000-05:00

My Bocce team, the O.D.B. is undefeated going into the championships.

This is the season that we win it all!

Prosper.com/Tools is here!

2006-11-29T13:26:00.000-05:00

Prosper has revealed their lending API/Tools section . Right now it is just a dump of data from their db, but the api section promises webservices coming soon.

What's cool about this? Now you should see smart folks like me building tools to analyze and pick through prosper loans, flagging good stuff and dissing bad loans. By opening up the data like this, prosper is letting interested people create tools for themselves and others to get better results for their systems.

This kind of openness will be good for their business as reliability goes up and people can make better informed decisions.

USPS.com uses Google

2006-11-28T22:38:00.000-05:00

Looks like the USPS website uses the google search appliance. I was messing about with the search url and turned this up:

Go to the search form and enter a search for a package.
At the page this takes you too, go to your address bar and erase everything after ?q=######## where ####### is your package search number.

You'll see the secret easter egg usps google home page.

Design: Paradox of Choice

2006-11-21T16:40:00.000-05:00

Here's a simpler explanation of the usability design principle of avoiding choice.
Joel from Joel On Software just wrote a great and simple explanation of the Paradox of Choice.
It all centers on what is wrong with this picture. Why are there that many options to choose from when you want to shut down?

Every choice presented to you is something you have to evaluate. That evaluation takes time and brain power. Whenever possible, we should make the choices very very easy and few for the user. Things should "just work".

It is true - the iPod, a battery powered device, doesn't have an off switch. Why are there so many ways to shut down my computer? These choices require 3 separate clicks - Start -> Little Arrow -> Actual Choice.

Joel argues for reducing everything to a "B'Bye" button. One click and it prepares the computer for you being away. And it's just that simple. The task is "I'm trying to leave my computer." Therefore the design should not force the user to interact more with their computer!

I'd only complicate this by putting in a place in the control panel where you can configure this behavior if you care enough to do it.

As I write more on user experience, I'll put these posts under the label "User Experience". If that's all you are interested in, you can go here for just user experience posts.

Design: Wallet

2006-11-20T19:35:00.000-05:00

I got a new wallet. It's made out of Tyvek, the stuff that FedEx pouches are made out of. It's waterproof and unrippable. It's also paper thin and light and I love it.
It looks like an Airmail envelope.

Full, it is smaller than my old leather wallet is.

Fits all the stuff I need, plus, I've added a tiny tiny little wallet pen so that I'm never without a pen. It's already come in handy once.

That tiny silver thing in the middle is a wallet pen.
I love this wallet. It is beautiful and lovely and inspires me with how well designed it is.

Snow Trip: Crested Butte Colorado

2006-11-20T08:05:00.000-05:00

Brian and I are looking for good folks to join us for a new years-ish trip to Crested Butte. Dates aren't firm yet. If you are interested - get in touch.

Concert: Marisa Monte

2006-11-16T12:49:00.000-05:00

Tuesday night I went out with Nate and Claudia to go see Marisa Monte, a Brazilian singer-songwriter. I understood none of the songs, but it was very good music - chilled out stuff with lazy beats and happy melodies.

The staging was sparse but very effective. A few lightboxes, a platform, a few lights on movable booms and a spot. That was it, but it allowed for so many different moods.

Sometimes it suggested a warm homey room, sometimes a night out at 3 am when it's just you and the moon, sometimes a city night under streetlights... I wish I had pictures that turned out well.

I was also pleasantly suprised that when I googled Marisa Monte, the first result was a link for more info on Google Music - what's all this? Those guys keep indexing all of the world's information in new ways!

User Experience Principles: Avoid Choice but Allow It

2006-11-16T11:59:00.000-05:00

Just had a long user experience discussion with coworker Marc about concurrency problems in settings.
His argument:
Everything on a screen should be atomic.
My argument:
Concurrency should be resolved as often as possible without forcing the user to make a choice.
Alice opens up our settings application.
Bob opens up our settings application.
Alice changes the background color on the "Quantity" column in column view "Alpha" and then save it up to our server.
Bob reorders all of the columns in the Alpha column view to the order he thinks is appropriate for their group.
Bob saves the column view up to our server.

Marc argues that Bob's settings should be rejected and he should reload in Alice's settings, then redo his work and save up to our server.

I argue that Bob's settings don't conflict with Alice's because column order is a property of a column view, not of the columns themselves in the column view. Caption is a property of the individual column.
Consider that column order has no meaning for an individual column outside of a column view collection - this is true no matter how you represent these entities in a database.
Bob doesn't care about Alice's caption change, and we should avoid bothering him about it.
If he's changed the caption of the column as well, then we have a conflict. Bob should get notified that Alice made a conflicting change, we should tell him why it conflicts, and then he should get a choice to either abandon his change and accept hers or overwrite her change with his.

Bob wants to change the order of the columns in this column view. Alice wants to change the caption of a column in that column view.
Because what they want does not conflict, we should not get in the way of what they are trying to do. We should just get it done, and let Bob know that Alice has updated some settings.

Great news for you - more work for me

2006-11-15T20:56:00.000-05:00

I've made the switch to blogger beta, mainly because I love tags.
The tags are up there on the upper left corner, and I'll be going through the old posts and making sure things are tagged appropriately.

Why is this good for you, my loyal handful of readers?
As Jen W put it, I have an awful lot of "weird whacked out computer programmer drama that flies over her head". She's a pal of mine who doesn't care one whit about that stuff.
I've got good news for you, Jen. Now you can only see stuff related to me and my pals.
Change your bookmark to point to just my posts tagged "pals".

And there are some programmer types who frankly couldn't care less about what a nice time I had snowboarding. They want to only see my developer stuff.

There you go. Get the stuff you like from me without the stuff you hate.

I'll be toying around with the template a little bit over the next week or so to make it my own again after switching to this new format.

UI Design

2006-11-14T00:20:00.000-05:00

I've been assigned to do the User Interface design mock-ups for our settings by my boss because I'm the guy who gets all excited by well designed things and starts talking about user experiences and such. I'm the guy who reads Passionate Users, Infosthetics, Alex Barnett, Etc. I get hot for sparklines.

Most applications are capable of great things, but never get a workout from their users because they are difficult or scary to configure. It isn't obvious to users how to do the things they want to do, so they just learn the minimum and stay with that.

Well designed things are easy joys to use. The best known thing like that right now is the iPod. People who don't know technology are not afraid of the iPod because it works the way they expect it to. In the area that I work in, users are so involved in their business that they can't afford to waste time learning the complexities of their applications. Things that are hard to understand just don't get explored, the users call up the help desk and get someone to do it for them.

Every call like that is wasted money for users and for the development/support teams. The user isn't doing their job and the developers aren't doing their job.

My task is to make sure that our newest application will be iPod easy to use and configure, no small feat when you are doing a hell of a lot more than playing music.

In the beginning I was writing a little sample application that would be a sort of be a dummy with dummy data. Of course, I spent too much time digging into the programming and produced a close-to-working-shell with databinding to object collections. Too much for a mockup. To keep myself thinking about just the design I'm doing the rest as drawings to be implemented. We've got visio somewhere but it's overkill for what I need. I got through just fine using the free web application Gliffy. It's handy and fast, exports to JPG so I can stick it in our freshly minted wiki.

I'm writing up a user experience design guide for my team as well, most of which I'm getting from what I've read in Jensen Harris's UI writings and Creating Passionate Users.

The problem of spam

2006-11-03T12:32:00.000-05:00

Been reading a lot about spam problems lately.

It isn't a problem for me, since I'm not a high value target for spam. The other reason is that I've raised the bar by a very tiny amount. CAPTCHAs (those type the letters in the picture tests) are designed to raise the bar for spammers, and I've got kind of a unique one on this blog.

My comments aren't hosted on blogspot, but rather on a site called haloscan. That tiny little difference has meant that I have never displayed a single comment spam ever. Automated comment spam occasionally is done, but it is always done using the normal blogspot comment fields. I get notices of these when they happen, but they aren't a worry because they aren't displayed ever or crawled by search engines.

This works because spam is a problem of economics. It takes very little work to be not worth the effort.
This is also a reason that firefox tends to be more secure than ie6. Fewer folks use it and therefore its less lucrative to write firefox exploits. So one of the surprising things that would tend to make ie6 and the web more secure is if opera, safari, and firefox took off!

Call Nightline!

2006-10-18T10:43:00.000-04:00

My friend Nikki pointed out the MIT Nightline for me and neither of us can get over how good this idea is. I love the idea of a number in your phone that you can call for anything. It's staffed with volunteers.

I think you could set up a non-MIT version of this based off of free labor.

Step 1. You sign up and list what you can be called about. "I can talk to people about finances, computers, snowboarding, general whatevers"

Step 2. You sign up for a time that calls can be relayed to you. "I volunteer for 6-7 pm this wednesday."

Step 3. You are now able to call in about any problem and get someone to talk to.

Your cost is mainly the servers, bandwidth, pbx system and phone time.

The trick is to balance the commitment that folks have to give versus the demand.

I think a good name for it would be to steal from Warren Ellis the name "Global Frequency".

Battle of the bands

2006-10-09T14:04:00.000-04:00

This reminds me of adult swim - but before "Tom Goes to the Mayor".
Via the Wooster Collective.

Tags:

when I think of the past, the twitches come back

2006-10-04T11:03:00.000-04:00

The Daily WTF - MAKEing Fools' GOLD:

"Paul's company develops financial software that's used by major stock markets. In his brief tenure, Paul was witness to millions of dollars in loss as a direct result of their software. "

I am proud to claim Paul as a friend and former coworker. He was one of the lights in an otherwise Kafkaesque experience. I'm pleased to see in the comments shoutouts from other former coworkers, one of whom I'm guessing was Eric.

I still talk to folks who work there. They are a working hard against a very discouraging culture, and I've heard recent reports of progress.

That said, I still tell stories about what went down there.
It's the only place I've worked at where multiple people put holes in the walls in anger without getting let go.

Tags:

programming

Atlassian Developer Blog: Good Fences Make Aloof Neighbours

2006-09-22T15:20:00.000-04:00

Atlassian Developer Blog: Good Fences Make Aloof Neighbours:

"In an enterprise environment, where every contributor to the wiki is identifiable, and every change reversible, what value remains in restricting edit rights a priori?"

I stumbled on this on the atlassian site. My group is trying out Jira and the Confluence wiki. This article from an atlassian developer expresses some of the core oversights enterprise wikis face. Rights management, like any security measure, is a balancing act. How much does rights management cost you in terms of lost good and effort spent managing the management? How much benefit do you gain?

My default setting for behind-the-firewall social software is full rights with authentication, with security imposed as needed, and only the amount of security needed to protect from specific probably problems.

Tags:

How to Deal With An Irate Person

2006-09-21T09:46:00.000-04:00

I'm working on getting my team to have a sane support rotation so that folks can spend most of their time on development instead of constantly switching between tasks. It's good because I'll get more opportunities to do work. I'm thinking about sending tips like this: "How to Deal With An Irate Person" out to folks. I'm pretty good at handling people on the phone in tense situations, and it might help folks who don't come by that naturally.

On the other hand, it might look a little preachy.

Tags:

support

Is Your IDE Hot or Not?

2006-09-19T21:48:00.000-04:00

As I read Coding Horror: Is Your IDE Hot or Not?
I noticed the call for someone to create a hotornot site for IDE screenshots.
It didn't seem like a bad idea, and I immediately thought of Ning, a social software platform that debuted a while ago.
They make it dead easy to create an actual application relevant to whatever social software use you are into.

I created this IDE Hot or Not ratings site in less than 10 minutes.
It's not tweaked, it could use more care, but damn - 10 minutes and it is working. It's got a few screenshots up there and a few ratings. I'd encourage you to submit yours and rate others for a lark.

And take some time to play with Ning. Next time you hear "Someone should whip up a website that lets us do x" you can finish it before they stop telling you how cool it would be. BTW - all the source code for your app is editable on Ning, but the standard stuff is truly code-free. It just works.

Configuration screens

2006-09-09T18:40:00.000-04:00

I'm thinking about configuration screens for stuff at work.
Some setttings affect things that happen on our server.
Other settings affect things that happen on the clientside.
There is a conflict between building things ahead of time and crafting them to be very userfriendly, and building things dynamically on the fly and letting them be very flexible.

If a setting is going to only affect things on our server we want to avoid having to do a new client release just to let the client change them. After all, the client program doesn't need new code. These kinds of settings it would be good to build user controls for dynamically. That way the client doesn't need to download anything new when we expose new settings.

If a setting is going to affect only the client side, then we have to deliver new components to the client to consume those settings. In that case, we want to deliver the new functionality along with the settings and it makes sense to construct the controls beforehand so they are as userfriendly as possible.

One way might be to deliver a document on loading up configuration screens where you list the major pages of configuration. Each listing would describe either a usercontrol to load or a list of options to construct a control around. For dynamically created settings controls you would create checkboxes for booleans, textboxes for mapping strings, combo boxes for enums, etc, then slap them all in a flow layout or something.

Even if the coolness of dynamically created controls for server side settings is doable, is it worth it? If we are creating a way to deliver updates to users in the background, shouldn't we just use that?

Writing With Water

2006-08-30T12:08:00.000-04:00

As promised by the Wooster Collective, this video made my brain go wild.

What if you used a sheet of water with detergent - you could excite just portions of the water to luminesce, creating a non-scrolling display.

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Music for free: The Black Angels

2006-08-03T11:34:00.000-04:00

I subscribe to the internet archive's public domain music feed and caught this: The Black Angels Live at Chop Suey on 2006-06-19.

I'd only heard the excellent "Young Men Dead" before, but if you want a good feel for this band then give a quick listen to track 3: "The Sniper at the Gates of Heaven".

The whole concert is available for dl in 64K mp3 or vbr mp3. You can also give a listen using the embedded flash player.

Tags:

music
free

Moves moves moves

2006-07-21T16:40:00.000-04:00

I've switched roles within my group - now I'm working on a new real-time application. I've also moved up a floor. I miss my old seat, pictured empty below in Tim's post.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/GuessmansGuess/~3/http%3A%2F%2Fguessman.blogspot.com%2F2006%2F07%2Fworking-in-solitude.html

On the other hand, the new floor has a blender. Smoothies ahoy!

alright which of you did this?

2006-06-23T21:12:00.000-04:00

alright which of you did this?,
originally uploaded by snarkhunt.

first http://matthewkatzisajerk.com, now this. I get the message. In cassidy's bathroom between 5&6 on 56th.

Bocce Season Begins

2006-06-22T09:32:00.000-04:00

Old Dirty Barristers is representing in the Floyd Bocce Tournament. Last season we came in second, this time we are going for the gold. Training will begin immediately in our firm's training camp.
I popped our games in google calendar if you'd like to come out and cheer for the future champions.

If you've got a google account, you can subscribe by clicking this button:.
Other stuff, you'll probably want the iCal address.

I, for one, welcome our death-dealing barking robot overlords

2006-06-21T08:38:00.000-04:00

http://feeds.we-make-money-not-art.com/wmmna?m=895
I know quake is free now, but couldn't they have trained it on a copy of the sims instead?

update: I can't find the article anywhere now. Found it in my feed reader, it was about scientists who were growing a neural net using cultured dog brain slices. They were supposedly training it by using a grid of electrodes somehow connected to a game of quake. The more I think about it, the fishier it sounds. Having read recently about how neural nets actually work when used by scientists, it is hard to believe bunging some electrodes in -> playing a rendered 3d game. I will try to be more careful in the future. This article was something I found and wrote about while on the subway, so I couldn't read further about it first.

Eric Newman: How to ask for help on the web, the bad way

2006-06-20T16:30:00.000-04:00

Something in internet land directed me to Steven Hargrove's page on status 301 redirects, which we use at work. The real story here isn't 301 redirects. No, the undercover awesomeness here is in the comments, when Eric Newman begins asking for help.

Steven Hargrove: How to redirect a web page, the smart way:

"and i know the source is correct because it gave me a source to use and it looks right to me i know this program works because i see other web pages work and it specified that windows xp can work which that is what im using (professional)and i talk with other people and they have no idea on this and i have one more question what is redirect web page mean im makeing pages from a web program called “web page maker v2″ i put the source to use the program after i create the page and i know i told where to look for it to"

Also:

"Please answer my question Mr.Hargrove i need to know and i have one more question to ask how do i get a sponsorship because i need a bigger harddrive,fast internet,some connections, and a pro of doing this business thing so please tell me i know i sound desprite sorry.If this will make you feel better i will have a link to this site."

Ah, if it were only so simple.

Tags:

dumb

Wooster Collective: Seen In The French Alps

2006-06-19T08:16:00.000-04:00

Wooster Collective: Seen In The French Alps

It must be these flames that are melting all the snow.

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The Mighty Power of the Feed

2006-06-07T08:27:00.000-04:00

After not publishing for approximately forever, Fafblog is back, and I only knew because I was faithful and reverent and had it in my bloglines.
Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog: After the end of the world.

"Albatross or not albatross?" says me.
"Hmmm... albatross!" says Giblets.
We reach in the ol cardboard box an pull out a rusty coke can. "Not albatross!" says me.
"This is stupid!" says Giblets. "Albatross Or Not Albatross is the lamest game ever!"
"Now to be fair it was a lot more excitin back before we ran outta albatrosses," says me.

It only gets better from there. Fafblog is the thing on the internet most likely to cause my actual real face to have an actual real smile on it.

Net Art: We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar

2006-05-31T08:11:00.000-04:00

We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar

It's not just pretty. This applet polls various rss feeds and collects posts where people describe how they feel. Then it uses various relationships and attributes to present that data in innovative ways.

These various graphs are playful and informative. Found this via MonkeyBites, which has a great writeup. Also of note is an API so that other artists can use this search without having to do the backend coding.

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new blog about living without tv

2006-05-23T16:27:00.000-04:00

uncabled | the network is the tuner
The guy is doing what I'm doing. How to watch your favorite shows for free without getting cable.

But he's writing on it more often.
via the hilarious Alien Loves Predator

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I think we can all agree

2006-05-19T10:26:00.000-04:00

Someone in this town knows how to party:
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/005485.html

just a test

2006-05-18T17:11:00.000-04:00

just a test,
originally uploaded by snarkhunt.

nothing to see here, move along.

Three burned out cars, 66& lexington

2006-05-18T16:13:00.000-04:00

Three burned out cars, 66& lexington,
originally uploaded by snarkhunt.

Wow, what the hell happened here? Saw this on the way to the doctors office.

How to sue in small claims court against your favorite corporation

2006-05-18T12:49:00.000-04:00

great little story from k5.

Guy lays out about $85 and gets $1k back from a registrar that done him wrong.

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Why don't ratings travel?

2006-05-17T08:08:00.000-04:00

I'm using musikcube as player for my music and it has 5 star ratings. So does windows media player on my pocketpc. So does iTunes. But they never translate between them!

How could they?

One way would be to store it in the id3 comments tag. Both id31 and id3v2 formats support comments. This is a great place to store ratings as text. ***** is 5 stars and anyone can read it. What would make sense is to store ratings in the last 5 characters of the comment field. Then, when changing or loading ratings, you can push or pull from that location.

After doing a little more research, I found that id3v2 supports freeform key=value tagging. Now it seems that all you need is for players to start reading and writing a custom ratings tag.

Why is this important? Because time you spend rating songs in itunes or musikcube or anything else is valuable. That's valuable info about your song that only you know. If it is lost everytime you switch from an ipod to an iriver, it is less valuable.

If I download a creative commons track or rip a cd at work and rate it in musikcube, I should be able to take that track to my home and have my ratings show up there. The information I put into it loses value if it is bound up in one location or one player.

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Cleverest graffiti i've seen in a while

2006-05-16T12:11:00.001-04:00

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NYC: The mirror collapses but the image does not

2006-05-16T12:11:00.000-04:00

This post from three quarks really captures the difference between the nyc I seem to live and the one people see.

When I first told my dad I was moving to manhattan he was worried that the city would eat me up. I got here and was impressed with just how easy and safe it all was. In my years here I've only had two things stolen( three if you count the bike tires separately) and they were mistakes on my part.

Check it out.

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Completely Untrue

2006-05-16T06:54:00.000-04:00

Why bloggers love handheld computers

more lies here.

BOCCE: Old Dirty Barristers Almost Win It All

2006-05-15T11:59:00.000-04:00

My bocce team, the old dirty barristers, came in second place in the FloydNy bocce tournament.

Here's a little video from saturday's game:

Matt Scott Places it on the pellino on Vimeo

Robbed: NYC bites back.

2006-05-14T03:46:00.000-04:00

Lots of nice stuff happened today. My bocce team (Old Dirty Barristers) won our game and we are in the semifinals. I attended drupal camp over at the polytechnic and it was great. (Drupal looks great and really easy btw - I think I'm going to create a new site on it.)

It's also my buddy Angie's birthday on the 13th, so that's nice. I went to her party, went upstairs, then we both came down to check out her new bike and mine.

Her's had two more wheels than mine did. For once, I didn't pull the front wheel off and lock it and back wheel through the frame to a fence. I got punished for it and someone used those quick release levers to help themselves to two new bike tires.

I guess I'll be making a trip to the bike shop on Mother's day.
--edit: I didn't. Instead I went and kicked ass in the floyd bocce tournament.

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Just showed up at Drupal Camp

2006-05-13T10:22:00.000-04:00

Drupal camp nyc is opening up. Every body is introing themselves. About 60 people here.

The irc backchannel info is irc.freenode.net #drupal-camp.

Sam and I had to show up because the whole thing is in our backyard practically.

U.S. versus U.K. on Health

2006-05-11T11:29:00.000-04:00

Found a really great article from gladwell.com: U.S. versus U.K.:

"The first conclusion is that Americans are really, really sick compared to the British. In every socio-economic group, for instance, the prevalence of diabetes is roughly double in the United States than it is in the United Kingdom. Rates of hypertension, heart disease, heart attacks, stroke, lung disease and cancer are also all higher in the United States. And not just a little big higher. Much higher. So, for example, 2.3 percent of the English have had a stroke, versus 3.8 percent of the Americans."

It appears that this study appears to have better controls on self reporting and the greater diversity of the US than previous studies did. 'Least that's what I gleaned from the comments. This comment about different work practices between the UK and the US rang particularly true for me.

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Books: Christopher Moore's "A Dirty Job"

2006-05-11T10:37:00.000-04:00

Just started this yesterday and it's a hoot:

It's the story of a Beta Male who, after the birth of his daughter, picks up the job of being Death. Not the Death, but rather a Death. So far it's a hoot and a half. Reading Christopher Moore is like reading Carl Hiassen, but with stories not just in Florida. That's a good thing. The stories are always inventive and very funny.

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RSS: Tracking packages

2006-05-11T10:28:00.000-04:00

I've ordered a dvd burner from Newegg.com. They send me an email letting me know the burner is shipping. Great! now I take the UPS tracking number (1Z5AE6660347303603 ) and slap it into a field on isnoop's feed generator, then subscribe to the feed in bloglines.
Now I'll know every step my burner takes on the way to my doorstep. Here's the tracking feed.

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Whassup, blotches!

2006-05-10T18:12:00.000-04:00

Allergy Test Results,
originally uploaded by snarkhunt.

Check out these huge blotches on my arm. I am very allergic to trees and grass.

That's it, I'm moving back to the upper east side. Also, check out this cool new contraption from Duane Reade I discovered at my allergists' place.

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Brooklyn backyard panorama

2006-05-08T12:56:00.000-04:00

bklyn backyard panorama,
originally uploaded by snarkhunt.

Tried out the panorama on my cameraphone and it came out pretty decent. In case you wanted to see what my backyard is like at the moment.

Happy Cinco de Matt!

2006-05-05T17:05:00.000-04:00

bday sake set,
originally uploaded by snarkhunt.

I hope everyone is having as nice a day as I am. This is the lovely sake set that sam got me. It also came with three lovely bottles. I'm off to valhalla with some peeps to count my blessings, both those nearby and those far far away.

New Phone, new phone number

2006-05-04T04:33:00.000-04:00

I caved to my own demands and bought a new pocketpc phone. It's an HTC Apache and it's so nice.

Unfortunately, because I switched providers and my previous service was from another state, my number has changed too. If you didn't get my multiple confusing and contradictory emails about my new phone number, drop me an email or a comment on this post with your email and I'll sort you out.

look who's on flickr now

2006-05-02T19:48:00.000-04:00

IWH,
originally uploaded by jrblackwell.

One of my favorite writers from the http://365Tomorrows.com website is on Flickr! Did I find this by looking around on the web for it? No.

I found it by reading the blog of Warren Ellis, a comics writer that I've never actually read any comics from.

In the future, more than 4 degrees of seperation for any 2 people speaking the same language will mean that one of them doesn't own a computer.

RSS needs conditional GET

2006-05-02T19:31:00.000-04:00

This got me thinking: I wish there was a list somewhere of those rss readers that implement http's conditional get. It's really important to the development of RSS for clients to play nice with server's rss feeds. Conditional get is a way for people to play nice by asking servers: "Should I even bother checking this feed?" and servers can say: "Nothing's changed, see you in a bit."

This lowers bandwidth for everyone, and makes it cheaper for people to provide handy dandy services like the Unofficial podcast for This American Life or The unofficial Exploding Dog Feed.

So say you want to be a good community member and use a reader that supports conditional GET. Where do you find out who supports it?

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Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers

2006-04-25T15:29:00.000-04:00

For Ed:
YouTube - Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers

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I developed film!

2006-04-24T18:34:00.000-04:00

Sam bought a weird camera called a Holga. It's plastic, cheap, and really cool. None of the parts are automatic, nothing is done for you, even the lense is plastic. It only costs about $30 and shoots large format film - 120 I think.

She got the idea from Daniel - that's the camera he used to take those moody shots of Mancunia.

She also bought a weird little light-tight bag and bucket. We took the film out of the camera, sloshed some chemicals around, and had honest to goodness negatives 15 or so minutes later. It was magical.

Negatives to go up on flickr as soon as we get em scanned in.

I moved to new york from the south to get away from crime.

2006-04-20T09:11:00.000-04:00

Just kidding. But I just noticed on Statemaster's profile of SC that SC leads the U.S. in aggravated assaults and violent crimes per capita. Sounds like someone needs to get even way more ultra-mega-tough-on-crime!

Bad news, beautifully presented

2006-04-20T08:59:00.000-04:00

It almost doesn't hurt to look at Seed Magazine's series of State of the Planet graphs. Oh, if only all information was so well presented, wouldn't that be nice?

Seed: State of the Planet

Great headphones on sale.

2006-04-18T19:36:00.000-04:00

http://www.dealhack.com/archives/2006/04/electronics_spring_sale_quick.html Saw this in my feeds. I'm using these headphones and they're great.
Couldn't tell from a $150 pair of Shure E4C's.

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This american life goes MP3

2006-04-18T13:43:00.000-04:00

My favorite NPR program "This American Life" has made the move from awful real audio to mp3. This is good and bad. It's good because mp3 works more places, it's bad because it breaks my greasemonkey userscript. Here is a workaround:

Right click on the link-> save as.
Change the file extention from .m3u to .txt.
Open the txt file. In it you will see a url. That is the url to the mp3.

I'll fix the script in a bit and it will be automatic, but this should be a stopgap till I get it done.

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Nerdvana: games bigger than your house.

2006-04-16T23:22:00.000-04:00

This weekend my neighbor, Matt Scott, hosted a bbq in the backyard. We had a good time and then as the day wore on, I dismantled the divider in our backyard. Next, I ganked his whole party by setting up the projector in the backyard for huge tekken projected on our back wall. This was great. A good time was had by all.

And then George the Russian Bear and I had a great idea.

We pointed the projector not at my back wall, but at the side of a building a few houses away. 3,000 ansi lumens of power tore the night away and threw up a Heihachi vs Panda match. The bastards were 2 stories high. Aaron turned to me and said "In all seriousness, you have the biggest television of anyone I know." I have reached a nerd pinnacle.

Working Stiff, at Masochuticon

2006-04-13T15:47:00.000-04:00

I don't know which makes me like this story more, my corporate job or my love of the zombie novels.

Working Stiff, at Masochuticon:

"It was a matter of some pride to John Parr that he had never taken a sick day in his life; the sudden and violent cessation of life did not seem in itself a convincing reason to shirk. In many ways, he might have thought, if most of his cerebral matter was not currently sitting in the oesophagus and gullet of a former loss adjuster (himself now sitting, due to an absence of working knees, in the gutter of Threadneedle Street), becoming a zombie was precisely the kind of radical change that employees often need if they are to resist staleness. There might even be advantages. Discounting for a moment the constant, instinctual yearning for brains, the undead did not appear to need food, and as such the tendency to dawdle over lunch could be excised from a workforce. Also, since zombies were by any legal standard as dead as… well, as dead as John Parr himself, it was reasonable to suppose that much of the workplace legislation that had recently caused so many problems in some of Price and Partners’ more production-oriented holdings could be open to challenge as discriminatory against the deceased."

I hope you like it too. By the way, you can be notified of every maschuticon story by email or subscribe to their RSS feed.

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Urban Exploration in south carolina

2006-04-11T11:49:00.000-04:00

I was reading ED's myspace (btw - does anyone know how you can get an rss feed off of myspace?) when I found this link from him: Welcome To Abandoned South Carolina
They go to all of these cool creepy places and take pretty good photos. Unfortunately the site is all done in flash, so I can't deep link or give you a sample easily. But it's way cool. I used to live not too far from these mills and like every other kid in colatown I had to spend time exploring these tunnels under 5 points. Lotsa cool moody photos, worth the visit.

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Daniel on flickr!

2006-04-10T13:20:00.000-04:00

River Irwell,
originally uploaded by 'flute.

Daniel's gotten started in his flickr page by uploading some great moody shots from Manchester.

Everytime I go to London it is sunny and nice and everyone tells me how miserable it usually is. This is more convincing than all that talking.

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flickr
peeps

shopping: buying a great projector cheap

2006-04-05T08:42:00.000-04:00

I've been raging on and on about how much I wanted a projector for ages. It seems like the perfect new york device. You put it up in the air, it puts the image where you point it. When I moved into my current apartment in Brooklyn I saw the backyard with a bare wall at the end and knew my projectorless days were numbered. They were probably numbered around at around 150 or so, because yesterday I picked up a Proxima Projectors: Proxima DP9280 PolySi LCD projector for only 200 bucks!

First, a few words about buying it. Do your research, because there are lots of terrible deals out there among the few good deals.

Resolution
Your standard TV resolution is 800X600. You may find projectors available at lower resolutions than that fairly cheap, but they will not look as good as your basic TV. If all you will ever be projecting is basic tv and movies, 800X600 is all you need. If you are planning on projecting your computer screen or HD content, 1024X768 is minimal and higher resolutions are better(but more costly).

Brightness
The brighter the better. Honestly. The way a normal TV works is that there are little bits of the screen shooting light out directly at your eyes. This is why you can watch tv with the lights off, but you can't read with the lights off. A projector throws light at some flat reflective surface and the light bounces back at you. An awful lot doesn't make the trip back to your eyes, so a projector is generally dimmer than a regular TV.
For projectors, the brightness is measured in Lumens. You definitely need to try any projector, ESPECIALLY A USED ONE, before you buy. That way you can see how bright it really is and what environments you can use it in. My projector is rated for 3000 ANSI lumens, and looks it. You can play it with all the lights on, no problem. Yes, that means it also uses a ton of energy and is hot like a furnace. Everything is a tradeoff.

Craigslist
This is how I looked for my projector. I went to to craigslist and put in a search for "projector". Every single search on Craigslist has an RSS feed. Hell, every page on craigslist has an rss feed. That's because you can get an rss feed just by appending "&format=rss" to any url in CL to get it back as an rss feed. So use that! Subscribe to your search in your favorite aggregator and check it daily. When you see something that looks like a good deal, email the people and set up a time to look at the merchandise. My projector was so cheap because I waited around until a company was replacing their projectors with the latest models. They asked the secretary to get rid of the old ones and she put up these $12,000 projectors for $200 apiece. Hot dog!

Tomorrow I'll try to put up some photos of the picture quality in various conditions. The projector is huge, hot, and totally awesome. Last night I played tekken5 on a 60" picture. I'm so psyched for the first warm nights and movies in the backyard.

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Cool flash game

2006-03-30T13:23:00.000-05:00

This flash game is cool! Start it up, then try clicking off the U.S.A button. The map is pretty inactive. Then click on the U.S.A. button. The game goes crazy!!
Via boingboing

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flash

Rockstars' Ramblings: Image Dogtoring #1: Christians & Crusades

2006-03-28T09:27:00.000-05:00

Jack Chick Comic turned into a lesson about argument ad baculum

Oh, that's hot.

What do you cost per hour

2006-03-22T15:45:00.000-05:00

How do you Rate?

This article discusses how to find out your hourly rate. It's a useful look and helps you realize how valuable your time is. If you will save less than your hourly rate by doing something yourself instead of paying someone else to do it, and you don't enjoy it, you should probably just pay someone else and concentrate on doing what you enjoy.

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Intellectual Property Run Amok

2006-03-19T10:38:00.000-05:00

Intellectual Property Run Amok: "AMONG THE 16,000 people thus far sued for sharing music files was a 65-year-old woman who, though she didn’t own downloading software, was accused of sharing 2,000 songs, including Trick Daddy’s “I’m a Thug.” She was sued for up to $150,000 per song." This is a long, funny, sad list.

via: LessigBlog

Viking 2GB Secure Digital Card only $65 at PC Mall - Dealhack

2006-03-17T12:58:00.000-05:00

Viking 2GB Secure Digital Card only $65 at PC Mall - Dealhack

This is a pretty damn good deal. I paid quite a bit more for my 2 gig sd card and it has made a big difference in how I use my axim.
Just thought I'd let you know.

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Gross: Organisms That Look Designed

2006-03-15T15:42:00.000-05:00

Organisms That Look Designed: "The purpose of this pro-creationism essay is to document several potentially unevolveable organisms of staggering complexity and design. As much as evolutionists will try, their (often pathetic) attempts to deny the undeniable, that life exhibits all the hallmarks of intelligent design, inevitably falter when faced with the evidence. As the rest of this document demonstrates, intelligent creation is necessary to explain the mind-boggling complexity of many organisms."

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Get Paid: You bought a cd from sony.

2006-03-15T11:12:00.000-05:00

Sony really played fast and loose with you, whether you know it or not.
If you bought any cd listed here, then you are owed money by sony. This is your money. The EFF has kindly set up an easy way to get your money from Sony. Go check the list. Go get paid by someone who's done you wrong.

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.:Swanky Gruel:.

2006-03-15T08:47:00.000-05:00

You know who's still cool in South Cack? My buddy Skylar, who's running .:Swanky Gruel:., a DIY girly site. It's the best kind of use of the internet. Okay, best non-dirty use of the internet. It's local, global, free and it forms a community.

Me likey.
Now I just need to go help them out with this whole RSS syndication thing. For me, right now, if it doesn't have a feed, it really isn't on the internet.

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Sol has pics of Mt. Baker!

2006-03-14T11:57:00.000-05:00

Top of Pakalolo - Shredded it!,
originally uploaded by Solman.

My man Sol just posted a bunch of pics from his trip to Mt. Baker. It looks gorgeous out there - I'm jealous!

Check out his great photo set on Flickr.

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Hear stories of heinous injuries

2006-03-10T18:51:00.000-05:00

Amazingly Gory Injury Stories
Like: "All of my muscles were hanging out of my arm."

Contribute a good nasty story of your own injury by calling their gory details hotline: 1-888-467-8535

I'm going to tell the one that begins "So I watch a lot of Jackie Chan flicks, and I can do this one stunt he does."

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Papers Please! Flying without ID

2006-03-10T18:30:00.000-05:00

My favorite read when it comes to security topics is Bruce Schneier's blog. He writes for Wired and runs the security firm Counterpane.
He points out that the folks at papersplease are looking for volunteers to test the TSA's claim that you can easily fly in this country without ID, just by submitting to an extra search.
I'd like to try it out, maybe on a flight to rochester or somesuch.

Why? Because security isn't knowing who's on the flight, security is knowing no one on the flight has explosives or a weapon. The reason for ID in travel is twofold.
1. From papersplease:

The custom of showing ID at airports came about in July of 1996, in the wake of the TWA flight 800 disaster. Faulty fuel tank insulation caused TWA 800 to explode over Long Island Sound. Before we knew that, there was concern that terrorists had blown up the plane. According to former terrorism czar Richard Clarke's book, the ID requirement was instituted as a temporary measure so that then-President Clinton had something to announce to the families of the victims when he met with them.

2. Scalpers. Airlines do not want your ticket to be resellable, like a bus ticket is.

Anyway, I've flown multiple times with no photo ID post 9-11-2001. My secret was the replacement driver's license.

I'm a bit absentminded, and I've lost my DL a few times. When you go to the DMV, they give you a little printed slip of paper with your info on it and then you get to use that till your real card gets mailed to you. I've flown using it. There's no picture on it, just a name and a dl number.

This is something you could easily print out on your home computer printer.

These are things that bad guys already know, you just have to be inconvenienced by the ineffective procedures because you don't know.

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Good Math, Bad Math: Tasty Brain Food.

2006-03-10T11:15:00.000-05:00

If you are looking for some good brain food, you could do worse than Good Math, Bad Math. It has an easy style that leads you painlessly through interesting subjects without bogging down in the actual math.

And it is funny:

"Godel presented an extremely complicated proof that showed, essentially, that no formal system could be both complete and consistent.

Most people saw Godel's proof, did the equivalent of saying 'Oh, shit!', and then pretending that they hadn't seen it. It does mean that there are fundamental limits to what you can do using mathematical formalization, but for the most part, they don't affect you in normal day to day math. (Sort of the way that car designers didn't change the way they build cars because of relativity. Yes, it showed that the fundamental physical model that they were using was wrong - but at the speeds that cars move, that wrongness is so small that it just doesn't matter.)"

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A free collaborative spreadsheet

2006-03-07T20:23:00.000-05:00

I just discovered Numbler on Download Squad's feed. (Download squad is turning out to earn it's place in my blogroll)

It is a spreadsheet online that anyone can edit together. It uses excel syntax for formulas. I haven't really pushed it too much, but it handled what little I gave it. You can import your stuff for a collaborative session and then export it when you are done. I know Sam and I will probably use this when we are looking at the numbers on our house. Pay attention to the warning on the page though, there is no security on this app - don't put anything up there that you want to keep secret.

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Google's hosting and publishing simple personal pages.

2006-02-24T08:11:00.000-05:00

snarkhunt - This is no boojum. That's mine. How can we play with this better?

Book: In the Palaces of Memory - Good look at formation of memories and of theories

2006-02-22T23:48:00.000-05:00

My bocce crew, the Old Dirty Barristers, played this weekend and while I was in Floyd's I found this book. I nearly forgot to keep playing.

The book has plenty of good non-scientist explanations of theories about how memories form. That's a really important topic. If there is no biological meat mechanism where memories are stored, then our consciousness is not a part of our biology. We would have to have something supernatural like a soul to explain our thought. If, however, memory storage and formation can be found in the body, then perhaps we can replicate that same sort of pattern in computers or other simulations.

Apart from a great explanation of competing theories on memory formation and storage, there are also some glimpses into the personalities behind them and the political nature of theory formation, defense and evolution.

I'm trying to get this one finished before I bolt off to Carnival. If you read this one and like it, I also recommend Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

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Howto turn a disposable camera into a projector

2006-02-21T20:58:00.000-05:00

FLASHPOINT
This is a great way to turn trash into something useful. Would be great to make a couple of these with faces for a party and just leave them running.
Note to self-turn Sol onto this.

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Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine

2006-02-21T20:06:00.000-05:00

Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine
Holy crap. This seems to be so awesome.
It uses yahoo's engine to search your terms at a specific number of websites. You can have topic specific search from sources you trust - it would be nice if OutFoxed linked in with this.
Seems like this is sort of OPML like - I can trust Debra Messing to be concerned with online shopping for hoity toity clothes and let her maintain her list of great places to search for clothes.

I can create a list of places that sell computer bits, and aggregate searches here.

What other things do you search for at multiple places? Is google the end of the search for you always?

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I'll be going to brazil next week.

2006-02-21T17:23:00.000-05:00

Sam and I are going with friends to the carnival in Brazil. We'll be in Rio and someplace in Bahia. I'll be offline and without cellphone. If you know of some great thing in Brazil to check out, or if there is something legal you want me to bring back, please let me know before friday.
I'll be gone Friday, Feb 24th and back Monday, March 5th.
Burglars, please note: I don't have much valuable stuff and our attack cats will be on patrol. You've been warned.

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Build It: A Homemade Media Center PC

2006-02-21T13:20:00.000-05:00

Feature from PC Magazine: Build It: A Homemade Media Center PC

Actually, this is just a test of a script change to make blogger's blogthis extension play nice with the greasemonkey script I use for tagging.

Edit: the test worked. But I'm going to read that article anyway.

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Programming: The standard treeview doesn't really support xml

2006-02-21T12:54:00.000-05:00

I'm putting together a utility at work that generates stylesheets given the output of a stored procedure in xml. There are a lot of choices on how to represent this.
I thought a tree-view would be nice (like the left hand side of windows explorer), but it looks like there is no good way to bind a tree view to the contents of an xml document without changing that document. Very odd, since a tree is the most natural way to present an XML document.

So for now, I'm going with a list of fields available and adding them to a datagrid view. All of this would be easier with .net 2.0, but it's politically unsound to be playing with the new toys if you are as junior as I am.

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Site exists to proclaim hatred of cilantro.

2006-02-21T08:41:00.000-05:00

Of course, I joined up. Cilantro is the worst flavoring ever. It's always being snuck into my food.
I hate cilantro.

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Stereo Bluetooth Headset - this is what I want

2006-02-16T13:44:00.000-05:00

Stereo Bluetooth™ Headset HBH-DS970 - Specifications - - Mobile phone accessory - Sony Ericsson

I want to wear my headphones and listen to music. Use the tiny remote to see what song is playing and fastforward, skip, etc. When a call comes in, the music pauses and I speak using the mic in the remote, then back to the tunes.
Why isn't everything like this?

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fallenidol: How to download trailers from the Apple site WITHOUT Quicktime PRO

2006-02-15T09:47:00.000-05:00

fallenidol: How to download trailers from the Apple site WITHOUT Quicktime PRO
I saw this in my delicious feed. It looks similar to what I did for my This Mobile Life greasemonkey script.

Perhaps I can automate this a little for people. It may be possible to make a GM_XmlHttpRequest on the file linked, determine if it has a *.mov string in it and then change the link. What you want to avoid is downloading a whole .mov file just to check it! Not sure if greasemonkey can do that.
If you want me to look into it, let me know.

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