I had a very old copy of the blogger tool in my projects section. I’ve made a number of bug fixes in this latest version, please feel free to try it out. I know there are a number of areas I want to improve it and ways to break it still; but it is a free beta tool for you to enjoy!
After moving up to Portland, and into a house with no internet access, I’ve found myself visiting lots of cafes, bookstores, pubs, etc for my emailing and surfing pleasure. But the quality of experience (food, throughput, cost, etc) vary greatly. I started making a list of places I’ve been and the general experiences. You can find it under the projects section, or linked here.
Blogger v1.1 now available. Added temporary save/load slots for entries.
Check out my projects page to get a copy. It’s a little tool I developed for simultaniously generating the HTML and RSS blog feeds used on this website. You can see the project page for details, downloads, etc. I generated this very entry with it!
Wow, wow – I am amazed by this thing.
The technology to do this has been around for years; but nobody has put them together until now. It is a map that has taken satellite images and overlayed them on topographical and street maps. You can zoom around in 3D, pan, and explore the entire world with actual satellite images overlayed on it – all for free.
I was just using it to plan out some possible photo shoot locations for my trip to Bend this weekend. It helped me see where some good sunrise/sunset shots might be taken from without even leaving my chair here in Portland. This is really close to real-time updating globe described by Neal Stephenson in his book the Cryptonomicon. If such a technology existed for the masses, you wouldn’t even really need CNN anymore – just go look at the events unfolding yourself. Imagine watching battles, demonstrations, parades/festivals, all in real-time from home.
It has made me realize again and again how much our society is in desperate need of some new tools to make sense of these new capabilities. Well, not new, but emotional, moral, and spiritual tools that people need when given these major shifts in information available to each of us. Human beings need a way to make sense and assign value to the many events in our lives. As a chaplain, I have been seeing this dynamic powerfully at work in the hospital. People become paralyzed and act very irrationally when they can’t make sense of what is going on to them. How do we go about avoiding this fate as we advance in technological understanding?
In case you didn’t notice, I’m the proud owner of my first domain name on the web: http://mattfife.net.
I got it from a great domain hosting service (www.1and1.com) that gives you domain registration, 25mb/mo transfer, 10mb storage, free emails, sub-domains, a 90 day money-back guarantee and a lot of nifty extras for $29/6mo. They also don’t hold your domain name hostage if you try to leave.
So far it’s an excellent service – very fast, great ftp support, etc. As added fun, it was very interesting getting spam emails after registering a domain name. A bunch of no-name companies congratulated me on my new domain and asked if I’d like to buy a whole bunch of stupid products/consultation services to help optimize it’s ‘business potential’. They were clearly form emails, and likely generated by scripts that watch the Internic for new domain registrations and pull the email address of the owner and mail them. Oh the fun of computer automation…
I undertook a little coding project for fun. After a number of requests, I’ve added a RSS feed to the site for you bloggers. I wrote up a little C++ app to update my blog in both HTML and RSS 0.91/XML format. The RSS feed only keeps the last 10 articles. The code for the blogger is really messy right now; but works. I’m planning on cleaning it up and then publishing the writer class. It’s silly nobody has released such a tool before…
Was driving today when all of a sudden I noticed that my left turn signal was blinking twice as fast as the right. Ahhh, I realized, this isn’t right. I went out and checked the bulbs and sure enough – the front signal bulb was out. So why does it blink twice as fast when a bulb is out? Because the relay (which switches based on a capacitor) gets more juice (because now the bulb isn’t using it), ‘fills’ up faster (2x faster because 1 bulb is now gone) and trips twice as often. Screw out the old bulb and put the new bulb in for about $1 at the local auto parts store and voila! Perfection.
Been a wild ride for the old Altima lately. After 12 years and 150,000 miles, she starting to need some repairs that I’ve been putting off. I’ve got 2 torn CV boots that can only be fixed by replacing the axles. Surprisingly not too expensive and good because you also get CV joints with them (which needed to be replaced like oh… 50,000 miles ago). Minor oil leaks galore but none that really need real fixing (rear main seal costs $300 vs. $1 for a quart of oil every 3 months). I just had to replace the radiator which had cracked at least twice and finally split beyond repair. Only took an hour from start to finish though – so that was easy. I also replaced a water pump recently; though I discovered later that the original was really OK – but now I don’t need to worry about it for years. Tricky part about the water pump was that I need to unbolt and jack the engine up just to get it out. No joke – that’s what the official guide said. And it was true. Took 6 hours. What a pain – they sure don’t design cars like they used to – meaning the average mortal might actually be able to fix it. I also seem to have some strange electrical problem/short going on; but have been unable to isolate it. Had the alternator out and tested at two places which both said it was OK (which is good because a new one wholesale was $170 – which is outrageous for an alternator. Sucker should be made of gold for that price).
But I’ve also discovered the beauty of a brand new source of do-it-yourself parts – the junk yard. There’s a GREAT one in Hillsboro – they have a great parts database and if they don’t have it they can check the inventory of most of the major other yards in the area. I’ve found almost everything that way. Just take some tools into the yard and tear out the part you want, bring it up to the counter and they’ll charge you something insanely cheap. Man is it fun!
It’s no secret my favorite game is Half-life 2 – especially Counter-strike. Unfortunately, there are some fun bugs in HL2, and here’s an interesting list of bugs with pictures and/or demos of them happening.
This guy has really captured some of the funny, but all too common problems with games.
My personal favorite is #14 about crates. It was a running joke while I worked at Intel in the graphics and 3D technologies lab. There was a hidden developer acronym for the phenomenon: TTC (Time To Crate). It could be used in sentences like ‘What a lame game – the TTC was zero!” TTC is the measure of time between the first moment of the title screen until you saw a crate on the screen. Try it – many times the answer is zero. Why? Because the very first scene starts you in a room full of crates!
The TTC metric often is used as THE metric of rating the creativeness of the artist that made the game.