All my rantings…
When encountering a new philosophy or religion, do not convert, but rather assimilate.
All my rantings…
Why did Fox's attempts to emulate Jon Stewart fail?
I was just reading somethng about Jon Stewart and I wondered why it was that right-wingnuts can't be that kind of funny?
And it occurs to me it's because they're liars.
Jon Stewarts humour comes from the juxtaposition of reality to the joke. If you don't recognize the reality you can't make, or get, the joke.
And right wingnuts have no connection with reality to juxtapose humour with. The facts they predicate their talking points on are fantasies, so trying to joke about them falls flat. A person skidding on ice also skidding on a banana isn't funny.
In Canada a religious sect known as the Hutterites has been granted an exemption from having photos included on their driver licenses.
Apparently most Hutterites take the Christian first commandment instruction against graven images very seriously and think it is wrong to render pictures of people (while others aren't so worried, as long as the images aren't idolised).
Now, I don't have a problem with photos on a drivers license, it makes sense to me as a way of confirming the person with the license is the person it was issued to. But I do have a lot of very strong objections to other ideas a government might have about regulating me.
But I'm not a member of any religious organisation, so if I make an objection to some requirement - let's say routine finger printing - I won't be doing it by saying 'my faith does not allow it'. Even though in practice that's equivalent to my saying 'my ethics do not allow it'. I have to argue as an individual for my position.
Arguing as an individual doesn't get you very far against entrenched interests, ever. I'd need to band together with others who agree with me into a pressure group and functionally behave as if we were a religious denomination. Which to my mind is all any religious sect is (and probably ever should be) to authorities - a well delineated group of specific opinions, easy to identify and count.
Does this mean it would be a good idea for any sizeable group of dissenters to form an ad hoc religious body for the express purpose of being recognized? Screw electing a president of your society, appoint a pope!
Every so often I trial a new release of a Linux distro. And they continue to get better.I still get annoyed at how much I have to learn the moment I want to reconfigure something but the simple horrible design aesthetics that just depress me are waning.
Kubuntu 7.04 is the latest I've been mulling over. It's not looking too bad - but it has motivated me to rant about those really annoying cursors it uses.
When I open the KDE menu a KDE icon starts bouncing up and down below my cursor. I've found what I want, I'm exploring menus for the option I'm after but my eye keeps getting distracted by an idiotic icon jumping up and down.
It's exactly the same sort of childish stupidity in design the HTML Blink icon represents. It has no purpose, it does nothing except annoy.
The lack of U.I smarts and cohesive design discipline this represents abounds on Linux desktops. It, rather than functionality such as missing games, is what ultimately destroys my enthusiasm for embracing Linux.
Cell phones should receive faxs. Some of the modern screens on phones would be good enough to read them but I'm thinking storing for printing (or transfer to PC) would suffice. Pictures taken could then be sent as faxs.
And when are we going to get Voice-to-text on cell phones? It would be so useful - for updating blogs, sending complex txts or any of a myriad reasons one could want to side-step laborious text input.
Cell phones should record phone calls (I'm guessing some already do). I think of this because of a newspaper article about an emergency call that was mis-handled.
You're not likely to think before hand that any given conversation is going to be important and you might want a record of it, but you may very well think afterwards that it'd be nice to have an accurate record of one.
So I think it'd be a good design choice to record each phone conversation, just record over any previous ones. Have options to save the last one to the side, wipe it if not saved after an hour or two, or demand a decision on saving or wiping at the end of the call or some such.
My take on a date time picker plugin for jQuery-UI. Developed from work done by Martin Milesich.
This years holidays were in Fiji, and I'm creating a page with photo's and videos here about it. Currently I'm editing the material and haven't presented it. Watch this space.
I've written an application to improve the U.I of my new phone (a HTC Dual Touch) called SlideActions.
It lets users decide on how the phone should behave in locking, hanging up and other options when its slide is opened or closed. And although it's written for my phone the code isn't particularly specific - it may work on others.
But it'll need someone a little clued in to configure it for other phones - I've put notes on what's needed on it's homepage.
This article helpfully describes how to get info on apparently unsupported installed devices.
To sum it up once you drill down through Device Manager to find the device instance ID (i.e PCI\ VEN_8086 &DEV_266E &SUBSYS_3006103C &REV_03\ 3 &B1BFB68&0 &F2) you can extract a vendor and device ID (in the example, Vendor Id : 8086 and Device Id : 266E).
Then if you go to PCI Database you can find what's required to obtain drivers.
When you use Thunderbird for IMAP accounts it can be annoying having the Local Folders sitting among your accounts.
To get rid of Local Folders you need to edit Thunderbirds prefs.js file for the relevant profile.
I've written a script to make the relevant edits, even if you've already created more accounts than the default.
It's a prettty cheap VBScript thing I just knocked up in a hurry so it isn't very pretty or cross platform (I may swap it out for a Perl version sometime). Just copy it into the directory prefs.js is in and run it.
It automatically creates a backup before over-writing prefs.js. Your prefs.js file will be somewhere like:
If you know what the lagoonarium is and you want a copy of the video contact me, because I've lost your address.
No, really, I really did. And here's the picture to prove it. That's me up on the monument at Thermopylae a few years ago on a trip from England to Istanbul (and most of the way back). I saw 300 last week and, eh, it was okay. The best bits were stylish stagings of the comics panels - but comics transcribed as movies don't have good scripts or dialogue (Sin City also demonstrates this).
The most interesting thing I noticed, given the debates and anger the movie aroused, is the addition of some dialogue: when Leonidas meets Xerxes emissary early in the story he warns the emissary he'll be held responsible for his words as if they were his own - a clear warning that this messenger may be blamed for the message he is about to deliver. This is not in the comic. So the producers demonstrate they know there's something unseemly about Leonidas in this story and attempted to defuse it by inserting language to moderate his character. If they now reply to accusations of producing propaganda with claims to only have been reproducing another work of art in a different medium, without responsibility for the story, they will be lying.
Finally the weather cleared up enough for me to get out and have a look at McNaught. About four days after it's peak appearance it's still mighty impressive. Supposedly the second brightest comet ever measured for brightness it covered about 20 degrees of sky. Much more impressive than Halleys or Hyakutake
Took my camera out and made my first astronomical pictures. At first I left it's battery in the charger. And after getting it I took the wrong lens. Oh well, they didn't turn out too badly.
While driving to work today I saw a ~four meter long fibreglass model of Thunderbird 2 parked on the roadside. Très cool!
Some reef sharks and rays in the Bora Bora lagoon.
While snorkeling in Bora Bora I found this moray. He was gorgeously coloured (underwater photography without lights washes colours out a lot).
He was something like six to eight feet long and I remember his eyes as being richly coloured and beautiful flecked with gold.
A short clip from my camera to test video streaming. I'm quite impressed at how well this comes across from the original just off my happy snappy Canon IXUS.
I recently bought these Jabra BT-620S headphones.
And I think they work quite well - the sound isn't all that good but I didn't expect it to be (I've got a good stereo for when I want to hear music at it's best). Bluetooth just isn't a good medium for high fidelity music and it would be foolish to expect excellent sound.
I didn't buy with any intention of using the microphone so I offer no opinion on that, but the review I linked to is correct that they can get uncomfortable (not enough for me to mind, but a more sensitive person could get easily irritated).
I approve of their user interface, very well thought out, just pressing the ear pieces does what you need in most contexts.
I also bought Jabras Bluetooth dongle to go with them, but also wanted to make A2DP (the Advanced Bluetooth Audio Profile) work on my Windows XP machine with my existing Bluetooth kit (so I could have these headphones paired with both my laptop and my PC). My cheap Bluetooth dongle I discovered (by looking at it's driver details) was manufactured by CSR, and it happens that Blue Soleil manufacturers Windows drivers that provide A2DP functionality to CSR Bluetooth chips.
I have downloaded and tested the latest Blue Soleil software and it did indeed work with my cheap Bluetooth dongle. Only I can't buy it - because you do that via the applications Help menu and it won't enable 'Buy' for me.
And it seems they offer no option to buy via their wesite (I guess they want to tie your purchase to the applications detection and identification of a particular Bluetooth device). So apparently they don't want me as a customer.
Sometimes you need a lot of columns in a table, and sometimes the plain language headings are too wide - they push the tables edge off any reasonable sized screen.
It'd be great if you could just rotate the headings a little so the colunms could be thinner. But you can't rotate HTML text (not even using the new Canvas element of modern browsers).
So I created a little code to generate text on the fly as an image, rotated and in the colours one might want.
I thought, for the fun of it, and because I'd Stumbled over it, that I'd implement OpenID as identity verification for logging in to this site. How hard could it be, I thought.
I know how these authentication schemes work, and being an open source project I expected there'd be some scripts I could grab and mutilate to my ends. But nope, I could find nothing except the original demo by danga.com (the folks responsible for LiveJournal) that suited my purpose (as light-weight as possible) and a crucial part of that is a Perl file whose source I could not view. For some reason the downloadable source file was missing. But I fortuitously found their CVS repository and snagged a copy.
Then I had to make sure I had all the supporting packages. And discovered that Crypt-DH (an essential part of SSH communications) wasn't readily available. But that's just a typical little installation glitch quickly sorted with a few choice searches.
More annoying were substantial changes required to the Perl source because it was originally written to make use of some sort of framework danga.com uses and I do not. But hey, what's a little tweaking and debugging among friends?
So now I have a sample of using OpenID to verify identity.
I like the idea of XUL. A mark up language for web applications (as distinct from HTML which was intended for marking up documents) is a great idea. Unfortunately it's unlikely to be widely adopted by browser publishers, although it's probably worth insisting users install Firefox just for it's XUL abilities when you can (Microsoft's XAML is pretty much the same thing but within the dot.NET framework, so not such a compact or cross platform option).
Anyway, because Firefox is itself a XUL application it can be modified with changes to it's markup. This is how extensions work. And to help out a developer who prepared some pretty animations for Firefox (see this page for a new 'throbber', a.k.a 'busy', animation in Firefox) I packaged this extension to answer the authors request for such a thing (they've since tweaked it and updated it for Firefox 2.0 it seems).