Alegators are Dangerous no matter how drunk you are

Okay, I'm bored, obviously, but here's some funny stuff I found online this morning.

Alligators are dangerous no matter how drunk you are

Tom, stop screwing around and hire this guy

Again, through diggdot.us, another great link. This is a sample design that someone suggested replace the main myspace.com look. To tom's credit, the current myspace.com intro page isnt that bad, but it would be a lot nicer if some of the user pages on myspace.com looked more like this.

Myspace layout redesign on deviantart.com

Please Tom, listen to them, and hire some web developers to clean the place up, and work very very hard at improving the default templates for people, because you have single handedly effected a time warp back 10 years in web design.

The phrase "you're website needs more fire", comes to mind in how to describe the average myspacer page. You should not give newbies this kind of power without training wheels.

It drives me mad that on half of the myspace pages out there I have to employ the horizontal scroll bar on 1280x1024 resolution. What the hell is up with that.

Some sites look moderately decent, like HipDave's page, where they are fairly clean, no freakish background, but then you get stuff like Tritonworld page, where you have some okay graphics, but the layout gets completely screwy.

And why oh why do we have to see every single freaking comment on the same page. Let the users have some other pages in here, maybe categories, this all on one page shit is madness. Now, maybe it's a bad mark against the general populace that this madness worked, but you have an opportunity to help improve the web dev skills of millions of young people. These people are actually interested in making better pages, throw them a bone and give them some automated tools to do so.

I must make this, a paper spider

This is a really cool article I found through Diggdot.us, on how to make a paper spider out of five one dollar bills.

Paper spider making instructions

Next time I get crappy service at a restaurant, i'm going to leave my tip in spider form.

25 worst tech products of all time

Diggdot has a link to the 25 worst tech products of all time, and right on top, where it belongs is America Online.

Here's the way it goes. There are a lot, and i mean a lot of people over the years that have been perfectly happy with America Online, but the folks there in recent years have decided to change it completely, thus irritating the folks who were willing to pay for the service.

I know a person who was so fond of it that they were willing to pay $10 a month to run it on top of their broadband connection just to listen to AOL radio and use the AOL e-mail, but with continuous changes that user eventually decided to go over to the GMail camp, because they wanted something simple and reliable to work with.

AOL's right moves in recent years have included opening up IMAP access to your e-mail accounts, which a lot of business users were hoping for since they have a vested interest in their AOL accounts established over long periods of time. This way business users with outlook contact lists could still check their aol e-mail from within outlook. That in my opinion was the last smart thing that AOL did.

Their client sucks, even on a freshly installed windows XP CD. It's slow, flakey, and completely useless to navigate. If a user wants just a few simple features, they have to navigate through all sorts of other crap. Not to mention the agressive advertising to PAYING customers. What the hell is my 10 a month going to if i'm going to have to sit through that crap. Why am I giving you money, please explain it to me.

The Caffine is back

I am CORNHOLIO! I want all your frappucino!!!!

Logo critiques

Random post:

This guy has a fairly cool article on logo design. Source: digg.

http://www.code-interactive.com/thinker/a112.html

Tiny Little Dog Icon?

I think it's a bit presumptuous to change someone's buddy icon simply because they log in from iChat. Now my AIM buddy icon is this sad looking dog.

That is weak.

On a sad note I enabled comment moderation and those irritating little image verification boxes, since I just got hit with blog spam. Those spammers deserve a special place in hell. Truly evil people.

Would be nice if Blogger would let you bypass the comment protections after you have been verified in some way.

Alex carefully summarizes E-Mail ettiquite in the workplace

Alex Hin is a former team mate of mine in the Flying Daggers Descent Squadron. HIs blog, Brilliance in Isolation details both his personal life and his efforts at his workplace. Being a relatively young fellow it's fair to say that he's not yet completely jaded, so it's fun to watch him discover irritating aspects of workplaces and life events and see how he deals with them.

Holding nothing back yet again, he covers Office E-Mail Ettiquite in a humorous yet completely useful fashion. Read it up, this should be in an encyclopedia somewhere for new tech workers.

MS shills drinking the kool aid again.

Within one minute of each other the following stories were posted on diggdot (via slashdot and digg). Microsoft, stop drinking the kool aid and get to work not sucking so damn much.

New MS Word 0 day exploit found - subbers writes "A zero-day flaw in Microsoft Word program is being used in an active exploit by sophisticated hackers in China and Taiwan, according to warnings from anti-virus researchers. The exploit arrives as an ordinary Microsoft Word document attachment to an e-mail and drops a backdoor with rootkit features when the document is opened and the previously unknown vulnerability is triggered.
Open source software not reliable, choose commercial - A senior Microsoft executive told a BBC World documentary that people should use commercial software if they're looking for stability. (Translation, this 2 bit idiot is getting paid to say this.)

The funny thing is, with open source software when there is a 0 day exploit, you at least did not pay $400 per MS Office suite to get ripped off. All things being equal, wouldnt you feel a little bit less ripped off if an open source package failed you than one you paid for.

The problem is, once someone makes a decision to shell out cash for commercial software, they are emotionally invested in the decision, and keep trying to justify it.

3tunes rendered useless

Okay, was this a shock at all? I mean even a little bit of a shock. No. The 3tunes program, which previously allowed users to store the mp3's that Pandora.com's flash player used on their hard drives has now been rendered useless. The program depended on the song title being present in the firefox toolbar. They took that away and no the program no worky. For the uninformed, Pandora.com is a web based self customized radio station of sorts that utilizes a flash based player which downloads tracks as mp3's which are untitled with no metadata, and plays them in your browser window. Normally you wouldnt be able to catalog these mp3's according to title, but the flash player updates (or did) the song title in the Firefox title bar. A very useful, but easily exploitable feature, once someone found out what folder the mp3's were being stored in.

This text is all that remains of the 3tunes homepage.

Pandora has removed the artists name & song title from the Firefox titlebar, this means that 3tunes no longer functions correctly. You may still copy the MP3 files over manually.

View the source here and download the source here.

I knew this shit was coming, but I mused about how useful the program could be here. It was obvious to me even then that this wasnt going to last.

At least they released the source code, as I was curious how they were reading out the title from the Firefox browser. The next pandora.com grab program will probably utilize an open source flash player or use screen scraping techniques. If I understand correctly the second is more likely because GNU Gnash, the GPL flash player, does not support interactions with the flash object, but is rather a basic movie player.

Hilarious Onion Article

Toasty has a damn nice article at the top of his page now. link to his post.

The inspirion was "up to something".

South carolina blogger: Lottalinuxlinks.com

There is a new podcast in my list, the LottaLinuxLinks podcast. This guy was college educated as a Food Scientist, but like many linux users arrived at their current profession through a circuitious route.

I believe he's back to working in the food industry, but he has a lot of good stories to tell about his experiences, and still runs his own linux setups along with lottalinuxlinks.com

Looks like Mr. Dias is going hungry

India clears Da Vinci Code with some minor restrictions. I applaud your government for not being such a freaking wimp to the religious zealots out there. Look, anyone in their right mind knows that this movie is not presented as fact, and if the Indian censor board feels that their viewing public is not intelligent enough to "get" this, then i'm fine with them putting little warnings about that before and after the film.

They can however at the same time go ahead and put such warnings in front of every church service on every religion in the whole freaking PLANET, because obviously SOMEBODY has it wrong. The most narrow interpretations of religious beliefs expect that everyone but one group will be wrong.

Why does this feel like the argument over evolution. Let people decide for themselves. Dias, you are a sad sad man, and I hope you stick to your promise if the film goes through. No one likes a whiner who doesnt follow through. That or apologize for being such a tool.

For those that havent been following the controversy, press grubbing and self proclaimed Catholic leader Joseph Dias has gone on a hunger strike until the film is banned in India. Gagwatch has it's own opinion on Dias' conduct

The official opinion of honest churchgoers who are offended by this should not be to hunger strike or protest, but to say "it's a freaking movie, get over it." Should they have issues with their minor children seeing it, hey, that's their business, but stop trying to censor your fellow man.

How dare you pandora

I dont know how or why this happened, but for the first time in my entire time using pandora, it launched an advertisement popup. This is reprehensible and completely pisses me off.

I look at their screen many times a day, with it's included moderately intrusive but tolerable side advertisement. I am not even bothered when it is animated, but one thing I will never tolerate is the use of popup ads. That's madness!

Their use of a flash based player is irritating enough, with the lack of stability of flash 7 on linux, but this is going too far.


Update: To add insult to injury, upon closing the pandora.com squeezebox ad, the browser crashed. Your service kicks ass pandora, but you obviously dont give a crap about linux users. It may not seem to be your target market, but I've gotten two other windows users on pandora.com since I started using it. The Linux user market is the same group of people who makes computer tech reccomendations to all those happy go lucky windows users out there, dont irritate us.

A meaningful alternative to this setup, and one that would make it harder for users to rip songs, would be a shoutcast stream that is controlled from a non flash web page for those users not wanting to deal with flash crap.

Some vim tips via diggdot

It should be scary to me that I consider this to be a personal article rather than an Information Technology article.

I use the Vim editor a lot, but I am not a master of it's secrets. I do way too much stuff manually. This article on vim markers and jumps was very enlightening, since I do have to jump back and forth in config files quite a bit.

I should also learn to navigate via the keyboard instead of the arrow keys, since they dont always behave the same over a terminal.

No 1UP mushrooms here.

Bausch and Lomb Contact Solution said to have problems, in an article on the Consumerist.

In the article we learn that several cases have occurred in Singapore in which contact lens wearers have been blinded due to eye infections by a flesh eating fungus. All of the users were using a particular brand of contact lens solution made by Bauch and Lomb.

This is some scary stuff, but as some of the comments pointed out it may be more likely that the solution is less effective at disinfection than it's counterparts. When I used to wear contacts back in the old days I used the AOSept full disinfection system which bathed the contacts in a solution overnight. It was a hastle, but I often wonder if the more convenient one step contact lense solution packages dont trade safety for convenience.

I've been happy (mostly) wearing glasses the last few years, and dont regret for a second leaving behind the misplaced vanity that caused me to put little slips of plastic in my eye every day for several years. I'm not against wearing contacts for special events like swimming, snorkeling, or maybe even sailing, but everyday wear is insane.

If you are going to be using the less agressive solutions, you are going to have to be VERY careful to follow manufacturer specified cleaning regimens and keep a safe storage place for your contacts, as well as avoiding over wear. Proper cleaning of your hands before working with contacts is also essential.

Meeting Taz

Meeting Taz
Originally uploaded by atlantevour.

Taz and me at Six Flags New England. I'm a huge Taz fan so it was great to finally get a chance to see him.

He looks exactly like the Warner Brothers Taz plush i've had for over a decade.

Hunger strike till death?

Hunger strike until death? What is your faith if you cannot handle things that speak against it. Even so, last I checked this movie wasnt listed in the documentary column.

No one, in the history of the world, has had it more right than when they said that church and state should be seperated. Is anyone else made uncomfortable by Catholic and Muslim organizations agreeing on matters of censorship?

You people make me sick. Trying to block this stuff, regardless of it's merit, will only make it more popular.

Feeling sick

Boston was cold and wet and four days in duration. I'm feeling very warm and worried I might be about to get a fever.

If boston made me sick it adds to my list of things that I have against it at the moment. The return trip in the far future is going to have to be great to make up for the weather on this last one.

I do have to say this, after driving in Boston I now have +5 agressiveness on my Driving Skill.

Boston mocks me and I return the favor

The weather in boston was horrific in so many ways. It will be a long time before I can bring myself to go back there again. Josh's graduation from Boston University was pretty cool, but we almost didnt make it in time to see him walk due to traffic and weather.

Everywhere we went to catch the sights it was raining heavily, and by the time we left there was talk of closing interstates and roadways we might need to leave the Boston area.

How people can flourish under such conditions is beyond me, but the natives of Mass. are to be respected for their fortitude. The city of Boston itself seemed to grow out of a mass of conflicting and disorganized highways, in stark contrast to the beautifully constructed Tobin bridge and the Big Dig. The Big Dig is the common name for the large tunnel that runs underneath the city.

With our trusty Garmin GPS rented from Enterprise rent a car, we were able to make it through the city alive, and visited the following places.

• Harvard
• M.I.T.
• Tobin Bridge
• U.S.S. Constitution
• Bunker Hill visitors center
• Boston University

I do have to say that the T train system is very well constructed and if used properly can get you damn near anywhere. We used it on occasion and the only time we got lost was when we were given the wrong directions on how to reach Boston University. My Uncle informed us that we needed to get off at downtown station, which was completely and utterly wrong, so we had to take a cab all the way to Boston University. As the time clicked by in the cab traffic caused us to leave the cab and try running to the graduation. There we were the four of us in a mad dash with tons of other parents/friends of graduates running down the side of Commonwealth avenue. We arrived approx twenty minutes late, but luckily for us the Keynote address was running long.

Congrats Josh. I know it isnt easy, but you did it! Congrats on your B.S. in Psychology.

Dying without music here

I'm up in Boston still on the trip to my cousin's graduation ceremony. Will be heading back today but i'm dreading the return trip to the car rental place up in manchester.

I didnt bring any CD's along and the local radio stations suck. I might need to pony up the cash for an IPod or something because I just cant take this crap anymore. I need to have music while driving long trips. Listening to Pandora.com on the trip would be great, but unless I use something like 3Tunes, which lets you save tracks off of pandora.com, it's not that easy to take my favorites on the road. Creating CD's for this purpose is irritating, but probably the most clear cut route.

In other news since it's been raining a lot we've been doing a lot of eating and my stomach seems on the verge of collapse, after eating a sushi dinner, some soda, and going to play Dance Dance Revolution in the arcade adjacent to the hotel. More on that arcade later, which I will refer to from now on as the "Dark Carneval." Muy Creepy.

Optimus Prime

After more web time wasting, I found this again through two links from Diggdot.us. Optimus prime looks hardcore here in this 3d CGI animation.

Bittorrent for movie distribution

Nathan is commenting on the use of bittorrent to distribute movies and has a moderately more optimisic view of the end results than me, but I concede that if the bittorrent complexity is properly hidden from the user that Warner Brothers will be sucessful in their efforts. Pricing will have to be a lot cheaper than DVD's for this to work in my opinion if they plan on having people put up with the key entering and such.

I think the ease of use is going to make this completely undesireable for the regular bittorrent user. It will however make a decent backend for a studio designed user interface which hides the bittorrent methods from the user.

One side effect of their doing this may be the increase of average user upload speeds. I am personally suffering with a 40kbps upload speed aside my really fast 735KBps download speeds on my Brighthouse Networks (Roadrunner) cable modem. I like the download speed just fine, but having crappy upload speeds is a nightmare.

Maybe if the broadband operators see the upload pipes regularly saturated they will deal with these problems.

Nintendo Commercial

During some free time in my Boston trip I found this commercial through Diggdot.us, the Slashdot, Digg, and Del.icio.us aggregator. It's pretty good, but the soundtrack to it is not in my taste, but while I was watching it for the first time something magical happened.

I was listening to Pandora.com streaming radio and the song "Safe Passage" by Manmade God came on. I didnt even notice that it's sound was playing over the video because it matched up almost exactly with the action of actors in the video. It was magical and produced a video I consider far superior.

Would be neat if someone were to combine the two. Either way, here is the original video, decent enough on it's own for the Nintendo fans out there.

Six flags

Visited Six Flags: New England this afternoon. Even with the incredibly irritating rain it was an awesome experience. Rode flashback, a classic forward/reverse type rollercoaster, then caught the comet, which is a badass wooden rollercoaster. I seriously had the fear of death on the comet, being in the back of a fully loaded train weighing as much as I do the car felt like it was going to try and leap off the track.

Got a bit of a wakeup call on Superman Ride of Steel. Since that guy died a while back they have reduced the total size of the seatbelt restraint on that ride. It didnt go down far enough for their tastes, and I was asked to step off the ride. Going to need to lose a bit of weight to ride this one. I'm not huge, just a typical IT manager gut, but it was very frustrating since this has never happened to me before.

The Manthem

Pirates are People too

Nathan has written up an excellent article that covers the divide between content providers and producers and several strategies that might helps us bridge that gap with a less invasive and irritating methodology than current DRM and agressive anti piracy efforts.

My burrito is mocking me

I was looking around for chipotle stuff and came across Chipotle Nutrition is Depressing, and if the calculator is correct, it is. It really really is.

Key point however that cannot be forgotten. It's worth it. That burrito is happiness wrapped in a silver bundle. It is pound for price and taste the most satisfying thing I can eat when I go out. Dont get me wrong, I have eaten at nicer places, but they invariably cost more and even when it is a very nice place it's not always perfect. It's a lot easier to not get bummed out when a burrito goes wrong if it's $7 than a steak when it's $30.

I should probably adjust my chipotle habits from eating there three times a week to only eating there on the weekends, and riding my bike there if I want to eat a burrito. I am getting lazy having my jeep around, taking it on 3 mile trips and stuff.

My burrito has 89g of fat, and
1807 calories. How about yours?

Using Pre-rendered footage in games

Was reading an article today through my Rojo.com feed reader on Activision's use of pre-rendered footage in video games.

I remember when I saw the TV spots for these games that it looked to good to be true. I am not saying that the game doesnt have impressive graphics, but to imply that your average user is going to experience graphics like that when they buy your game is reprehensible.

I understand that it's human nature to want to show your product in it's best possible light, but if the average experience of your consumer is far less than that, you are going to have a major trust gap, and it will come back to haunt you. I used to be fairly big into computer gaming in high school, spending all of my $400 bi weekly paycheck from my internship on computer parts and games. It was a really expensive hobby. When you look at the price of an XBox 360, even the $500 doesnt look so bad, because you are getting a reference platform that developers can target. When you buy a game, you know it's going to perform just like it did in the video game store when you played it on a test system.

I dont know if it's still common practice, but the gamestop in my area will let you return a console game if you dont like it. A much better deal than most returns on computer game software. You are paying a larger price when you go pick up a console title, almost $10 more in my experience on average, but you are paying for the extra reassurance of knowing it's going to work on your system.

I could be called a software cheapskate. I hate buying software unless I know it's going to run flawlessly, but when a good product comes out that fufills a need I have no problem spending money on it. A form of one of my favorite lines goes like this "I'm not paying for broken, I can get broken for free."

Phones are a pain

In this e-mail connected world I find phone conversations frustrating and irritating, unless you are actively collaborating on a project where the work is not easily subdivided.

With e-mail you can attach documents, links, dates, etc, right inline with the conversation, making an incredibly relevant and documented "paper trail" that leads throughout the project.

Second day without music

This is really starting to drag, another day at the office without music. How weak is this. They day just seems to go on and on and on.

Crippling loss of music

I am one of those people that uses music to set the tempo of my workflow. If I am suddenly without the ability to listen to music at the office I have a much more difficult time focusing my efforts.

The forces of nature seem to be mocking my efforts to listen to music. My Sony MDR V700's developed the characteristic crack in the swivel joint that happens to most of the long term users, so cant use those to listen. My el cheapo logitech headset got damaged when it got caught up in my leg when i moved away from the desk, the cable got ripped out of the end of it. My Logitech USB headset is working in ubuntu, but i'm having a hard time getting the system to output to it instead of the Audigy 2 sound card that's inside the PC. Unless an app explicitly sets this as it's output source, i have problems.

And forget my favorite music service, Pandora.com which uses a Flash based player. I believe it outputs via OSS, which is picked up by Alsa using emulation. I'm not sure what card is set by default as the recipient for that emulation. I would rather the OSS go into the Enlightened Sound Daemon that's running on this system, so I could have finer grained control on what output it went to.

Trying to jump back into daily blogging.

Taz likes the Duty Free alcahol.

Just got back from a Disney Cruise, and it was awesome. Highly reccomend the 7 night cruise, it's worth every penny.

I have other pictures, F-Spot, the photo management application I use, is crashing with frigtening regularlity. The program is just flakey as hell, for no reason that I can understand.