2007 Jun 17, 10:40FTA: "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these
intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could de
ai article human intelligence internet philosophy evolution essay scifi technology science future singularity 2007 Jun 7, 5:29The other day I had the best idea for my Wii remote. Clearly I should use it to control the rotation of Tetris pieces in my
N-dimensional
Tetris game Polytope Tetris. One of the
issues I described with Polytope Tetris is user input. Given a Wii remote the
user could rotate a piece through 3 dimensions in a manner that's much easier to adjust to than particular keys on the keyboard.
Anyway, I did a little
research into how this might work. I knew that the Wii remote used infrared for absolute positioning and
Bluetooth for everything else (LEDs, speaker, accels.) I bought a
Bluetooth adapter for my PC after realizing that none of my
computers had one already. I used
GlovePIE to ensure that my Wii remote could connect and successfully communicate with my computer.
GlovePIE is actually pretty cool -- it provides a simple script layer over the Wii remote to control things like your mouse.
Since Polytope Tetris is in Java I looked for and found a
Java library for operating with the Wii remote and a long
forum thread discussing its use. I then read up on
Bluetooth in Java. Apparently JSR 82 is the name of the standard that describes the API a Bluetooth stack should expose
in Java. That is, to get Bluetooth working in Java one needs an additional package for Java that actually implements the Bluetooth Java API. This package would depend on the system so I suppose I
can't fault Sun for not including it... Where to find such a package? I found a
comparison list of implementations and tried the ones
that support javax.bluetooth.
None of them worked for me because none can address USB devices it seems or they cost money and I couldn't get the trial version working. I also tried
bluesock (not listed on the previous list) which seemed promising and could produce an address for my Wii remote as a connected device but couldn't use
that address.
And I thought that after I found the Wii remote Java library it would be easy... Oh well...
java bluetooth wii technical remote jsr82 tetris polytopetetris wiimote 2007 Jun 6, 4:59A list of free web based language translation services including language guessing which I think is neat.
dictionary translation tool language reference free internet 2007 Jun 4, 12:41Pointless vandalism -- yet honest...
humor graffiti photo blog 2007 May 22, 3:22I've created an
update to the IE7 feed display.
After working on my
update to the XML source view I tried running my resourcelist program on other IE DLLs including ieframe. I found that
one of the resources in ieframe is the XSLT used to turn an
RSS feed into the IE7 feed display.
My first thought for this was that I could embed enclosures into the feed display. For instance, have controls for youtube.com videos or podcast audio files directly in the feed display. However, I
found that I can't use object or embed tags that rely on ActiveX controls in the page or in frames in the feed display.
With that through I decided I could at least add support for some RSS extensions. Thanks to
IE7's RSS platform which provides a
normalized view of RSS feeds it was really easy to do this. I went to several popular RSS feeds and RSS feeds that I like and took a look at the source to see what extensions I might want to add
support for.
For
digg.com I added support for
their RSS extension which includes digg count, and submitter name and icon. I
added the digg count in a box on the right and tried to make it fit in stylistically. For the
iTunes RSS extension
I add the feed icon, feed author, and descriptions. I was surprised by how much of the podcasts content was missing from the feed view. I also added support for a few other misc things: the
slash RSS extension's section and department, the feed description to the top of the feed display, and the atom author icon.
I wonder what other goodies lurk in IE's resources...
feed res slashdot digg resource itunes technical browser ie rss extension 2007 May 17, 11:18The spec. on the iTunes RSS extension.
rss reference itunes apple podcast music xml 2007 May 13, 12:16My parents and grandmother came to visit the weekend before this current weekend, starting Friday May 4th. They arrived via their new motor-home which is quite the machine. Of course its my parents
motor-home so its very well decorated inside including drapes and mini-chandelier. I didn't have a memory card for my camera at the time but I'm sure my parents will put up photos on their
new blog dedicated to their motor-home at some point in the future.
At any rate, they parked the motor-home in an
RV park in Issaquah so that Friday night I drove over to them and we ate at the conveniently
closely located
Pogachas. The next day they came over and I showed them the various cool looking things my computer connected to my flat
screen TV can do. This includes
Vista Media Center showing my photos from recent trips and
Google Earth mapping out our respective homes and my recent trips (and Paris). Additionally, we played Wii which, unsurprisingly based on anecdotal evidence
from varied sources across the Internet, was a seeming hit. Mom broke records playing bowling with my dad and I, Dad did an excellent job fishing, and Grandma's slow but steady win's the race
approach to cow racing worked very well.
The next day I drove them to Seattle and we walked around Pike's Place. My parents made dinner that night at my place which was very good and made my apartment actually smell like cooked food. Also,
we exchanged Christmas gifts. For the past two years I've flown back to my parents' house for Christmas and ended up with gifts I couldn't take with me in both directions. Those I left at their house
they drove up and I was able to give them the ones I left at my place. They started the drive back the next day. I really enjoyed seeing them here.
motorhome family personal nontechnical 2007 May 11, 7:48
After
Carissa and Elijah's wedding Sarah and I went to San Francisco. We drove in, well Sarah drove anyway, still in
the PT Cruiser Sunday morning and checked into our hotel,
Hotel Diva. I was originally concerned that I wouldn't fit in as I don't really consider myself a
diva, however the hotel was cool. They have Internet rooms setup in various themes, the front desk is always staffed, our room had a very modern look, and when we entered the flat-screen over the
front desk was playing an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
We walked around a bit before going to the
SF Museum of Modern Art. There was a Picasso exhibit at the time
which we could see for only $3 more. It felt kind of wrong like my ticket was super-sized. I think the most memorable piece I saw was
three white
panels which consisted of three blank panels. Art. Sure. After that Sarah wanted to see the giant Hello Kitty store she had heard of from her sister. We ended up going to the Westfield Shopping
center which has a disappointingly average sized Hello Kitty store. Apparently the giant one is gone. That night we went to
First Crush for dinner. I had a
flight of wine which consists of three one-third sized glasses of various but complimentary wines. It was a great restaurant in terms of food, drink, atmosphere and service.
The next morning we were even more the tourists when we went down to Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39. We visited the famous wax museum and purchased multiple
pounds of taffy. On the way back to the Oakland airport we got to experience a little traffic as part of
the
580 freeway had collapsed the morning we arrived and was still under repair on our way out. We survived of course and I think the trip went rather well.
sanfrancisco personal california sfmoma nontechnical 2007 May 2, 1:39From The Onion News Network: "In The Know: Do You Remember Life Before The Segway? Panelists discuss how the Segway personal transporter has revolutionized American life."
humor onion segway video 2007 Apr 23, 1:31As noted in the title, an interesting result from researchers who find that a third result which is clearly worse than the two other options will influence people picking from those two.
article raymond-chen business game-theory decoy-effect 2007 Apr 21, 11:38This previous Wednesday, I went to
trivia at the
Wilde Rover. Our team consisted of Sarah, myself, Jane,
Eric,
Rachel, and Ansen. Before the last round we were 16th (out of ~32) but after the final round we were 6th!
The previous time Sarah played there the exact same thing happened. Of course you must be in the top five to win money (or last place who gets their money back). You could say, of those who didn't
get any money we did the best! I didn't contribute too much except for spotting a street from Paris in the picture round and knowing which generation the Wii is of Nintendo home consoles. Mostly I
focused on increasing our bill =)
bar game personal trivia nontechnical 2007 Apr 15, 4:06For the past several months I've seen various articles suggesting why bees are disappearing. At first I thought this was another crackpot's article that somehow made it onto digg.com. But they keep
coming and sometimes from credible sources. After the article I saw tonight I thought I should go back and put together the various articles I've read on this topic. Bees may be disappearing due to
pesticides,
new organic pathogens,
genetically modified crops,
mobile
phones, or
climate change. Apparently,
the US hasn't been keeping accurate counts of its
bees so we don't know the extent of the situation. There's an
interview with Maryann Frazier, M.S., of the Dept.
of Etymology at Penn State and a
congressional hearing on the matter.
I know this is all very serious and could signal the end of our ecosystem as we know it, but I can't help throwing in the following links as well. The bees could be
hiding in this Florida couple's kitchen. Or perhaps they're laying low while being
trained by the government to fight terrorism. Or
they're hiding in extra dimensions that we mere humans can't perceive (I'm fairly certain that's what this
article is suggesting. Really. Read it. Seriously. Its awesome.)
roundup personal bees nontechnical 2007 Apr 13, 2:52Shocking newsflash: Kids view adult content! OMG! FTA: "Commission investigators also found that youth access to violent fare had fallen since 2000, especially in video games. Only 42 percent of
unaccompanied young buyers were able to buy games rated M (f
article business censorship government rights violence videogames 2007 Mar 30, 3:29Apparently there's a dance form named 'spam'. From the link: "The term originated in the underground scene from Ontario, Canada. It was lifted from the video game and technological meanings of spam,
relating the concepts of rapid speed and randomness."
spam dance 2007 Mar 30, 3:26Information on reducing phone, email, and physical spam (junk mail & telemarketers). Also has lots of info on other privacy related matters. The sites ugly but I find its easy to navigate and
find the info I want.
privacy security tools junk mail spam 2007 Mar 30, 3:21The FTC describes why you don't need to register your cell phone on the national Do Not Call registry.
phone cellphone spam junk ftc government 2007 Mar 28, 3:53Software to convert DVDs or other video into something for your iPod. Recommended to me by Matt.
ipod encoding itunes open-source software transcode tv 2007 Mar 21, 5:59Grandcentral is a service that acts as a phone proxy. Friends call your new Grandcentral number and GC calls all of your phones (cell, home, work, etc). The additional associated features are pretty
awesome.
phone grandcentral article 2007 Mar 21, 5:18Get a Chinese propaganda poster personalized with your face in place of the face of someone on the poster.
art poster propaganda painting vintage humor china chinese
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