The weekend before last I saw Dark Knight with some friends from work and then we all ate at Z'Tejas after. Like everyone has said and as the name implies Dark Knight is... dark. Dark Knight was a little over the top at times as compared to Batman Begins but I really enjoyed it. Two times during the movie I thought it had ended but I was wrong. The Joker is both frightening (Cringe inducing line "Wanna know how I got these scars?") and humorous ("Where is Harvey Dent? ... You know where Harvey is? You know who he is?", as well as the pencil magic trick). I can certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Batman Begins. The previews included Burn After Reading a new Coen Brother's comedy that I look forward to, and Quantum of Solace which hopefully does the same thing Dark Knight has, keep up the new direction on the refreshed franchise.
This past
weekend Sarah and I went to a Mariners baseball game. I think this is the first MLB baseball game I've seen in person. Sarah's company gave out tickets for the game and the use of a suite. Its a
room half way up the stadium with comfortable chairs, a mini-fridge built-in to the marble counter-topped center table, and a big flat screen television with the game on it. I suppose that's in
case you don't want to turn to the right and sit at the window, or walk out onto the balcony which features three rows of comfy chairs overlooking the field. Anyway there was free food and drinks
and I met some of the people Sarah works with.
sequelguy posted a photo:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_Parliament_Buildings
I just installed vmcNetFlix which lets you watch your on demand NetFlix movies via your Vista Media Center or any Media Center
Extenders like the Xbox 360. It works well but fails poorly with some cryptic error messages and long timeouts. Be sure to get NetFlix on demand movies working in your browser before installing
this plugin. Once I did that everything worked very well.
To test it out I watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in which Ting must travel from his country village to Bangkok where he works with his cousin in the city to recover his village's stolen religious artifact. Its a mix of Perfect Strangers, Street Fighter and Pad-See Ew. Martial arts movies, like porn and video games, aren't required to have a strong plot but Ong-Bak has a fine plot line and enjoyable Thai martial arts. I saw the Tiger Knee in there several times. An enjoyable movie that reminded me of watching martial arts movies with my friends in high school.
While re-reading Cryptonomicon I thought about what kind of information I'm leaking by posting links on Delicious. At work I don't post any Intranet websites for fear of revealing anything but I wondered if not posting would reveal anything. For instance, if I'm particularly busy at work might I post less indicating something about the state of the things I work on? I got an archive of my Delicious posts via the Delicious API and then ran it through a tool I made to create a couple of tables which I've graphed on Many Eyes
![[The cover of Cryptonomicon]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0380788624.01._SX140_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
![[The cover of Quicksilver]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060593083.01._SX140_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
![[The cover of The Confusion]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060733357.01._SX140_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
![[The cover of The System of the World]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060750863.01._SX140_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
I've finally finished the Baroque Cycle, a historical fiction series set in the 17th and 18th centuries by Neal Stephenson whose work I always enjoy. There were often delays where I'd forget about the books until I had to take plane somewhere, or get discouraged reading about the character's thoughts on economics, or have difficulty finding the next volume, or become more engrossed in other books, projects or video games, and leave the Baroque Cycle books untouched for many months at a time. Consequently, my reading of this series has, I'm ashamed to say, spanned years. After finishing some books which I enjoy I end up hungry for just a bit more to read. For this series I don't need a bit more to read, I'm done with that, but I do want a badge or maybe a medal. Or barring that, college credit in European History and Macro Economics. I can recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed Neal Stephenson's other work and has a few years of free time to kill.
More of my thoughts have been stolen: In my
previous job the customer wanted a progress bar displayed while information was copied off of proprietary hardware, during which the software didn't get any indication of progress until the copy
was finished. I joked (mostly) that we could display a progress bar that continuously slows down and never quite reaches the end until we know we're done getting info from the hardware. The amount
of progress would be a function of time where as time approaches infinity, progress approaches a value of at most 100 percent.
This is similar to Zeno's Paradox which says you can't cross a room because to do so first you must cross half the room, then you must cross half the remaining distance, then half the remaining again, and so on which means you must take an infinite number of steps. There's also an old joke inspired by Zeno's Paradox. The joke is the prototypical engineering vs sciences joke and is moderately humorous, but I think the fact that Wolfram has an interactive applet demonstrating the joke is funnier than the joke itself.
I recently found Lou Franco's blog post "Using Zeno's Paradox For Progress Bars" which covers the same concept as Zeno's Progress Bar but with real code. Apparently Lou wasn't making a joke and actually used this progress bar in an application. A progress bar that doesn't accurately represent progress seems dishonest. In cases like the Vista Defrag where the software can't make a reasonable guess about how long a process will take the software shouldn't display a progress bar.
Similarly a paper by Chris Harrison "Rethinking the Progress Bar" suggests that if a progress bar speeds up towards the end the user will perceive the operation as taking less time. The paper is interesting, but as in the previous case, I'd rather have progress accurately represented even if it means the user doesn't perceive the operation as being as fast.
Update: I should be clearer about Lou's post. He was actually making a practical and implementable suggestion as to how to handle the case of displaying progress when you have some idea of how long it will take but no indications of progress, whereas my suggestion is impractical and more of a joke concerning displaying progress with no indication of progress nor a general idea of how long it will take.
The Goodwin family, except for Michelle who is taking a class trip to Washington DC and New York, was in Seattle this week. Sarah and I met up with them for dinner last night at the Icon Grill. I enjoy the Icon Grill in general and last night was no exception especially having dinner with the Goodwins which was a lot of fun. It was particularly cold and at one point snowed. The Goodwin's are seeing all the classic tourist attractions in Seattle some of which are depicted in the following 1962 Seattle's Worlds Fair postcard. The postcard is featured on Paleo-Future and unsurprisingly the 1962 Worlds Fair favored Seattle's Space Needle and monorail.
![[Icon Grill front. Licensed under under Creative Commons. By Troy B Thompson]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/17/22461595_7fb7e702c4_m_d.jpg)
![[Seattle's Worlds Fair Postcard]](http://bp0.blogger.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/R7NOl8B8s2I/AAAAAAAABX4/0gPURFTR4X4/s400/Seattle_Fair_Olympia_Brewing_PC_001.jpg)
Internet Explorer 8 has made my plugin Feed Folder obselete in functionality and implementation -- which is good!
I made Feed Folder for IE7 because I wanted the Live Bookmarking feature from FireFox. The Feed Folder plugin for IE7 would allow you to display your feeds as virtual folders in your Links Bar. When your feed is updated the virtual folder is updated as well with the new feed items. I use del.icio.us to store all my links so I could add virtual folders of my daily links, my friends blogs links, quick reference links, etc. etc.
My plugin relied on shell folders to implement the virtual folders I described above, but IE8 doesn't support shell folders in the Favorites Bar. But I'm OK with Feed Folder not working in IE8 since there's a much better implementation already there. IE8 does better than my plugin on a number of points: First, there isn't the horrible perf. issue that my plugin had on Vista. Second, when a feed is updated the virtual folder flashes to note the change in status. Third, unread items are bolded and the bolding bubbles up from feeds contained in subfolders. And lastly, the middle click button is supported to open items in a new tab.
Accordingly, I don't plan to work on Feed Folder anymore unless someone comes up with a good reason. Instead I mark Feed Folder deprecated and suggest you use Internet Explorer 8 instead.
To use this feature in IE8 simply drag a feed from your feed list in your Favorites Center onto your Favorites Bar. Or, when viewing a feed, click on the 'Add to Favorites' Star Plus icon thing in the upper left, and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar'. A .url Internet Shortcut file is produced as usual, but if you open up the .url file you'll see there's some additional info about the feed.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available now. I can finally talk about some of the stuff I've been working on for the past year or so: activities. Activities let you select a document, some text on a document, or a link to a document and run that selection through a web service. For example, you could select a word on a webpage and look it up in Wikipedia, select an address and map it on Yahoo Maps, select a webpage and translate it into English with Windows Live Translator, or select a link and add it to Digg.
IE8 comes installed with some activities based on Microsoft web services but there's a page you can go to to
install other activities. However, that page is missing some of my favorites that I use all the time, like del.icio.us.
Accordingly, I've put together a page of the activities I use. MSDN has all the info on creating Activities.
Activities are very similar to other existing features in other browsers including the ability to add context menu items to IE. There's two important differences which make activities better. Activities have a preview window that pops out when you hover over an activity, which is useful to get in place information easily provided by developers. The other is that the interface is explicit and takes after HTML FORMs and OpenSearch descriptions. Because the interface is explicitly described in XML (unlike the context menu additions described above which run arbitrary script) we have the ability to use activities in places other than on a webpage in the future. And because activity definitions are similar to HTML FORMs, if your webservice has an HTML FORM describing it you can easily create an activity.
This post is about creating a server side z-code
interpreter that represents game progress in the URI. Try it with the game Lost
Pig.
I enjoy working on URIs and have the mug to prove it. Along those lines I've combined thoughts on URIs with interactive fiction. I have a limited amount of experience with Inform which generates Z-Code so I'll focus on pieces written in that. Of course we can already have URIs identifying the Z-Code files themselves, but I want URIs to identify my place in a piece of interactive fiction. The proper way to do this would be to give Z-Code its own mimetype and associate with that mimetype the format of a fragment that would contain the save state of user's interactive fiction session. A user would install a browser plugin that would generate URIs containing the appropriate fragment while you play the IF piece and be able to load URIs identifying Z-Code files and load the save state that appears in the fragment.
But all of that would be a lot of work, so I made a server side version that approximates this. On the Web Frotz Interpreter page, enter the URI of a Z-Code file to start a game. Enter your commands into the input text box at the bottom and you get a new URI after every command. For example, here's the beginning of Zork. I'm running a slightly modified version of the Unix version of Frotz. Baf's Guide to the IF Archive has lists of IF games to try out.
There are two issues with this thought, the first being the security issues with running arbitrary z-code and the second is the practical URI length limit of about 2K in IE. From the Z-Code standard and the Frotz source it looks like 'save' and 'restore' are the only commands that could do anything interesting outside of the Z-Code virtual machine. As for the length-limit on URIs I'm not sure that much can be done about that. I'm using a base64 encoded copy of the compressed input stream in the URI now. Switching to the actual save state might be smaller after enough user input.
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