I just upgraded to the Zune 3.0 software which includes games and purchasing music on the Zune via WiFi and once again I'm thrilled that the new firmware is available for old Zunes like mine. Rooting around looking at the new features I noticed Zune Badges for the first time. They're like Xbox Achievements, for example I have a Pixies Silver Artist Power Listener award for listening to the Pixies over 1000 times. I know its ridiculous but I like it, and now I want achievements for everything.
Achievements everywhere would require more developments in self-tracking. Self-trackers, folks who keep statistics on exactly when and what they eat, when and how much they exercise, anything one may track about one's self, were the topic of a Kevin Kelly Quantified Self blog post (also check out Cory Doctorow's SF short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away featuring a colony of self-trackers). For someone like me with a medium length attention span the data collection needs to be completely automatic or I will lose interest and stop collecting within a week. For instance, Nike iPod shoes that keep track of how many steps the wearer takes. I'll also need software to analyze, display, and share this data on a website like Mycrocosm. I don't want to have to spend extreme amounts of time to create something as wonderful as the Feltron Report (check out his statistic on how many daily measurements he takes for the report). Once we have the data we can give out achievements for everything!
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Carnivore Eat at least ten different kinds of animals. |
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Make Friends Meet at least 10% of the residents in your home town. |
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Globetrotter Visit a city in every country. |
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You're Old Survive at least 80 years of life. |
Of course none of the above is practical yet, but how about Delicious achievements based on the public Delicious feeds? That should be doable...
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Cadbury jumps out of her toy box hitting the fireplace shovel, and does a few other cute things.
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From: David Risney
Views: 76
1 ratings
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| Time: 00:44 | More in Pets & Animals |
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Cadbury sits in and eats her box of toys. She enjoys eating her toy box more often than playing with any of the toys.
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From: David Risney
Views: 343
2 ratings
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| Time: 00:16 | More in Pets & Animals |
As noted previously, my page consists of the aggregation of my various feeds and in working on that code recently it was again brought to my attention that everyone has different ways of representing tag metadata in feeds. I made up a list of how my various feed sources represent tags and list that data here so that it might help others in the future.
| Source | Feed Type | Tag Markup Scheme | One Tag Per Element | Tag Scheme URI | Human / Machine Names | Example Markup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LiveJournal | Atom | atom:category | yes | no | no | , (source) |
| LiveJournal | RSS 2.0 | rss2:category | yes | no | no |
technical(soure) |
| WordPress | RSS 2.0 | rss2:category | yes | no | no |
, (source)
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| Delicious | RSS 1.0 | dc:subject | no | no | no |
photosynth photos 3d tool(source) |
| Delicious | RSS 2.0 | rss2:category | yes | yes | no |
domain="http://delicious.com/SequelGuy/">(source) |
| Flickr | Atom | atom:category | yes | yes | no |
term="seattle"(source) |
| Flickr | RSS 2.0 | media:category | no | yes | no |
scheme="urn:flickr:tags">(source) |
| YouTube | RSS 2.0 | media:category | no | no | no |
label="Tags">(source) |
| LibraryThing | RSS 2.0 | No explicit tag metadata. | no | no | no | n/a, (source) |
| Tag Markup Scheme | Notes | Example |
|---|---|---|
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Atom Category atom:category xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
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term="catName"
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RSS 2.0 category rss2:category empty namespace |
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domain="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme">
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Yahoo Media RSS Module category media:category xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"
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scheme="http://dmoz.org"
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Dublin Core subject dc:subject xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
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humor
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Update 2009-9-14: Added WordPress to the Tag Markup table and namespaces to the Tag Markup Scheme table.
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.
When I woke up this morning for some reason I was thinking about Polytope Tetris, my N-D Tetris game, and specifically generating Tetris pieces in various number of dimensions. When I first wrote PTT I thought that as the number of dimensions increased you could end up with an infinite number of non-equivalent crazy Tetris pieces. However this morning I realized that because you only get four blocks per piece there are only a possible three joints in a single Tetris piece which means that you only need three dimensions to represent all possible distinct N-D Tetris pieces.
Below is the table of the various possible pieces per number of dimensions and sorted by the number of joints in the piece. Notice that the 'J' and 'L' become equivalent in 3D because you can rotate the 'J' through the third dimension to make it an 'L'. The same happens for 'S' and 'Z' in 3D, and 'S+' and 'Z+' in 4D.
| Joints | Name | 1D | 2D | 3D | + |
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| 1 | I |
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| 2 | J |
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| L |
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| 3 | O |
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| T |
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| S |
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| Z |
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| T+ |
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| S+ |
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| Z+ |
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| Total | 1 | 7 | 8 | 7 |
As a consequence of not realizing there's a finite and small number of N-D Tetris pieces, I wrote code that would randomly generate pieces for a specified number of dimensions by wandering through Tetris space. This consists of first marking the current spot, then randomly picking a direction (a dimension and either forward or backward), going in that direction until hitting a previously unvisited spot and repeating until four spots are marked, forming a Tetris piece. However this morning I realized that continuing in the same direction until reaching am unvisited spot means I can't generate the 'T+' piece. I think the better way to go is keep the list of all possible pieces, pick one randomly, and rotate it randomly through the available dimensions. Doing this will also allow me to give distinct pieces their own specific color (like the classic Tetris games do) rather than picking the color randomly like I do now.
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
Last weekend after Saul and Ciera's wedding, I drove up to Pat, Grib, and Jesse's
house to which I hadn't previously been. I got in late and they'd just finished a UFC party. The next day Grib had to travel for work but the rest of us met Scott and Nicole, Jesse's girlfriend at
a place for breakfast. After that we went back to their place for some Rock Band which I hadn't played previously and Pat took the opportunity to show off his real life musical skills on the banjo.
This weekend, Jesse and Nicole are up visiting Seattle. On Friday, Sarah and I met up with them at the BluWater Bistro in Seattle which sits right on Lake Union. The view was nice although difficult to see from our table and overall I like the sister
restaurant in Kirkland better. They were both short visits but it was fun to see people again.
It was warm and lovely out this past Saturday and Sarah I and went to a
new place for lunch, then to Kelsey Creek Park, and then out for Jane's birthday. We ate at Cafe
Pirouette which serves crepes and is done up with French decorations reminding me of my parent's house. We got in for just the end of lunch and saw the second to last customers, a gaggle of
older ladies leaving. I felt a little out of place with my "Longhorn [heart] RSS" t-shirt on. The food was good and in larger portions that I expected.
After that we went to Kelsey Creek Park and Farm. The park is hidden at the end of a quiet neighborhood, starts out with some tables and children's jungle gym
equipment, then there's a farm which includes a petting zoo, followed by many little trails going off into the forrest. There weren't too many animals out and the ones we did see didn't seem to
expect or want the sun and warm weather. We followed one of the trails for a bit and turned back before getting sun burned. You can see
my weekend photos mapped out on Live Maps.
That night we went out with some friends for Jane's birthday. Eric was just back from the RSA conference and we met Jane and Eric and others at Palace Kitchen in Seattle located immediately adjascent to the monorail's route. The weather was still good so they left the large windows open through twilight and every so often you'd see the monorail pass by.
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.
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