2008 Apr 26, 11:45
Last weekend while Sarah was up in Canada for a spa weekend with her sister and her sister's other bridesmaids, I went to Saul and Ciera's
wedding in Three Rivers, California near Sequoia National Park. I flew into Fresno picked up a rental car and my GPS device navigated me to a restaurant with the wedding location no where in sight.
"No problem," I thought, "I'll just call someone with an Internet connection and..." I had no cell reception. What did people do before GPS, Internet, and cell phones?
A waitress in the restaurant pointed me down the road a bit to the wedding location which was outside overlooking a
river. Their wedding cake was made up like a mountain with two backpacks at the top and rope hanging down. Ciera's father married them and the ceremony was lovely. The music after included Code Monkey to which all the nerds were forced to get up and awkwardly dance.
Besides getting to see Ciera and Saul who I hadn't seen in quite a while, I got to see Daniil and Val, Vlad, and Nathaniel. Since
last I saw Daniil and Val they had a child, Katie who is very cute and in whom I can see a lot of family resemblance. The always hilarious Vlad,
Daniil's brother, was there as well with his wife who I got to meet. Nathaniel, my manager from Vizolutions was there and I don't know if I've seen him since I moved to Washington. It was fun to
see him and meet his girlfriend who was kind enough to donate her extra male to male mini-phono cord so I could listen to my Zune in the rental car stereo on the drive back.
wedding saul and ciera california nontechnical 2008 Apr 23, 2:42Web apps intended for the iPhone could easily be made into activities for IE8.
apple directory activity iphone software web tool tools 2008 Apr 22, 4:14DIY car lo-jack system using a cellphone and cellphone charger. "Now, if your vehicle is stolen, you can give the authorities the IMEI number from that in-car 'hidden' handset, which can then be
tracked using cell tower triangulation or GPS, and hopefull
diy howto video cellphone car 2008 Apr 21, 4:52Daniil and Val's child's new blog. At 6 months old she's already had two blogs.|Katie Magdalin
blog baby friend daniil-magdalin katie-magdalin 2008 Apr 12, 10:38
For Encode-O-Matic, my encoding tool written in C#, I had to figure out the appropriate DllImport declarations to use IDN Win32
functions which was a pain. To spare others that pain here's the two files CharacterSetEncoding.cs and NationalLanguageSupportUtilities.cs that declare the DllImports for IdnToUnicode, IdnToAscii,
NormalizeString, MultiByteToWideChar, and WideCharToMultiByte.
encodeomatic boring csharp widechartomultibyte idn tool dllimport 2008 Apr 8, 5:41Biology site makes activity to resolve their URNs: "In this case we decided to see how we could easily highlight a LSID and quickly get related information from its Authority."
activity ie8 urn uri blog article biology via:benny 2008 Apr 3, 9:00
With the new features of IE8 there's several easy ways to integrate Gmail, Google's web mail service, for mail composition, searching, and monitoring that I enjoy using.
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Composition
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I made a Send via Gmail activity that allows you to select some text, a document, or link and via the activity menu open a new tab to compose a new message with the selection. Go to my activity page and click "Send via Gmail" (source) to install it. I found info on the gmail composition URL in the comments of this gmail howto article and used that in the
activity. I talked about activities previously.
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Search
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I've made a search provider that searches your gmail account. See my search provider page and select 'Gmail' (source) to install the Gmail search provider. Search providers aren't new to IE8 but this fits in with Gmail integration in IE. Again in the
comments of another howto I found information on a Gmail search URL.
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Monitor
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New to IE8 is authenticated feed support and favorites bar monitoring which combined with the Gmail inbox feed
means you can see when you get new mail in your favorites bar in IE. To do this, navigate to the feed https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom,
click 'Subscribe to this feed', then click on the Add button in the upper left (the star with plus icon) and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar' to add this as a monitored item in the favorites
bar. Next, right click on the new item in your favorites bar, open the properties dialog, and enter your Gmail username and password into the new username and password fields. Now when you get
new mail the Gmail feed item will shine and bold and you'll be able to get to new messages in the dropdown. I described monitored feed items previously.
activity gmail search howto google ie feed rss opensearch 2008 Apr 3, 2:19"How one supercharged province cranks out lightbulbs, buttons, and bra rings, as well as instant cities for the factory workers. "
via:boingboing china economics environment politics video 2008 Mar 18, 1:04"The Wooster Collective was founded in 2001. This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world." More cool street art and hacks
cultural-disobediance art street-art street graffiti via:boingboing blog 2008 Mar 5, 11:36
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.
microsoft technical activity openservice ie8 ie activities msdn 2008 Feb 19, 1:51
I signed up for the pre-release beta and purchased a Chumby last year. Chumby looks like a cousin to a GPS
unit. Its similar in size with a touch screen, but has WiFi, accelerometers, and is pillow like on the sides that aren't a screen. In practice its like an Internet alarm clock that shows you photos
and videos off the Web. Its hackable in that Chumby Industries tells you about the various ways to run your own stuff on the Chumby, modifying the boot sequence (it runs Linux), turning on sshd,
etc, etc. The Chumby forum too has lots of info from folks who have found interesting hacks for the device.
When you turn on the Chumby it downloads and runs the latest version of the Chumby software which lets you set alarms, play music, and display Flash widgets. The Chumby website lets anyone upload
their own Flash widgets to share with the community. I tried my hand at creating one using Adobe's free Flash creation SDK but I don't know Flash and didn't have the patience to learn.
Currently my Chumby is set to wake me up at 8am on weekdays with music from ShoutCast and then displays traffic and weather. At 10am everyday it switches to
showing me a slide-show of LolCats. At 11pm it switches to night mode where it displays the time in dark grey text on a black background at a reduced
light level so as not to disturb me while I sleep.
I like the Chumby but I have two complaints. The first is that it forces me to learn flash in order to create anything cool rather than having a built-in Web browser or depending on a more Web
friendly technology. The second complaint is about its name. At first I thought the name was stupid in a kind of silly way, but now that I'm used to the name it sounds vaguely dirty.
chumby review flash linux 2008 Feb 8, 11:21FTA: "I was quite troubled to realize today that I couldn't list ten major differences between Sweden and Norway. All my best Livejournal pals lent a hand and we came up with this
not-entirely-comprehensive list."
map humor via:boingboing norway sweden europe geography information visualization 2008 Feb 5, 2:02From BB's article: "In December, graffiti writers AUGER and REVOK modified a billboard advertising the wonderful Takashi Murakami exhibit ... Murakami himself saw online photos of the graffitied
billboard and thought it to be "so wonderful, he had to have
art graffiti cultural-disobediance murakami via:boingboing 2008 Jan 10, 6:49A satirical blog of one NYC citizen reporting odd behavior to the authorities.
blog article comedy satire paranoia security humor nyc 2008 Jan 3, 12:30This just in from Swivel: Swivel is the best!
swivel data visualization website 2007 Dec 26, 5:45Miscellaneous thoughts I had that would have been relevant many months ago:
- A History Channel program had a reenactment of a 1920's archaeologist discovering a stone tablet, sending the tablet to a warehouse, etc. all behind the voice over giving the dry facts. The
reenactor hammed it up a bit and I would have rather had clips from Indiana Jones in the background. If they're already not showing me the archaeologist who discovered the tablet, they may as well
show me one who will be entertaining.
- There are many parodies of the Get a Mac ads and so when I saw a UK Get a Mac ad I payed attention to see what the joke was. I was
disappointed by the 'parody' because it was a conventional Get a Mac ad with different actors. Apple localized their Get a Mac ad campaign in this fashion in the UK and in Japan. I've got a
playlist of the US, UK, and Japan's version of the Piechart ad. Ranking the lovable bumblingness of the PC I give the order
UK, Japan, then US and ranking the sumgness of the Mac I give the order UK, US, then Japan. But don't take my word for it, view
the ads for yourself.
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Yahoo Pipes lets users generate an RSS feed altering service that runs on Yahoo's server using a GUI. This is very different from Microsoft's Popfly which allows users to component-ize and share javascript utilities that run client side on a webbrowser. Both have the awesome power of buzzword associations
like 'Web 2.0' and 'Mashup' but in my mind Yahoo Pipes is for server side RSS feed modification and Popfly is about client side javascript webpages. And neither will allow me to run an arbitrary
XSLT =).
popfly apple personal history-channel indiana-jones pipes mac technical microsoft mashup yahoo nontechnical 2007 Dec 19, 11:06Article about striking similarities between COLOURlovers and Adobe's Kuler.
article blog color design web social kuler colourlovers 2007 Dec 11, 12:31I wanted to give a brief update on what's been going on for me this weekend and the previous two.
Two weekends ago Sarah and I went down to Santa Cruz for a long weekend and a belated Thanksgiving. I have yet to sort through the photos but Sarah has already put up the
photos from our California trip. There's some nice shots from the Monterey Bay Aquarium in there and the place where we
stayed. It was a good trip and I'll write more about it at some point in the future.
This past weekend Sarah and I went bowling with Eric and Jane and other friends. And no bowling experience is complete without a DJ and black lights. Surprisingly my work shirt looked great in the
blacklight.
This coming weekend Sarah and I will stay at the MGM in Las Vegas where I'll meet up with college friends I haven't seen in a while. Previously the only non-gambling thing I did in Vegas was buffets
and
the Star Trek Experience (I'm cool) but this time we'll see some more shows which should be fun.
lasvegas personal bowling california weekend nontechnical 2007 Dec 5, 1:43Found my grandfather's patent: Donald Risney, February 13, 1973, BOAT TRANSPORTER. Abstract: A cross piece clamped and tied to the ends of a boat, rotatable about the short axis thereof, and
longitudinally movable about the long axis thereof for lifting
patent family donald-risney boat