March 2009 Archives

Now with ASCII art.... how awesome was it to find this in my inbox just now:

From: Stdenny Corning 
Subject: Nothing can  seduce women faster than a...
To: anything@arcterex.net                                                                                           
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:01:44 +0000
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19(Windows/20081209) 
Message-ID: <49CBD0A6.5604658@plconsult.be> 

This is yoour penis: 8--o                                                                                           
This is yoour penis on drugs: 8=====O                                                                               
Anny questions?                                                                                                     
[spammy MS spaces link and standard spam random words]

ASCII art is awesome! Update: I love that Wil Wheaton also blogged about the same spam (though his was much funnier and more interesting of course).

Random pic I found while surfing... check out Burj Dubai 2009 over at Chromasia. Very sweet!

Funny introduction to twitter in the video twouble with twitters. Thanks for the link Len (who doesn't get it either).

So for some reason my home built Apple Time Capsule started giving me problems, errors about "operation not permitted" and such, and not backing up. Being that I'm becoming more and more backup conscious lately, I let this go on for a month or two before I finally broke down and tried to find a solution.

I think the issue might have to do with that I created the file to store the backups might have been too small, and maybe my laptop's file on disk have grown too big for it. However, I'd think I would have made as much space available for backups as possible though. Ah well.

So when digging around for a solution to this, and of course I can't find the page or comment right now, I found a guy who had the same problem whose solution was to dump the SMB protocol for sharing the backup file, and who went to AFP (the native Apple File Sharing protocol). He also linked to a nice set of instructions for setting it all up at:

http://www.milkcarton.com/blog/2009/01/24/Getting+Time+Machine+To+Backup+To+A+Network+Volume.aspx

Note that I had to use the hdiutil command (see step #5) create the sparsebundle on the local computer. This was needed because for some reason the Time Machine program still refused to create the backup file initially on the remote server. I couldn't create the 450G backup file that I wanted with the normal Disk Utility.app on the mac because even though it was a growable file (ie: it wasn't creating a 450G file, but a file that can grow to 450G) it wouldn't let me created it on a hard drive without 450G available. Easy enough with the command line though.

End result was re-enabling Time Machine on my mac, pointing it to the new share (had to connect to it with command-k to connect to the appletalk share via afp://<ip address>), and letting it do it's thing. Hopefully this time it'll keep on going for a while longer :) Or at least until I break down and pay the apple tax to get a "real" Time Capsule that is.

Not a huge deal, but another thing that came to mind while watching this screencast on the new features in Mozilla Firefox 3.1. Depending on what video sharing site you go to, be it YouTube, Vimeo, etc they all have different embedded video widgets, with different controls, different ways of reacting, etc. Why not a standard, or at least a standard toolkit to deal with video?

The one thing I'm not sure about is the new Firefox 3.1 native video is using Ogg Vorbis as the default video format. I'm all for open standards and all, but I don't see camera makers switching from .mov and .avi formats.

Still, being able to just upload a video to my own site and sticking it in a <video> element and have it Just Work would be pretty awesome.

My brother-in-law got himself (for some reason, through some strange set of events understood only to him I think), a BlackBerry Storm, BlackBerry's "iPhone killer" (or at least, answer to the iPhone). I know I'm really late to the party, but I wanted to air a couple of quick thoughts about it.

Full disclosure, I'm an iPhone owner and have been accused of being an Apple Fanboy, but I maintain I can be fairly neutral. Also I only had about 3 minutes with the Storm, so my "review" is rather incomplete :)

• Size - First of all it's big, it felt more along the size of the Palm Treo in terms of bulk compared to the iPhone. I was actually really surprised at the size, I first thought it was one of the older smartphones (pre-iPhone era) when it was first handed to me. It looks like it's actually a bit shorter than the iPhone, but is far thicker. Feels bulky regardless.
  
• Accelerometer Portrait to Landscape mode switches took a couple of seconds, not nearly as long as some of the reviews I read. No worse than an iPhone under heavy load or in the middle of loading a webpage. Way worse than an iPhone not doing anything however.
  
• Web Browsing - This is about the only thing I got to do with it really, I turned the phone sideways, clicked on the web browser icon (I don't think I knew what I was doing at the time to be honest). I typed in ufies.org and it loaded up. The display looked ok, it wasn't a "mobile" browser look, but UFies isn't a great example of a "modern" web page by any means :) There was no multi-touch zoom, I didn't try double tapping to zoom in as you do on the iPhone, but there was a big zoom button in the controls. Fairly boring.
  
• Multi-touch - No (at least in the browser anyway. Probably not a big deal to someone whose never had it, and a huge lose to anyone who has used it and found it to be an intuitive way to work. No pinchy-pinchy zoomy-zoomy or un-pinchy-pinchy :(
  
• Typing - OK, this is the biggest thing I think. Many people criticized the iPhone when it came out for using a non-tactile, software only keyboard. And yes, as a Blackberry (old style) user, the typing is way slower, more mistake prone, and much harder to do while you're driving :) The problem with the Storm I think is they scrambled for an answer to the iPhone and didn't think about the keyboard or innovate the way that Apple did (who had no legacy to deal with and could start 100% fresh). Because of this the Storm keyboard doesn't do things like display they key you hit "above" the point of impact. Not a horrible thing, but not as easy to see if you hit the correct key as easily.
  
• Clicky-Clicky Typing - The other thing they did to differentiate themselves from the iPhone was to solve the problem of no tactile feedback from the keys. To do this they made the entire screen "click" when you pressed down on it (think the mouse buttons on a laptop touchpad). Just a little click, but it lets you know when you click a key and when you don't. The issue with this is they aren't solving the right problem. The problem with the iPhone keyboard isn't the tactile feedback of clicking, it's the ability to feel the keys. The reason that I loved the Blackberry physical keyboard was that I could feel my way through the keys without looking at them. Once you find they "home row" as it were, you can figure out where the other keys are. Apple's iPhone has none of this so you have to (basically) be looking at the keyboard all the time to type on it.

  Secondly, the keyboard click is required, meaning if you just hit the key as you would on an iPhone they don't register, they just turn blue. You have to click the keyboard down to register the key, which makes it much slower to actually type, as you have to push they screen for each keypress. Ugh.

  When apple created the iPhone they had a few innovations that people don't actually realize right away. One of them is the keyboard is very smart, and you can basically stab at the keys and the iPhone will (for the most part) figure it out. That, plus the learning auto-correct and the adaptive keys (changing for entering URLs with a ".com/net/org" key or email addresses) are things that seem intuitive and an innovative way of making the best of a touch screen only keyboard. Of course, some of these things are only obvious after a fair amount of use.

  Short story is putting in a URL into the Storm's web browser was slower and more of a "meh" experience than it should have been.
  

My two cents anyway, I'll probably be able to see the phone more in the future, so I'll add/subtract/adjust if I find some other revelations about it.

Went to the Fraser Valley Ruby on Rails meetup tonight. Organized by a guy who now works under one of my ex-bosses from back in the dot com days, basically a group of geeks interested in the Ruby on Rails framework who get together and geek out. I've only been to two meetings so far, and so far it is more geeking out than actual Ruby or Rails work, but the group and the direction is still evolving.

While there wasn't a lot of "project" work per-se, I did find a set of interesting links to look through.

• Stack Overflow - Site for finding solutions to programming problems without a lot of cruft.
  
• Refactor My Code - Submit your programming problem/solution, and other folks can check it out and help to make it better/faster/smaller/less calories.
  
• 15 Exercises for Learning a new Programming Language - A nice selection of short and simple problems to help learn a new programming language with.
  
• Project Euler - An interesting idea. A list of programming / math problems is given, if you submit a solution, you get to see how other people solved the same issue.
  

Looking forward to next weeks meetup, it's nice to be able to just geek out for stuff that's not work related. Also good to network with other local geeks out in the boonies :)

Half the random videos that see posted are on Youtube (which is fine) and the other half seem to be from either Hulu, The Daily Show or Comedy Central. If you go to the former, you get a page which is then eclipsed by a big ass popup saying basically "you're not in the US, sucks to be you". The latter will redirect you to the Canadian site for the Comedy Network, but not if someone posts a video.... if I view one of those I get a 3 second clip telling me "you're not in the US, sucks to be you (and go to the comedy network Canadian site)".

This is stupid.

This is really stupid.

Being that 80% of the programming I watch on TV every night is from the US, with no such restrictions, half the rest of the media I watch/view/read is from the US, why the hell does this affect me watching embedded videos in my news feeds?

This is yet another thing I'd love to see go away, and another thing that in 5-10 years just go away. In 2015 I see no reason why things like geography should matter. The point of the Internet was a global network, unrestricted by borders or lines on a political map.

Well, that's my idea of the Internet anyway. Seriously, string a network cable from Abbotsford, BC a couple of kilometers south to Sumas, WA, and your bits and bytes will flow as easily and unrestricted as they would from Mission, BC to Abbotsford, BC, or from Wala Wala, WA to Riverside, OR. Companies and service providers go to great length, and no doubt cost, to ensure that their content is restricted to only certain countries that they choose, by looking up the IP of the requesting user. Stupid, stupid stupid, and easily circumvented, if you care enough. There are a ton of open proxy servers you can use to get Hulu content (for example), from Canada, Iraq, or Norway if you so choose.

I look at this two ways... if there are two competing companies (ie: Comedy Central (US) and The Comedy Network (CA)), and one country isn't allowed to see the others warez, then you're diluting the brand. Also you're pissing off users. What possible differences between the two sites is going to be so huge that it'd scar the delicate eyes of Canadian viewers?

Secondly, well, I forget my second point, I was probably going to re-iterate again how dumb it is. If people could just get along, this would all go away....

You can read Part 1 - Downloads as well.