Archive for December, 2006
Last Post of 2006
Dec 31st
This is it. Last post of 2006 (EST). After this, we’re on our way to A+J’s house.
A happy, healthy, safe new year to you and yours.
Which Superhero Are You?
Dec 30th
You are Green Lantern
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Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.  |
Happy Holidays To All
Dec 28th
Since I didn’t say it before, happy holidays and to everyone. Have a safe and happy New Years!
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Edit: there was a Quicktime movie snip here, but I’ve moved it to the body of this post at the urging of some to improve page load time. I won’t make that mistake again, sorry.
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Christmas Roundup 2006
Dec 28th
Well, I’m back from New Orleans. Christmas was a blast, and I got *a lot* of great stuff, but most notably, my lovely wife kept her eyes open and secured me a Nintendo Wii. I was so psyched to play it, and I am actually sore from it right now, no kidding.
The thing about the Wii is this: it’s really really FUN. It’s so different from playing a game while sitting down. Playing the games, moving around, designing a Mii — even watching other people play it is fun. It’s just fun. There’s no better word.
New Orleans is… well… what I expected. Much of the city is mostly back to normal, although traffic is crazy on the West Bank since much of the eastern part of the city is honestly unchanged since Katrina. It’s pretty amazing and eye-opening to see parts of the city worse off today than they were a year ago. Parts of the city are literally abandoned.
It was also great to see the in-laws. They once again received us openly and we had a great, relaxing time. They fed us well, kept us warm, and gave us another great Christmas.
I also missed quite an active week at OSNews, where Thom was able to anger Aaron Siego of KDE fame, and then backtrack a bit to clarify. I find myself often disagreeing with Thom, sometimes infuriatingly so (esp. with regard to his hard line politics and his anti-Isreal views). This time, I once again disagree with him. But what makes the world go round and the reason I haven’t slammed down my hands and flat out quit OSNews is because Thom at least has the guts to say what he thinks. The discussion is generally worthwhile. And though the criticisms that Thom uses OSNews like his own blog and that the staff is generally uninformed and unskilled is often tossed around, what appears on OSNews is much better than the tech alternatives, which is almost exclusively recycled and rehashed link soup. Slashdot rarely features originals, and digg *never* does. At least OSNews gets people talking. And although you may not agree with Thom’s or Eugenia’s viewpoint, there is always good conversation. I’m going to pick up the specifics of the article in my next entry.
More About Picasa Web Albums
Dec 18th
Forgive me if this sounds especially arrogant or offends anyone, but I think I should be asked to join Google as the project lead for Picasa Web Albums, because I am really let down by what exists today and I think that I might be able to write something better myself with a week’s worth of programming and a server running PHP5.
Google has always been a “release now, update frequently later” kind of company, and I respect that. It’s cooler, as a user, to get something today and slowly and unexpectedly watch features trickle in, but Picasa Web Albums is a disaster right now. Read more for the details.
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The Lost Room
Dec 18th
This weekend, Jenn and I did something we really have never done before: we set ourselves in front of the TV for a marathon. We watched all six hours of The Lost Room consecutively. It was actually quite a bit of fun, and we really enjoyed the show. Afterwards, we agreed that we were exhausted and that we needed to really get moving on Sunday.
The Lost Room felt a lot like Heroes in that instead of people with powers, we were learning more about objects with powers, and unlike people, where there’s a whole character to meet, it was easy to introduce new objects with little responsibility to develop a backstory.
The only real problem was that it never really explained who was good and who was bad, nor did it explain where the story goes now that Joe has… well… done what he did in the last scene, which presumably ends the storyline pretty damned dead in its tracks.
Anyway, I liked it, and I recommend that if you haven’t seen it, you check it out when it makes its way to DVD.
I Found a Google Bug!
Dec 16th
Yes, I can now confirm that I have found a bug in Picasa Web Albums. Since the new “tagging” features are not validated – either client side or server side – you can use URL signficant characters in your tags. At first, I used a plus sign (+), which was URL decoded as a space. This lead me to try #, then ?, and finally &, which inexplicably – WORKS!
So I created a new tag D&psc=CONTACTS — and guess what? — it has some funny results. It searches all of your contacts’ photos for the letter D (which is common in default photo names, such as DSC001.jpg). Then I thought, “I wonder if I browse the JS source if I can find a command that is passed via URL GET variable that can be instantiated via an intentionally malcrafted tag?” I have posted on the Google USENET group and filed a bug through the standard complaint form. I consider this pretty big news, but I don’t want to submit it to digg or Slashdot or post on OSNews until someone has a chance to implement a fix, which is probably pretty trivial (URL encode the tag links) or fix it properly (validate tags on creation).
Anyway, I’m psyched, because I understand it’s pretty rare to find a bug in Google’s code.
Picasa Evolves
Dec 16th
Well, I’m very excited to report that Google has begun bringing Picasa into the Web 2.0 realm.
Today I signed in and found — tags! and search! and moire storage! Hooray! So this is fantastic, it’s the start of bringing this beast up to “usable” for large photostreams.
Now that Picasa is evolving, they are letting you expand beyond 6GB to 25GB, 50GB, and even 100GB. I can’t image how clunky and weak it would be with that many albums, but I have to assume they’re working on it.
Unfortunately, what’s really missing is the ability to tag multiple photos at once. I’m not going to tag 3000+ photos one by one. But still, nice to see some progress.
I did find a bug. It let me create the tag “A+J,” which is linked on the front page of my photos, but not wrapped with urlencode(), so it throws an error. I found a google bug!
Congressman Assumed to be Fool Removes All Doubt
Dec 20th
Posted by Adam S in [...]
Comments
The headline actually reads: “Congressman: ‘I Fear … We Will Have Many More Muslims In The United States’,” but it might as well read the same as my headline. Rep. Virgil Goode, a Virginian Republican, uttered this masterpiece. These are the words of a coward. The words of a rascist. The words of a fool. And what’s worse, there’s nothing more unpatriotic than uttering a phrase like that.
You see, I read stuff like this ridiculous comment online all the time. Let me quote “Answeil Vachette (R) Va.”: “America is Christianity.It is the 4th largest religion in the world.This nation was founded on Christianity.It is the fact.”
Where do people come up with this stuff? Anyone who has studied history ought to know better. I often hear people mutter this nonsense about America being founded by white Christians in the Christian vein, but it WASN’T (1) (2) (3) (4). I don’t care what you read online. It was founded by people fleeing religious persecution who went to great lengths to NOT write any religion into the constituion and laws. In fact, religion is mentioned twice in the Constitution, once in the first amendment which prohibits laws “respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and once in Article VII, which forbids “reigious tests” for public office. The brilliant authors of this document, the Founding Fathers, couldn’t have foreseen us destroying their intentions and forsaking their well-intentioned documents hundreds of years later.
Laws are intended to sway with the times, and laws are easy to repeal. The Constitution is the backbone of the US, and it is decidedly NOT Christian in nature. The only valid argument, I suppose, is that the basis of the morals set forth in the Constitution is Judeo-Christian in nature. So be it, I suppose. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that most Western cultures have the same basic set of morals for grounding, and I don’t think it really implies a tie to religion.
Getting back to ol’ Congressman Virgil Goode, his words reflect a xenophobia that I see more and more of, and it makes me sick. It exposes the poison deep-seeded in the veins of the US today, and it’s pathetic. It embarasses all of us, and pretty much proves that the decline of the US is inevitable, because we have turned on ourselves and destroyed everything that made this nation great. We were once a nation that said “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Remember that little ditty? It’s inscribed on the Statue of Liberty! At some point, that mentality made us a great nation. But Virgil Goode — a rotten, cowardly shell of a man — thinks he knows better.
America, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. And we should be ashamed that people like Virgil Goode represent us. And we should be ashamed that our mindset is getting to sound an awful lot like Nazi Germany.