Getting Everyone Back in the Game

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/arts/24wii.html?ref=technology

"More important, I have already seen the Wii appeal to people who would never pick up an Xbox or PlayStation controller. At Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house in New Jersey, there was my 59-year-old stepfather, who hadn’t touched a video game since Pong, locked in a tight golf match with my 21-year-old cousin. There was my aunt clamoring for her turn. And most shocking, there was my mother, 61, whom I had been trying to get into video games for two decades, playing tennis so vigorously she bruised her finger."

Poll says USA is the most unfriendly country to visitors.

"
The survey showed that the United States was ranked "the worst" in terms
of visas and immigration procedures by twice the percentage of travelers
as the next destination regarded as unfriendly -- the Middle East and the
Asian subcontinent.
"

"
Between 2000 and 2006, the number of overseas visitors, excluding those
from Mexico and Canada, has declined by 17 percent
"

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-11-20T221513Z_01_N20294102_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-IMAGE.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-R1-MostViewed-1

Joel on user interfaces. (Yet again?)

Joel wrote:

I'm sure there's a whole team of UI designers, programmers, and testers
who worked very hard on the OFF button in Windows Vista, but seriously, is
this the best you could come up with?

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between
nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items.

...

This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the
open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and
for "Making Everybody Happy," but it's based on the misconceived notion
that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink.

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html

Sun Open Sources Java

I suppose that all of you have already heard this. I've hadn't. In any case, I think it's wonderful news.


http://www.sun.com/2006-1113/feature/story.jsp

How high school kids can make money.

In high school I made money by mowing lawns and scooping ice cream at
Baskin-Robbins. This was the only kind of work available at the time. Now
high school kids could write software or design web sites. But only some
of them will; the rest will still be scooping ice cream.

- Paul Graham , http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

Joel Spolsky on productivity consultants.

It's an interesting description of a reasonably common scam. Joel wrote:

A management consultant at Bain wrote me a nice email, that included the
following sentence:

"Our team is conducting a benchmarking effort to gather an outside-in view
on development performance metrics and best practice approaches to issues
of process and organization from companies involved in a variety of
software development (and systems integration)."

I didn't understand a thing he wrote. The email contained a lot of words
(benchmarking, outside in, performance metrics, best practice, process and
organization) each of which set off a loud buzzing alarm-like sound in my
head. The noise from the buzzing was so loud and so distracting that I
found myself completely unable to parse the email.

Car dashboard image for low tire pressure.

I would normally pick an ISO standard over ANSI simply because it is probably more widely accepted. I came across a paper on the image to be used in a car to signal that tire presure is low.

I have seen the ISO image and it took me a moment to guess what it meant. Even then I looked it up. The interesting thing is that the image is a cross-section of a tire without a rim. I am going to guess that most drivers do not know what that looks like.

The paper is interesting not only because it gives insight into what symbols drivers understand but because it deals with designing an interface to communicate with humans.

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/vrtc/ca/capubs/tpms_hfes01final.pdf

Calgary Traffic Alterts on your cell phone

The idea is you enter your travel time and streets you will be
traveling on. The system then sends you alerts about traffic problems
in related areas.

http://calgarytraffic.com/work.php

I AM TROLL

Read input and manipulate files on Linux systems with PHP scripts - Program - Linux - Builder AU

If you are already familiar with PHP code for Web sites, then you'll find it works great for command-line scripting on Linux systems. [...] using PHP on the command-line works fantastic and fast. [...] Perhaps one of the biggest functions of any scripting language in a script is to manipulate files and obtain user input. PHP handles this with as much grace as any other scripting language.

I couldn't believe this post and I really can't believe how angry it made me! Here's the comment I submitted but I don't think they'll post it:

It's almost like you don't even know what the words "fast", "easy", "works", "fantastic", and "grace" actually mean!!!




This post is ridiculous! PHP is none of those things. It's slow, broken, inconsistent and clunky!




PHP is one of the my top three languages in terms of lines of code written for employers. I have work experience with at least half a dozen. I have studied language design and implementation. I've reviewed PHP's source along side other dynamic languages. There is no language, (which i have experience with) which i have a lower opinion of!




I know this is a flame but I just don't care. PHP's lack of consistency and awkward implementation have wasted my time on occasions too numerous to count. If i can stop just one programmer or project manager from thinking that PHP will bring them one single advantage over most alternatives, then this flame was worth it!!!

I'll chalk all this up as evidence towards my recent realization: The attraction to PHP that some feel and the difficulty breaking away from it is not entirely unlike those of in a relationship with an abusive partner!

Tool for recovering stolen vehicles.

A while ago I thought about a system with a GPS unit and a cell phone that
can email me when my car is moved without me being in it. Or maybe it
does it every 5 or 10 minutes and normally those messages just get deleted
after say a week or so.

Someone sells a similar system but not in Alberta. Just Ontario, B.C. and
Quebec.

http://www.boomerangtracking.com/

Update: I forgot to mention that the site requires version 8 of the flash browser plug-in. There is a beta version of flash for linux that you can download. http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

Living beyond your means.

When I was in high-school a friend said he and I should split an appartment. I said there was no way we could afford that. I had a part-time job and knew that without working full-time and overtime it was not going to happen.



He didn't believe me that we couldn't afford it. I said "do you know what groceries alone cost for a month?" He said "about $40". I told him that was far short of what we would need. I went grocery shopping. I had an idea of what food cost. His mother did the grocery shopping for his family and he didn't go to the store with her. A few years went by. He now has a very good idea what groceries and bills cost.



The following story is about how credit-card debt gets built up and how people learn to deal with it. It's not a long read and it is kind of interesting.



http://www.violentacres.com/archives/30/you-can-learn-a-lot-from-a-rich-girl

This sounds kind of familiar.

This sounds like something someone we know would try.

"
Off we set on our merry way, and within only an hour we had managed to
concoct the dozen or so lines of assembler to create /etc. The stripped
binary was only 76 bytes long, so we converted it to hex (slightly more
readable than the output of uuencode), and typed it in using my editor. If
any of you ever have the same problem, here's the hex for future
reference:
070100002c000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000dd8fff010000dd8f27000000fb02ef07000000fb01ef070000000000bc8f
8800040000bc012f65746300
"

Someone is talking about how they dealt with a "rm -rf /".
http://www.justpasha.org/folk/rm.html

Mike is installing an eclipse plugin that Lakin helped him find...

...

Mike: ok, it's installing

Lakin: This mouse is just fucking finicky.

Mike: thanks it works!

Lakin: yay

Mike: howz yer mouse?

Lakin: Expect eclipse to binge on your memory like Kirstie Alley on Grape Sodas

Lakin: mouse still doesn't want to connect.

Mike: Kirstie alley?!

Lakin: It works fine on my desktop, but is being annoying with my laptop. I'm ignoring it as a punishment.

Lakin: Kirstie Alley's gut-busting binges

Mike: like we do with Kirstie Alley?

Lakin: I'm not certain I understand your last sentence.

Mike: ignoring it as a punishment

Lakin: aah. yes.

...

The Interweb

These posts got me thinking about what the web was, is, and is becoming...

Web Design is 95% Typography

The 10 commandments of Web Design

Joel Spolsky on website SQL injection.

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/01.html

11.3% of web applications have SQL injection vulnerabilities.

Joel wrote:

"
I tried to sign up for an online site. ... The signup page wanted a secret
question and secret answer. ... For the secret answer, I put "Aunt Vera
doesn't have a cat." And I got this:

1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that
corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near
't have a cat', 'male')' at line 1

This is an extremely common problem: Michael Sutton did a little research
project and found that 11.3% of web applications have SQL injection
vulnerabilities.
"

Scott Adams on voting machines.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/10/electronic_voti.html

"
Now dont get me wrong theres a 100% chance that the voting machines will
get hacked and all future elections will be rigged. But that doesnt mean
well get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next
American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket,
autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some
teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement? "

"
Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the
elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in
. . . oh, lets say for example, science.
"

"
Is it too late to start selling bumper stickers that say 'I think I
voted'?
"

myspace hacked?

From http://news.netcraft.com/

Netcraft has discovered that the social networking site, MySpace, appears
to have been compromised by phishers who have presented a spoof login form
on the main site. This modified login form is designed to submit the
victim's username and password to a remote server hosted in France.

Netcraft has notified MySpace of the issue, although it currently remains
live. Because the fraudulent login page is hosted on MySpace's own servers
and does not exhibit any signs of external content, such as cross-site
scripting (XSS) or open redirects, it is convincing and even
security-conscious users are at risk of becoming victims.

Robert X. Cringely's Hard Drive news

Mark told me about this. It sounds pretty amazing. It sounds good. So
good that it might be vapor-ware. It is coming from Cringely and he tends
to be pretty credible.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20061026_001143.html

He comments:

Who needs flash in general as a mass storage technology? Our 10-gigabyte
0.85-inch drive can spin up, read or write data, then shut down again,
all in less time than it takes to perform the same task using flash
while being just as resistant to shock damage and more resistant to
heat. That 10-gig drive will cost $24 compared to $240 for 10 gigs of
flash, so we expect that our technology will be used for any
application requiring more than 2-gigs of storage. The obvious market
here is mobile phones, which will become media storage devices.

Housing crash in the USA.

Preamble: this is about housing markets and economics. Skip it if that
bores you.

Historically in the few years following a stock market crash the housing
market booms and busts. (This might be a North American trend.)
Disclaimer: off the top of my head I don't recall where I heard this.

Stocks prices in North America took a dive in the early 2000s. There were
big things with Nortel, Enron, World Com for example.

There was also the "dot com" crash when people finally had to admit stocks
were over-valued and there is no "new economy". Okay, you don't have to
admit those things to yourself but a number of people lost a lot of money.

1) That's the first thing that kind of supports rising prices being a
bubble.

A while ago I read about "the housing bubble" at
http://www.stock-market-crash.net/housing-bubble.htm

It is a very interesting argument. The problem is with too much debt
being built up in the economy. It reads:

In recent years, despite the recession, housing prices have risen by
over 43 percent. ... Mortgage rates are at a 40-year low. ... A
major sign that we are in a housing bubble is the fact that fewer people
can afford homes. ... A housing bubble needs a steady stream of
thirsty home buyers.

Just that last bit starts to sound like a "Ponzi scheme".

2) That article argues there is a bubble with housing prices.

Just now I came across an Associated Press article from a few hours ago
that reads:

Is this what a housing bust looks like? New home prices fell last month
by the largest amount in 35 years and owners are being warned to brace
for further declines, especially in formerly hot markets.

...

The sharp slowdown in housing follows an extended boom in which the
lowest mortgage rates in four decades powered sales of both new and
existing homes to records for five consecutive years

Read todays article over at
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/061026/economy.html?.v=10

Anyone in Smallville has the power to wake up.

If your team is unreasonably resistant to change, more often than not, they can be reignited. All you need to do is press on that part where they are passionate.

Epsilon-Delta » Are You on a Pleasantville Team?