You decide.
Our own kitty, whom we’ve named Scrappy, ranks a respectable 7.8 on ratemykitten.com. This cat, well, not as much.
Cat, or Gargoyle?
Monthly Archives: August 2004
Change This
Today’s link of the day routes you to ChangeThis, a website with an interesting idea: if you distribute good ideas, people will adopt, adapt and use them to make the world a better place. Ah, optimism. Personally, I often tend toward pessimism, but even though I know it will fail, I’ll try to entertain optimistic ideals for a moment or two. 🙂
The first manifesto they have posted is by venerable Macintosh evangelist Guy Kawasaki, and is excerpted from his upcoming book The Art of the Start. Since I am mired deep within what has beme a rather large organization, I found his mini-chapter The Art of Internal Entrepanuering to be particularly interesting. I suspect I’ll be visiting this website frequently in an attempt to expand my thinking about a wide variety of topics, and to combat my occasionally crippling pessimism.
Holy Niche Market, Batman! — The Wave Pillow
Engadget reports on The Wave Pillow, an Internet enabled pillow that connects to a server and checks the waves at a beach that you specify, and then vibrates in time to the waves. Supposedly then, you can decide to either wake up, grab a surfboard and miss your classes, or alternatively roll over, go back to sleep and miss your classes.
Making Sh*t Up
My brother and I had a conversation recently about police merely making up laws to roust you about. Apparently some cops think they can make using your computer in public a crime. For God’s sake, don’t they have anything better to do with their time?
Garden State
This weekend’s movie extravaganza was Garden State, starring, written and directed by Zach Braff. Braff is perhaps best known for his role on the TV show Scrubs, but here he stretches beyond the comedy antics and tries to tell us a story of considerable warmth, emotion and humanity. Braff plays Andrew Largeman, an L.A. actor who returns home to New Jersey to attend the funeral of his mother. Largemen has lived a life dominated by anti-depressants and ineffective therapy, and for the first time begins to realize that he’s better off without chemicals. While he is back, he meets Sam (played by Natalie Portman), and strikes up an unlikely friendship with her.
The movie alternates between moments of significant comedy and moments of surprising poignancy. The one slightly disturbing thing that I found was the less pleasant parts of the plot kept nagging at me, and I kept wondering whether I was being lead down a certain path by the comedy, and that I would be emotionally ambushed by some strong tragedy at the end. But in the end, the film is actually rather gentle, no strong tragedy climaxes the film, and it remains an extended sketch of life.
I think Braff did a marvelous job with this film. If I have a criticism of it, it is perhaps in its subtlety and its gentleness. Still, Braff managed to coax a convincing and charming performance out of Natalie Portman, which is something that George Lucas could not. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of his work as a writer and director. Well done. I would rank this movie as 8/10: not the kind of thing I normally go see, but I’ll make up for it by going to see Hero or Anaconda 2 really soon.
It’s a good thing the lady wanted $450 for these pups…
Otherwise we would have ended up with a brand new puppy and I’d be laying down papers in the kitchen and trying to scold them for chewing on my old shoes. Damn, they were cute. More photos from Carmen’s hiptop blog, from which I also swiped my new photo on the right.
Computer Chronicles Flashback
I was amazed to watch this old episode of Computer Chronicles which chronicles the swansong of the Apple II series of computers. What the people involved in this episode do not seem to realize is that eight bit computers were dying. Less than four years later, Apple would finally discontinue the Apple IIgs and abandon eight bit computers entirely. Remember: the Apple II gs was a 2.8 Mhz 65C816 processor, charitably described as a 16 bit processor. In the 12 years since then, we’ve now arrived at computers which have gigahertz clockrates, half a gigabyte of main memory and 100s of gigabytes of storage. Moore’s law is really amazing.
John Cura: Snapshots of History by Mark Lewisohn
Kudos to Metafilter for digging up this one. Try reading the story John Cura: Snapshots of History by Mark Lewisohn and then pine about the lost treasure that his quarter of a million pictures of early British television represents.
BatBox installed on Linux Router
Just an update on the Linksys WRT54GS router that I bought. I’m as yet too chicken to reflash it, but I did install BatBox on my system. It just creates a ramdisk and installs some basic software onto the system, including a simple telnetd so you can log in. If you look at /proc/cpuinfo, you get
system type : Broadcom BCM947XX processor : 0 cpu model : BCM3302 V0.7 BogoMIPS : 199.47 wait instruction : no microsecond timers : yes tlb_entries : 32 extra interrupt vector : no hardware watchpoint : no VCED exceptions : not available VCEI exceptions : not available dcache hits : 4229955107 dcache misses : 25173 icache hits : 540860934 icache misses : 4080842876 instructions : 0
Nifty!
The Vision of Hell
Project Gutenberg just released The Vision of Hell, by Dante Alighieri, translated by Rev. Carey and illustrated by Gustave Doré. If Doré’s Bible I posted about earlier wasn’t to your liking, perhaps this will do better. It’s been quite some time since I read Inferno, perhaps I’ll have to set some time aside to do it again.
Dick Van Dyke – Animator?
Apparently the legendary Dick Van Dyke put in an appearance at SIGGRAPH 2004 and demonstrated some of his animations. It’s really very cool that a 79 year old acting legend can show he’s still learning and growing. Thanks to Jim Hill for writing this up. Almost makes me wish I had gone to SIGGRAPH.
Linux on Your Router
Ever wanting to keep up with the other hackers on the street, I recently decided to upgrade my 802.11b network to run 802.11g. Toward that end, I purchased a Linksys WRT54GS router, largely based upon a rather silly feature: it’s actually a full Linux device, and you can develop and reflash it without huge difficulty. Here is the most lucid description of the procedure I’ve found. Note: I have not yet done this on mine, and doing so will likely void your warranty, so be aware.
Why would you want to reflash your router? I can think of several reasons:
- It would be nice if it booted with the defaults that I like: with the ports for
sshandhttpdforwarded to my desired host, the correct SSID and WEP keys enabled and so on. - I use sitelutions.com for my dynamic dns stuff, it would be great if it could update all of my hosted domains automatically.
- It could be nice to have traffic shaping to keep my son from chewing up all my bandwidth.
Anyway, I haven’t done any of this yet, but someday when I am bored I’m virtually certain to give it a whirl.
The Night Before Christmas, and other Stories
Project Gutenberg just released The Night Before Christmas and Other Popular Stories For Children which includes nice stories (mostly of a Christmas theme) and some cute clip art. It even includes the much less well known The Night After Christmas, which gave me a chuckle. Come the holiday season, expect to see some of these images recycled as graphics for this blog. Perhaps I’ll even think of doing an audio version of this. While the dulcet tones of my voice aren’t the most pleasing, I bet you that I could render a version of it that would be enjoyable for kids who are, let’s face it, not the most discerning of critics.
Time go gather jingle-bell sound effects.
Phil Zimmerman on Moore’s Law
I think the biggest threat to privacy is Moore’s law. The human population does not double every eighteen months but the ability to keep track of us does. This may be a prescription for an omniscient government. Democracy never had to face an all-knowing government. I don’t know how we’re going to get through that.
Useless Security Measures
SFGate.com reports that Senator Ted Kennedy was delayed in boarding because his name appeared on a terror watchlist as an alias.
Oh, dear, God.
Apparently it took three separate calls by Sen. Kennedy’s staff to be removed from the list. In a hearing yesterday, Kennedy asked:
“If they have that kind of difficulty with a member of Congress, how in the world are average Americans, who are getting caught up in this thing, how are they going to be treated fairly and not have their rights abused?”
How indeed.
Sen. Kennedy tried to buy tickets three times in March, and was told that he could not purchase a ticket because his name was “on a list”. When he tried to determine why, he was told that they could not tell him that.
It’s almost enough to make me support John Gilmore’s crusade against useless airport security measures. Almost. He’s got a lot of interesting views, but I’m glad I haven’t had to fly with him.