Monthly Archives: February 2005

Gutenberg Gems: In Time of Emergency

Duck and CoverNeed to know what to do in the event of a nuclear attack? Well, given that it would most likely be a low yield dirty bomb, you probably won’t find any useful information In Time of Emergency, but heck, your tax dollars paid for it, you might as well have a peek. It also includes some basic first aid information as well as information about floods, tornadoes and other natural disasters, so it might actually be of some use.

Of course you can get the original Archer Productions movie Duck and Cover from archive.org.

Goodbye Speedy

Nerds name their fish after video gamesIt’s kind of a bummer day. Speedy, one of a pair of Betta Splendens that my wife and son bought for me over a year ago has gone to that great fishtank in the sky. I noticed that he wasn’t eating very much in the last few days, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected, but I still get bummed when I see one of these guys on the bottom of his tank.

His tankmate Pokey seems to be doing pretty well though. I’ll probably remove the divider in their tank and give him free reign.

As a tribute to Speedy, here’s a brief MPEG of both of them. Speedy is the one on the left, while Pokey is the angrier looking one on the right.

I named them after observing them in the first few days I had them, Speedy seemed quite fast, and Pokey quite slow. Ironically, once they were adjusted to their new environment, they seemed to reverse roles, and Pokey became the more active one. Their names of course are drawn from the classic arcade game PacMan, although they are also reminiscent of the stories my dad used to write for us when I was very little about Speedy the rabbit and Slowpoke the Turtle.

Another Librarian Who Doesn’t “Get It”

Oddly enough, I find myself agreeing with Dave on this matter: Gorman doesn’t have much respect for blogs or Google.

In my career, I’ve done a fair amount of library research. I’ve tried to find books related to esoteric topics by hunting through card catalogs, pouring over stacks and generally just browsing. It’s not a very efficient use of my time, and unfortunately it requires that I actually cart myself to the library. Yes, I know, many libraries now have online catalogs, but they do nothing to index content, and therefore they are only useful in telling me if they have a resource I already know about, not finding one that might be relevant to a given query I have.

Let’s accept for a moment Gorman’s basic premise: that Google is a terrible search engine that returns links in random order. Even if that were 100% true, his opposition to the digitization of millions of books by Google is absolutely and completely unfathomable. If there is one thing that is obvious, it’s that providing universal availability to the bulk of published works in existance can do nothing but increase the general level of education world wide. He says…

In the eyes of bloggers, my sin lay in suggesting that Google is OK at giving access to random bits of information but would be terrible at giving access to the recorded knowledge that is the substance of scholarly books. I went further and came up with the unoriginal idea that the thing to do with a scholarly book is to read it, preferably not on a screen. It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.

The problem with this idea is that doesn’t properly understand the economics of the situation. It’s glamorous to have nicely bound copies of books: I have thousands in my house. I love them dearly. I do find them more pleasant to read than text on the screen. But simple economics makes it impossible for most communities to have these warehouses of dead trees. Most libraries aren’t very interesting places to go, because they can’t afford to fill in the long tail of interest that humans being have. The big ones are expensive monuments: useful, prestigious but not within the reach of the vast masses who crave for information and education.

Gormon seems to want to justify his own existance by claiming that he’s the right professional to act as an intermediary between the knowledge that the world needs and the individuals who need it. Not only is he wrong in his particular case, he’s wrong in principle. The best of all possible worlds occurs when there are no intermediaries at all: when anyone can access whatever information they want whenever they want as cheaply as humanly possible. When we need the assistance of librarians and scholars, we will be able to find them on the internet as well, at least if they decide to come down out of their ivory tower and participate.

Slashdot? Slash not…

Dan Lyke is right: Slashdot has become a joke. It isn’t just the commentary. I expect that when you get 100 people to comment on something, you’ll get an awful lot of chaff to a small amount of wheat. The real problem is just their choice of articles: thinly veiled product announcements, endless incitement to the defense of Linux/Open Source, endless bashing of Copyright Laws (except of course when they defend Linux/Open Source) and warmed over rehashes of news which is reported more capably elsewhere.

I’m joining Dan in delisting Slashdot from my weblog’s sidebar. I don’t think I’ll be replacing it with Dan’s candidate though…

Argh, Debugging…

The Devil BoxWhat do you do when you have the flu? Well, I sit down and try to debug a computer system which has become unreliable. In particular, the little gem is the gadget pictured on the right, my old SV24 with an 850Mhz Celeron Processor in it. I’ve thought about turning it into a MythTV box, since it largely goes unused, and I’m vaguely nervous about the predicted death of Tivo.

So, what’s the problem. Well, I’ve had difficulty installing software on it. I put a DVD drive in it awhile back, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I burned Fedora Core 3 onto it, and verified that the disk would boot and check in another machine (Fedora nicely includes a checksum routine to verify disks during install), but it fails with hdc media errors in this box. Repeatedly. Predictably. I’ve tried changing every bios thing I can figure, disabling DMA, doing all sorts of stuff, no dice.

This morning I swapped the drive for an old 10x CDROM that I had lying around. For some reason it doesn’t want to boot at all from this device (powers up, but when the CDROM probe happens, no love). Grrr. Not happy.

Strangely enough, I think there might be something electrical which is wacky in the box. If I leave the case off, sometimes the machine refuses to boot at all, instead just making a series of short clicks as if the reset button were being pushed. What’s that about?

I really don’t want to retire this box needlessly, but I’m beginning to get a bit annoyed with it. Anyone have any ideas and/or expeirence which might be useful?

Flu is a bit better. I’ll probably try to work a half day today.

Word of the Day: Influenza!

Yes, it’s not just for the Pope, yours truly is experiencing the high fever, bodyaches, headache and general crappiness that marks the arrival of the flu. Last night I started getting the aches, which quickly shifted into the sweaty chills. Yuck!

So, I’m stuck at home with my laptop, feeling bored but too sick to really muster enough energy to do something. The rest of the day will probably be spent drinking water, taking advil, snoozing, and the occasional bit of websurfing.

Apple to buy TiVo?

Intriguing rumor that hit Wall Street today. It would be great if my favorite consumer appliance got acquired by someone who could prevent its long, slow descent into the tar pits.

Of course, they’d probably change the name to iTv or something, and it would be a sterile white instead of the comforting black. Actually, it could probably just be a Mac Mini…

Minimo on Pocket PC

I had heard about the open source browser Minimo, but they just recently released their first trial build.

You can download a sneak peak at this build here:
http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.002.zip. Keep in mind,
it is basically the second build that I made that actually rendered a
page successfully. When you check it out, remember I told you: Lots of
work to do; Lots of work to do.

I’ll have to check that out when I get home. Stay tuned for an update.

BowGo

Those crazy guys at CMU have invented a cool gadget: the BowGo. It’s basically a regular pogostick gone high tech: instead of using a heavy but relatively inefficient steel spring, it uses a fiber-reinforced composite spring that rides on low friction rollers. The net result is high bouncing. Check out their pictures and video.

A possible brain for the brainwagon robot?

Glancing around the surplus market yielded the following computer which seems like it would be entirely capable of driving my as yet unstarted robotics project.

Dell Optiplex GX1 PIII 450Mhz./ 128MB/ 6GB/ CD(Desktop)

I found out that tigersurplus has the same sort of systems for less money, but it’s about the same when you add in shipping. I think I’ll travel down south and have a gander at one of these this weekend.

Gutenberg Gem: Beeton’s Book of Needlework

CrochetToday’s book which crossed the Distributed Proofreader’s RSS feed and caught my eye is Beeton’s Book of Needlework by Isabella Beeton. It includes all sorts of cool illustrations of tatting, embroidery, and crochet.

I’m about to admit to something which will undoubtably blow some serious cool-geek points: I’ve actually done embroidery before, and my grandmother Francis taught me to crochet when I was probably six or seven, and I’m still pretty good at it. She did remarkable work, and made many lovely, intricate doilies and mattes in ornate pineapple patterns. Every Christmas I think I should make a bunch of crocheted snowflakes like the ones she had on her tree, most of which have long since frayed and decomposed. Someday, I’ll get to it. Crocheted snowflakes always remind me of her, as does certain Polish foods, good kosher pickles, and macaroni and cheese with sliced hot dogs. Francis, you are not forgotten.

Yes, I can crochet and embroider. And knit (not as well as crocheting, but still passable well). But I don’t tat. Tatting is for quiche eating wimps.

Here is a nice link with some pineapple crochet patterns to get you all started.

Robot Motors Ordered

Windshield Wiper Motor, Retarget For Evil RoboticsWell, in an effort to push my as-yet unstarted robotics project forward, I decided to begin as I always do: by spending money! I ordered two windshield wiper motors from American Science and Surplus which I hope will do for powering my little robotic minion around. I’ll have to do an evaluation of their power before I set too many more design parameters, but they should be good enough to push a fairly good sized little bot around.

Now, I need to line up some 12v batteries and a charger, dust off my ammeter, and think about a test rig.

Addendum: I found this page which details a lot of the tests you can do on motors to help establish your robots overall performance characteristics. Good stuff.