The Voidspace Techie Blog has a brief review of Panda3D, an interactive graphics environment based on Python created by Disney and CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center. Looks cool. Haven’t done anything with it, but I thought I’d put in this link to remind me to have a look at it later.
Monthly Archives: April 2005
Drive cloning software…
I recently began to have difficulties with my Windows XP box. For reasons which were not clear (and given XP’s “weld the hood shut” architecture, impossible to diagnose) I could not install Visual C++ on the machine. I realized that over the last couple of years, I had acquired a lot of cruft in my system, so I decided that I would just blow the drive away and do a fresh reinstall.
After killing the better part of a day with the “download patch/driver, restart” cycle, I decided that I should invest some money so that I wouldn’t have to do this again. So, I went out and bought a copy of Acronis True Image version 8, a disk cloning and backup solution. This program allows you to backup your entire system to either another hard drive or removeable media, and then restore it all at once. I have a spare 20gb drive in an external enclosure, which was large enough to hold my newly created barebones distribution. So, I backed it up.
And restored it, in only 28 minutes, without any user intervention (just told it what to restore and hit “go”).
It worked perfectly.
You don’t need anything at all running off the old disk: you can create a boot disk that will allow you to install on completely hosed/new media. It works pretty much as expected. If you value your time, perhaps this program will be useful to you. It seems expensive ($50) for what is probably just a version of dd, but hey, convenience counts for something too.
Epia Information
EpiaWiki.org is trying to become the primary source of information on using the EPIA motherboards produced by VIA.
This website currently runs on just such a motherboard, using FreeBSD. They are cool, capable, and run with very little power. All in all, a very good deal.
Google Maps, Now with Satellite Imagery!
Google just added satellite imagery to their map services. Check out their view of Pixar. Too cool.
Flutterby! : flippin’ the bird
Dan took some nice pictures while walking around San Francisco today. He snapped this picture:
which I liked, but I thought could use a bit more oomph. So, I fired up gimp, cut the bird out, and manipulated the contrast of the bird and the background separately, and came up with this.
Probably overdid the blacks and whites, but I was only really goofing around. I really like The Gimp.
Opening Day!
Ah, baseball season begins today.
Okay, I guess it really started yesterday with the Yankees/Sox game, but today is the first Oakland game. Unfortunately, Barry Zito didn’t do so well, and the A’s lost their opening day game.
Zito gave up four runs and six hits in six innings, breaking Oakland’s 7-0 record against Baltimore last year. Bobby Crosby got his first career hit against Baltimore, after beginning 0-23.
Slusher on MGM Vs Grokster
Dave Slusher has an excellent article detailing just what is at stake in the case of MGM v. Grokster. He says:
I am the benificiary of being able to serve my podcasts to an order of magnitude more users than I could without it.
Without the technological innovation of P2P networks, Dave would be unable to reach the huge numbers of individuals that he currently does: it simply wouldn’t be cost effective. A reversal of the Sony decision would allow the creators of Bittorrent or similar programs to be held liable for piracy created by their sharing technology, and we would be back in a world where media is controlled by the few who can afford the higher costs associated with the classic means of distribution.
I’m noticed!
Andrew noticed my name in the credits for The Incredibles. Woohoo! I’m famous!
Note: I actually have two listings in the credits.
Sorry for the lack of updates…
I’ve been busy all weekend, caught Sin City, the Courbet exhibit at the Legion of Honor museum, spent some quality time with my wife including a night out eating sushi, listened to a little baseball and in my down moments, blew away my Windows XP installation and reinstalled from scratch. Expect a podcast in the next day or two with these and many other topics.
Brainwagon Radio: April Fool’s Day and Sweet and Sour Bitter Melon
Where your host talks about his experience with Chinese calligraphy, relates a timely story about MIT hackers Gosper and Greenblatt and their attempts to get a good chinese meal, and reviews a couple of plugins for WordPress.
Links:
dynamic-text-replace is a plugin that you can use to automatically insert useful links using simple macros. Check out the documentation, but using it you can create links to Google, Amazon and Flickr searches, such as ::flickr(“chinese”, “this bunch of links to Chinese things on Flickr.”)::
You can read the story I’m talking about in Steve Levy’s ::amazon(“0385312105”, “Hackers“):: or online here. Buy the book though: it was one of my early inspirations.
The Long Slow Ride To Cancellation
Lisa has some comments for the writers on CSI, so I thought I’d pile on with a couple of my own:
- The original CSI still has the best characters of any of the shows, but they are slipping. Early episodes actually presented them as secondary plot elements, not merely props to advance the plotline. Get back to character development to serve as a stable backdrop. Oh, and CSI: Miami and CSI: NY? Try getting some characters.
- Mobsters? Boring. Hookers in trouble? Boring. Jealous spouse? Boring. Work on some better angles. The stories of humanity are incredibly varied. Find some of them.
- Stop using technology as magic. There aren’t magical databases of every shoe ever made. You can’t pull images of license plates from a single bad frame of video taken a quarter of a mile away.
- Realize that mostly CSI is a show for nerds. Appeal to the nerd sensibility and be smart first, and titilating second.