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Re: my syndicated feed
In addition to my blog posts, my syndicated feed also pulls in a daily summary of whatever I linked to via del.icio.us. I realize this can look a like a whole lot of noise to a typical LiveJournal user. If you'd like to subscribe to a 'friend' that doesn't have this daily noise, try adding syndication for this feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/GlobalResetBlog
Just pop that url into the bottom of this page:
http://www.livejournal.com/syn/
Let me know if you add it. |
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I stopped blogging here ages go and moved everything over to my own domain (http://blog.globalreset.org). That means that I occasionally have to send my 1 friend who only uses LJ (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cbradfield) a direct link (since he can't be bothered to setup an rss reader). Well, now I know of 2 friends who only use LJ (add spoonless). As a paid user, Jeff was able to add my regular blog's rss feed to LiveJournal's syndicated blogs. So cbradfield and spoonless can add my feed to their friend's list and be notified right away on events like when I receive my MacBook Pro or when I crash my next attempt at ski jumping (if you can stand the wait!)...
Here's the syndicated feed that you want to add to your friend's list:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/globalreset_syn/
Thanks Jeff!
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You'd think that given the high cost of rent we pay for the posh downtown apartment we're in, we wouldn't have to deal with crap like this. It's leaked since we moved in, but it really only drops any water if there is a horrendous storm outside... Which, thankfully, is rare in Dallas. We've made complaints to the management multiple times, but no action has been taken. I assume that either they don't want to re-shingle the roof since they did it right as we moved in about 2 years ago or they are waiting for us to move out to dig out the root of the problem.
And as much as I'd rather continue renting in downtown than move out to a house in the suburbs, crap like this really makes home ownership a no-brainer. I mean, sure, if you own a house problems like these are your own to deal with... But in my current situation, nobody is dealing with it.
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Take a look at this screen capture to see how I spent my 4th of July vacation weekend.
I ended up taking the libusb build of the 1-Wire Public Domain Kit and creating a JNI-wrapper around it. Now I've got a nice USB Adapter driver for the Java API (and hence for OneWireViewer). I'm going to look into modifying the WebStart download so that it will deliver the new USB adapter and the binary (JNI) portion of it. Possibly, I can sneak the libusb drivers along with that as well, without causing too much confusion. Maybe make 2 builds, one that includes libusb for people who aren't cmd-line savvy enough to build their own and one that doesn't.
The good news is that this should work on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. Windows users will have to install a .inf file first, but it will be a single-click application for Linux and Mac.
Update (7/10/2005): I used JarBundler to create a nice .App bundle of this for Mac OS X users. It's pretty nice to have a installable .App of OneWireViewer that supports both the USB Adapter (DS9490) and the Serial Adapter (DS9097U) on Mac OS X. Unfortunately, I don't have a good place to host it.. I'm not sure in it's current form if it's suitable for an official release to go up on the dalsemi ftp servers. So, if you'd like to try it, just leave a comment and include your email address (not in the comment, but in the regular email address field, where I will be able to see it but noone else will) and I can email you a copy of the app. It's 2.3mb compressed. |
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Presumably, you are as saddened as I am by the recent ruling of the supreme court which upholds the state's right to seize property from individuals to give to other individuals (if the state government will generate greater tax revenue as a result of the property "reassignment"). If so, you may be consoled a little by the fact that someone is trying to use the new ruling to seize the home of Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter. His idea for building a hotel on the property of the Justice's current home will, most likely, generate greater tax revenue for the area, but it's unlikely to succeed for obvious reasons... Clearly, the Supreme Court meant the state has a right to seize your homes, not theirs. My favorite bit from the press release:
The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Café" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."
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| » Mac Mini Mess |
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A couple of weeks ago, I made a comment in Chris' blog post about how he tried to ruin his laptop with a bottle of water. For your convenience, here's my relevant addition to his story where I tried to ruin my delicate Apple hardware...
Last weekend, Nicole was using my brand new Mac Mini. Of course, that also means she was using my almost brand new Dell 2005fpw 20" lcd... Not to mention my mostly new wireless keyboard. And, she was drinking coffee while doing this. So, I'm playing fetch with the dog downstairs. The way our apt is laid out, we have a second floor with a sort of balcony over the living room which is where my mac mini lives. I decide to give the dog a good challenge by tossing his toy over the balcony edge to where Nicole is sitting. Nothing but net... The toy went straight into the coffeee, splashing coffee everywhere. Keyboard was the worst hit, but I did actually get a big splash on the Mac Mini. It looks like it's going to survive, but I have a nice brown stain on the felt in the slot loader to remind me of what an idiot I am. I think I got the keyboard back to a good state, though if the N sticks on me again, I'll have to buy a new one. Can't tolerate sticky keys, you know...
Today, thanks to a remnant of that mess, I learned a couple of things about my Mac Mini...
1. Dried coffee is like hardened cement when placed between my computer desk and the rubber bottom of the Mac Mini and will, in most circumstances, require an actual chisel to separate the two.
2. That little power cord in the back slips out of the Mac Mini like a frightened, greased pig at the county fair.
3. Mac OSX does not berate you for improper shutdown of your system, unlike Windows XP.
That third point is an interesting one to me. I'm very familiar with recovery on Windows, given that prior to WinXP crashes were quite frequent... I'm sure Mac OSX must have some sort of method for recovering orphaned files and, perhaps, booting into a safe mode if I installed something which hosed the boot process...
I need to add that to my "to research" list...
Jun. 27th, 2005 @ 08:14 pm
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| » SHA-1 Collisions Paper Online |
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The full paper describing the recent attack on SHA-1 is now available online, according to Bruce Schneier. Previously, only an excerpt was made available, but this was due to some misunderstanding about the rules for papers being submitted for the Crypto conference.
Admittedly, it is early and I've only had my first cup of coffee, but the methods described in the paper don't make much sense to me yet. Might take another cup of joe and one or two more reads.
If you feel up for it, you can give it a shot by grabbing a copy to read yourself.
Technorati Tags: Crypto
Jun. 27th, 2005 @ 10:08 am
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| » Skinning XP |
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I booted up my Windows XP machine to try out FlyakiteOSX. It's a suite of tools to help skin your XP desktop to look a lot like OSX. If nothing else, you should check out the website. It's a very slick Javascript implementation of an OSX desktop. It's kind of a painful way to navigate a website, but it's really amazing how well it's put together. I hope the idea does not catch on though... I think one or two desktops is enough. I don't need another one in my web browser.
In any case, the FlyakiteOSX suite works remarkably well. It doesn't change many of the tiny user interface issues that I was hoping for (i.e. double-click on title bar still maximizes, unlike OSX which minimizes.) But it does add transparency to pop-up menus and a pretty drop shadow to every window. I have a reasonably speedy AMD box, so I didn't notice if this was a severe drain on resources. It might stay on my home machine (which rarely gets any power-on time since I got the Mac Mini), but I probably won't propagate it to my work PC.
Experimenting with that got me curious about getting widgets on my Windows XP machine, so I also tried out Konfabulator. This is actually a bit different from the Dashboard included with OSX Tiger. It allows widgets to run floating on your desktop, above your normal apps... Versus Dashboard which only runs on an invisible layer which must be summoned to the foreground. Konfabulator does have a layer which isolates just the widgets, so it ends up looking a lot like Dashboard. I haven't experimented with many widgets, but the default ones are useful enough to convince me I'll like it. This will be propagated to all of my machines. I may even use the OSX version of Konfabulator instead of Dashboard, just so I can be assured that any widget I grow to love will work everywhere I go.
Technorati Tags: Apple, MacOSX
Jun. 22nd, 2005 @ 01:03 pm
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| » Truncated RSS Feeds: A Suggestion |
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So, a few days ago I complained about sites who hosted RSS feeds without the full content in the RSS feed. Apparently, even sites which post only text can exceed their allotment of bandwidth. This is news to me... But I suppose I underestimated either the size of the readership or the common courtesy of the readers. Of course, by that I mean that you would be doing your favorite blogs a nice favor if you could avoid fetching their RSS feed once per minute... Especially blogs which are only updated once or twice daily.
I use BlogLines for all of my news reading, which seems to be on an update schedule somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour. The good thing about BlogLines though is that it fetches your feed only once for all the users of BlogLines who read your feed.
I'd like to make a suggestion though for site owners whose RSS feed does consume a lot of their bandwidth... Host your feed with FeedBurner. They provide a pretty good set of "circulation" statistics, to help you track the size of your readership. But, perhaps most useful of all, they actually cache your feed and serve it up for you. They refresh their cached version once every 30 minutes. And it's free. They have a "pro" version which offers more statistics and other advertising-related features, but the basic statistics and feed hosting is a free service. If you'd like to try it, but also be able to switch back transparent to your readership, they have a good suggestion on how to do that in one of their FAQs.
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with FeedBurner, nor do I receive any sort of referral bonus if you try their service. I'm just a happy user.
Jun. 20th, 2005 @ 12:24 pm
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| » Truncated RSS Feeds |
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On principle, I have to start being more strict about unsubscribing from feeds with a truncated RSS feed. The whole point of this syndication stuff, is that I gather all of my news into a centralized location and I format it how I want it formatted. When certain bloggers only offer a truncated feed, I have to exit my feed depot to visit their website. In certain cases, I assume the site is trying to conserve bandwidth. That must be the case for sites like Cox and Forkum. I guess the bandwidth adds up quickly when the content you are distributing is primarily a large image, rather than text.
But what excuse does Diana Mertz Hsieh and Patrick Oscar Boykin have for their truncated feeds? Most of their posts are relatively short... They aren't making advertising money off the site... It's possible they don't realize that a truncated RSS feed annoys some of us. I have no estimate of the size of their readership, so I guess it's also possible that I'm the only one. Diana is an interesting character in Objectivism in that she originally sided with David Kelly (in the infamous split with ARI and Peikoff), but after serious reflection has reconsidered her position and has written a lot of good articles about what's wrong with The Objectivist Center (in practice and in principal). I believe that her well-written articles do net her a large audience. Patrick is a friend from Georgia Tech. We were meant to be roommates, but he kicked me out of my own dorm room to squeeze a friend of his in. Consequently, we became very good friends. A couple of his publications on social networks have been recently slashdot'ed, so it stands to reason that his audience has to be more than a handful of readers.
I wonder if there is a service out there that parses popular blog layouts (wordpress, blogger, etc) and "screen-scrapes" the full blog post into a full RSS feed? Do truncated RSS feeds bother you also? If you aren't using RSS yet, check out BlogLines for a good example of "RSS made easy." You can start with my blogroll as a quick intro.
Update: No thanks to my petty complaints, Diana's RSS feed is no longer truncated. I no longer find her blog, in any way, inadequate. :) Though I did learn that bandwidth is a concern. Those of you using an RSS client would probably be doing all of your favorite blogs a solid if you toned down the polling rate. A couple of times a day should be more than adequate for anything but a "breaking news" blog.
Jun. 18th, 2005 @ 12:58 pm
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| » Firefly! On Sci-fi! Woo-hoo! |
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Firefly, a science fiction series that was canceled midway through its first season on Fox, has found a new home on the Sci Fi Channel.
Fans of the cult-hit series Firefly will be pleased to learn that the show has been picked up by the Sci Fi Channel--just two months before the release of Serenity, a Universal Pictures film based on the series.
This story (from to a tv.com article) is great news! It looks like they will only be airing the episodes which have already aired, plus the 3 unaired epiodes which were included in the Firefly dvd set. So, hardcore fans don't have much to look forward to, other than the hope that our unwashed, ignorant friends will finally get a chance to see why we are fanatical about the show... And hope that this leads to more new episodes!
Jun. 16th, 2005 @ 07:29 am
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| » Evolution of Coffee |
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The future of coffee is here, and it's bit more bland than I expected.
I really enjoy the taste of the coffee I get out of my French Press, especially if I'm using fresh beans. I'm not pretentious enough to actually have a favorite bean or anything. But the only downside to the French Press is the clean up afterwards. It takes a lot of scrubbing to get those coffee grounds out of every crevice it's filter creates. On a weekend morning, though, it's quite worth the extra effort.
Then there's the pod coffee maker. It's hard to beat the convenience of this thing. You just drop a tiny "pod" of coffee, already wrapped in it's own filter, into this thing and tell it to brew 1 or 2 cups of joe. It doesn't taste as good as the French Press, but it's faster and easier to clean. The advent of the pre-flavored pods with some flavored creamer offsets the blandness of the coffee flavor a bit. It's really excellent if I decide to have a quick cup with my breakfast before work.
Now, my latest discovery, is the self-heating canned coffee. So far, I've only tried the French Vanilla latte flavor... And it is quite bland. Too much milk for my tastes. But how in the hell can you beat this product in the convenience department? You pull a can lid off the bottom, pop a plastic container to create a chemical reaction, and wait 5 minutes... And it's literally too hot for me to drink. I picked up a 4-pack for $4, so it's a bargain compared to other "on-the-run" coffee solutions (like Starbucks).
The self-heating can is designed by a California company called OnTech. It apparently took them 7 years and $24 million to perfect the design. Presumably, more products will follow and, hopefully, these products will taste better. I can see oatmeal, soup, hot cocoa, and even melted chocolate for dipping being quite a success.
Jun. 15th, 2005 @ 08:16 pm
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| » TiVo and Mac OSX: Remux Redux |
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I finally found a workable set of tools for extracting and re-encoding video from my TiVo using Mac OSX Tiger. For reference, I'm pulling video off of a Series 2 DirecTiVo (HDVR2). If you have a Series 1, you have many more options, including TyStudio, which I mentioned in my previous post. AFAIK, both of the excellent options I'm using now should work for all Series 1 and Series 2 streams. I have found workable solutions for both GUI and Command-line interfaces. Both tools have their advantages, but the tools I'll be using the most are the command-line tools. Here's the procedure I use for each tool. ( Procedures for CLI and GUI )Technorati Tags: Apple, MacOSX, TiVo
Jun. 13th, 2005 @ 11:46 pm
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| » TV Shows on DVD |
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Nicole and I are addicted to watching our favorite TV shows on DVD this summer. We just finished watching Scrubs Season One and that was hilarious. Scrubs and Arrested Development are neck-and-neck for the funniest-shows-ever-aired-says-me award.
Before that, we watched Season 1, 2 and the Chrismas Special of the BBC version of The Office. That one grew on us a bit, but you have to be British (or watch British tellie a lot) to get a good many of the jokes. Now we are about a disc and half through Seinfeld Seasons 1 & 2. Soon, the next season of Monk will start, so we'll finally have one of our season passes that's getting new episodes of something.
I was thinking about picking up The Lost whenever that one finally makes it out on DVD. I watched the first four episodes when they did some reruns in the middle of the season and I was instantly hooked. Any other shows on DVD that we should check out during the TV-starved summer months?Technorati Tags: Television
Jun. 9th, 2005 @ 11:22 pm
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| » Steve Jobs is a two-timing hussie |
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Of course, right when I decide to switch, Apple announces that they are going to be moving to Intel chips next year! That could mean that I would've been able to get Mac OSX running on hardware that I already own. The likeliest outcome is that Apple will require high-end hardware and, possibly, only support a proprietary hardware set (thereby blocking out self-built or other 3rd party PC's).
I think it's pretty cool though that Apple has had a team for the past 5 years dedicated to making sure that each build of OSX runs on Intel's chips... Just in case... I wonder if MS has a team trying to get WinXP running on Power PC?
In any event, I don't think it's a coincidence that Intel recently announced their hardware DRM solution in their upcoming Pentium D. Also, iTunes recently added Video support... You can download a music video along with a song purchase now. Perhaps the next step for iTunes is purchasing movies for download at home. Before they could pull that off, they'd have to convince the big studio execs that their films will be safe from pirates. Intel's Pentium D sounds like a good package deal for them. Not only do they get their performance/watts number down a bit from the Power PC offerings, but they get an extra layer of security for a next-gen iTunes offering.Technorati Tags: Apple, MacOSX
Jun. 6th, 2005 @ 08:18 pm
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| » TiVo and Mac OSX |
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I've finally hit a pretty big roadblock in my switch over to the Mac. I am having trouble getting a good set of tools to help me offload video from my TiVo. I've been back and forth on this since I bought the TiVo, where I'd go from constantly downloading video for archiving to not really thinking about it at all. Since I picked up the PSP, one of my goals has been to get a nice workflow going to grab episodes of shows that Nicole won't watch with me (X-Play, Smallville, and Deep Space 9) and take them along with me. Unfortunately, Dell has been delaying my order for a 1GB memory stick pro duo, so using the PSP as my mobile video player is still bottlenecked by the storage problem. I'd like to cancel my order from Dell and just grab it from Amazon (1 GB Memory Stick Pro Duo) for a few dollars more, but why bother if I can't get the tools in place to make it convenient on the Mac? This makes me a very sad man...
Here's what I've tried so far...
TiVo-mplayer Had pretty good success with this on the PC, though I had a lot of audio-sync problems. Given that it's at 1 version number greater than what I last tried on the PC, they may have fixed it (though I'm not too hopeful). In any case, I always had to correct an error in one of the .c files (variable declared in the middle of a function, rather than at the top of a scope) just to get it to compile on Windows. On the Mac, I gave up after correctly nearly a dozen compile errors. If anyone would like to provide a binary of this for Mac OSX 10.4.1, I'd sure like to give it a shot.
MPlayer / MPlayerOSX / ffmpegX Unfortunately, none of these incorporated the above changes to support TiVo's .ty files. So, they are mostly useless for my purposes. However, if I could get my hands on a TiVo-mplayer binary, ffmpegX would still function as a front-end for that command-line tool. (Update 6/9/2005) I discovered that the mencoder portion of the ffmegX binaries does include the demux code for ty files. I also discovered that, just like the last time I used mencoder on the PC to transcode, I still get major audio sync problems. I assume if I just demux the video and use another tool to remux it (with some manual adjustments to audio sync) it will work fine... But that's too much work. I'm spoiled by the easy TyTool for Windows. Unfortunately for me, he won't share the source for it so we can try to port it to OSX.
TyStudio These guys have built, what looks like, a fantastic tool. Unfortunately, it has never worked for me. They have an OSX version (requires X11 be installed) and it seems to function nicely once you get "dlcompat" installed. I couldn't get Fink or DarwinPorts to install dlcompat for me, so I ended up just checking it out of CVS and building from source. Seems the easiest way to get the libs in the right folder so that TyStudio can see them anyways. Once I got this tool running, I selected a local ".ty" file I had sitting around. Amazingly, this tool performs on Mac OSX exactly as it performed on the PC... That is to say, it got exactly halfway through indexing the .ty file before crashing heinously. I believe it might be because my .ty files came from a series 2 TiVo, because their website only has info about a series 1 server component.
From here, I'm kind of at a loss. I guess my options are: 1) forget about getting video on the PSP memory stick and just buy UMD movies to keep myself entertained, 2) use the PC for video extraction/editing since I already have a good toolset to use, 3) "get cracking" on porting the other PC tools over to the Mac.
Aside: Whenever I have to code up my own solution instead of waiting on someone else to provide me with one, I love using the phrase "get cracking." It comes from an email conversation a buddy of mine had at Ga Tech. He was using a system tray CD-player app, but he felt it was missing a feature or two. He emailed the author of the app to let him know what was missing, and the author gave him the succint reply: "Get cracking!" :)
Technorati Tags: Apple, MacOSX, TiVo
Jun. 6th, 2005 @ 09:11 am
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| » Multi-Head Display Unit |
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Erik pines for a second monitor at work... Well, gaze upon this with envy! Notice the specification document on the right side and the memory map of one of our devices taped to the left side! And that's UltraEdit for my code and Cygwin for my compile in the middle! Would the addition of a second monitor give you the kind of resolution I have on my device spec?!
Click on that picture to get a technical breakdown of all of the modular components of the multi-head display unit.
May. 26th, 2005 @ 07:18 pm
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| » 1-Wire on Mac OSX |
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On the very successful front, I have had some luck getting 1-Wire apps to build and run on Mac OSX. I tried for far too long to get rxtx working, so that I could run OneWireViewer. That still fails, but I think it's for an old reason. I had been having problems with rxtx on Win32 and Linux, but they are fixed in the CVS head revision... Unfortunately, I can't build the CVS head revision for the Mac yet.
Eventually, I gave up on rxtx/Java and turned to our 1-Wire Public Domain Kit. The ulinuxgnu build (which maybe should be renamed the "posix_serial" build), built and ran perfectly. Using a keyspan USB-to-serial adapter and a DS9097U serial-to-1-Wire adapter, I had 1-Wire connectivity! The only modification I had to make was to the ownet.h file, where it was defining certain data types based on platform (and this platform wasn't one of the ones it knew about).
I also got the libUSB build to compile, though it threw a lot of ugly warnings. I had to first ask the very cool Fink to "install libUSB." Unfortunately, I am without a USB-to-1-Wire adapter at home, so I was not able to test if it's actually going to work. :( But I have every confidence that it'll work or, if it doesn't, I'll get it working.
May. 26th, 2005 @ 08:44 am
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| » A slight retraction... |
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I have to make a correction to my previous post. I said that application developers get "easy" access to basically add Spotlight search capabilities "for free".
"Easy" and "for free" did not take into account the energy said developer would have to expend to learn Cocoa (Apple's version of Microsoft MFC). As odd as MFC was in terms of some of the design choices, at least it's back-end was in the very popular C++. Apple's code-behind is Objective-C.
My GUI development (which, btw, has always been terrible as I really have only an Engineer's eye) has moved beyond the Cocoa/MFC style, where I actually prefer to create my UI at runtime (changing it up as appropriate). I'm referring to Java Swing style or the newer Microsoft .NET visual designers. I use a visual designer to get a grasp of the initial layout, and then use code to manipulate the layout based on runtime properties. This could explain why my GUI's always look like crap. :)
If anyone knows of any good references on Cocoa (from a .NET/Java user's perspective), I'd appreciate it. Although there are wrapper interfaces available from .NET and Java, you still have to understand Cocoa before you can use these and you still have to use XCode/InterfaceBuilder to layout your GUI (and all of it's events/actions) ahead of time.
May. 26th, 2005 @ 08:26 am
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| » It barely took a week... |
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I'm a Mac zealot.
It didn't take long. It's funny thinking about how I'd refer to "those mac users" as being in a cult. Seriously... I would stress that the whole platform was based around a quasi-religious cult. Now I've learned that there is a such thing as a "rational cult". People are fanatical about it because it is good. I am in the cult...
( Read more... )
May. 25th, 2005 @ 06:24 pm
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