Shining
A post-production house organized a competition where assistant editors ‘re-cut’ trailers for famous movies to try and make them seem like different movies . . . . this is the one that won: Shining (Quicktime file)
[via Defective Yeti]
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September 29, 2005
September 28, 2005
They done got hitched
My friend Steve was married this weekend to a lovely young lady named Liz. (That sentence sounds like I'm about to start a limerick, but I promise I'm not.) Sadly for me, I was very sick this weekend, and didn't make it to the festivities. Thanks to the Power Of The Internet, however, I can enjoy pictures from the joyous occasion.
Here are they are at the reception, doing the everyone-clinks-their-glasses-and-the-newlyweds-suck-face thing:
The rest of the photos are here: Our Wedding
Congratulations, Steve and Liz! I love you both.
September 22, 2005
New Ook
A new version of Ook, v2.2, is out. Some things that changed:
- Ook has a proper installer now.
- Updated documentation
- Fixed a bunch of bugs nobody but I noticed.
- The source distribution now includes the regression test suite (such as it is)
Enjoy.
September 20, 2005
Nate takes pictures of stuff
My friend Nate (who you may recall purchased a new camera during his last visit to Seattle) has been busy taking snaps all over the place since he returned to London. At least, he busy doing that when he's not otherwise engaged at work for 20 hours a day. Anyhow, his latest adventures resulted in a great set of photographs from Stonehenge.
Check out the rest of his pictures as well; Nate's got a good eye.
September 16, 2005
Pay no attention
I've been using Movable Type to manage my weblog for almost three years now. I recently upgraded to their latest version, 3.2, and I've been so impressed with the new release--particularly it's effectiveness at dealing with comment and trackback spam--that I finally got around to registering my copy. I also spent some time and converted the rest of Headblender.com to also be managed by MT, including the homepage and my about page. The upside is that all the layout is CSS-based now (no more ugly tables) and it's a lot easier for me to keep things updated.
Of course, I'm probably the only one who cares, but it took some work to pull it off so I'm mentioning it here. So there. Nyaah.
September 11, 2005
Introducing Ook
Since I posted my entry on Outlook's annoying IMAP behavior, I've gotten a few requests for copies of the program I wrote to automatically dismiss the bothersome error dialogs.
I was a little surprised that there were other people who find this behavior as frustrating as I do, but I suppose that's just more evidence as to the disservice Microsoft does to their customers by not fixing these obvious kinds of bugs. (I only wonder how many people have simply switched to another better IMAP client simply because of this issue.)
Anyhow, you wanted it, you got it. Introducing Ook: the Outlook dialOg Killer. It's a little .NET app that just sits around waiting for a dialog it likes and then gives it the ol' WM_CLOSE treatment. I spent some time cleaning up the app and the source code, and I decided to release both under the BSD license. I even put together some rudimentary documentation. Ook isn't the prettiest app or the best code I've ever written, but it gets the job done--for me, at least.
I hope some other people find it useful. I welcome any feedback you might have about it.
September 09, 2005
Spider Man
The thing about spider webs is that you never see them coming. But I’m getting ahead of myself; let me back up a bit.
My friends, by and large, are a pretty smart bunch. I’d like to think that this is because I am also smart, and so I have a natural tendency to self-select other smart people to socialize with. The truth is that an equally plausible explanation is that I’m actually very stupid and my friends keep me around because they can always beat me at Scrabble. (I suppose yet another explanation would be that we’re all together in this gang of ours because we are destined for collective greatness of some sort—like solving the world’s energy problems—but I think the Scrabble answer is much more likely.)
Okay. Maybe I’ve backed up a bit too far from the spider web thing. Skipping ahead…
My friend Ken doesn’t like to toot his own horn, as they say, but he’s pretty much the smartest person I’ve ever met. And I say this having met some pretty smart people so far: a couple of NASA astronauts, Bill Gates, these three guys from my high school trivia team who collectively know everything, Bruce Campbell, and the guy who invented those little dangly fastener things that keep you from driving off from the pump with your gas cap on your roof.
Well, okay, not the last guy. But still, I think I’m fairly well-placed to be able to point out smart people when I see them, and Ken is a smart guy. I’m not even slighting my friends when I say this—they agree with me! There are stories about him going back to high school detailing truly mind-boggling feats of sheer cleverness and sleep deprivation. Sure, you say, but a lot of those stories are apocryphal, right? Well, maybe so, but I guarantee you that the apocryphal stories aren’t nearly as impressive as the ones that are actually true.
But I digress! Spider webs, yes, yes.
Long story short (too late!): After toiling away for years in a musty Faraday cage working for Northup Grumman doing who-knows-what-and-if-you-do-know-they’ll-kill-you for the sorts of people who fly around in black helicopters, Ken came to his senses and has moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft. (Now, having recently quit my job at Microsoft, I could reasonably argue that this is less a sign of having come to his senses and more a symptom of finally having lost them completely. Nevertheless.)
The other day I get a phone call from Ken, which goes approximately like this:
“Hello?”
“Hey, Joe.”
“Hey Ken! What’s up?”
“I’m living in Seattle now. Want to get some dinner?”
“Sure!”
“Great. And could you bring your TiVo remote with you? I need to borrow it.”
“No problem.”
Some of you may be wondering at this point, “what’s with the TiVo remote?” Others of you may be wondering “yes, yes and what of the spider webs?” I’m going to ignore the latter group. Nobody who knows Ken is surprised in the least when he makes unusual requests, like “Can you bring your TiVo remote to dinner?” Or “Can I borrow a ball of silly putty and some wire mesh?” Or “Do you have a pencil?” Ken asking for ten square yards of wax paper and a tuning fork is rather like Emmett “Doc” Brown asking for some heavy-gauge cable and a clock tower: you don’t know exactly what he’s doing, but it probably involves time travel.
Where was I? Ah yes, spider webs. The thing about spider webs is you never see them coming. From the spider’s point of view, of course, this is the whole point of the spider web, although when you walk into a one there is an issue of massively disproportionate size involved. The spider has built his web so that he might catch things that weigh a few grams or so which he can eat for dinner. You, on the other hand, weigh many kilograms, and might, if you were so inclined, eat the spider for dinner instead. The net result of all of this is that you are left very cross about having walked into a web, and the spider is very cross at having captured what is, as far as he can tell, a small moon.
Okay, now I am cleaned up and on my way out of my apartment. Locking the door, TiVo remote in hand. Door is locked, double-check, yes, it’s locked. Turn around, take a couple steps towards the stairs, and ACK YEEECH OH WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?! I’ve just walked into a spider web.
Now, the spider’s problems at this point have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably be expected to get. My problems, however, have just begun.
Because you can’t see the web, in the first moments after colliding with one, your brain simply doesn’t know what to make of things. Something has attacked you but you cannot see it. Your first reaction is to try and get whatever it is off, so of course you begin to swat and flail about trying to do just that. Your brain takes this as a cue to go off and have a think about what’s just happened, and when the answer comes back: “Ah-ha! Spider web!” things get stupendously worse. Now, of course, you know there’s a very real possibility that you have a spider crawling around on you. So what does your body do? It freaks out.
So here I am, a few steps out of my apartment, my keys in one hand and my TiVo remote in the other, thrashing wildly about as if I am trying to audition for the Lord of the Dance while being electrocuted.
And now my neighbor comes bounding down the stairs. I’m only just peripherally aware of this, however, because my brain has chosen that precise moment to inform me “Spider web!” and so now I’m spinning madly around while, as far as he can tell, I am trying to remove my underpants by pulling very hard on my ears.
He stops at the bottom of the stairs, not moving because he’s both distracted by my flailing and also deathly afraid of getting caught up in whatever has transformed me into a whirling human maelstrom.
After a few frantic seconds, my brain sounds the all-clear, and I stop and catch my breath. It is at this point that I notice my neighbor.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I reply. And as if this helps explain anything at all, I mumble, “uh… spider web.”
“Yeah.” And he hurries of into his apartment.
Making my escape now as quickly as possible, I trot up the stairs waving one arm around in front of me so as to be able to detect any other lurking webs between me and my car.
There were none.
I met up with Ken for a nice dinner at Coho Café, and then we walked to the Monks to bother them for a while and eat ice cream and pet their cats.
September 07, 2005
Worst. Phishing email. Ever.
Got this in my inbox today:
I'm not sure which bothers me more, though: The fact that the spammer didn't bother to fill in the phishing email template, or that there is spamming software that provides a phishing email template.
Updated Katrina photos
Cryptome has some new Katrina images up:
The last few links went dead pretty quickly, so I've also mirrored the images here.
September 06, 2005
Beyond belief
Most of the articles about the hurricane Katrina disaster and it's aftermath have been relegated to the Disaster category on Crooked Links. But not this one.
I'm willing to concede that there were failures and missteps at every level of government during the run-up to and the rescue and recovery efforts after the hurricane, but this article, from the Salt Lake Tribune, made me furious:
Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA [via Josh Marshall]
Here's the gist of the piece (emphasis mine):
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers...
I simply cannot believe the gall and incompetence of an organization that wants to use firefighters as public relations mouthpieces during the recovery from a grave national disaster. This is beyond inexcusable; this is reprehensible. And it gets worse (again, emphasis mine):
On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.
Federal officials are unapologetic.
"I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country," said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.
Not only is FEMA depriving the rescue and recovery operations of trained, able, and willing rescuers, but they are depriving also the cities and towns that must do without those firefighters while they are handing out fliers. How can anyone suggest that the men and women who traveled to Atlanta to help need to "revisit [their] commitment to...the citizens of this country"? And even more:
But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.
This reveals a government that has nothing but seething contempt for the lives of those affected by this tragedy. There are members of this administration who have blood and suffering from Katrina on their hands, and they should be held accountable.
[Update:] More details from NBC. "Firefighters: We Were Misused In Katrina Rescue Efforts" [via]
An udder glow of happiness
This one is for Rach: "The goal is garbage in, writers out: Teachers who fail to correct bad student papers are shirkers"
"...'I believe in my second amendment that is the right to bare arms.'
A college student wrote that line, one of a couple dozen I pulled from a batch of student papers for use as a classroom exercise during my last year of full-time teaching.
The student who wrote that line was quite bright. She was funny, quick- witted and intellectually curious. She did not write well. It is possible she will write well in the future, but she made only small progress during her brief sojourn through my remedial English class."
So, Rach, go ahead and lift your red pen proudly! And never forget those four magical words: See Me After Class.
The hunter lies in wait for the rare North American dialog box
I've been reading "flow | state", a fascinating UI design weblog by ex-microsoftie Jan Miksovsky. His recent entry, "Situation normal, all fouled up" had me laughing, particularly because of this part:
People who use Outlook outside of an enterprise struggle along with support for POP mail that hasn't improved appreciably in years. While POP isn’t great, at least Outlook's POP driver is reasonably solid. Outlook's IMAP driver, on the other hand, appears to have been left for dead in the jungle, where it was raised by apes.
I (grudgingly) use Outlook's IMAP support for basically all of my email needs, and the lack of fit-and-finish there is terrible, bordering on the ridiculous. For example, as Jan notes:
Among its many deficiencies, the driver can’t properly cope if you use two different machines (say, at home and at the office) to check your email. This scenario is one of the reasons for IMAP’s existence, and most IMAP clients handle this situation gracefully: if they see another client is checking the mailbox, they wait for a while then try again. If you try to use Outlook this way, however, the IMAP driver throws up the following error:
Your IMAP server has closed the connection. This may occur if you have left the connection idle for too long.
This is such an incredibly stupid behavior that I have actually written a program that does nothing but wait for this dialog to appear and then dismisses it. (It works for Outlook 2003, and if anyone would like a copy just let me know.)
And to add insult to injury, the IMAP support in Windows CE has the exact same behavior! I have my smartphone setup to check my IMAP email as well, although at much less frequent intervals than Outlook. If the two devices (my phone and my desktop) happen to check for mail at the same time, the smartphone displays an error as well!
My friend Melinda is a tester in the Office organization, and I told her that if there was a position open for someone to test (or heck, to develop) the IMAP driver in Outlook, I might just consider applying for it. I was only half joking.
[Update:] I've made my Outlook dialog-killing app available for download.
September 04, 2005
The big, ugly, fascinating banana slug
Ah, the banana slug. Probably Ariolimax columbianus. These suckers get big. And I mean big. Like up to six inches long. And they are pretty damn ugly.
Katrina and NOLA photos
The photo links from Cryptome are all dead now; I'm guessing the bandwidth demand forced them offline.
Here's another few batches of pictures, from The Interdictor:
I'll post more as I can find them.
September 02, 2005
More on Katrina
From Jef:
"If the people stranded in New Orleans had been rich and white, it would not have taken our government so long to get relief to them. As it is, however, it took five days, and I wonder how many people died because our government dragged its feet."
From Mom:
"One of the best things our governments, local, state and federal, can do is get rid of all the power-hungry, narrow-minded, self-centered egotistical pompous asses who dictatorially wield their power in their own little disaster relief fiefdoms and who continually resist attempts to combine forces and share information, personnel, and materials to develop an all-encompassing relief plan that works."
I've been posting a lot of Katrina-related links as well, and I think they're worth checking out.
[Update:] Fixed incorrect link.
On having moved on from Microsoft
Dare sums it up pretty well in his entry, "On Moving On From Microsoft in 5 Years ":
...I don't think the Microsoft culture and the direction from its executive leadership lends itself to building great consumer-centric software... Of course, it's not only customers that get the short end of the stick. Employees also have the consequences of this kind of thinking to deal with as well. The primary way this manifests itself is integrated innovation, a buzzword that translates to more dependencies among shipping products, less control of one's product destiny and longer ship cycles. A lot of the frustration you see in the comments in places like the Mini-Microsoft blog are a direct consequence of this focus by our executive leadership."
I don't miss Microsoft. A few years ago I never thought I'd say something like that, and it makes me a little sad.
Heartbreaking
"...I'm back in Baton Rouge, this time with all of my team. Sadly, we've had to pull out of New Orleans for now because things have gotten too dangerous...Swinging an axe and breaking into an attic to see if there's anyone there to save and finding a dead family of four instead will bring tears to even the most stoic of people." [via BoingBoing]