February 2006 Archives

One of the loveliest “under construction” messages I’ve seen. Echoes nicely with my furniture theme

USA is an amazing country. Here’s a shot from the photo essay from Time Magazine.

So one lifeguard to watch one person? That’s highly efficient. When I saw this picture, I thought of India and Latin America. Unemployment is a problem there so when you board, say, a bus, you often face three persons — one is collecting your cash to buy a ticket, the second is handing you a ticket, and the third one validates it. And everyone is happy.

When I was in a hotel a few months ago, it had a pretty big pool — say 20x7 meters or something. And it was pretty deep — say 1.65m in one end and about 2.5 in the other. And there were no swimlanes. And THERE WAS NO LIFEGUARD so you were completely on your own there. If you went alone swimming and something bad happened, you could have easily drowned with no one noticing until too late. (I’m not sure if there were any CCTV cameras and where would they have been hooked up to… even if there was one displaying stuff to the lady in reception, I’m not sure what she would have done if she saw someone in distress.)

I’m sure there’s a good reason for Google to have that lifeguard there. Probably some safety regulations that say “if you have a pool operated by a commercial entity, it must have a lifeguard” or something. But it just looks silly to me.

I let my PSP battery run dry. Not on purpose, but I just didn’t charge it for a while but still played with it. It wouldn’t boot without a charger. With charger, it first showed me some Japanese greeting when trying to exit the game that was automatically booted when turning the thing on, then showed a screen which said to me nicely in 15 languages that “settings have been corrupted” and then it ran the same sequence as when first initializing and booting the device.

I had to choose the timezone again. Interestingly, the clock was still accurate — could it be that it kept running with the last bits of remaining battery? Or could it be that it’s stored in some sort of NVRAM or even on Memory Stick? Hmm, now that I think of it, my mobile’s clock remains correct even when I remove and reinsert the battery — how does that go?

Anyway, all the savegames and files and other info were on non-volatile Memory Stick anyway, so no harm there. And the only info I really lost was the WiFi network configurations, which was a bit of the same, as I now must walk through them again and set the passwords and all that. But other than that, nothing irreversible happened with the battery reset.

Here’s a tip from a Japanese colleague. By default, individual entry filenames in Movable Type are generated based on the entry title which are “dirified” — non-ASCII characters are taken out. If the title only consists of them, say Japanese glyphs, the title becomes something like entry-x.html. Which is not very friendly.

Turns out you can configure the individual entry template to be generated from keywords which you can then use to indicate the content of the post in English. Here’s a blog post about this. I have no idea what it talks about, but there’s this critical line:

<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryKeywords$>.html

Just copypaste this into your “Individual Archive Entry” file path under Settings, Publishing (change first to Custom) and it works. Funny thing is that the Movable Type manual says nothing about how you can use MT tags in those filenames and only talks about a limited set of variables. But using the tags seems to work. Cool.

I went to a friend’s place after a party and he showed me something pretty cool he said he had coded up in 3 nights. A media center running on Linux and hooked up to a big badass TV and sound system.

The concept was really simple — something like Apple’s Front Row but done in a much more appealing way to a geek like me who wants to understand what’s actually going on. It starts with a simple directory listing. You select a file to act upon:

• if it’s a video, it gets played in fullscreen or Picture-in-Picture
• if it’s a picture, it’s shown
• if it’s music, it gets played

The cool part here was playing videos as Picture-in-Picture. I haven’t really seen this kind of thing in any other “Media Center” but I found it cool. You can toggle between fullscreen and PIP with a simple button on the remote.

For controlling, a simple Logitech Media Remote was used. The scrollwheel was really convenient for this kind of thing, and so were the other buttons. It maps to standard mouse and keyboard events in the host so coding something up for it is really straightforward.

It was running on Linux but was using Python, SDL and mplayer, so all standard components which should also work on other platforms. I’ll try to get my hands on that thing and get more info and maybe try it out and post it here.

World’s largest Windows error message | NetworkWorld.com Community. These are fun when they come on billboards, internet kiosks and all those places.

I’m developing a habit out of “finish the game almost up to last boss fight, then abandon it for a month, and then come back and finish the boss fight with cheats cuz you’re too lazy and impatient to do it properly”. Doom 3’s add-on pack Resurrection of Evil is the latest in the trend.

I just finished Prince Of Persia Warrior Within.

Well.. actually I almost finished it like 3 months ago. But there was one fight remaining which, it turns out now, was the final boss fight. I ditched it back then because it was just so insanely complex. But now, I wanted to get this over with, so I got an “unlimited life” trainer and went with it.

The final fight was indeed insanely complex — with normal life, I would have been killed like 10 times. But just one final fight is not that bad in cheating I completed the rest of the game before it fully on my own — I’m not sure if I glanced on some walkthroughs once or twice, but that was it.

I just spent the better part of my past two days constructing two new desks. These days, if you buy cheap furniture, it comes in a box containing a pieces which you’re supposed to assemble yourself. If you buy anything fancier, it either comes readymade or it makes sense to have pros build it (such as a kitchen), but for simple stuff like chairs and desks, I find assembling them myself and doing other types of home maintenance to be a very liberating and relaxing experience.

I have this thing about not getting along with home appliances that have ridiculous complex interfaces. It used to be only about the microwave. But now, I came across a real oven that I couldn’t use.

Ovens should be easy, yes? You put the thing to cook in it, set the power/temperature, and maybe timer, and you’re done with it? This is how it used to be in the old days. Now you also have settings like whether to cook only from top, from bottom, from both, or maybe grill? If it’s limited to this, sure enough, I can manage. But wait, there’s more! This is an actual cooker I had to stay with for a while.

It starts off innocently. Nobody can misread the power settings, right? Although it’s beyond me why you need five buttons here where a simple turn knob would have sufficed.

The EU recently voted in favour of having a services directive — but it’s a crippled one. The BBC website has a nice Q&A on it.

Here’s a strange picture I got one day from TypeKey when trying to log into a blog to comment.

The shot is in Russian, although there’s no Russian in the language list I guess they were experimenting with a new language and figured by my GeoIP that Estonia should get the Russian language. Which is nasty — Russian is not an official language in Estonia. Many large corporations do the same error of associating Estonia with Russia — an excellent way to turn off the more intelligent part of the region.

I recently needed to solve a similar problem — determining language by territory. Turns out that unicode.org offers a whole complete translation table for that. So you can feed it the GeoIP and get back what language you should use to talk to the user. You obviously cannot localize into all the languages, but you can localize to the bigger ones. And when no match is found, I guess just use English as fallback.

I don’t like “sorry, but” constructs one single bit. They sound very patronizing and are a sign of failure of copywriter and UI language. If your stuff doesn’t work, then just say so. Mitigating this could be as simple as removing the “but”. “We’re sorry. We can’t do this for you right now.” sounds much better to me than “We’re sorry, but…”. Obviously, even better would be if there was no error in the first place… but if there is, no matter what you message, the user is pissed anyway, so no need to further patronize with “but” — just say it’s broken and it will be fixed and then do as you say and fix it.

I just converted a large Blogger blog to MT. I’ve been keeping this Estonian one for quite a few years now and it had 400+ articles. Converting was a royal pain.

First it seemed to be easy. You could find this forum post that suggested a Blogger template to dump all the entries into a temporary index, import that back in to MT, and you’re done. Fair enough, and a test index dump with just a few entries seemed to work fine, after changing some linebreaks in the template, so I thought I was almost done. Right? Wrong. All the trouble started then.

Working at Skype and having your Skype Name all over the place gets you the weirdest contacts…

So there was this story I had about including remote files with caching and everything. And all is fine and dandy. I’m also using it in one of my Movable Type blogs whose templates and modules use PHP which gets invoked when user views the file, and I’m using the method I described to include some remote content on all pages.

Until you realize that to fully skin you blog, you also need to skin the dynamic/system page templates, such as comment preview. And you’re screwed, you think — because if CGI outputs PHP, it’s just blindly dumped to your browser.

I am PSPized now. Just got a PSP™(PlayStation Portable).

I wanted to get a portable console already for ages and was considering between Nintendo’s DS and GBA, and the PSP. I don’t think there are any other major ones out there? Nintendo had a cooler oldskool feel to it, but finally I went with PSP, because…

• several people I know have it and are happy — network effect at its finest
• it had GTA Liberty City which I was keen to see how it compares to the PC version
• it seems to be more high-end and more multipurpose

Initial impressions are good. Was easy to get started. I like the menu interface. Video quality rocks if you manage to find a place with sufficiently low ambient light. Builtin sound/speakers are crap, as are the bundled in-ear headphones — why rape the sound like this??? However, with proper headphones and the good video, the video and game quality rocks. I’d even imagine myself watching a movie with this — the trailer was good.

I can’t understand how to download stuff from yourpsp.com onto the device, such as new trailers? It launches a Java app and then tells me Memory Stick is not inserted — can I really do this only with a PC that has Memory Stick port? Or should the thing be connected with a USB cable? (Update: yes, if the PSP is connected over USB, it works fine.)

It adds horribly to my current travel case adapter/cable mess. I like to be on the move and carry everything with me I need to stay mobile — all the adapters and cables. Now I have FOUR power adapters (laptop, camera, mobile, PSP), plus two small-to-big-USB cables — I thought the small USB cable for my Olympus camera, having small USB on one end for camera, and big on the other end for computer, would be enough, but the small USB ports and connectors on PSP and camera are different and thus incompatible??? Where can I learn about different USB types? Ok I see… there’s Mini A and Mini B type… argh.

I don’t want to think of implications of PSP to contributing to further buildup of Sony’s media empire. Let’s see, I have currently in my hand from them…

• the console (PSP)
• the media (Memory Stick Duo, UMD)
• the content (Spiderman trailer from the demo UMD, and some music)

All of these reinforce each other. Will it soon be Sony all over? Or Apple? Or…? (Will Apple have a game console? It would make sense although I guess they’re a bit late by now.) And is UMD used in any other device? Apparently not. Wow it holds 1.8 gigs on size much smaller than a floppy and miniCD… quite impressive.

I had this idea the other day, just out of the blue. What if you could read your Skype chats as RSS feeds?

Short answer: with Chat Channels, you can now. If you just want to get the program, jump to the Installation part. The following blabber is about how I got there.

E-mail stuff just keeps coming at me. Here’s something I got. The addresses and headers look genuinely correct, so TB has gone a bit hyperactive here.

What is a J? A letter in the alphabet, yes, no, yes? Well sometimes it’s a bit more than that, or rather, something different.

Have you ever got emails like this and wondered what the HELL is that J?

I’ve been getting those for ages. And it became really annoying, so I thought let’s just figure it out. The truth, as often, is simpler than you’d expect.