Archive for March, 2007
Student Bloggers Carnival!
March 31st, 2007 • blog, carnival
This week I also made it into the Student Bloggers Carnival with my submission on the semantic web and education. It’s a young carnival and this was the first edition and I loved the post about what you can learn from John Chow.
This was actually only the second carnival I submitted to and I’m glad to have been included in it. I will probably be revisiting my topic on the semantic web’s impact on education once I start school again for my Master’s degree.
Feeds to the rescue!
March 30th, 2007 • web
Turns out they weren’t broken, which I actually knew, but Feedburner was not displaying my feed whatsoever. Turns out I’d forgotten about the Event Service being on and it was set to only show future items. Duh me.
Broken feeds, oh no!
March 30th, 2007 • 1 comment web
It seems that my feed is not properly updating for RSS2 but I’m not entirely sure as of why just yet. I know that the Atom feed and RSS .091 feeds are working without issue but RSS2 is proving to be a PITA.
Major Nelson gets his grubby paws on the new XBOX360 Elite
March 30th, 2007 • consoles, xbox
Rumours on this only came out weeks ago, Microsoft did a great job of keeping it mostly underwraps. Details were scant until last week when it was announced that the Elite would have HDMI, a 120GB hard drive (a much needed upgrade over the paltry 20GB included with the Premium), and be a svelte black color. I was wowed about this for about 10 minutes and went on back to my job because really, it’s nothing super. Honestly, it’s black and that’s about the greatest thing about it. Oh, and the upgraded hard drive which will also be available separately. Instead of adding things customers really want, MS took an easy way out and only added one NEW feature: HDMI. That’s great and all but not everyone has an HDTV and not everyone has an HDTV with HDMI support. Now, we’re given a new $400 console to replace the Premium that’s not really worth it…or is it?
Major Nelson got his new “shiny” black elite in the post today and decided to take pictures of it. All the press photos showed this thing as a giant shiny black monster of a console but instead, it’s more of a matte dark charcoal color. Aside from the hard drive, the only thing going for it was the fact that it was going to be a glossy black like the PS3. This turns out to obviously not be true but that won’t stop people from buying it. I was a bit excited about the idea of a new 360 because I expected it to have an HD-DVD drive and integrated wireless like most people did but no, we were all let down.
This new console will replace the existing Premium console in the coming months but it’ll be plain white instead.
Jersey wants you to drive, not text
March 29th, 2007 • 1 comment legal, phones
I know that a number of states already have laws in place about driving while talking on the phone and I for one am all for them. The laws in most states basically state that it is illegal to drive while talking to someone on the phone while holding it but if you’re using a wireless or wired headset, it’s OK because you are “less” distracted by physically holding the phone. I think these laws are fantastic because I know most people drive poorly but when you add a phone conversation into the mix, they drive about a million times worse (scientific fact!). The only problem with these laws? Enforcement. Most cops have a hard enough time catching speeders let alone people that are blabbing away on their phone about who knows what. And frankly, down here in Boca, getting a cop to catch anyone is a feat of wonderment.
I read the following article at TechDirt when I found out that Jersey is now trying to enact a law similar to Washington State’s no texting while driving law. This is yet another law I support that really doesn’t even need to be a law. I’m guilty of this as well considering how much easier it is for me to pop out a quick text message than it is for me to find my headset (which is always at home, mind you) and make a call. And I can usually be found making some slight swerves while doing this as well with my new phone simply because I’m not used to the keyboard. However, if you have a regular phone (non-Smartphone/-Treo/-Crackberry), this shouldn’t even be a problem. Using predicted text on a regular handset is quite simple and should not require one to take their eyes off the road. Amazingly, it seems most people can’t text to save their life so they have to look down at the phone to make sure they’re hitting H instead of typing a G. Here’s a hint: watch your kids/friends/friends’s kids/young person do it and you’ll pretty much see how easy it is to text without looking or paying attention to it.
It’s humourous to see laws put in place to save us from our own stupidity but it’s even more funny to see how they’re properly enforced.
Woo! I’m on the Skeptic’s Circle blog carnival
I submitted my article on Purity Balls to Martin from Aardvarcheology and he used it for the new edition of Skeptic’s Circle. Woo! I’ve been reading his blog for months now because he has a most interesting viewpoint on archeology from a Swedish standpoint. He likes to get visitor interaction as well and does a lot of visitor-centric posts on archeological subjects and tasks.
I’ve submitted a few other things to other various carnivals in the last week so hopefully, I’ll get posted on those too!
Surfraw isn’t browsing the ‘net without a condom
March 28th, 2007 • bash, linux, web
About a month ago, my friend livinded introduced me to an infinitely helpful program for using in Bash or any other Linux shell: surfraw. Surfraw is an excellent tool to search for just about anything on the internet straight from the comfort of your shell. Installing it from source is as easy as unpackaging the source, running `./configure && make && make install`. Installing from Debian or Ubuntu is even easier as you can merely type `sudo aptitude install surfraw` and you’re done. Once it’s installed, all that’s left is to run `surfraw-update-path` and you’re ready to use it after you start another shell session.
I find this tool incredibly helpful because I use bash…a lot. I normally have two shells open that I’m currently working with and it’s so nice to be able to type `rfc 821` and have the original SMTP RFC pop up in Firefox on one of my multiple viewports (or virtual desktops for you non-Linux folks). This lets me work unhindered on what I was doing without having to stop, switch to the other desktop, pull up www.rfc-editor.org and search for 821, then go back to whatever I was doing in shell on the *other* desktop. This way, the RFC is ready for me when I need to reference it and it’s on another viewport so it’s non-distracting and unhindering to what I’m currently doing.
As you can see from the SourceForge site, surfraw has a ton of sensible options already built-in (google, yahoo, rfc, ask jeeves, etc. etc.) and adding new ones is very simple if you feel comfortable adding some shell code. I’ve written a few scripts like this in the past that were very much application-specific so I may end up adding those functions into surfraw’s elvi (the author’s oddball name for sites to search) for future use.
If you find yourself switching between a terminal window and your browser very often to look something up, I highly advise downloading surfraw to more streamline your tasks.
Turns out it was just a button push away
March 28th, 2007 • chatter, web
So, my cable internet connection was down for nearly two days and I was relegated to using my connection at work which I don’t particularly like to do. This means I get to drone on at work about nothing ineteresting since I’m not digging through all of my RSS feeds for tidbits of interestingness. Anyway.
When the connection went down I did the normal Adelphia/Comcast troubleshooting shuffle: unplug modem, unplug router, wait 30 seconds to 5 minutes, plug up modem, plug up router, see what works. Well, I did that a few times and of course, nothing worked. Instead of calling those imbeciles at Comcast, I futzed about more, doing the same things over and over without results. Having worked in IT for over 9 years now, I felt pretty silly so I went to bed. Come the next morning, I scurred to do the troubleshooting dance again without change and decided to unplug it all and go to work. Fast forward to around 10PM that night (yesterday, 03/27) I start messing with it and miraculously everything works…sans router(s) in place which make me hesistant to even plug up a toaster to my modem. So I manage to restore both routers to defaults and still, no go. Turns out the modem was sending a Ping of Death to my routers for whatever reason. Also turns out there was an outage in my area that just happened to coincide with the time I originally noticed it going out and Comcast said it’d be “fixed by 8AM”. Right. That’s why it took 4 days to fix the same issue last year (ping of death, not an outage) because someone obviously cannot differentiate BRAVO and VICTOR in a MAC address. Anywho, after I hung up, I unplugged everything and went off in a huff.
Fast-fast forward till tonight when I got home from work. I decided to reset one router (again) to see the results. This time the reset worked, maybe I only thought I did it the other night. I was so looking forward to chewing out Comcast for bombing my modem with garbage data during the Adelpia->Comcast transistion but I was robbed of that.
Now that I’m done with my rant, anyone know of a good Google Calendar sync program for Windows Mobile 5? I’ve tried OggSync and frankly, it’s trash. Extremely clunky useless UI and atrocious colors. I’ve also tried GMobileSync which was OK but only synced one calendar of three and only sync three events out of about 70. It had an OK UI but lacked any real options or much of anything else. It’s basically dummy-proof. I also tried GCalSync but it failed to run on WM5 which I expected.
So now I’m on the hunt to get useful apps on my new T-Mobile Dash smartphone.
Homemade red lentil soup
March 28th, 2007 • Uncategorized
My coworker Kafel just made a huge batch of red lentil soup for us. It’s different from what I’m used to but it’s amazing tasting.
Later he’s making some rice for us too 
The beautiful Motion Computing medical tablet
March 27th, 2007 • computing, tablets
Approximately three years ago, at my former job, we got a fancy new toy: a Motion Computing tablet PC. It was the first tablet I’d ever seen and was arguably one of the first tablet-only tablets on the market. It was very lightweight, had a clean front bezel and human interface and I saw a lot of applications for it. Since I was at a University, the possibilities only boggled my mind because I knew we’d soon be ordering a million of them for all the teachers. Unfortunately that never happened and we only kept the one tablet for whatever reason which was soon relinquished back to the IT Department for re-deployment after the user got a fancy new IBM X60 tablet (which later was replaced by a monster Macbook Pro).
I was always envious of this tablet because of its sheer simplicity and value-add for the product itself. In foresight, I knew it’d hit vertical markets such as warehousing and inventorying with a swiftness, which it did. One thing I had always waited to see was its application in the medical field because frankly, it could easily replace stale old paper notes and information that stays with the doctor or the patient in their room. Now, Motion Computing has finally released their Medical tablet and it’s gorgeous looking. The ergonomics and form factor truly fit in with someone in a hospital having to lug it around whereas they used to cling between the breast and forearm and now they can just carry it like a shiny white tote. It looks like they’ve taken some of the ruggedness and durability from their industrial outings and put it to good use with the C5 Medical Tablet (see rubberized handle) and make excellent use of rounded corners to avoid any snagging on clothing or equipment.
I know I could never afford one of these things but I’d sure love to get my hands on one just to see how well they designed the UI for medical use.