Monthly Archives: October 2006

If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers…

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Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.

However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

B.O.O.K.

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Introducing the Basic Optical Organized Knowledge device, a revolutionary breakthrough in technology. It is completely wireless, requires no power supply nor external circuitry, and has a completely intuitive user interface. Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere, in any position. The interface can be maintained while moving or standing still.

The BOOK is constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper (completely recyclable!) each capable of holding many kilobits of data. The pages are locked together with a collation device known as a “binding” which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence. Opaque Paper Technology (OPT) allows manufacturers to use both sides of the sheet, which doubles the bit density per storage unit.

Any BOOK that requires more data content simply uses more pages. Each sheet is scanned optically by a bio-organic device (usually available in pairs for redundancy.) Information is registered directly on the user’s memory retention device. The rate and quality of memory retention is controlled by the user.

The BOOK implements a “browse” feature allows the user to move instantly to any page. Many BOOKs also come with an “index” feature, which pinpoints the exact location of any selected information for immediate retrieval.

An optional “BOOKmark” accessory allows the user to instantly restart a BOOK session at the exact place it was ended in a previous viewing, even if the BOOK has been closed or transported. BOOKmarks fit universal design standards; thus, a single BOOKmark can be used in BOOKs by various manufacturers. Conversely, numerous BOOK markers can be used in a single BOOK if the user wants to store numerous views at once. The number is limited only by the number of pages in the BOOK and availability of BOOKmark material. (Note that BOOKmark material is often open-source, and can be quickly created from many available materials. Using the material of the BOOK itself as raw material for a BOOKmark is frowned upon by many authorities.)

The BOOK never crashes or requires rebooting; indeed, it can be dropped multiple times on a hard surface without damage. However, contact with significant amounts of fluids may cause unrecoverable data corruption. This issue should be allowed for when contemplating long-term storage. Maintenance and short-term storage can be an issue as well. Aside from the previously-mentioned fluid damage, flammability has been noted on occasion. Due to differing sizes of BOOKs, certain users may find inappropriate secondary uses for the devices. The owner of the BOOK should take care to prevent this.

Modifications and annotations can sometimes be made near BOOK data entries with optional programming tools, such as the Portable Extensible Notation (PEN) and Portable Erasable Notation Composite Internal Lithotropy (PENCIL) devices. However, again, this activity is not appreciated by some authorities.

BOOK’s appeal seems so certain that thousands of content creators have committed to the platform and investors are reportedly flocking to invest. Look for many new versions soon.

Floyd Fights Back

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Professional bicycle racing is one of the very few sports I follow religiously. All my spare time in July is spent following the Tour de France. It’s only in the last few years that coverage has even been available on American television. But there’s much more to pro cycling than the Tour.

Cycling as a sport is suffering from a serious image problem because of all the doping. But they’re suffering even worse because of their response to the problem. They way they handles the various issues this year sure didn’t help.

Floyd Landis, the winner of the Tour de France this year, was accused of doping by the race authorities. He’s alleged to have far more testosterone in him than he’s allowed to. He claims he’s innocent and is mounting a defense.

Frankly, the offense he’s accused of doesn’t make much sense. The substance the lab detected isn’t a performance enhancer under those conditions. His samples before and after the problem sample were clean.

As part of his defense, he and his team [*] have created a Powerpoint presentation describing the problems with the testing procedures. All I can say is “wow.” I work in the medical lab business, and if one of our labs made even half this many mistakes and tried to pass it off as good work, they’d get their license pulled and we’d probably see someone doing a perp walk.

If he’s guilty, okay. Fine him, take back his title, disgrace him, kick him out of cycling. But it’s looking more and more like his only offense is being American, and a winner.

[*] By his team, I mean “his doctors and lawyers.” His racing team, Phonak, dumped him like a hot potato as soon as he was charged. They ought to be ashamed of themselves, and I’ll never buy a Phonak hearing aid until they apologize publicly to him and his fans. And yes, I’m a hearing aid user and I buy a new one every five years or so.

Gorgeous women and morons

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Sara Evans

I’m reminded of the old truism: “no matter how sexy and gorgeous a woman is, somewhere there’s a guy who’s tired of her.”

But I gotta tell you, I think this dude is an idiot. (This is a studio shot, later used for one of her album covers. Here’s a better candid; slightly risqué, possibly NSFW.)

By the way, the picture uses a new technique I’ve been experimenting with. Mouse over the thumbnail and the picture expands to full size. This uses pure CSS, not javascript.

Rabid Cory

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The new TiVo Series 3 is outPretty much ho-hum; it’s not selling all that well, and there are some significant bugs in it. Widely reported, widely ignored. But Cory Doctorow, boingboing‘s resident anti-DRM pit bull, ramps up the anti-DRM rhetoric to a new level:

The Macrovision DRM in the new TiVo Series3 recorders is so broken that just having the wrong piece of equipment attached to your TV can cause it to register some shows as un-savable to your VCR, DVD recorder, etc. TiVo characterizes this as a glitch, but that’s not the whole story.

It is a glitch, and they’re working to fix it. But wait, he foams some more:

It’s like those movies where an accident or a bad guy triggers the “self-destruct button” on a spaceship. Often the self-destruct button is locked away behind plexiglas and padlocks for safety, but wouldn’t it be safer not to include a single command that blows up the whole space-ship? […] Wouldn’t it be better if TiVo didn’t build in any technology that attacks its customers?

Well, yuh, it would be good. We get it…. “DRM is Evil.” But you want TiVo to ignore it? They’d be sued out of existence in about two minutes. Remember ReplayTV? The people who own the content want DRM. Blaming TiVo for that– and all the other faults of the MPAA and other industry groups– is just silly. Vote with your wallet– if you think the DRM outweighs the usefulness of TiVo, don’t buy it.

Cory, you write great fiction. Maybe you should stick to what you’re good at.

Firefox extensions

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I’m a huge fan of the Firefox web browser, at least in its current incarnation. (Whether that fandom follows the next major upgrade, which allegedly suffers from creeping featuritis, remains to be seen.) One of the most lovely features of Firefox is that it allows additional features to be easily added, through a mechanism called “extensions.” I have eighteen of them installed, many of which I wouldn’t want to surf without. Here’s a list and some commentary:

  • Adblock (and the associated auto-updated filter set, Adblock Filterset.G) This pair of treasures nukes 99.9% of the annoying ads on web pages.
  • BugMeNot – Accesses a shared database of usernames and passwords for stupid web sites that require you to log in to view their content.
  • Forecast Fox – Weather reports that appear in your status bar and are updated constantly. I have a love/hate relationship with this one. The concept is great, but it’s tied to a server that has absolutely awful weather forecasts for my area. (How bad? I live near San Diego. All summer it was predicting “morning showers” for my home town. That simply doesn’t happen here. We haven’t had a hundredth of an inch of rain since April.)
  • Mouse Gestures – If you’ve never used a program that has mouse gestures, you probably won’t understand how incredibly useful this feature is. Now I find myself trying to use them in programs that don’t support them.
  • PrefBar – Adds a menu bar that allows you to quickly turn on and off various browser functions (Java and Javascript on and off, create new tab, change font size, etc.) I don’t use this as much as I once did, but it’s still worth the screen real estate it takes.
  • MediaPlayerConnectivity – A simple but very useful idea: it allows you to download the content of any page that has embedded media.
  • DownThemAll! – A mass downloader that lets you download all the links or images in a page. Users love it, webmasters hate it. If you happen to run across an open directory that has a bunch of stuff you want, no more right click, save as, save, ok. DownThemAll! and it plays a little tunes when it’s finished leeching all the content.
  • QuickNote – Yellow sticky notes that live in your browser. Great for quick notes, keeping track of magic numbers and URLs, whatever you want.
  • Mozilla Calendar – Another love/hate relationship. If they ever finish it, it’ll be a killer app. In the meantime, it’s a semi-useful quirk.
  • Web Developer – I’m not sure why I have this installed at all. I never use it anymore.
  • VideoDownloader – It does exactly one thing: it lets you easily download videos from YouTube. If you ever want to do that, you need this. If you don’t, you don’t.
  • FeedView – Makes your RSS feeds look better. It’s kind of quicrky, and I suspect there are better extensions available that do the same thing. But this one does what I need, so why look for something better?
  • StumbleUpon Toolbar – What can I say about StumbleUpon? I love it, I just love it. Click the little icon, and a new web site appears. You can select what categories you want and every click delivers a new one.
  • Performancing – A blog editor. Again, kind of quirky, but it does what I need. I do wish they’d publish the source code so I could bend it to my will. But for all my griping, I’m using it to post this.
  • NoScript – Turns off Javascript for all sites not in your whitelist.
  • View Source Chart – Organizes the “View Source” function to make it readable. Ever want to figure out how a web site does something, but the source code is a big mess? This extension fixes that.

Job interview questions

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Here’s an interesting article on what questions you should ask when you’re interviewing for a job. There are a couple here I wish I’d asked before I started on my current gig:

  • If I want to buy something like a book or a tool, how does the process work (how hard is it?). What’s the cost limit before the approval must go up the management chain?
  • How many projects have succeeded/failed in the last five years? To what do you attribute the failures?

I’d also add a question about how raises and increases are determined.

How dumb can you get?

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Okay, the thief is a “transient” (pretty much the Union Tribune code word for “crackhead”) but still, how stupid can you get?

The pickup was stolen from Pacific Beach Drive in San Diego earlier in the day, El Cajon police Lt. Tim Henton said.

The truck’s owner called a cell phone he left in it and a man answered, saying he would sell the vehicle back to him for $600, police said.

The victim then contacted El Cajon police and a plan was made to meet with the thief later that evening.

I really wonder how the crackhead expected this to end well.