Mind the Gap!

Google Lab’s new tool, the Gapminder is the coolest thing I’ve played with in a while. It’s got a ton of demographic data from around the world, and allows you to make all sorts of interesting and informative graphs. You can even track the changes per time.

Here’s an example: This graph lets you see how Income, life-expectancy, and internet usage relate. Cool.

Ain’t that the truth

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

-Jamie Zawinski

Also see: Regular Expressions

How you know software is in beta

Upon closing Songbird I sometimes get this error:


sbPlaylistPlayback::stop() - WHOA. Playback core didn't actually stop when we asked it!
!!! ERROR: sbPlaylistPlayback _onPlayerLoop

To be fair, that’s much better than the “WTFOMGBBQ” exceptions my scripts throw occasionally…

Songbird, iTunes, and Ubuntu

I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows XP, and with most programs I use, sharing configurations is no problems. My Firefox profile is the same, my Thunderbird email saves to the same place, and even Gaim uses the same preferences. The biggest problem that I am facing right now? No iTunes on Linux.

Since I got an iPod for my birthday, I’ve been using iTunes pretty extensively. I’ve been creating complex playlists, and rating all of my music. I just rate songs as I listen to them, which is easy enough, but when you add it all up, it’s a big time investment. I’m willing to boot back into windows every so often to update my iPod, but I really want to have all my playlists and ratings available when I listen to music from linux.

The solution for me was to use a new music player called Songbird. It’s an easy enough install to begin with, and some folks over at the Ubuntu Forums have written a script that automates everything. (I didn’t use the script, but it seems to work well for others).

Then, follow these steps that I wrote out over at the Ubuntu forums. Hopefully this helps someone with a similar setup and a similar problem.

The Internet weighs fifty grams

A statistically rough ( one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each.. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~ 40 GW. Since silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, if the average chip runs at a Gigaherz , straightforward calculation reveals that some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet.

via Adamant

Nerd-off!

Janet has declared a nerd-off, and I feel compelled to participate. A small sampling of my science nerd cred:

Quick Post

Too much good stuff going on for me to not post some of it. So here’s a link dump:

GnuCash

I just set up GnuCash (a financial management package) and I’m fairly impressed. It’s simple to import the QIF files that my credit card and bank provide for download. This means that with just a couple of clicks, I can create reports showing exactly where my money came from and where it went.

The big things I learned? I should probably use cash a litle less, so I know where that money goes (I have a pretty good idea, though - food and beer). The other big one is that I need to stop eating out quite so often, which is nothing I didn’t know already.

I’d love to recommend the software to family and friends, but right now it’s Linux-only (and can be run on Macs, thanks to their UNIX core). The new version is GTK2, though, so hopefully a port will be coming soon.

Youtube videos and XHTML

Youtube gives you a nice little snippet of code that allows you to embed a movie in your own webpage. (As I did below, with the X3 trailer). Unfortunately, the code they provide doesn’t validate as XHTML compliant. Luckily, there’s a pretty easy fix.

The code they give you:

<object width=”425″ height=”350″>

<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OLTdN-BbOok”> </param>

<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OLTdN-BbOok” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425″ height=”350″> </embed> </object>

You sould modify this code to look like this, keeping all the URLs the same:

<object data=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OLTdN-BbOok” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” height=”350″ width=”425″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OLTdN-BbOok” /> </object>

Easy enough.

Gcal

Google Calendar is pretty nice. I had been running WebCalendar on the web server in my living room, but I think Gcal (as I’ve dubbed it) is good enough to replace it.

Email to RSS

I like the idea of groups like Freecycle, which work on the “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” principle. People post if they have unwanted stuff, and the first one to respond saying ‘I’ll take it’ walks off with a used whatever. I’ve gotten computer monitors and lawn chairs, among other things, for just the cost of driving
to someone’s place to pick them up.

The problem with Freecycle is that it’s run on a members-only yahoo groups account. This means that in order to stay on top of what’s being offered, I can either check the site many times per day (ain’t gonna happen), or get emailed after each post (inbox nightmare). I found myself wishing that I could make it work like Craigslist’s free section, which has a handy RSS feed.

Thanks to Mailbucket, I can turn individual emails into an RSS feed quite easily. All I had to do was set up a gmail account that subscribed to the Yahoo list emails. Then, I set it to forward all emails to asdf@mailbucket.org (where asdf is any name you choose). My emails then get parsed into a nice feed, available at http://www.mailbucket.org/asdf.xml. Sweet! Now, whenever I check my RSS reader (multiple times a day), I can quickly skim through what’s being offered on Freecycle.

For those of you unfamiliar with RSS, I can not tell you how much time using Bloglines has saved me. All the sites that I read regularly now have their content in one place, and I never have to check to see if there are new posts on those sites. In addtion, it makes skimming through and reading only the best stuff really easy. If you haven’t experienced the beauty of RSS, give something like Bloglines a try.

Del.icio.us

I’ve been light on posting lately, because other parts of my life take precedence over the blog. I still do lots of reading though, and often bookmark things I find interesting using Del.icio.us, which is a social bookmarking site. To see a few of the things that I’ve found interesting lately, you can view my del.icio.us links here.

Things that are tagged with “readlater” are things that I haven’t had a chance to look at, but that I thought looked interesting enough to read when I get more time down the road. Items that are tagged into categories are sites that were helpful or interesting enough that I wanted to save them long-term. Lots of these are sites that I may find useful in future web design projects.

Also feel free to peruse my blogroll on the side of the page. There are lots of good sites there that churn out content daily.

Dell Dimension Hard Drive Issues

People with Dell Dimensions (esp 3000 series) seem to occasionally have problems with slow hard drive performance. The most common symptom reported seems to be audio and video stuttering or skipping, as well as huge amounts of CPU usage when reading from disk.

The reason is that Windows XP is dropping your hard drive out of Ultra DMA mode (fast) into PIO mode (slow). The reasons for this have to do with failed access attempts (which may or may not be a sign of a drive going bad. But it’s nothing to worry about, because you run scandisk regularly and have all your data backed up, right? RIGHT?)

The easiest solution is to download a little utility from Dell’s site called PUSHDMA2. (search their site or google for it). A quick double click of this utility forces you back up into DMA mode, without a restart. There’s another solution that involves editing registry keys and rebooting, but its not worth elaborating on when the utility is much simpler.

This seems to be a fairly common, though infrequent problem, but it took me a while to dredge up the solution. Here’s hoping that this post hits google and helps some people out.

Google Pages

It looks like Google Pages has just launched, and I thought I’d post a quick review.

Update: Woooah. The whole site went down after about 10 minutes of me playing with it. I’m willing to bet that it wasn’t supposed to be released yet. Guess I got a sneak peak! Read on for details: Looks like the site was just bombarded with traffic and experiencing some growing pains.

Google Pages is a WYSIWYG web-page creator. The interface is fairly user friendly, though necessarily limited in scope. You can choose from a fairly large selection of page layouts and pre-created styles. You can also edit the HTML, but I haven’t found a way to modify the styesheet, so web-savvy users can forget doing anything too horribly creative. Still, I whipped up a basic bio page in about 5 minutes, including a picture and links to my CV and my other websites. You can see the results here.

The service is tied to your gmail account, and all the pages you create are hosted at <yourusername>.googlepages.com/. Their quota is 100 MB of disk space, which is more than enough for a few personal pages and a couple of photo galleries. Also, being hosted on google gives you the advantage of almost unlimited bandwidth.

My biggest peeve with the service is that the pages produced don’t validate correctly, though they came fairly close. They are using some nice XHTML and CSS, but there were lots of little errors, like divs being nested in places they shouldn’t and forgetting to self-close <img> and <br> tags.

All in all, the service wasn’t bad, but it isn’t anything I’d be using regularly. For someone who just needs a personal page, or a place to post a few pictures, it looks pretty nice, though. It’ll be a good complement to Blogger, in that it allows users to post content that doesn’t fit into blog format well.

Podbop

Podbop is an awesome site that just launched. Enter in your city, and get back a list of bands playing in the next week and MP3s to listen to. Discover a band you like, then go see them. Podbop even links each listing to show details and a page to buy tickets.

This is what the so-called “Web 2.0″ is all about. Taking data and bundling it together into an intuitive package that creates new connections. Cool stuff.

apt-gentoo

apt-gentoo enhances the Debian package installation experience to make it fully competitive with newly-popular source-based distributions. As packages are installed, apt-gentoo automatically downloads their build logs from the buildd network. The logs are then slowly scrolled past on the user’s terminal to simulate building the software on the local machine. apt-gentoo optionally, and by default, gives increased realism by spinning the CPU in a tight loop between build log lines, and writing large files to disk.

Link

DRM-free

Sign the pledge, make the message heard: I will pledge to never purchase a CD contaning any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM)

And more importantly, vote with your spending habits.

Myspace Hacker

For the uninitiated, Myspace is a social networking site. You create a profile with your info, quotes, pictures, etc, and then can also peruse other people’s profiles and leave them messages. It’s wildly popular among younger folks (though I haven’t yet succumbed to the pressure).

Another feature of the service is that you can add people as friends. It doesn’t mean much, but some people judge their own popularity by the number of friends they have. One guy decided that he wanted to be popular.

Really popular.

So, he created a javascript exploit that caused anyone who viewed his profile to automatically add him as a friend. As if that wasn’t cool enough, he used the same exploit to cause his code to be reproduced on those people’s own profiles. From there, it spread virally and exponentially.

It spread so fast, in fact, that within 20 hours of releasing the code, he had accumulated over one million friends.

Read his personal account here.

UPDATE: I succumbed to the pressure. Find me on Myspace here, if you’re so inclined.

Silly n00bs…

Amy: i just can’t seem to find how to get to one page
Amy: but that’s ok
Amy: i’m going to do it
Amy: i’ve got magic
Amy: I’m harry potter of the internet

Amy: I DID IT
Amy: I CAN’T BELIEVE IT
Amy: I JUST PUSHED CTRL AND CLICKED ON IT
Amy: OH MY GOD
Amy: THIS IS SO COOL

via Joel

Trusted Computing

A short film about trusted computing. Does a good job of communicating the problems with it to the general public.

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