Month: December 2002

Best. Spoilers. Tag. Ever.

Damn Gossip,

I think that is the most elegant Spoilers markup I’ve ever seen. Are you going to add it to the clickable markup? (The links that are between the Title text input and the Main Entry text area.)

[Spoilers] Most places just set the font color to match the background color. Then you have to highilight the area to read the spoilers text. I like this solution much better. [/Spoilers]

3 Hours to Go

Soon I’ll be counting down the minutes until my vacation. The only reason I haven’t left already is that I’m waiting on a delivery from an outside design agency. I don’t really want to have to come in on Monday if I don’t have to – of course if I do, that’s 8 hours less PTO I have to burn…

Tick Tock.

Everything Old is New Again

Yesterday during our lunch-break, a few of my coworkers and I hit the local Toys R Us. (To do some X-Mas shopping – yeah, that’s it…) Anyway, I was poking around over in the videogame area when I came across an interesting kiosk. It had a GBA with a new peripheral installed: the Nintendo e-Reader.

Basically, you buy this reader, and you can use it to scan cards that have “Dot Code” printed along the side. Depending on the complexity of the Dot Code needed, an entire game, (or some text, or a picture or something,) can be encoded on anywhere from 1-5 cards. The technology reminds me of the punch-cards that used to be used to program computers.

I just thought it was interesting. (Even if there is a Pokemon tie-in…)

I don’t suppose someone knows of any prior art, do they?

CNET News.com –

[Quote] Patent creates IM wrinkle: “America Online quietly secures a patent that could shake up the competitive landscape for instant messaging software.” [Quote]

If AOL ever does decide to go after other IM networks, well – that would not be a good thing.

Would a Unix chat system, or (IRC even?) count as prior art?

Out Shopping…

my wife and I are out doing some christmas shopping – in the rain.
There is a new shopping center in Emeryville that we decided to check out. We just ducked into an Apple Store to get out of the rain for a bit. Just thought I’d hop on one of the iLamps and see if it had net access. It does. 🙂

(Yes, I am a geek, and a g-blog addict.)

I want one of these G4’s that are sitting next to the iMacs…

Anyway – back out into the weather we go!

Make it stop. Please, make it stop.

I finally figured out why I’ve been so edgy since lunch.

The HVAC system in my part of the building is acting up again.

It used to buzz or whine in the mornings for a couple of minutes and for much longer at night. I’ve literally been driven out of the office at 4:45 a couple of time because the niose was giving me a headache. Our facilities people finally figured out what the problem was, and fixed it. (well – “MacGyvered” it anyway…)

Right now its not whining, but it is clicking – sounds like a pc doing some heavy HD writing over in the corner. (I thought that’s what it was at first, untill I walked over and saw that the machines over there are all powered down.) I really noticed it about 30 min ago – it probably took a while for the noise to register as unusual – I bet it’s been clicking away since at least noon.

The noise is driving me batty – music doesn’t seem to mask it, and I don’t have any headphones here. 🙁

Who says developers don’t have a sense of humor?

I just read the FAQ for the current Phoenix release

Specifically – check out item 1:

[Quote]
1. What can I do to help?

We need all the distribution we can get. Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell your coworkers. If you’re a student, get it distributed at your college. Submit a story to Slashdot and other news sites about the release. Make some noise on your blog. Spread the word!
[Quote]

This entry takes care of that. What made me laugh were items 14 and 15:

[Quote]
14. I kept hearing that you were changing the name from Phoenix to something else. What happened?

That was just a giant publicity stunt. We’ve observed that in the past, the open-source community has instinctively favored David when big corporations complain of trademark infringement. We wanted to cash in on this sympathy by asking the community to send us money to fight the legal battle (obviously we’d really spend it on cool stuff), but with all the taxing issues and whatnot we decided to can the idea.

15. Uhhhh…really?

No, not really. This isn’t like an action flick where the evil madman reveals the intricacies of his plans to hostages and then leaves them alone with a bomb set to detonate in like 10 hours. When we’re ripping you off, we won’t explain how in the FAQ. The truth is that we’d already had this 0.5 released planned for awhile, so it was okay to release under the Phoenix name. But under no circumstances will any future release be called Phoenix.
[Quote]