One of the best bits about being me: I have a unique name.
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iPhone clone window bookmarklet
August 29, 2008 – 6:58 pm
Mobile Safari’s multiple window interface is amazing, but it lacks the ability to explicitly open a link in a new window. Being a fan of tabbed browsing in desktop browsers, I find it irritating not to be able to leave the current window in place while I follow a link or two.
I don’t have a clever hack to force Safari to open a link in a new window, but I do have the next best thing: a javascript bookmarklet that opens the current page in a new window. This makes following a link in a new window possible, if a bit inelegant.
Jott is a mind boggling…
August 17, 2008 – 12:24 pm
Running zsh on the iPhone
August 10, 2008 – 12:44 pm
I jailbroke my iPhone 3G as soon as the iPhone Dev Team had posted their tool to do so, and ever since, I’ve been screwing about with the command line. There’s something deeply appealing to my inner nerd about having Unix on my phone, and recreational command line hacking is more fun for me than many of the games available for iPhone.
The one thing missing on my journey to mobile nerdvana was zsh, my favorite shell. Cydia had a zsh package available as soon as Pwnage Tool 2.0 came out, and I promptly installed it. Unfortunately, though I was able to run zsh from the command line, I couldn’t figure out how to set it as the default login shell.
Finally moblogging
July 22, 2008 – 4:54 pm
WordPress for iPhone is finally out, which gives me the opportunity to post random stuff from wherever I’m standing, assuming I’m standing within range of AT&T’s wireless system.
This is the kind of thing I’ve wanted for years, and though there have been ways to do this for some time now, they’ve all been too clunky, expensive, or both for me to stay interested in them too long.
I can even include pictures right from the phone, which might never get old:
Sweet ride
July 18, 2008 – 9:44 pm
It’s long been surmised by tuners and drift racing fanatics that stickers not only add to the aesthetic of your automobile, they can actually make your car go faster. If you extend this theory a bit further, you realize that lots of stickers will turn your Honda into a hypersonic missile of cool.
That’s the theory. In practice, it makes you look like a complete dufus. Case in point: Mr. G. Antonov, better known to his friends as “Jawls,” as it’s written on the driver’s side door. He’s obviously put this machine through its paces, though; this isn’t some prettied-up curb queen with a big stereo in it. Have a look at the Flickr set for all the stunning details.
I can respect that it’s a real Japanese Honda. This baby’s got right-hand drive. I only wish him the best of luck next time he visits a drive thru.
Crossposting to LiveJournal
July 18, 2008 – 6:13 pm
I’ve been slowly warming to LiveJournal, not because I love its interface or features, but because I have a number of friends over there I keep tabs on. I post infrequently enough to this blog, and coming up with more posts to put in a LJ seems far-fetched, at best.
To the rescue: the LiveJournal Crossposter, a WordPress plugin that automatically copies posts from my blog to my LJ as I make them. I was going to let it copy every post from here to LJ, but that went poorly; somewhere after the first hundred posts or so, the plugin tried to shove some malformed XML at LiveJournal, and its parser barfed with a delightful Perl error message.
As a result, I only managed to push posts from 2003, and not wanting a gap in there, I went through and deleted them all from LJ. By hand. This is why I’m using WordPress. I do stupid power-user stuff like this all too often.
With any luck, this should be my first post on LiveJournal. To those of you following my blank LJ already: hello, and I apologize if I just spammed your friends pages with a honking huge pile of old posts that are now deleted. With even more luck (and possibly a miracle or two), I’ll post things often enough to make it interesting for people.
Don’t orphan my art
June 3, 2008 – 11:50 am
My usual rants about copyright law involve unwarranted strengthening of copyright law to protect old works that ought to be public domain by now. This post, however, deals with the drastic weakening of copyright protections by the proposed Orphan Works Act of 2008 (H.R.5889). This piece of legislation would damage the livelihoods of living artists, amending the law to allow anyone to infringe on a visual work’s copyright after being unable to locate its author after a “reasonably diligent search.” In theory, this would allow works whose authors have died or otherwise dropped off the face of the earth to be used commercially, which could only be a good thing, right?
Not so much. The infringer would be allowed to determine what constitutes a “reasonably diligent search.” This goes far beyond fair use; the infringer would be free to commercially exploit the work for any purpose. The entire burden of proving copyright infringement of a so-called orphaned work would fall on the artist. Current copyright protections provide for injunctive relief, payment of attorney’s fees, limitations of damages in a countersuit, and a discovery process for determining infringement; none of these would apply to orphaned works. Even images that directly incorporate copyright and contact information would be easy prey for unscrupulous infringers who deliberately remove such information, because they could claim an orphaned works defense, making it nearly impossible for an artist to prove infringement.
Quieter pavement test section
May 16, 2008 – 1:26 am
There are three strips of 520 that have newer pavement on them, laid sometime last summer. They really do make a difference in tire hiss as you drive across them. Assuming traffic is moving in the morning, I get a couple minutes of blessed silence from the road as I drive across asphalt rubber (still the quietest after several months of use), the control section of regular asphalt (always the noisiest, but new enough not to create the roar of older asphalt from other parts of 520), and polymer-extended asphalt (almost as quiet as the asphalt rubber, and seeming to wear a bit better).
I had the geeky good fortune a few weeks ago to follow a department of transportation test car as it traveled eastbound during the morning commute. It had a frame attached to the right side, from which was suspended a pair of microphones that rode only a few short inches from the rear tire. One of the vehicle’s occupants was collecting data on a laptop in the back seat. All in all, it makes the wannabe scientist in me very happy to see things like this.
WTF global warming?
April 18, 2008 – 10:04 pm
Ah, spring in Seattle. The flowers are blooming. The trees are turning green. The birds are singing. The snow is accumulating.
Yes, snow. Last I checked the calendar, we’re in the latter half of April, and the magnolia in the front yard has a dusting of snow on its new blossoms. The drive home this evening was bizarre, with partial cloud cover and a spring shower in Redmond, complete overcast and please-don’t-strip-the-paint-from-my-car hail on the 520 bridge, and black clouds and a raging blizzard from the U District to Northgate.
Ironically enough, my commute began behind an enormous black SUV, upon which was a large bumper sticker that read, “Global warming is a ‘theory’ - backed up by presumptuous science, not facts.” Presumably, the fact that it’s snowing in Seattle in April is perfectly normal.