Month: August 2005

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Bzzzpeek

Bzzzpeek: Sounds of frogs, firetrucks, cuckoo clocks and donkeys as spoken by children from around the world, wrapped up in a nicely done international flag interface. Accepting contributions from children around the world.

This project focuses on the pronunciation and comparison of these sounds by presenting them side by side as each language expresses them differently.

Impossible to tell how much of the variance is due to culture and how much to individual differences in kids, but this is interesting to me in part because Miles had such a gas with it and in part because I’ve been working on a sort-of-similar project for about two years now (but in video, rather than Flash). Promise to have it done by this Christmas (famous last words).

Music: Erik Truffaz :: Minaret
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Remodel Status #3

Grout Making progress. Grouted the chicken wire a couple weekends ago. After taking so much care to protect tile from damage, almost painful to smear adhesive-laden mud all over the job. But a few hours sponging, swabbing, wiping and it came out nicely. Used the tile saw at a local shop (free!) to re-cut a few pieces of coving, then installed that last weekend and grouted it yesterday. The corners are a bitch (can’t believe they don’t make pre-fab corner coving pieces).

Today set out to install toilet and sink. The old toilet (excuse me, “closet”) was bolted to the floor through the sub-floor. New one didn’t have such holes, and is attached only to its own drainage flange. But surprise! Previous workers cut a big hole out of sub-floor around the drain, no place to screw down a new one. Ended up cutting a big donut out of 3/4″ ply with hole- and jig-saws. Screwed that in, which provided a platform for new flange. Worked out nicely, but knocked a big hole in the day.

Finally tracked down a source for chrome sink feed pipe covers (so you don’t see plain galvanized pipe when viewing from the side). Stupidly hard to find these, but they cut nicely and make a world of difference. Now if I could just find a source for ceramic toilet bolt covers; these are apparently officially extinct in favor of plastic. The modern world blows.

Assembled sink fixtures and prepared to install pedestal, when I discovered that the new sink has a 1 1/4″ drain, while we have a 1 1/2″ drain in the wall. Also needed more height for new drain assembly. And I’ll have to remove a hex from the floor to bolt down the pedestal, which meant I needed a grout saw. Fourth trip to hardware store.

The cable guy arrived (90 minutes late, we get a discount!), which meant it was time to drop everything and reprogram the Tivo. First night with cable learned how to change sprockets on a dirt bike to suit muddy conditions, watched the removal of immense face tumor from poor Malaysian boy, and was reminded of just what an ass Sean Hannity is. Sink will have to wait.

Music: Pink Fairies :: Chambermaid
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Going Cable

When we moved into this place two years ago and discovered we could get 10 channels via antenna, decided not to get cable. Tivo helped keep an OK menu of OK fare available, but the pickin’s have become increasingly slim. As much intellectual nourishment as we get out of Nova, American Dad, Spark, and Fire Me… Please!, I can never shake the feeling that I’m painfully out of touch not having access to the Daily Show and Bullshit! But it’s been hard to cost-justify standard cable at $43/month, especially when we’re paying $50/month for Speakeasy DSL with static IP (it’s kind of amazing to me how popular cable TV is, given the pricing; but then I suppose a lot of people would consider DSL access non-essential too).

Finally decided to rearrange things and switch to SBC for DSL at $15/month, go dynamic IP and use DynDNS for the limited inbound access I need. Not expecting the platinum service I get from Speakeasy, as long as the reliability is good. But we’ll be able to put the money saved into cable for a few extra bucks per month.

All I need now is for cable subscribers to let me know what’s worth watching.

Addendum: When I was on the phone with SBC, they asked whether we were on Macs or PCs. I told her Mac and she reacted with surprise, as if a customer had never said that before. She asked me why, and I gave her a short version of the usual security spiel. She then proceeded to tell me that her entire office at SBC had been sent home early the previous day, as they had been hit so hard by the latest round of Windows worms. Someday the light will go on for the sysadmins of the world.

Music: Charlie Parker :: Segment
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Shark-Eating Octopus

Keepers wondered why they kept finding shark carcasses on the aquarium floor, until one of them decided to stay up all night with a video camera. When they put sharks and octopi together in the tank, nobody guessed that a mere invertebrate could inhale sharks like nachos. Video at KQED/Nature (works in Firefox, not in Safari).

Music: Stump :: Buffalo
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Gas Prices Around the World

Quit complaining, Yankee. The Dutch are paying the equivalent of $6.48/gallon for petrol. On the other hand, Venezuelans are practically paid to haul it away — they pay a mere $0.12/gallon. Accounting for the disparity is government policy — from huge taxes to extreme subsidies. Wonder which country on the list comes closest to actual free-market prices.

Music: The Cranes :: Thursday
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Washington Needs More Cowbell

Christopher Walken is preparing to run in the 2008 presidential campaign.

“Our great country is in a terrible downward spiral. We’re outsourcing jobs, bankrupting social security, and losing lives at war. We need to focus on what’s important– paying attention to our children, our citizens, our future. We need to think about improving our failing educational system, making better use of our resources, and helping to promote a stable, safe, and tolerant global society. It’s time to be smart about our politics. It’s time to get America back on track.”

No argument from me there, and I do think Walken would likely be a better untrained politician than Schwarzennegger, but I still don’t want an untrained politican running the country. Even if he does bring us more cowbell. Which we sorely need.

Music: Dexter Gordon :: Second Balcony Jump
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Ministry of Reshelving

Culture jamming in bookstores: Avant Game has launched the Ministry of Reshelving project, which encourages people to visit bookstores and re-shelve incorrectly categorized books. Steps 3 & 4 in the reshelving guidelines:

3. Go to the bookstore and locate its copies of George Orwell’s 1984. Unless the Ministry of Reshelving has already visited this bookstore, it is probably currently incorrectly classified as “Fiction” or “Literature.”

4. Discreetly move all copies of 1984 to a more suitable section, such as “Current Events”, “Politics”, “History”, “True Crime”, or “New Non-Fiction.”

They also post a clarification on the site:

Note: this project is not a critique of bookstore culture, the state of the shelving industry, or even of pervasive government surveillance. It is merely an observation that 2 + 2 = 5, and 5 is no longer fiction.

Photos at Flickr.

Music: Zero 7 :: Spinning
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Three-Armed Clown

Miles suddenly became very curious about what I did at work all day.

“Do you have lots of toys at your work?”

“Well, not really, but I do have a good time. Most of the time.”

“Do you have a park at your work?”

“No, but we have some grass where we can sit and eat lunch.”

“Are there a lot of kids to play with at your work?”

“Ummm, depends what you mean by kids.”

“Daddy, do you have a funny clown at your work with three arms?”

“See son, it’s like this…”

Music: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band :: When Big Joan Sets Up
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Alternate SMTP Port

ISPs are clamping down on port 25, preventing users from using 3rd-party SMTP servers such as Birdhouse’s, even with authentication. Some have even gone as far as requiring outbound mail to belong to a domain the ISP knows it controls. All a well-intentioned — but naive — attempt to thwart spammers.

Unfortunately, the trend makes it difficult for Birdhouse to offer SMTP services to a lot of customers. At this point, I simply recommend up front that people use their ISP’s SMTP for outgoing mail.

Now add to this the hassle of using a laptop and traveling from place to place — I hear from some customers who are changing their SMTP servers several times a day. And I hate recommending webmail because I myself hate webmail with a passion.

Solution: Birdhouse needs to open an alternate SMTP port, which people could use from anywhere. cPanel makes this easy to do, but the question is, which port to use for the SMTP alternate? In the first few hours of experimentation, have already discovered that SBC/Yahoo! also blocks port 26, which is the cPanel recommendation. In fact, some ISPs may be preventing their customers from using all non-standard ports.

mneptok helped to clarify the question: Need to choose a port that’s common enough to not be considered non-standard, but that we also don’t need for anything else. If you’re using one of the big commercial providers for connectivity and have found surprising ports blocked, let me know!

I remember in the early-mid-90s, it was still possible to find wide-open public mail relays, and it wasn’t even considered a problem. Now it’s hard even to use closed private relays. Doing business in a world full of bad guys is a drag.

Music: T.Rex :: Chariots of Silk
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SeeSS

My friend Guy D2 just released a really nice Dashboard Widget for web developers — SeeSS gives you instant access to “all CSS1 & CSS2 (and some CSS3) properties with their values, examples, descriptions and other valuable info.”

After the initial “Wow!” factor of Dashboard wears off, you quickly start to separate the wheat from the chaff and pare down the collection. This is the kind of thing Dashboard was made for – useful info at your fingertips. I liked the distinction made between Dashboard and Spotlight made back at WWDC:

Spotlight – Find Stuff
Dashboard – Find Out Stuff

Though truth be known, 99% of my Dashboard use can be boiled down to punching F12 as I get out of the shower to see whether I can wear shorts to work.

Music: Bongos Ikwue :: Woman Made The Devil