Hi There

January 26, 2004 Daniel

You know what Triceratops ate? Ya think it grazed grass? Wrong. There was no grass. It hadn’t evolved yet.

New Hampshire Primary is tomorrow. I’ll hold out comments on that one.

This site has been blocked by my employer’s intranet. I don’t want to say why — I’m afraid that using the name of the category it’s grouped in will just cement its blocked status.

Traditionally, computer pointing hardware, such as the mouse, transmits packets with three bytes of data. When Microsoft introduced the wheel mouse, they kicked those packets up to four bytes. BUT … laptops have pointing devices built in. Some have touchpads, some have nubs — some have both. These built-in pointing devices do not include a wheel. So, they transmit packets composed of four bytes of data.

This isn’t a big deal, until you connect a pointing device that transmits four-byte packets to a PC that is set up for three-byte packets. In such a setup, the fourth byte of data is sometimes interpreted as the first byte of the next packet and — ding! — your pointer jumps.

I use a wheel mouse on my company laptop, and the sucker jumps all over the place. Microsoft has ackowledged this problem; They suggest a BIOS upgrade. I upgraded my BIOS. I disabled the built-in pointing devices. No beans. Isn’t somebody working on a solution to this problem?

Update

September 21, 2003 Daniel

I haven’t posted in a month. I started a post a few weeks ago, but decided to can it. It was about the RIAA’s amnesty letter … what a bunch of BS. In that killed post I was actually going to drop an f-bomb. It’s just totally ridiculous. Anyway …

The Bills are outstanding so far. Go Buffalo! The Dolphins are actually favored for the Sunday night game. It’s hard to believe, seeing as how the Bills wiped the floor with the Patriots and the Jaguars. But I’ll admit — it’s still too early in the season to tell who’s really good, whether teams have just played against stinkers, etc, etc. But I think the fact that the Bills have put up 30+ in both games says a lot. They also shut out New England and allowed 17 against Jacksonville … and that 17 should be 10 or even 3. Jacksonville’s last touchdown was against Buffalo’s second string defense, and their first touchdown came after Buffalo blew a fake punt (the only real complaint of the season). So … I’m looking for Buffalo to beat Miami 27 – 10.

What else … Summer 2003 is wrapping up and I’m still in Allegany. Dear Mr. Bush … I don’t need a tax cut – I need a job. You know, there might be something to the whole idea that the economy was good when Clinton was President because of things Reagan and Bush enacted, and the economy slowed because of things Clinton enacted … but there is a serious trend over the last century showing that when a Democrat is in office, things tend to be good. Demand side economics? Socio-economic debate, anyone?

Push

August 13, 2003 Daniel

Apparently there is a new variant of the Blaster worm that actually downloads Microsoft’s patch for the Windows vulnerability and then deletes itself when the machine it has infected reboots.

Can you say viral marketing? How about push technology? Anybody remember when the Next Big Thing in the browser wars was “push technology”? Microsoft had channels and Netscape was going to do up Netcaster. Microsoft’s channels sucked, Netscape never released Netcaster, and the whole thing died with a whimper. People already have push technology — it’s called TV. The whole reason we use the Internet is to avoid push technology.

Still, I can’t help but take a long, hard look at an Internet worm that downloads and installs a patch from Microsoft’s web site and then deletes itself on reboot. What if a Microsoft employee wrote this sucker with Bill Gates’ blessing? And even though it might be causing some unwanted Internet traffic, does it cause any damage? Is it providing a service?

And does anybody remember Darwin’s theory? Survival of the fittest. Maybe the best Internet worms will inherit the Earth. That reminds me. I’ve got to go see what Slashdot is saying about this.

The Latest

August 10, 2003 Daniel

I found the AC charger. Turns out I took a suitcase and a backpack to Buffalo. I put the charger in the backpack for the trip home, and never took it out. Dammit.

Spider-Man really just gets better and better every week. Even if MTV is only showing one new episode per week.

This game is good.

I downloaded and installed Mozilla. I’ve got 1.4 running, but I couldn’t get Firebird 0.6 to work on my system. It freezes on launch. Version 1.4? … It’s good, but all I hear is how quick it is … for me, IE is quicker. Hopefully when Firebird finally goes gold (probably as Mozilla 1.6) it will compete with IE’s speed on my machine.

Cell Charger

July 30, 2003 Daniel

Short update tonight. If you’ve been calling my cell phone and I haven’t answered, don’t take it personally. I lost my AC charger, and the phone’s been dead most of the time since I got back from Buffalo. I’m almost certain that I got the charger before I left my hotel room, but I cannot for the life of me find the damn thing.

MTV Shows

July 25, 2003 Daniel

Let me hit upon MTV‘s Spider-Man cartoon one more time.

It seems to be getting better. I originally said that it was very good, but maybe not excellent. Now … I think I can say that it’s excellent. Today I caught last week’s episodes (I missed them because I was busy in B-lo) and tonight’s new episodes. It’s hot shizzle. They’re showing episodes out of order, and I sort of assumed that would happen from the start. I think the plan was to put out some on-par episodes while people adjusted to/got their socks blown off by the technology, and then to cue up the really impressive episodes. I liked the Lizard episode from last week, but I thought tonight’s stuff was top notch. Maybe it was just the whole MJ thing … I don’t know; everything is awesome. There’s so much more depth than you’d find on a Saturday morning cartoon. Again people are getting killed, there is actual relationship exploration, things aren’t always simple … when they put out a DVD, I’m gonna snap it up.

Short Take: Have I mentioned Doggy Fizzle Televizzle before? Some of the skits are a little weak (like the Braided Bunch), but most of them are well worth watching, so all in all I’ve enjoyed every episode I’ve seen. It’s on Sundays, right before Who’s Got Game … There’s a guy on this show whose nickname is White Chocolate (He’s a white guy) … Once he’s off the show, can we all (and by we all, I mean Western Civilization) just pretend that he never existed?

Wedding and Water

July 25, 2003 Daniel

Brown’s wedding was a blast. I was in Buffalo for all or part of four days, and I had a blast the whole time. The wedding and reception were outstanding … I even enjoyed being an usher. Unfortunately I am behind on posting my pictures … it seems that almost all of them feature glaring red eye. My camera has a red eye removal feature, but usually most of the pictures turn out fine without it. Maybe it was the open bar … Hopefully I will post them sometime this weekend. Lewis has his wedding pics up, though. They turned out really well. Give ’em a peek.

This week at work was kind of abbreviated, which is nice in a way because I was kind of pooped after the wedding weekend. Monday we were looking out the office window at the unusual darkness, the horizontal rain, and the toppled trees. At 5:30 the power went out, but most of us have laptops that will run 3 or 4 hours per charge. When i drove home i got about a quarter mile up Chipmonk at 8 o’clock to find “Road Flooded” signs and a county worker telling drivers to wait an hour before proceeding any farther because there was a foot of water over the road. So I went to McDonalds and when I got back there was only about an inch of water.

Tuesday we were surprised to find that Coudersport, PA was still without electricity, that the Sheetz gast station was filled with people buying gasoline for their generators and food for their stomachs, and that there was more afternoon rain. That day the generator had to be turned off early, and the maintenance crew asked us to leave. So we left. I got to Chipmonk at about 7 and while it wasn’t as bad as the previous night, there was probably about 8 inches of water over the pavement. A guy in a pickup came down through the water, and he told me he thought I could make it, so I gave it a shot. I don’t know exactly how deep the water was, but the water line looked to be about a foot high on my car and I assume that some of that was probably due to splash. Water splashed up to my windows and onto the hood of my car. It was an interesting experience as I hoped my car wouldn’t stall. I suppose if it had I would have quite literally been “up a creek.”

Wednesday there was still no power in the town of Couderpsort, and the generator at our office conked out unexpectedly at about 2:30. For some reason our phones and LAN were also down, so there was an awful lot of work we just couldn’t do. We decided to leave and to also avoid Coudersport on Thursday. So my weekend started a little early. This was fine because I was still a little pooped all week after the wedding.

Today I slept in until 9:30. It rained again today, and it sounds like it is raining now. I expect it to rain tomorrow. I’m tempted to go into town just to see how deep the Allegany River is.

Spider-Man Cartoon

July 12, 2003 Daniel

Spider-Man on MTV was very good. I’m not sure it was excellent, but it was very good.

The voice acting was nearly flawless. The only complaint I had about that was an instance or two of what seemed like choppy editing, and that isn’t really the actors’ fault. Neil Patrick Harris is Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Lisa Loeb is Mary Jane Watson, and Ian Ziering (Beverly Hills, 90210) is Harry Osbourne. The show also has some pretty solid reoccurring characters (who didn’t show up in the first two episodes) and some nice choices for guest characters.

The animation? It’s cel-shaded, which means that even though it’s done entirely in computer graphics, it’s done in a way so that it looks like traditional animation. This effect has been around in video games (Jet Set Radio Future, Sly Cooper, Auto Modelista) for several years, but I believe the new Spider-Man cartoon is the first televison show ever to use it, and I don’t think there have been any films done with the technique. What Spider-Man delivers might not be as good as Finding Nemo or any of Pixar’s latest, but I like it better than any traditional animation. And it’s the best cartoon television series I’ve ever seen. The team behind the visuals is Mainframe, the same house that produced the ReBoot Saturday morning fare that was on ABC(?) a few years back. I enjoyed ReBoot while it was on because it was entirely CG, and that was different back then.

Of course, I like to nitpick. When Spider-Man’s costume rips it’s pretty obvious that the animators put a patch that looks like skin on top of the costume. Everyone’s clothes seem to be a little too tight, particularly those on the male characters. Everyone’s waists seem to be a little too small in relation to their chests – especially on Peter. However, I’ve felt for a long time that one of the biggest quality tests on any animation is whether characters’ feet stick on the floor when they walk, or if they slide because of timing errors. As far as I could tell, when characters walk in this show it is absolutely convincing. Animators may have gotten this to look right beacause when Spider-Man crawls on walls not only does it look believable, it looks unlike anything I’ve ever seen. At first I thought it looked too much like they tried to make him look like a spider … but the more I thought about it, the more I think that it looked exactly like it should have.

The stories so far have been less than perfect, but still better than any cartoon series or any superhero television series up to this point. Villains kill helpless humans, villains kill other villains … it’s grittier than I expected, and I welcome that. The depictions of fatal wounds aren’t particularly graphic, but you can clearly tell when a person is killed. In a show like the Spider-Man cartoon that was on Fox Saturday mornings, I’m sure that no characters ever died or at least were ever shown being killed.

The dialogue is about 100 years ahead of any Saturday morning fare, but I think it could still use some slight updating. Ever hear a joke like, “Jaromir Jagr just called – he wants his hair back”? In one episode, Peter Parker uses a variation of that joke. It’s better than the pedestrian stuff you hear on Saturday mornings, but that joke is at least five years old.

I do have to give the show a lot of credit. The characters are in college. They drink coffee out of cups that look like they came from Starbucks. They go to parties. They drink alcohol. It’s a good time.

Short Take 1: So I have multiple email addresses. I have one for friends and family, one for job applications and resume sites, and my yet-to-be-deactivated RIT address. My personal address is on Yahoo! Mail, which I feel is the best free email service available. It’s so great, I wish I could use a second Yahoo! address for my resumes and applications. I would do this, but you can only be logged into Yahoo! with one username per computer at any given time. Why is that? If I were to download and install Netscape 7 or Mozilla or both, I could be logged into Yahoo! with two or even three usernames at once. So if I can accomplish it with a little bit of work, why not just let me accomplish it with one browser? Hear that, Microsoft? I mean, if I can open multiple browser windows, why can’t I check two different Yahoo! email addresses at the same time?

Short Take 2: On the latest episode of MTV’s The Real World: Paris I noticed that the desktop on the chateau PC had an image from Digital Blasphemy. It’s a 3D desktop site. For a while I used one. The images are very high quality. You have to pay to get access to all of them, but a lot of good ones are available for free.

Clarification

July 7, 2003 Daniel

So the point of mentioning the fact that the power went out was because I cannot rule out the possibility that a power surge caused my hard drive to fail.

And you know how everyone who has ever owned a Compaq sooner or later refers to it as a Comcrap? Well although I am not ready to crucify Dell I would like to use a similar nickname for it, but Dell-crap just doesn’t roll off your tongue. Additionally, some minimal Google searching found Compaq Sucks, a site full of user comments bashing Compaq products. Even if you don’t click on any of the stories, the headlines are entertaining.

Hard Drive Problems

July 4, 2003 Daniel

Where do I start?

About a week ago, Wednesday June 25, I’m getting dressed for work and the power goes out. Then it comes back on about 5 seconds later. No big whup. So then Thursday night I’m using my computer when all of a sudden it starts running really slowly. I thought maybe my antivirus software had started a full system scan, but that’s scheduled to happen on Friday nights. Eventually everything just stopps. Mouse won’t move the pointer, nothing. I have to hold down the power button to shut down. It was late, so I went to bed.

The next day I boot up and everything works fine. I don’t think twice about the problems from the previous night. Later I use the system again and all of a sudden it starts working slowly, and completely stops about 5 seconds later. I hold down the power button to shut down, then restart, and the system basically tells me I have no hard drives. I reboot again, and this time it boots, but within a few minutes everything freezes again.

So I open up the case, unplug the hard drives, then plug them back in. I close everything up, it tells me I have no hard drives. I open the case again, look at everything, close it back up, turn it on, and it boots. A while later, it freezes. Now it boots sometimes, other times the BIOS tells me there are no hard drives, other times the booting Windows screen appears and then it restarts and tells me I have no hard drives. So I call Dell.

The guy tells me to unplug the hard drives and plug them back in. Instead of telling him I already tried that, I do as he says. What do you know. The system boots up. I thank the guy and hang up. Less than ten minutes later? It freezes again. I call Dell again, and tell them everything. The guy tells me how to do this hard drive diagnostic. The program tells me it can’t even run a diagnostic on the drive. The guy tells me I need a new hard drive. Unfortunately, the system is about 20 months old, and I’m no longer under warranty. I tell him I have a second drive I bought recently, so I’ll try that. I also mention that when I got the system, I had to have the hard drive replaced then. He seems to ignore that tidbit, and I end the conversation.

So I’ve got the second hard drive and my Windows installation CD, but there was data on that failed hard drive that I’d rather not lose. Since I got the Compaq during my Freshman year at RIT, I’ve lost data exactly one time. I lost about a week’s worth of stuff when the Dell’s first hard drive failed. This time I was dealing with about a month of stuff. It’s not like I don’t back stuff up … I have a ton of stuff on the Compaq that I copy to the Dell every time I format. But I don’t backup every day.

So before I worry about getting the Dell up and running, I throw the failed hard drive into the Compaq. I can access the data, but after varying amounts of time, the system always freezes. So I try putting the bad drive on the second IDE cable, separate from the main hard drive. Bingo. Now even if the drive fails, the system keeps running. This doesn’t really help the data situation, but it does improve convenience.

The problem was, I would try to copy data from the bad drive to the good drive, but it would always keep failing. And when it fails, it disappears from My Computer until I reboot. Once after I shut down I inspected both drives and I discovered that the failed drive was really warm to the touch. So my current theory is that the thing is overheating for some reason. How do I solve this problem? I don’t have any spare system fans lying around. What about some kind of water cooling system? Warning kids: don’t try this at home. I put cool water in a Ziploc bag, but not filled to capacity – I wanted the bag to spread out and cover as much surface area as possible. It seemed to work at first. I got about 70% of all my MP3s before it locked up, and the second time I restarted the Compaq everything worked for an hour and five minutes.

Since then I’ve thought I had everything twice. Tonight the bad drive twice in a row failed quickly even with a Ziploc of cool water sitting on it, so I got a second one, mixed some ice with the water in both bags, and put one above and one below the drive. I guess it helped. I again believe I have everything new copied off the bad drive.

I don’t mind formatting, and I got all my data back … but this really pisses me off. The failed drive was 60 GB and my current one is 40 GB. I didn’t fill the 60, but it was nice to know the space was there. I also had the second drive because Photoshop likes to have its scratch file on a separate disk from the Windows swap file. It seemed to actually run a little faster when I put it on the second hard drive. Now I’m without that luxury again.

Short Take 1: Has anyone seen commercials for the new Spider-Man cartoon on MTV? It looks pretty hot. It’s all computer graphics, but it’s all cel-shaded, so it looks more or less like a traditional cartoon. Neil Patrick Harris of Doogie Howser fame voices Peter Parker/Spider-Man. In the show, Peter is in college. I’m hoping that because it’s on MTV it will be more … serious than the Saturday morning fare. Maybe some actual chracter development, even some college-years angst? I think it premieres July 11, even though I couldn’t find anything about it on MTV.com.

Short Take 2: Does anyone actually use the crossfader in Winamp? I don’t like it. When I listen to MP3s I don’t want it to be like the radio. I want to hear songs in their entirety.