Monthly Archive for September, 2005

links for 2005-09-28

Everybody Hates Chris

Somehow our TiVO missed the first episode, but thank­fully Google is host­ing it for us:

Inspired by his child­hood expe­ri­ences, come­dian Chris Rock nar­rates the hilar­i­ous, touch­ing story of a teenager grow­ing up as the eldest of three chil­dren in Brook­lyn, New York, during the early 1980’s. Uprooted to a new neigh­bor­hood and bused into a pre­dom­i­nantly white middle school two hours away by his strict, hard-​working par­ents, Chris (Tyler James Williams) strug­gles to find his place while keep­ing his sib­lings in line at home and sur­mount­ing the chal­lenges of junior high. This respon­si­ble resilient ado­les­cent brings a dis­tinct, funny spin to his every­day trials and trau­mas in UPN’s new single-​camera comedy EVERY­BODY HATES CHRIS. Thurs­days on UPN (8pm EST/PST).

links for 2005-09-21

iTrip LCD

I’ve had the iTrip LCD for a couple of weeks now, and I am very frus­trated with it. I’ve used the reg­u­lar iTrip for a couple of years, and it per­fomed about as well as can be expected from an FM transmitter.

How­ever, when I recently broke it, (the con­nec­tor some­how bent and detached, caus­ing some wires to dis­con­nect), I decided to buy a new one. When I saw the LCD ver­sion, I ordered this instead.

My setup in my car is exactly as it was with the orig­i­nal iTrip, (2000 Saab 9-3, 3rd-Gen iPod, with flat EQ and broad­cast to 88.7), but the result is simply maddening.

With the old iTrip, the iPod volume was set to about 90%, and caused very little dis­tor­tion. But, with the new iTrip LCD, the sound is heav­ily dis­torted at 90% volume, and the unit auto­mat­i­cally reduces the volume to about 50-60% for most music. This of course ampli­fies the static and back­ground noise. To make mat­ters worse, even then the music is still dis­torted. DX-​mode makes only a mar­ginal difference.

I hate to rain on the parade, but I had the old one, and it worked fine. I sub­mit­ted a help ticket to Grif­fin 12 hours ago, and have yet to receive a response… per­haps their ser­vice techs are busy draft­ing the product’s sup­port web site?

14 is My New Favorite Artist


Thanks Raymi.

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

It’s a pain to build web sites that behave prop­erly in Inter­net Explorer — and, if my IE7 beta any idi­ca­tion, it will con­tinue to be a pain.

But, Microsoft just released the Inter­net Explorer Devel­oper Tool­bar Beta.

Some of the many fea­tures are:

  • View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
  • Out­line tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
  • Val­i­date HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
  • Dis­play image dimen­sions, file sizes, path infor­ma­tion, and alter­nate (ALT) text.
  • Imme­di­ately resize the browser window to 800×600 or a custom size.
  • Dis­play a fully fea­tured design ruler to help accu­rately align objects on your pages.

But of course, I still love the Web Devel­oper Exten­sion for Fire­fox. It’s just that some­times you have to work with IE.

Google Secure Access client

Jeez, Google is branch­ing out in to all kinds of new businesses… the latest is a ven­ture to pro­vide the world with a secure WiFi con­nec­tion, espe­cially use­fule in public places.

Dubbed Google Secure Access, it pro­vides a free VPN con­nec­tion to Google. Some observers are already ques­tion­ing Google’s com­mit­ment to user pri­vacy, which gives pause — but, I for one, would love such a ser­vice. Too bad the down­load is avail­able only for WIndows.

Stef in Norway

I noticed that Stef some photos of her Euro­pean trip. I wonder if she’s back yet?

Norwegian flag on Ulriken

Norwegian flag on Ulriken, by Mystera
Preikestolen, just about at the top!

Preikestolen, just about at the top!, by Mystera

links for 2005-09-17

links for 2005-09-15

Office 12

Microsoft unveiled its new user inter­face for Office 12 ear­lier this week, and they seem to have departed rad­i­cally from past releases:

…we set about rethink­ing the UI from the user’s per­spec­tive, which is “results-oriented,” rather than from the developer’s per­spec­tive, which tends to be “feature-oriented” or “command-oriented”… instead of having to learn how to make some­thing shad­owed, or what the aspect ratio is or the per­cent gray, you just say, “Oh, I like that one,” and you pick it, you click it and get it in your doc­u­ment. It’s more visual.

outlook12 outlook12-2

Word, Excel, Pow­er­Point, and Access are due to get the face lift, but Out­look (the one Office appli­ca­tion that I use con­stantly, and which pisses me off the most), will remain largely the same, accord­ing to the press release.

(Although oddly enough, xBetas has a couple of screen shots of a sim­i­larly engi­neered Outlook.)

My ini­tial reac­tion is very wait-and-see… True, it looks like an aqua rip-​off, but con­sid­er­ing I use the suite every day on my work PC, any­thing new will peak my interest.

links for 2005-09-13

“Underground Man” update

Thanks to Mint, I noticed that a few vis­i­tors were referred here look­ing for the text of a New Yorker arti­cle writ­ted in Feb­ru­ary 2004 titled, Under­ground Man: Can the former C.I.A. agent who saved New York’s subway get the Tube back on track?. I had scanned the text a while back, but my direc­tory secu­rity set­tings on my server were tight­ened, and the scans were no longer available.

So, if you’re look­ing for the arti­cle, it’s is now prop­erly linked in the orginal post.

I still wish I had a way of extract­ing the text via OCR…

links for 2005-09-10

301 (Permanent redirect)

I’ve taken a second step toward fixing my Google index­ing prob­lem. On the advice of Casey, I mod­i­fied my .htac­cess file to rewrite all ned.suckahs.org URLs to nedward.org and send out 301s (Per­ma­nent redirects).

Now, when a user arrives here via a ned.suckahs.org URL, they’ll be trans­par­ently redi­rected to nedward.org and Google will see the 301 mes­sage. Hope­fully then, Google will get with the program.

Thanks Casey!