garmana::blog

O'Reilly Labs Code Search

O'Reilly has made "O'Reilly Labs Code Search" available to the public.

This looks like it will be a great technical resource for programmers and Web developers, whether you are a fan of the O'Reilly books or not. This site is a search index of all of the coding examples in the O'Reilly library. I came across the link a few hours ago and have already used it twice.

To search on an example for a specific language, just search for "cat:whateverlanguage yourquestion." For example, if you want to search on examples for using a browser session in PHP, enter:

cat:php session

If you're interested, be sure to check out the other query formats for searches based on year published, author, ISBN, and chapter number.

You know you've been working on t

... you're proofreading a research paper, and when you read through your scribblings to type the changes you find a mix of traditional edit marks and HTML. Okay, about 50% HTML.

My section headings have <b> scrawled next to them in red ink to indicate they should be bold, and I circled a handful of phrases and marked them with an <em> for italics (no <i> tags here, no Sir!).

Dual core goodness

It was a little painful parting with this much cash, but I used my freelance money to get a new laptop:



Is this thing ever sweet! It's the best overall performing machine I've ever used, and I have only good things to say about it so far. It's great to be untethered from the office (especially considering it's half a jungle). Doug found an amazing deal and so the final price ended up being almost exactly 50% retail. Here's a rundown on the specs:

• 1.83 GHz Dual Core processer


• 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM


• 15.4 inch UltraSharp widescreen LCD


• 2256 MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON

  Posted by Mark at 08:18 pm on Sund under tech & IT

Office 2003 sucks

I upgraded to Office 2003 recently and it's literally brought my laptop to its knees. Simple tasks like opening my calendar in Outlook and opening an Excel file take 2-3 minutes sometimes, and switching between Office applications locks up my machine for almost one minute every time. Some of the features are really cool, but it's noticeably lowered my productivity.

My laptop is pretty robust: the chip is only 1.2 GHz but I have 1 GB of RAM. I checked out the system requirements for XP Pro and Office 2003, and both require 233 MHz with 128 MB of RAM. Only 300 MHz is recommended for XP. I'm way over that; I feel for anyone out there that is running this configuration on an older computer (of course, owners of those computers probably don't have Office 2003).

On the plus side, maybe this will give me an excuse to get that G-ed out, Alienware command center in a box I've always wanted. ;-)

I need a research topic

I need a research topic for my Artificial Intelligence class this semester. I'm absolutely stumped on what to research.

We've covered game playing almost the entire semester so far (this is my professor's field of research). I'm a little sick of that and would like to do something else, but nothing is floating my boat right now. I'd like something related to the Web or business, or even a fun diversion to motivate me through the end of the semester.

Any ideas? Off the wall suggestions are encouraged.

What jumped out of your cake?

You know you work in IT when you overhear the following on the escalator:

"Your wedding is in like a month. Unbelievable! What are you doing for your bachelor party?"

"I'm having a LAN party at my house."

"What? A LAN party??? You're not getting drunk or going to a strip club or anything?"

Of course, ribbing and hem hawing has to occur in a group of men at this point. It did occur, but not in the way you'd expect.

"Dude, lighten up. I had a LAN party for my bachelor party."

"I wanted to, but my best man wouldn't let me."

"What??? Why can't you at least get drunk like normal people?"

"Oh, we had beer. Trust me. Battlefield 1942 is soooo much better wasted. Talk about dog fights!"

And the entire space filled with gregarious laughter.

A useful idea?

I have an unfortunate, notorious habit of coming up with a marketable idea 90 days after someone else. A keychain WiFi detector? Done. Using a digital camera for side and rear view mirrors? Done.

This morning Jessica was driving back from Chicago and got turned around trying to find the interstate. She called and I was using Google Maps to help her get back on track. She asked me how far it was from her current location to the next major street. I looked down at the legend and looked at the bar listing an inch as 500 ft. I furrowed my brow: she was seven or eight lengths away, how exactly would that translate into distance and time?

That's not an impossible calculation of course, but how cool would it be if you could trace along a route with your mouse and get the distance in real time? Very cool, in my humble opinion. I found Google's feedback form and sent my idea below. I'm planting my flag in that one. ;-)

Email submitted:



These already exist in the physical world, and so I'm likely not the first one to think of this either. But, maybe I'm the first one to suggest it to Google. Now, if only I could find someone willing to market that Web site that tracks the history of used cars. Oops, wait...

It's Fall, so...

It's time for a bad Autumn geek joke:

Q: What do you get when you divide a Jack o' Lantern's circumference by its diameter?

A: Pumpkin Pi.


I'm not sure that one even qualifies for Laffy Taffy (I apologize).

Attack of the fifty-foot script k

My site was hacked for the first time recently. Someone used my site as a launching pad to send spam to be exact.

I received some odd emails last week auto-generated from the site with bogus "from" and "to" values in the message headers, and they all contained bergkoch8@aol.com as a bcc recipient. The message bodies themselves were just a short string of gibberish. Hmm...

I did some searching on that AOL email address and found that it is commonly used in spamming attempts. The spammer tries to hack your site's email form by adding extraneous email header values into the fields on the form, and then waits for an email to be delivered to that bcc address. If the email is delivered, the spammer can inspect the results to get information about your code and security, and adjust the bogus code accordingly. After it's tweaked enough the spammer can use your web form to send spam to any recipient he or she wants, and the owner of the web site is none the wiser.

Except I received the emails because I forward all undeliverable messages in my domain to an admin email account. It was my fault; I had an unplugged security hole in my contact form that was easily exploitable by any Mountain Dew guzzling fourteen year old without a social life. Time to do some patchwork with something other than my finger in the dam.

If this happens to you, the easiest line of defense is to replace any and all carriage returns in your form fields with empty strings. This breaks the email header format and the message cannot be delivered. This document provides some details on how the attack works and how to prevent it.

Not that I'm offering an invitation to prove me wrong, but this should take care of this problem at least. Of course this sucks; I hope there weren't too many people that received spam messages originated from my site. On the flip side, this is a bit like a graduation. Someone I don't know at least found the site. ;-)

Who's lurking about?

I came across this on the QuickBits section of simplebits.com: a cool new service called gVisit. The short, non-techy version: this free service shows markers on a Google Map indicating from where people are viewing your Web site.

The longer, geeky version: they map your IP to the geographical location allocated for that address and use Google Map's API to plot the points on the map. All I need to do is add a single line of Javascript to the page passing along my ID, and voila! If you're on a layover in Gnome, Alaska and pop in for a gander, I'll gnow about it. If you're on the coast of the Mediterranean, we'll sea you. The basic service is free which shows the last 20 locations of users hitting your site, and they accept PayPal donations. If you add it to your site do send them a few bucks; this is a creative use of Google's API.

In the 24 hours that I've had this on the site I've had visits from four countries on two continents, only two being close to home.

I've added a permanent link below in my footer. You can also see the visitors to the site here.

Guess who's back? Back again??

Okay, I didn't really leave this time, but my Internet connection is finally back up in my house. No more living on bread and water (aka the ISU computer lab after class). My connection had been down for a solid two weeks, and down at least 50% of the time for a few weeks before that. The re-addiction ramp up may now ensue.

It turns out that the connections in the box in my yard were corroded, and the congestion has gotten higher than capacity for the hub in my neighborhood (good for the cable company, bad for the customers). One bonus: they're coming back on the 6th to upgrade the equipment in my neighborhood and boosting the bandwith available. Higher speeds for everyone!

Unanswered emails will soon be replied to. Unread RSS feeds will soon be examined. And, I'll sprinkle in some homework too, most likely. But... it's almost the weekend.

Please stand by...

...we are experiencing technical difficulties.

My Internet service went kaput on Friday afternoon, and it's still not restored as of Monday afternoon. I'm getting some sort of connectivity to the ISP and my account is alive and well, and so we're all pretty confused. Hopefully soon it will be back up and running.

This taught me how dependent I am on the Net. My frustration over the weekend at not being able to read email or check the weather forecast was a little frightening. I'm sure it stems from the same primeval part of the brain that makes people scream, "Hurry uuuuuuup!" at the microwave like Sam Kinnison on a caffeine high.

I also have a few freelance items I was wrapping up, and this is the least fun aspect of this experience. I had some solid work time over the weekend and lost the opportunity to check some things off my list. A Web Guy with no Web does not a positive impresion make.

Adding quick searches in Firefox

Have you ever used a quick search in Firefox? The most popular one is probably the "dict" quick search to find the definition of a word. To do that, just type "dict x" in the address bar, where "x" is the word you want to look up. By default, Firefox has others built in for google searches (google x) and stock quotes (symbol x).

Looking in my bookmarks manager I found these listed, and I wondered if I could build my own. I thought of three that I could use that Google has built into their search engine: books, the calculator, and local movie showtimes. I'm also often looking for the WHOIS ownership information for Web site domains (I'm nosy), and so I thought I could build in a shortcut for that also.

It's worked very easily and it's quite handy. I can just type "showtimes batman begins" and it gives me Google search results with the showtimes for the movie listed at the top:



To do this in Firefox:

1. Click on Bookmarks - Manage Bookmarks
2. Click on Create a New Bookmark
3. Give it a memorable name in the Name field in case you want to go back to it later
4. In the Location field, type in the URL needed with "%s" in place of your query variable (watch for the examples below)
5. In the Keyword field, type in the word that you want to designate for that particular quick search (again, check out the examples below)

For the movie showtimes I used the following values:

• Name: Bloomington/Normal showtimes
• Location: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
• Keyword: showtimes

In case you're interested, here are the keywords and locations I used for my other quick searches. Find your own uses, and do it to it!

• math http://www.google.com/search?q=%s (i.e. math 5+2)
• book http://www.google.com/search?q=%s (i.e. book ralph s mouse)
• whois http://www.whois.sc/%s (i.e. whois garmana.com)

Behold the Tandy 5000 MC!

Many of us are familiar with Moore's Law: the predication that computer speed and capacity roughly double every 12-18 months while the cost is cut in half for each benchmark. I remember a few years ago when chips seemed to jump through the roof; 1.8GHz suddenly became 3GHz and so on, and desktops were coming with 1GB of RAM, and the cost was hovering around $1500 for a solid system (sans gamers).

I remember coming back from Christmas 1994 freshman year of college, and Ryan across the hall had gotten a 100MHz Pentium as a gift from his parents. He had Doom on his machine and piped it into his surround sound sytsem, and it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Now of course, top shelf PDAs can crank at almost double that speed on a rechargeable battery.

Cleaning out some of my image folders on my desktop, I came across this little gem:



I don't remember where I got the ad, but it's a scan from a newspaper for a Tandy 5000 MC desktop from 1989. It boasts a 20 MHz processor with a whopping 2MB of RAM (expandable to 16MB!), VGA graphics, and... get ready... cache memory! And all for the bargain price of $8499. That's a little over $13,000 in today's money.

My, how times have changed. Of course, I'm sure today's toddlers will wonder how we ever got by on 3.5GHz machines and 1GB flash drives when they're heading off to college. I mean, how did we store and watch our class lecture holographic playbacks???

Mark vs. the Pepsi machine

I achieved (self proclaimed) Office MacGyver status this morning.

The Pepsi machine on my floor at work is notorious for getting quarters stuck in the coin slot. You have to launch them into the coin slot at 100 mph at a slight upward angle or they will get stuck every time on a little shelf just inside and below the slot, and this morning I fell victim.

My first quarter got stuck, and I don't know what I was thinking because I tried inserting the second one a little faster. It must have been my lack of caffeineted blood. Now I had two stuck. My desk key is thin enough to fit into the slot, and so I manuvered the second quarter around until it slid down into the machine. Half way there! The second quarter was a little more tricky. I couldn't get it with my key, and a keychain card wasn't reaching it either. The cola gods were against me.

I went to the supply cabinet and got a paper clip, stretched it out, and put a slight bend about half an inch from the end. I put that in the coin slot and turned it like a key, catching the quarter and scooting it backwards. That quarter dropped too, and then I was home free.

Like I've said before, the little things seem to make or break a day. Never mind the odd looks from people sitting in the break area outside; at least I didn't escalate up to rocking the machine and screaming obscenities.

Want to search PodCasts? Enter b

I had a dentist appointment today, and one of my rituals in the waiting room is reading "Laughter, the Best Medicine" in Reader's Digest (yes, I admit it). One of the articles was Wired-esque and described the fourteen most important trends in world culture.

They described one particular trend as the "Me Media;" basically the personalization and customization of multimedia thanks to Tivo, MP3 players, blogs, news Web sites, and the like. The article mentioned blinkx.com, a site that scans the blogosphere's podcasts, pumps them through voice recognition software, and indexes the text much like Google does with the rest of the 'Net's content. For those of you unfamiliar with podcasting sites, they are basically blogs like this one, but the entries are audio MP3 files instead of text. They range from newscasts to music to buddies telling stories about their weekends.

Blinkx is in beta, but it's a pretty nice service. You can choose to search TV and media, podcasts, or standard text Web pages. I searched on a handful of topics, including my name and "Jon Stewart crossfire." Needless to say, I found many more hits on the latter.

Wired NextFest!

Jessica, her brother, and I went to Wired Magazine's NextFest 2005 yesterday in Chicago. It was a blast! It is an innovative technology exhibit, and included everything from flying cars and robots to protype medical imaging systems and virtual reality video games.

I was impressed by a lot of the inventions and ideas. Some of the highlights for me were the Moller flying car and some GM hydrogen fuel cell concept cars, a one-person boat/submarine shaped like a dolphin, water soluable golf balls, an off-road Segway, and models of military spy probes.

Many of the exhibits showed creative ideas for gaming and recreation interfaces. There was a very cool video game "arena" that tracked your movements and literally put you into the game on two giant screens in front and behind you. The character looked exactly like the participants, down to their outfits. I saw them demonstrating two different games: a martial arts game that tracked your kicks and punches, and another sword-fighing game where the player held foam water wiggles as the stand ins for the swords. They also had a virtual air hockey table where the puck was projected onto a white cloth and you used your hands to hit it, a treadmill connected to Halo with handle bars and fire buttons at the controls for steering and gameplay, and a virtual reality Pac Man game.

We came very close to riding a Segway (I was really looking forward to this). They were giving lessons and one- to two-minute rides when we got there, and then we left to see Batman Begins on IMAX (which was... awesome). When we came back, something had happend with one of the riders and the folks at the Navy Pier exhibition hall had asked them to stop allowing rides to the public. Bummer.

The University of Memphis had an artificial intelligence project there featuring a robot made to look and converse like Philip K Dick. He did look much like Dick, and the artificial skin they used was very lifelike. He responds to questions and can carry on somewhat of a conversation. People asked him how many children he had and the sum of 2 plus 3, and he got these correct. I asked him if he had seen a pre screening of the upcoming movie based on his book, A Scanner Darkly, and he just looked at me puzzled, shaking his head and raising an eyebrow a bit. That aside, the project is ongoing and I was very impressed. I'm taking an AI class in the fall, and I wonder if we will discuss this project at all.

I took my camera, but both sets of batteries bombed out on me during the day. I only have limited photos and a couple videos. I got some good shots, but not of everything I've mentioned here. This also introduces the lame beta version of my photo gallery -- more to come on that. My current layout isn't wide enough to accomodate the thumbs, and if you're using Internet Explorer you'll have to scroll dowwwwwn to see them, but bear with me. I have some changes in store for the site soon that will fix all of that.

The first video is blurry because I was at a distance, but it shows two automotive robot arms dueling it out as DJs. The "hands" of the robots were expandable cylindars that picked up records and spun them benath turntable needles in front of them. You can sample their mad beats. The second is of a very cool "moving floor" intended for VR gaming. The player can actually walk forward in a straight line and robotic panels move beneath the feet to create the illusion of walking across a floor.

For now, enjoy some videos and photos!

Good luck, Raffique!

Raffique is a good friend I have made in my Masters classes over the last two years. We have had three courses together, and I have always been impressed by his knowledge, warmness, work ethic, and ability to get along with literally anyone. Everyone that runs into him gets a friendly swat on the shoulder and a sincere conversation about how they are and how their school work is going. The guy is an encyclopedia when it comes to people. "Hey, Abi, how is that 3G paper going for your 485 class? Mike, did Villa like your presentation?"

Raffique is from the island of St. Vincent in the Carribbean (jealousy... creeping in). He studied for a year in London during university, and then he stayed for two years building phone networks. That set his sights on telecom technologies, and so he has had a telecommunications focus in his studies.

Since I alternate taking one and two classes each semester the first group of people I started with are graduating this month, and I am at the halfway point. I have made a handful of friends, Raffique being the best. Last week after class he said that he was negotiating with a company back in St. Vincent that will be rebuilding the island's phone network and installing wireless access points in many spots. That has been his goal all along: working in the wireless industry in his home country.

Good luck, Raffique! You will be missed.

Open pondering to Microsoft

Two things have always bugged me about the Properties button on the Print dialog box on Windows applications. I almost always need to change an option on the Basics tab; usually the number of copies or page orientation (portrait vs. landscape). That tab is aptly named. The options there are presumably the typical ones used by the most people.

When you open the Print properties box, there are two things wrong:

1. The Basics tab is furthest on the right, and
2. It is not the default tab selected. You have to click on it.

I also realize that my life must be going fine if I find time to complain about this. I'm not ranting here. I've just always wondered how this never came up in years of usability testing at Microsoft.

I know it's lame, but...

... it's another search string post. I have to laugh when I see some of the search strings that get people to the site. A few are truly bizarre. I obviously need to spice things up a little around here to get the truly juicy stuff. Here are a few of my favorites from April:

• batman's martial arts training


• clausterphobic bean plants


• tae kwan doe double jump front kick board break


• sippin bacardi


• wjbc monkey see monkey do song


• she handcuffed herself naked


• stereotype of a meathead

RSS 2.0

I am finally working to finish the content management system for the site, and one of the steps is adding the RSS 2.0 feed.

For anyone unfamiliar with RSS, don't worry about it. ;-)

For you Blogliners out there, do it to it.

Look ma, no phone wires!

We finally completed the switch today and have no more landline phone service. We dropped phone, DSL, and DirecTV, and went with cable TV and broadband in addition to an increased cell phone plan. All in all, it should save us $70 per month!

I have to give it to Insight Cable: their setup software was very nicely designed and got us up and running quickly. In five minutes I ran the software to activate my home computer with their server, pulled the ethernet plug out and plugged it into the router, and repeated the activation process for the router. The connection is working flawlessly and it's fast. I don't know if it's noticeably faster than DSL or I'm just imagining it, but either way I was impressed with the easy setup.

It is a little weird not to have a phone line in the house. Most family has asked, "But what about when you have kids? How will the babysitter call you or 911 in an emergency?" We're keeping one phone plugged in and you can call out to 911 on any phone whether or not you have an account (at least, in my town; I think this is standard everywhere). And I'm sure that by the time we're hiring babysitters, I will be hard pressed to find a teenager that doesn't have access to a cell phone.

The best part: no more telemarketers. At least, not until I've updated my cell phone number with my bank, utilities, etc., and they sell off my information...

Another reason IE sucks

Internet Explorer needs to support PNGs. Come on; they've been around for five years, and they are superior to GIFs in a variety of ways.

I've been trying to use a dynamic text replacement script using PHP on a site I'm working on, and it works beautifully in Firefox (thank you once again, ALA). Unfortunately, it looks like total ass in IE. I found a reference stating that you can wrap a filter around the image to make it render properly in IE, but it's not working for me for some reason. Part of this may be that I've been staring at this for too long, and so any help would definitely be appreciated.

Try viewing this test page in IE, and then Firefox. The menu items on top and the large "welcome" message below the photo are both being rendered using this swapping technique. The small font is relatively clean, but the large font looks terrible, and also wraps in IE since the same font size is rendered larger in IE also. Thanks again...

I, geek magnet *

I seem to have become the target of a hetero man crush. One of the guys in my college class, we'll call him Bob, has gradually sidled up to me over the course of the semester and is making me feel a little uncomfortable. Not Wesley Snipes in The Fan uncomfortable, but a little too much for my liking.

Bob is one of those stereotypical techy guys who is perfectly nice, but rarely talks to anyone and has a hard time looking away from his shoes when he does. In both classes I've had with him he sat by himself in the front row and never said a word. He is part of my group this semester, and so we all sit together at the same table each class period. I usually sit by him, and he's progressively warmed up to me. Suddenly on Tuesday he would not quit talking, even during the professor's lecture.

As the professor is talking about disintermediation in an evolving electronic economy, "I ordered a Dell DJ over the weekend. It should come in tomorrow."

"Cool." I try to follow and take notes (honest!).

"Hey, we both wore black coats today. Mine's a little thin for the weather, but I just got it and so I had to get some use out of it."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Is your coat warm?"

What??? This is where Bob and I crossed the line into weirdsville, especially considering we're in class.

"It looks warm. My coat's fitted, and that's the first time I've gotten something fitted other than a blazer. I needed a 44 long, but they didn't have any on the rack. The girl had to go back and get one..."

This went on through the entire lecture, and then out of the building after class. Bob apparently works at Bergner's, but didn't get his coat there becuase he didn't like their selection. He's also going home this weekend to visit his parents (he really hopes the Dell DJ gets in before he leaves). I wanted to scare him a little by telling him that I was tired because I stayed up late plucking roosters after a cock fight so I could trade the meat for mescalin from a one-eyed hobo named Squishy, but I held back. I never knew how interesting disintermediation in an evolving electronic economy could be.

I'm probably a prick, and I do feel good that he feels comfortable enough to talk to me when he won't with anyone else. I just wish it wasn't during class.


* I can confidently use this label, since it's directed at me several times per day. I'm not sure I fit the profile, but I'd definitely perceived that way by many. This is equivalent to Jerry Seinfeld safely making Rabbi jokes.

New word for the day: automagical

My J2EE instructor has been using the word "automagically" all week and it's driving me bonkers ("bonkers" is a technical psychology term). I'm getting the impression that good Java tools do not require a programmer to write any actual code to create software; everything is done for you automagically. This is exciting!

au-to-mag-ic-al-ly (o - to - maj' - ik - le) adv. to complete a task while keeping the details hidden from the benefactor
syn.covertly, in blackbox fashion

Mark, could you use that in a sentence? Certainly.

I ordered a third Long Island iced tea, and I automagically woke up in the back of a strange car in the Wendy's parking lot with no shoes on.

True.

I had a class today introducing the J2EE technical architecture, and the instructor was giving examples of development environments. One being IBM's Websphere Application Development software suite, or WSAD. It's pronounced wuh-sod' ("sod" being the accented syllable).

I couldn't concentrate at all once the instructor introduced this to the class. Every time he mentioned "WSAD" I kept hearing Batman and Superman yelling it to the cadence of the Budweiser "Wassup!" commercials.

I spent much of the class period thinking about which cartoon characters would ideally be cast for my commercial. Since we're talking the IT crowd here, I'm thinking Dilbert, Sponge Bob, Ralph Wiggum, and Cartman.

Now that would sell software.

The farce is strong with this one

I'm waiting to see how many of these end up on cubicle shelves in my IT department.

I will report back...

NASA names the VW Bug as its offi

No, not really. But have you noticed that almost every probe launched or proposed by NASA lately is described as "about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle?" How did this poster boy of nostalgia turned commercial icon get to be so lucky? ;-)

Actually, the point of this post is to talk about how amazing the Cassini-Huygens mission truly is. Over a seven year period, the two probes launched, joined at the hip tandem style, and headed for Saturn. First, though, they orbited the sun, orbited and shot pictures of Venus, and then moved towards their goal. Casual tasks when your flight plan looks like this.

Last year they took up close pictures of the ringed planet, and even discovered two previously-unknown moons. They orbited two moons of Saturn, Phoebe and Titan, and then the Huygens probe broke free from the Cassini and guided itself to land on the surface of Titan. It landed successfully early today, and will soon start transmitting pictures and atmospheric readings from the moon's surface until its batteries run out.

How cool is this??? the child-astronaut-to-be inside me screams. This really is a feat of engineering and physics. I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy.

I am a little baffled, though, as to why we can do this, but no one can build a battery that will power my MP3 player for more than ten hours, or a printer that doesn't jam. "PC load letter? What the #%*@ does that mean???"

Things you never hear anymore

I'm just as much of a sucker for the latest gadgets, techology, and shiny stuff as the next person, but when certain technologies go away or become commonplace, there are some quaint parts of life that fade out of everyday life with them. Not that we're worse off for it or anything overly sentimental like that, but in a way I miss hearing or saying a few of these things that just made using the latest toys fun:

"Guess where I'm calling your from?!?"
Admit it, all of you squealed this with glee more than once within thirty minutes of getting your first cell phone. I remember doing it to Jessica and my parents. This may have been replaced with, "Guess where I am right now?" as you were pulling into someone's driveway or standing in the hallway outside a friend's apartment. Now that cell phones are more common than the cold, no one will probably utter that again with such delight...

"Play it on 45!"
When my sister and I were listening to records, I don't know what we enjoyed more: listening to our own music, or taking my parents' copies of The Beach Boys and The Mamas and the Papas, lowering them onto the platter, and cranking up the speed to 45 (we didn't have 78 -- now that would have made our heads explode!). There was just something about hearing Brian Wilson sound like Alvin the Chipmunk that made our Saturday morning better.

"Breaker 1-9, breaker 1-9. Come in Bandit. Over."
Did your dad have a CB radio? Any chance I had to sneak into the kitchen out of earshot of my parents, I would snap on my dad's CB and scan through the channels listening for truckers or chatting friends. CBs and HAM radios were really the cell phones, email servers, and chat rooms of their day. I still have a question... just what in the hell does the squelch button on those things do?

"Circle what you want for Christmas in the Sears catalog."
Other than the last day of school, I think the best day of my year as a kid was the day that the Sears catalog came in the mail. I could make my Christmas list some three months in advance! I would slip to the toy section, carefully avoiding the boys clothing, dog ear everything related to Star Wars, Transformers, or He-Man that sparked my interest, and then go write everything down. Then I would prioritize, rank my selections, and circle the things that I hoped to find under the tree on Christmas morning (we had to prioritize because Santa had a budget). Today I just shoot off my Amazon wish list and my parents ask Jessica for a list discreetly over email.

"How do I get to your house?"
Remember asking people directions to their houses? Now that's been replaced with, "I think Mapquest gave me a wrong turn. Could you tell me how to get to your place from the corner of Boofoo and Fubar? I think the liquor store I'm parked in front of just got robbed."

"What time is E.T. playing tonight?"
We used to call the movie theater to ask them what time they were playing the movie we wanted to see. If it was the weekend, we'd look in the paper (that could go on this list, too. Yes, I mean the paper paper). That was soon replaced by the touchtone menu for showtimes, followed by the number no living sould would ever pick up, no matter how many times you let it ring. Today I have my local theaters' sites bookmarked for easy reference.

What are some of the things you remember from technologies past?

Longing for that analog life

I'm slightly dreading staring at anything resembling a monitor right now. Work, school, and outside project work have all been busy in November and December, and I feel like I'm handcuffed to a mouse and keyboard too many hours per day. My eyes are pretty buggy this week, and travelling this weekend (family Christmas with the in laws) will give them a welcomed rest.

My efforts are going well, there are just a lot of them packed in together. As of yesterday work should not be busy for the remainder of the year -- knock on wood -- and school will be over Monday. The project I'm finishing up has been fun, but it's been hard to give it the necessary attention with the other things going on. It may even be done by end of next week, also.

When I'm done with all of these things I will probably take a week or two off from writing here. I need to enjoy some time away from the computer, away from the television, and most other things digital. I'll have the week off work between Christmas and New Year's, and so I plan on getting back into my workout routine, doing some home improvements, and writing (in a notebook!).

No more working on the couch

Besides the fact that my wireless connection is hosed right now, there is another reason why I won't be surfing or coding in front of the TV.

Also, another funny conversation heard over the cube wall (names changed to protect the innocent, and in the spirit of Aaron's post earlier today:

Dude #1: "We're getting pizza. Are you in?"

Dude #2: "Sure."

Dude #1: "What do you like on your pizza?"

Dude #2: "Oh, anything. I'm not picky."

Dude #1: "Are there any toppings that you definitely don't like?"

Dude #2: "Well... I can't eat pork, chicken, or beef. But anything else is fine."

Dude #1: "So what you're saying is, we should order at least one cheese pizza?"

Dude #2: "That will work, thanks. That's what I always get at home."

There is a life lesson here. Don't waste others' time when you have a definite opinion. Just be honest, already! ;-) This is right up there with answering a dinner destination question with, "Wherever you would like to go."

CSS-based slide presentation

I can't take credit for this one, but I had to pass it on. This is from the King of CSS Himself, Eric Meyer.

Most people have probably given a PowerPoint presentation at some point that was going to be shown to a group from a computer with Internet access. If you are like me, a well-crafted Web page is a lot more aesthetically pleasing and nimble than a PowerPoint file, and I cringe when I see the .ppt extension on Google search results when I'm searching for reference material.

Why not mimic the functionality of PowerPoint using HTML and CSS? You could, but it would end up being a lot more work than just building it with PowerPoint; your lost time could be more than the added satisfaction of a sharper-looking presentation (especially since everyone's used to PowerPoint).

Eric Meyer solved the problem by adding JavaScript into the mix with his "beta" of a CSS-driven slideshow. Each slide is just a <div> wrapping up the content: a header tag for the title, and an unordered list for the slide text. The controls are there, too. There are links in the bottom right corner to navigate through the presentation, or you can just traverse forward by clicking anywhere in the browser. The slide numbers are also auto-generated for free!

I made this working example in about ten minutes using Eric's framework, content and all. Minus the background image, the presentation content is a single HTML document sized only at 2K. All I did to customize it was swap out a different background image in the CSS file, and I changed the content font-size attribute to be a bit bigger since I'll be presenting it in a large classroom. Other than that, it was good to go right out of the box.

Google is using Gmail to create t

Here's an interesting look under the hood at Google and how they're using Gmail to create their search index. Yesterday Brian told me that my blog site comes up second when you do a google search on the word "garmana." However, the root/homepage of garmana.com doesn't come back at all. What??? I thought. How can that be? How did Google find me to index me?

As of right now, the cached version of the page you're reading right now (on google.com) is dated November 2. The first link to this page that I know of anywhere on the Net is the one Aaron posted on salt-the-earth.net, and that was on November 3. I've never personally linked to it anywhere, and Brian and Aaron were the only people reading it at that point (as far as I know).

Hmm, strange you say. Yes, quite. Thinking it over, I went through my sent items in my Gmail account. Sure enough, I had sent Brian an email on November 1 with a link to this blog (to his Gmail account). Google must have parsed the message and added its links to their index processing!

I don't personally have a problem with this. Hey, it could be one more way to move yourself up in their rankings. Given the public scrutiny over Google mining Gmail message content to display advertisements, I'm surprised that I haven't seen this topic pop up in an article as well. It's another creative way to build their search index, but some people may see this as another way of being "watched."

Forget tracing paper - buy graphl

I am impressed with carbon nanotubes, and I am definitely impressed with aerogel, but graphene gets the prize in my book for fascinating uses from a harmony between physics and chemistry. Graphene is a fabricated sheet of one-molecule thick material made from fullerene molecules, making it the thinnest man-made substance one earth.


The article describes it as a kind of unwrapped nanotube - the same material arranged in a different way to pursue even more practical uses. It brings conductivity up while shortening the distance the electrons need to travel, pointing towards faster, tinier computer chips. Imagine the speed of a transistor that transmits faster, and is only one molecule long? That's the equivalent of shortening a transcontinental highway to a few car lengths and handing someone the keys of a Ferrari with a rocket engine strapped to the roof (just don't scratch it, pleeease).


And I can remember my jaw dropping at Doom on a 100-Mhz Pentium.