Dancing About Architecture

As I'm sure anyone who cares now knows, Ken finally lost in his 75th Jeopardy! appearance, taking home a bit more than $2.5 million. I, for one, am going to miss him. I started watching him about 14 episodes in, back in June, and he was always just amazing to watch.

The last post on Ken turned out to be host entry for a number of comments about Ken over the past four months or so. I stayed out of it, but now that the Era of Ken has drawn to a close, let me say a couple of things:

• Gail Jones, posting on Nov 10: you nailed it.
• To the conspiracy buffs: thanks for the laughs. All you had to do was watch, oh I don't know, maybe one show and you could tell he wasn't being fed the answers.


• To all the people that put down Ken because he's a Mormon: your intolerance of his beliefs which happen to be different than yours and, by the way, completely unrelated to his brilliance, is pitiful and disheartening

Thanks, Ken, for some great television.

Posted by Eric at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's one thing to think about sailing on the high seas and to romanticize the tactical battles between ships, but the reality, I imagine, would be quite a bit different. This movie conveys some of the brutal reality of what it must have been like to sail aboard a ship in the 1700s better than any movie I've seen. The best thing, though, is that it really does it almost in a matter-of-fact manner, as the crux of the story revolves around the relationship between the captain and the ship's doctor, played by Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany, playing off each other as well as they did in A Beautiful Mind. This is a very good movie.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (***1/2)

Posted by Eric at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was going to post a HOWTO on how to use the power of RSS and BitTorrent to be able to download television shows, but Phillip Torrone at Engadget did a better job than I ever could have, so check his guide out.

Now, I'm a huge Tivo fan with a number of hacked DirecTV-Tivo units throughout the house. I've even got a Series 1 unit that's nicely set up for video extraction, but the BitTorrent solution is really superior imho.

I have a 35-minute commute on the train two times a day ... perfect for catching up on some shows that I watch but Christine does not watch (The West Wing, South Park, and pretty much the entire Sunday night lineup on Fox). Azureus with the RSS plug-in dumps them straight to the laptop. Even better, most of the shows are captured in HD. Sweet!

This even came in handy last Thursday night when there was a DirecTV local channels outage across the country. Screwed up Survivor, CSI, and The Apprentice, which are three shows we watch. Bummer. But, a visit to "that tv torrents" site the next day, a few downloads, and a DVD burn, and we were set to watch them by Friday night. That sure was better than having to read about the episodes.

Source: How-To: BroadCatching using RSS BitTorrent to automatically download TV shows - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Posted by Eric at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Less than a week after the Treo 650's release, a genius named shadowmite has patched the Bluetooth manager to enable BT Dial-Up Networking. He changed two bytes. Hmmm, makes me just a little skeptical about Sprint's claims. As Gameboy70 speculates:

My theory is that Sprint originally wanted to portray DUN as nonexistent on the 650, and since all carriers are concerned with bandwidth hogs, Sprint expected Cingular and T-Mobile to disable the profile likewise. But they didn't, and therefore made Sprint's DUN profile conspicuous by its absence. What's followed has been a public relations conundrum.

So now I'm in a quandary. Do I stick with Sprint and get the Treo 650 now, or do I wait until next year for the GSM version and jump ship to Cingular? I'm leaning towards making the switch next year.

Source: TreoCentral.com - Dial Up Networking For Sprint - HACKED!

Posted by Eric at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at FeedBurner we've started to offer publishers the ability to include links to Amazon.com items and (on a limited trial basis) advertisements in their feed. While this is sure to be a contentious issue, I personally think it's great to give publishers the option if they are looking for ways to monetize their hard work and effort. But that's neither here nor there -- I want to talk about some of the technical issues we've worked through to associate dynamic content within the unique constraints of feeds.

The number one big concern when you're dealing with feeds is: don't modify old items! There are few things more annoying than having an old entry show up as modified in your newsreader only to discover that the reason it's modified is that now there's an ad in the item. Lame. That said, we still give publishers the option to put ads in old items, but they are strongly discouraged from doing so:

Hmm ... maybe that should be stronger. Let me go talk to creative.

So that's the primary consideration. The next consideration is to remember that ads can get stale. But we quickly bump into the "don't modify items after the fact" rules again: if we need to change an ad because it's stale, how do we do that without modifying the entry? That's why we use images to display the ad. We generate an img src link once, attach it to the item, and then (with careful cache directive management) can change the image that gets returned from that constant URL over time. If the ad had been static text, the item would have been flagged as modified every time we refreshed the ad. If the ad was JavaScript, then it only would have shown up for 2% of the readers out there.

There's of course a bunch more stuff that goes into managing all of this, but I just wanted to let everyone know that we're really trying to respect the nature of this wonderful medium of feeds and not screw things up. There are going to be the people out there that cry "you've ruined feeds", but I really view this as filling a need that publishers have. It's been said before but I feel I need to reiterate: FeedBurner NEVER puts anything in the feed that the publisher doesn't want. If you see an ad in a feed, that's at the request of the publisher. We're going to be doing quite a bit of tweaking and tuning over the next few weeks before we open up some of the capabilities to a wider audience, but we all value your feedback.

Posted by Eric at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

By Bill Bryson


This must have been a very challenging book to write. It's a very broad survey of science from the past 350 years or so, and it's a testament to the talents of Bill Bryson as a writer that he weaves it all together in an engaging, accessible story. Well, maybe not "weave" ... I mean, each chapter examines on particular topic and is fairly independent from the others, but the transitions seem smooth somehow.

When you're dealing with science, the mind can't really appreciate the magnitude of the quantities involved. It's extremely difficult to really relate to how small an electron is, or how brief humans have been on this planet relative to the age of the Earth. Bryson has a special skill in coming up with creative ways to illustrate these quantities that are sometimes head-shakingly unbelievable. My favorite:

Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale … the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, "and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history."

Make no doubt about it, this is a science book, so if you really don't like science you're probably not going to like this book. But for everyone else, it's a great read that will undoubtedly expand your appreciation for the personalities and achievements of science over the past few centuries.

Original entry from September 20, 2004:

I've really enjoyed some of Bryson's earlier works (especially A Walk in the Woods), and I've been waiting for this book to come out in paperback for months so I can bring it on the train. Well, it finally arrived, and I'm going to dig right in.

Posted by Eric at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There was a lot of buzz about this movie before it came out, and I'm happy to report that this movie delivers in every way. It has definitely displaced Toy Story as my favorite Pixar movie. A family of superheroes forced to live a normal life in the suburbs under a "Superhero Relocation" program? Brilliant premise. The animation was fantastic, the voice acting very good, and the storyline was engaging from beginning to end. I thought that Edna, the superhero costume designer (voiced by director Brad Bird), stole the show, but all of the eight-year olds in the audience were rolling on the floor with the final kidnap scene.

I think this is the first PG Pixar movie, but I personally think that it's okay for younger kids to watch. Yes, it's loud and there are guns and explosions and even killings, but there really aren't any of those frightening scenes that Disney sadistically likes to include in their movies (Woody discovers the mutant toys? The sharks in Finding Nemo?). And the killings are really closer to the A-Team "pan back to the exploding Jeep and see the evildoers thrown safely from the wreckage holding their heads and groaning" than anything else ... it's not like there's blood or even bodies.

So, interesting question. This movie begs for a sequel, but Pixar and Disney are splitting up before that's possible. How does a sequel get made if Disney owns the rights but Pixar's got the talent? I sure hope there's a sequel, and that it's got more Frozone. "Woman, where's my Super Suit!?!"

The Incredibles (****)

Posted by Eric at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The second entry in an extremely occasional series on old funny web pages, I submit for your approval the "Curtains on Fire" chat that we laughed about several years ago. The post is dated 2003, but I remember seeing this back in the last millennium.

Beware of imitators! I think this chat has been "embellished" over time, but I love the original.

Warning: sexual content! Woo hoo!

What happens in the chatroom

Posted by Eric at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What's the true promise of RSS? That it fades into the background, becoming as ubiquitous and invisible as HTTP. Producers, consumers, intermediaries ... all speaking this language of streaming information, shuttling all kinds of data.

Here's a great example: Halo 2 uses RSS to send stats about the online games's you've played. Awesome.

Source: ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman's Weblog

Posted by Eric at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

GTA: San Andreas (10/26)
Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal (11/2)
Halo 2 (11/9)
Half-life 2 (11/16)

Quite an amazing month if you're a gamer and don't mind sequels.

Posted by Eric at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Very nice demonstration of the kind of app that's totally appropriate on a Media Center PC. It's amazing how just putting a different kind of UI on a basic app can change your perception: "I can program my TV!".

Source: My Netflix MCE 2005 Plug-In

Posted by Eric at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)