Slashdot Mirror

Hardly the same, but I always liked these: http://kisrael.com/features/gb.html

Oh, BTW, the Disney/Mickey ears are copyrighted & trademarked.

My advice is not to try to make them and sell them on the street. I wouldn't even sell pictures of them.

But if you want to put them on a picture of Obama to make a political point, it's Katy-bar-the-door.

Bush as Dracula in a French Dracula poster:
http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/a/T/bush_dubcula.jpg

Bush in a Rambo poster:
http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blbushrambo2.htm

Obama as Dumbo:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/bush%20dumbo/darthdilbert/Blog/obama_dumbo.png (this one should rile the faithful, eh?)

Bush as Custer:
http://www.seedsofdoubt.com/distressedamerican/images/graphics/Custer.jpg (although the copyright has expired, so not a great example)

Making fun of the republican symbol (probably a TM)
http://kisrael.com/m/2009.01.23.dumbo.png

Point is, it's pretty well accepted to used TM'd & copyrighted images to make a political point. Does that make it legal? You'll have to talk to Captain Morgan to find out...

Windows Vista is a very sad exercise in "More is the new More!" design.

I took a snapshot of first desktop scene of my Vista laptop. Some of that's the usual OEM cruft, but man, what a visual assault! Harsh colors, the OEM cruft (icons, windows, toolbars), messages screaming at me... and then this dumbass sidebar. Because, you know, I always wanted a slideshow permanently putting up a new picture to distract me every couple minutes.

I still run w/ windows maximized, just a way of focusing, but Windows UI is running in the opposite direction.

I tend to dial Vista's UI way, way back.
(though I still miss the old Ctrl-F as seperate app from Win95/98 time - search as "sidebar" is a UI wasteland of lost context and difficult to mentally model behavior surprises)

I don't like the OSX dock, and its lumping together of "start a new task" and "return to a previous task context"... (not to mention the hopelessness of "alt-tab to the application you're thinking of, then alt-tab (or whatever) to the window in that program) instead of Window's "alt-tab to your task"
but I was thinking a better windows task bar would be just the icons of the running programs, but hovering or clicking brought up all the mini screen shots of just that application... that would actually be useful, one of the Windows 7 shots gave me hope that that's what they're leaning towards...

Just to pimp some of my own work:

I developed a system to make pretty ice blue translucent sculptures, by extending Conway's Game of Life, but plotting "time" in the 3rd dimension: (in Java "Processing" language)
http://kisrael.com/2007/10/21/ is the basic version,
http://kisrael.com/features/java/conwayice2/ is a bigger version that lets you set the initial seeding options.

Just to pimp some of my own work:

I developed a system to make pretty ice blue translucent sculptures, by extending Conway's Game of Life, but plotting "time" in the 3rd dimension: (in Java "Processing" language)
http://kisrael.com/2007/10/21/ is the basic version,
http://kisrael.com/features/java/conwayice2/ is a bigger version that lets you set the initial seeding options.

This was a very good book. Probably my favorite bit was hearing the history of Pac-Man
Best Quote:
"I thought that one of the things women like to do is eat. So I started working on a game concept based on eating."
--Toru Iwatari, inventor of Pac-Man

Hearing about the SwyftCard idea was cool too.

Some of the best things were the artifacts, from in house materials to source code to random sketches and napkin plans:
I made some banners for The Gamers Quarter with the early sketches of Pac-Man:
http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2007.11.13

While you may carp about the "science" of NKS there's a sh*t load of extremely interesting potential there.
If you look at kisrael's visualization http://kisrael.com/2007/10/21/ and click on the display mid-low area, you can get "structures" of varying complexity.
What if these structures where generated by a "seed", say protein or molecule in a solution. The seed reacts with the surrounding contents forming a structure at a molecular level. This could be used to build things at the nano level. We could call it an assembler (kurweil).
Problem is constructing the seed(s) for complexity. How you going to predict what'll form. Maybe have a library, component parts list, to build more complex structures.

Also (and this is all stuff I happened to do on Saturday, which is why it's on my mind)

http://kisrael.com/2007/10/26 is Conway West, where you get to play a little happy face trapped in Conway's Game of Life, with a ghost farting out random particles to add a random element the patterns. Dodge the Life cells and go for points! (made for http://glorioustrainwrecks.com/ Klik-of-the-Month 2 hour game jam)

yeah, I know I'm pimping my own site, sosumi...
Anyway, I was thinking about 1D CA the other week, and realized one of the attractions was that you plot time and make it 2D... but there's no particular reason you can't do the same thing to a 2D CA, like Life...
http://kisrael.com/2007/10/21/ is the result, ethereal blue sculptures made by plotting 2D Life with Time as a physical dimension.
I'm not sure if I learned a lot or proved anything, but it *is* pretty...

my favorite bit of hiring dumbness: http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2005.11.09

it is ASTONISHING at the low quality of people you can interview. Degrees are only super-loosely correlated.

BTW, w/ swap two variables... could they use a third place holder, or was it meant to be more clever than that?

On a semi-related note, I just made a tool that scrapes flickr to extract flickr notes as an HTML imagemap. I started it as an HTML screenscraper but then saw there didn't seem to be support for this in the flickr api.

I think sometimes Linux fans start to worry more about what's under the covers and less about the actual UI experience.

I haven't used WinCE derived stuff much, but Palm had a lead for years in the department.

I just wish there was some kind of toolkit for letting me roll my own UI (I had some very definate ideas about what an optimal TODO UI would look like for me)-- and without resorting to Java. It's funny, for a language that was originally meant to make life cooler for mobile devices, it provides some of the worst, loading-screen heavy craptastic UI I've seen on a portable device.

heh, as long as we're strolling down memory lane...
I was a pretty early adopter of laptops in the classroom...
in 1992-1995 I had this pretty cheap Tandy 1100FD...no hard drive, the floppy was only 720K, but it had a decent text processor hardwired on for quick startup, was pretty durable, and the "oversized gameboy" CGA screen did its duty.

95-96 I had a tiny TIAC laptop w/ trakball, now with 16! shades of grey, good enough to run Win 3.1... i could finally do diagrams w/o resorting to ASCII! I got so good at doodling w/ the trackball I did the logo/mascot for the schools "dorm wired for net" project.

Anyway, a lot of kids had laptops even then, but you mostly saw them in the library, I was a bit of a freak for hauling mine into class. Also, I kind of worried about the distraction of the sound of the keys for the other students. Ah well, for the most part the Profs were pretty accepting. It let me take notes I could read later, and that was the important thing.

Hey there....
do you have a cite for the River Raid info?
I've always wondered about that... in fact I worked with a guy to try to map the thing out... one time I used an emulator w/ a hacked ROM w/ infinite fuel and no collisions...I let it run over night, and when I came back the game was showing "impossible" configurations, with items where they shouldn't be viz a viz on water or land...

Thanks for the response.

As an amateur with pretensions of mediocrity, your RTFM recommendation is right on. I think I limped by with a half-understanding of even the limited manual settings on my S200. (Couldn't directly control the shutter speed I think)

And the S200 delay was noticeable even when I was taking the photo, sometimes it was awkwared where I'd have to go wait for it...wait for it... but it sounds as if they've dealt with that and have some nifty rapid-fire modes...and for the first time I'll start looking into the speed of memory. (Also, I wonder if I should consider sticking with ~2megapixel modes...I guess you never know what you might want to blow up, but I'm not much of an image quality queen...given that these images are higher resolution than my 19" screen, that seems pretty good to me!)

I see it for $300 on Amazon vs $350 at the local places. I wonder if local retailers would pricematch something like that...I'd use Froogle (they really need a sanity check for "sort by price"...I hate wading through pages of lowcost accesrories 'til I finally find the product itself) though I'm worried about the reputations of some of those independent store front shops.

Yeah, but how many variants of "first X this" and "last Y that" and "first Wth letters of the Zth" word would you code in? Someone could probably see all the "sentences" you coded in after reloading 10-20 times, and have a script deal with each case. It's only one thin layer better than a traditional captcha image, not "many times more difficult". (So it will probably work if you homebrew it and do it all yourself, but if it gets popular someone will spread the countermeasure.)

Lots of token- or javascript-based authenticator ideas make similar mistakes...the people suggesting tokens assume that the form is only loaded once, but a spammer might as well get a fresh form each time. And they might as well run clever form-building javascript through a javascript engine.

So finally, I used the blogspammers own copiousness idiocy (hundreds of thousands of the same F'in links, not for human viewing but just to crank up googlejuice) against them:

If you don't have http:/// in your comment, no problem, your post goes through. If you do, you can't use one of a list of "forbidden words", mosty pharmaceutical and gambling based.

You can see the words and further thoughts on my site:
http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2005.07.15

In theory content based filtering goes against the free speech grain, but in practice the combo of badword PLUS link doesn't seem to block real stuff too much, and a human gets a clear explanation and can try again. Over the last month and a half its had a low false-positive rate and a perfect success rate.

I have a homebrew-ed backend weblog, http://kisrael.com/

I know RSS has forked, and I don't use it much myself but I know others have asked for an RSS feed...is there a simple guide to outputting my content in an RSS kind of way?

Also, if I wanted to mirror my content on an LJ, would it be easier to automate the LJ postings and get an RSS feed off of that, or vice versa, or are they completely indpendent tasks?

2002:
http://www.kisrael.com/vgames/egm100.2002.html

1997:
http://www.kisrael.com/vgames/egm100.html

In 2002 I did some comparisons of how the list looked vs 1997...

2002:
http://www.kisrael.com/vgames/egm100.2002.html

1997:
http://www.kisrael.com/vgames/egm100.html

In 2002 I did some comparisons of how the list looked vs 1997...

Hey, thanks for the Plug :-)

I'm still on the look out for true "one button games" -- Mario Party has a few, including a clever one where you have to limbo...each button press is a hop plus a lean back, but you're leaning back up at the same right...click too fast you topple, too slow and you rise too hight and don't make it under.

I also made some REAL one button games:
http://kisrael.com./features/gb.html
these are games ENTIRELY played within a single grey HTML pushbutton...I change the captions via javascript to make some cute little games.

sure, my email is on http://kisrael.com/

Funny, just yesterday I blogged about some similar experiences...I had an XP box that would log me out as soon as I went to log in, and because all my passwords were blank some of the linux rescue CD based fixes wouldn't work...

I decided to just grab my personal files off (one rule I have is to put all my personal stuff in c:\data\ ) To make a long story short, Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD, at the recommendation of Enkidu on alt.os.linux, turned out to be a better bet for my needs, letting me shove the files onto my laptop over the network. (I'm proficient at both Windows and Unix commandlines but not too great as an admin on either, so maybe that has something to do with my problems with, says, system-down rescue cd linux)

First, there's nothing wrong with a language being easy to learn and easy to use. Power and ease of use are not mutally exclusive.

True. But sometimes "ease of use" runs into "quick and dirty", and all the difficulty in maintaining and extending that that implies. VB and Perl lend themselves to quick and dirty and require more self-discipline to stay well-engineered. Java usually pushes you to more forethought, and while crap code is certainly possible, it's somewhat less likely.

Second, what's with this stuff about languages "for the masses"? VB programmers are programmers. No one's running down to the local curb store for a loaf a bread and a $400 box of VB.net. MS hasn't included Basic, Visual or otherwise, with its operating systems since,I dunno, DOS 3.3?

Yes, currently VB is just another language.

But I grew up with built-in BASICS, and when I got introduced to it, VB3 seemed to be positioned in a similar role. I got a student edition for cheap and had a lot of fun.

As for the "for the masses", that could also be "for the non-techie, business-knowledge people in your company". I don't know if VB (especially the Office-centric versions) still do that well or not.

I do think that we who grew up with computers that booted into BASIC have an edge over people who get the start button. Making goofy, kiddie programs had a much lower barrier to entry back then...now it's almost certain you'll have to install something, or go nuts with the Javascript.

"Despite 'only' being XML, RSS is the driving force fulfilling the Web's original promise: making the Web useful in an exciting, real-time way."

Err, did I miss the meeting where that was declared as the Web's original promise?

Anyway, the trouble is pretty obvious: RSS is just a polling mechanism to do fakey Push. (Wired had an interesting retrospective on their infamous "PUSH IS THE FUTURE" hand cover about PointCast.) And that's expensive, the cyber equivalent of a hoarde of screaming children asking "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Are we there yet now? Are we there yet?" It would be good if we had an equally widely used "true Push" standard, where remote clients would register as listeners, and then the server can actually publish new content to the remote sites. However, in today's heavily firewall'd internet, I dunno if that would work so well, especially for home users.

I dunno. I kind of admit to not really grokking RSS, for me, the presentation is too much of the total package. (Or maybe I'm bitter because the weird intraday format that emerged for my own site doesn't really lend itself to RSS-ification...)

I wonder if the front page "changes" log is going to remain...that's been a useful way for me to get around 10 or so extra hits per update, and some of those people have become regulars of my site (not weblogs.com hosted)

I don't like logic games, they seem like too much work and I might learn that I'm not as smart as I assume I am.

I love Pictionary though, just the creative element involved...

Scrabble and other similar word games suck...I hate the idea of treating words as mere collections of letters devoid of meaning. On the other hand, crossover stuff like Scattegories, which brings the meaning back into play, are ok.

And Monopoly is just boring boring boring.

Huh, looking at the screenshots, I realize I think System 7 really look the best to me. I'm mostly a Windows on the desktop guy, but when I was first introduced it to it was on System 7, and that's probably what I used at the School of the MFA. It captured the elegance of the early Mac but wasn't so starkly monochromatic. OS 8 still looks about the same, but then 9 starts to get into that "ooh look shiny metal crap" that was the prelude to the Fisher Price look that is so dominant these days.

Similarly, I think I'll always dial down Windows XP and whatever comes next to as close to Windows 95/98 in appearance as possible. The boring parts of an OS should look as boring and grey and consistent as possible, that way you can more easily tell what's boring and what might be interesting and new.

(This from a guy who invented gamebuttons, javascript games where the sole input and output is a single javascript button)

The Kodak DC20 was my first digital camera.

Oddball (and small) max resolution (493 * 373), other artifacting issues, no preview or display screen, only like 8 pictures at 'high' resolution (16 at 320*240), no flash...

Still, it had some great qualities: tiny, durable, lightweight, battery lasted forever. It was the camera of choice for certain model rocket hobbyists I think. Not til Canon started making small cameras was there something smaller, and that's like a tiny little brick. (There are some interesting "novelty" microcameras out now though, and some even make tiny movies!)

It took some ok pictures...every gallery above the double line, though some of those were from its DC25 brother, which added a flash and viewscreen (no digital viewfinder though) and doubled the memory at the cost of size, weight, and battery life...overall less cool.

Oh, and it came with Kai's Power Goo, which was hella fun. (Too bad that software doesn't work w/ recent versions of Windows :-( )

Mario Party has some good ones.

I've made some games you might be interested in ...
game button arcade, reasonably playable games that take place ENTIRELY in a single normal HTML grey pushbutton (via javascript)...the only input is the button, and the only output is, in effect, the caption on the button, but I still came up with some half decent action games.

And the news programs... don't even get me started. They tell you, "Up next," whatever story they were advertising all day. But the only thing that's "up next" is more commercials, and the story you're interested in is always about 2 seconds long and at the very end of the news program.

Hah! One night I got totally suckered by a Fox news teaser "find out why you might want to avoid that second cup of coffee!"...I watch the whole crappy "news" program for half an hour for a 15 seconds blurb that 3 cups or more of decaf coffee daily is linked to rheumotoid artheritis in middle aged women.

Right up there with my favorite ever Fox 'teaser' line
BALLOONS: Why are they so DEADLY.

I suspect that those are the equivalent of an actor's "headshot", mostly for use in 'official' documents, like for the pamphlet of something where he was a speaker.

Narcisist nerds will generally aim for more obviously interesting pictures to show off.

Despite all the promising technologies, I think we have to admit there's a decent chance all of the people reading this will be dead in a century or two.

So if you don't believe in the afterlife (or you might but you're not positive) and the idea of maybe not living forever really bothers you, I've put togther a document that might help: Dealing With Mortality: A Skeptic's Guide or: Kirk's Big Fun Pages O' Inevitable Death .

When I wrote it, I thought it might be the most important thing I had ever written (maybe I still feel that way) and that's why I've been plugging it via my .sig ever since.

The trouble with Javascript is that it doesn't provide a screen to draw on. (Though, come to think of it, I guess if they get into it, they might be able to move graphics around as a primitive form of Sprites...still pretty poor I/O.)

Of course, they might end up with some mutant hybrid like my own gamebuttons, games each entirely self-contained in a single HTML form pushbutton for Input and Output.

Yeah, I can never hear "Republican Guard" without thinking of Crimson Guard, whether it's Iran or Iraq.

I posted about that , tracked down a picture, on my site a month ago.

My contribution to the 'amazingly simple game' genre are game buttons, reasonably rich games each played entirely within a single CGI form grey pushbutton, as both controller and display. I still come back to these every once in a while, especially Dashteroids and Happy Eater.

Interesting warnings, maybe I should dive more deeply into the fine print.

I get the feeling that while there might be trouble if my bandwidth was constantly huge (it's not) I should be free of any nasty surprises if I had some kind of slashdotting. (And the gamebutton arcade on http://kisrael.com got some spikes in traffic when I was boingboing'd, though probably small potatoes over all.)

arrowweb.com and ezpublishing.com both offer
$7-$15/mo hosting...CGI scripts and UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH--the catch is the total storage space is on the low end, 50-100megs.
all my sites run on one of them, and I've been pretty happy. ezpublishing seems slightly more reliable, but has a funkier CGI setup.

I was the editor of my high school's literary magazine back in the day (I was always more of an English person than a math person), and my senior year I submitted a C++ Hello World as a poem to the magazine. Got a lot of strange looks but it got in.

I gotta ask--what brace formatting style did you use?

When pixeltime.com (now sadly defunct, a site about cramming creativity into little 45x45 GIFs) had a "Y2K" theme for one month, I made a
tiny plausible perl Y2K bug, the old "slap a '19' in front of the C representation of the year rather than add 1900"...wonder if anyone got the joke?

You can learn more about pixeltime on my tribute site.

I was the editor of my high school's literary magazine back in the day (I was always more of an English person than a math person), and my senior year I submitted a C++ Hello World as a poem to the magazine. Got a lot of strange looks but it got in.

I gotta ask--what brace formatting style did you use?

When pixeltime.com (now sadly defunct, a site about cramming creativity into little 45x45 GIFs) had a "Y2K" theme for one month, I made a
tiny plausible perl Y2K bug, the old "slap a '19' in front of the C representation of the year rather than add 1900"...wonder if anyone got the joke?

You can learn more about pixeltime on my tribute site.

Yeah, "white hot" was a bit much, but I think Blogs still have their place. I think the Filter vs. "blog"/notebook style is important. I keep up with 6 or 7 filters, and only 1 or 2 notebooks.

Filters are great, they do the surfing for you, finding some diamonds in all that internet coal.

My site is mostly a filter, but with an emphasis on found quotes as well. I do it a little for the attention, but mostly as a record of my own life and findings.

I just wanted to take the chance to burn some karma and plug the miniwebsite I advertise in my sig: Dealing With Mortality: A Skeptic's Guide or: Kirk's Big Fun Pages O' Inevitable Death. From the lead paragraph:
Coming to grips with mortality- this is the biggest personal issue that every one of us will have to deal with. It can be especially difficult for people who don't believe that there's an afterlife waiting for them. To contemplate the end of our selves in this world is frightening; to not convince yourself that there is life after this world requires a special kind of bravery. This site is here to try to share the thoughts that have allowed me to understand and accept the situation.

I went through a time when I was thinking about Cryonics. And other times when I've gone through paralyzing anxiety about death in general. This site is the result of all that, and might help others in the same boat.

My alma mater has a monument to this forthcoming breakthrough, placed by Roger W Babson (of Babson College). It's called the Gravity Stone and it's "to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents" Kinda kooky stuff, check the link.

(not karma whoring, just rambling)
I've always liked the concept of lowend digital photography:
Starting with a kodak DC20...amazing light (like, hollow) small camera, 16 320x240 (or 8 493x373, never messed with that tho). Lasted forever on one of its little batteries. Got some decent shots from it.

Then later got a kodak palmpix add on to my Palm IIIc...not quite convenient/small enough to justify its drawbacks as a camera, though using the Palm as a viewfinder was kind of a trip.

My friend got a cart so he could upload pictures from his game boy camera.

I loved those old b+w quickcams, made some tiny animated GIFs out of them.

And now this...of course, now I have a tiny Canon elph powershot in my pocket at all times...but it's a bit bulky...maybe I should compromise and go for this new thing, who needs good resolution anyway? (But then I'd hardly ever use the canon, argh...)

(not karma whoring, just rambling)
I've always liked the concept of lowend digital photography:
Starting with a kodak DC20...amazing light (like, hollow) small camera, 16 320x240 (or 8 493x373, never messed with that tho). Lasted forever on one of its little batteries. Got some decent shots from it.

Then later got a kodak palmpix add on to my Palm IIIc...not quite convenient/small enough to justify its drawbacks as a camera, though using the Palm as a viewfinder was kind of a trip.

My friend got a cart so he could upload pictures from his game boy camera.

I loved those old b+w quickcams, made some tiny animated GIFs out of them.

And now this...of course, now I have a tiny Canon elph powershot in my pocket at all times...but it's a bit bulky...maybe I should compromise and go for this new thing, who needs good resolution anyway? (But then I'd hardly ever use the canon, argh...)

Robert Abbot's piece Video Games Are Incredibly Stupid! touches many of the same themes, and was making the rounds a month or two ago. You can see my studied (and illustrated) response back, and he's also posted many of the replies he has received.

Blogs. People can spend less time randomly browsing, and go to their favorite, trusted, reliably interesting link-centric Blogs (as opposed to content-manufacturing, often more journal-y blogs) and see a plethora of interesting stuff: a much higher cool stuff / filler ratio than if you start with, say, a typical search engine.

I think one effect of this is even the Blog compilers do less random surfing, and in fact depend a bit on other blogs. So there's a bit of a circle jerk effect, though enough incidental stuff gets added in from the occassional surfer or tangent to a websearch (for instance, my own gets an infusion from outside sources like Usenet) that over all things don't get too stale.

Yeah, I put this on my blog a few weeks ago. They have all sorts of high falutin' ideas, but in the end their production is just a lame crossbreed of non-interactive dance dance revolution and tamagotchi. It's kind of pretentious of them, the way they go on about ideas of AI, public/private spaces, and sharing data.

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)

from my blog at kisrael.com