XyzzyB - Blog

My poor inbox

2008-09-06T19:39:00Z

Another Presidential Election is upon us, which means a return of the dreaded Forwarded Political Emails with 5% facts, 100% spin, and that trite smugness only Republicans can muster. Somehow the Republicans keep managing to cast themselves as the underdog outsiders with real rural values who would have everything cleaned up and working right if it weren’t for those sleazy Democrats.

In a hundred years modern American history undergraduate students will be writing papers trying to explain how millions of Americans could so willfully ignore the fact that Republicans weren’t the party of financial responsibility, family values, and small government but corrupt, borrow-and-spend, no-bid contracting exploiters who want to legislate morality because letting us make our own choices is just out of the question.

Stanza + iPod Touch: the best ereader

2008-09-02T15:16:00Z

I just downloaded Lexcycle’s excellent Stanza for the iPod Touch/iPhone and, wow! Hundreds of free books all downloadable from the app itself, very nice. The ereader is nicely customizable (fonts, font size, margins, text/background color) and feels very polished. There’s even feed versions of big newspapers / magazines available.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s a desktop program (Stanza Desktop) that allows the conversion and importing of books from other formats, notably PDF. I’ve already imported some of my Pragmatic Bookshelf. The formatting gets a little screwy, but very nice overall. The great thing is that this also opens up Stanza to Project Gutenberg

OMG Vacation

2008-09-01T02:38:00Z

Vacation! I’m taking the entire week off of work. Four vacation days buys me nine continuous days off. Sweet! No special plans, just relaxing at home with Sarah and Edward. Ahh.

Sarah and I have been watching Hill Street Blues on Hulu and we’ve been very impressed. From the very first episode the characters and story are gripping and nuanced. Of course we have both been imprinted by the theme music, which is now an almost irresistible psychological command to relax and get ready for bed.

Speaking of Hulu: Jaadu has proven to be fantastic for controlling our home theater mac. This great app allows an iPod Touch (or iPhone) to connect to VNC servers (such as Leopard’s screen sharing) and does it extremely well. It comes with some shortcut setups that are supposed to be geared toward driving powerpoint presentations, but also happen to be perfect for controlling mplayer or hulu. Now we don’t even have to keep a laptop on hand, just a couple clicks on the iPod controls anything we need on the tv computer. Establishing the connection only takes a couple seconds, and everything works intuitively. Tapping the screen is a click, double tap is a double click, double tap and drag is a click and drag, and dragging with two fingers pulls the scroll bar for the current window. Jaadu even perfectly scales our odd resolution (when tilted to horizontal mode) to fit, although it scrolls so seamlessly I usually just use it in vertical mode.

Moving on to current videogames. If you have an XBox 360 download the demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Unless you think that pulling down Tie Fighters and throwing them at squads of storm troopers sounds boring. While you’re on XBox Live, you should download the demos (or full games!) of Braid, Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and Castle Crashers. The wonderfully, magical, and myterious game Braid is a moving and beautiful mindbender about time. It’s kind of like Einstein’s Dreams in videogame form. If you don’t know about Bionic Commando don’t bother, it’s a perfect remake of an old school Nintendo game of the highest order. If you don’t already have the ingrained reflexes from the ages of high hand-eye coordination games then you’ll just be frustrated. Castle Crashers is the next game from the geniuses behind Alien Hominid. If you get it, hit me up for some four player fun on XBox Live.

Edward and the Bees

2008-08-31T22:16:00Z

As you may have read on Sarah’s blog, Edward loves to play The Bee Game. We tie a robe sash to one of his arms or legs and he gets to wiggle his bee mobile around. It’s like a videogame, but with better physics. He really likes to figure out which limb is controlling the bees, then keep perfectly still until the bees have stopped swinging, then unleash a big wiggle to shake them all around. He’s even started to hold down the foot connected to the bees with his other foot, for maximum bee stability.

Other cute things Edward is up to:

He giggles an adorable “heh heh heh” giggle when he’s very entertained by something
He’s got some serious foot control while kicking around his tethered plastic ball:
- He’ll poise one foot just next to the ball and wait for it to be still, then kick it.
- He’ll grab the ball between his two feet and swing it around.
He’s discovered that he has feet, and is fascinated by them, especially when he can grab them.
He’s learning to program (that initial page turning is all him, he loves to play with books):

Six Reasons why Avatar: The Last Airbender is more awesome than Harry Potter

2008-08-19T01:24:00Z

The best kid’s television series ever ended a couple of weeks ago and not nearly enough people watched it. The show? Avatar: The Last Airbender. And since you probably didn’t watch it I’m going to extol its virtues in the time honored tradition of the comparative list. Since you are practically guaranteed to have read it, the otherwise relatively excellent Harry Potter series serves as our lens to the world of Avatar.

A world-spanning adventure

In Avatar the adventure literally spans the globe from pole to pole. Our heroes travel from the frigid arctic to sweltering swamps to dry deserts to lush tropical paradises and everywhere between.

In Harry Potter we spend 90% of our time with our heroes in a castle in England. Sure, we hear some small snippets about the wider world, but even that wider world doesn’t extend beyond Europe. Really? No magical people from, say, China are interested in stopping the ultimate evil?

A celebration of world cultures

Harry Potter is just as limited culturally as it is geographically. It barely hints at cultures beyond British, and still doesn’t get past Europe and doesn’t really care to. We must either conclude that the rest of the world is simply irrelevant, or that Voldemort was just a serial killer/cult leader stalking around the UK.

In Avatar, the world spanning conflict spans the world culturally as much as it does geographically. Bits of practically every world culture are found in the many disparate peoples of the series. Although the series does have a focus on Asian cultures it is by no means fixed. Bits of Western, Inuit, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and many more cultures make the world of Avatar a rich and compelling place. The global conflict really feels global, and not like some power play for a small European island.

Complex characters and motives

In Harry Potter, with the notable exception of one or two characters, the evil people really are the evil people. The Malfoys are evil from the start. House Slytherin really is the house of evil fighting against the three houses of good that we all thought it was. The Ministry of Magic really is as slow-moving and incompetent as we suspect.

In Avatar, the four nations are truly balanced, with good and bad in each: even the ‘evil’ Fire Nation. At the start of the series the Fire Nation is the faceless horde, bent on world domination. As the series progresses we learn of internal conflicts within the nation, and eventually a face is put to their people and culture and we learn that this isn’t the work of an evil nation but that of an evil person who happens to be a powerful and charismatic leader. Avatar doesn’t really treat people as good or bad, they just follow their logical motivations.

Breaking that down a little more:

In Harry Potter Voldemort wants to kill everyone. Why? Because he’s evil.

In Avatar Fire Lord Ozai wants to dominate the world because he desires power, yes, but also because he believes that his domination will lead to a better world. As we learn about the Fire Nation we find that under his rule the people in the Fire Nation are insulated from the war and actually enjoy a very prosperous lifestyle, albeit with some restriction on individual liberties.

Avatar presents a simplistic but very effective starting point for a discussion of both the lure and peril of imperialism. Harry Potter starts a discussion about why we shouldn’t like evil Wizards and bureaucracy.

Further, Harry never questions what he will do when he finally, inevitably, duels Voldemort. In Avatar Aang seriously soul searches for a solution that will allow him to face Fire Lord Ozai and restore balance to the world without taking a life.

Bending is martial arts based and has set rules and limits

Magic is great for a writer because you always have an out, because it’s magic. Harry Potter can introduce entirely new concepts and abilities as needed by the plot (see Horcruxes and every other plot device that requires Hermione to do something obscure she happened to have read in a book).

Avatar sets down the ground rules for bending and then never breaks them or introduces new plot devices. Instead, it demonstrates how cleverness and real honest to goodness hard work and training (shocking!) can be used to make great things happen within those limits.

Also, each style of bending being based on branches of actual martial arts means that bending is a million times more awesome than magic. Just about every fight scene in Avatar contains some of the best martial arts action I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something.

The adults aren’t all blindingly stupid (but aren’t always right, either)

It would be difficult to find adult characters more utterly, staggeringly idiotic and blind than those in Harry Potter. Look at the Quiddich Referee as a microcosm. Harry is the subject of openly obvious cheating and unusual events, yet the game goes on without a foul or whistle? Hmm, that bludger is continuously making hideously powerful attacks on that one player, even chasing him around and off the court…I’m going to allow this. His broom is clearly being immobilized by an enchantment…I’m going to allow this.

In Avatar, the story is about the children, yes. And they are also unusually gifted children. But the adults of the series are actually clever and competent as well.

You don’t have to be “magical” to be relevant

My biggest gripe with Harry Potter is that the lesson is: only magical characters matter.

In Avatar, many characters, including one of the main characters, has no bending (i.e. magic) ability and still contributes in a major way. We learn that if you work hard you can do whatever you set your mind to. That’s a lesson worth learning.

Cute Edward

2008-07-25T22:10:00Z

Edward continues to increase his cuteness level. Last weekend he learned a new syllable, “guh”, which he has so far shared only with me. It may, in fact, be his name for me. He’s already got a very cute parroting of “hello” down. It’s kind of like “aaahlooo” and he only brings that out when he’s really happy and talkative.

He has learned that his hands can be used for useful things, such as pushing himself up, pushing bottles away when he has had enough, and (just today) holding on to them so they don’t fly away while he is eating.

When Sarah puts him on his stomach to play “roll the baby” (maybe the game is the act of turning the baby over?) he has no trouble holding up his head, and actually seems like he is figuring out how to turn himself over. He’ll push with one arm and tilt his head, and wiggle his legs back and forth. Like a little Bender on his back!

See ya Wikipedia

2008-07-24T11:24:00Z

Knol, Google’s online encyclopedia with articles written by verified users, is now publicly accessible. It looks great and already has lots of good content. Hopefully it won’t devolve into the deletion bickering of Wikipedia.

A bunch of cool stuff

2008-07-19T02:19:00Z

There are a ton of cool things happening now. Let me show you them.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is pretty much the best thing ever. It’s a musical starring Neil Patrick Harris as the eponymous Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as a swaggering superhero, and other people that I don’t really know or care about. Watch it now, part three of three comes out tomorrow and it’s all gone by Sunday. After that if you want to watch you’ll have to pay.

Avatar: The Last Airbender has finally had new episodes all this week, leading up the to inevitably incredible two hour movie “Sozin’s Comet” tomorrow (Avatar and Dr. Horrible on the same day, sweet). If you don’t watch it, you are missing out one of the best shows on tv.

Sarah and I have made semi-complicated plans to see The Dark Knight) tomorrow (oh yes, Avatar, Dr. Horrible, AND Batman on the same day). We still can’t bring ourselves to both leave the baby at the same time, so Sarah and her sister will see it in the early afternoon, followed by a dinner by Lance, then Lance and I will see it in the evening.

E3 is going on. The coolest announcement so far may be for the 1-to-1 movement add-on for the Wii that will come with Wii Sports 2. Wii Sports 2 has frisbee throwing and sword fighting. Sword fighting and frisbee.

Terminator 4 looks fantastic. I was very “meh” until I saw that we have Christian Bale as John Connor. Bam!

The wonderful Hulu:http://hulu.com has The Secret of Nimh available for your viewing pleasure. My favorite Bluth movie and it holds up quite well.

I’m on del.icio.us roughly eight years behind everyone else, but now I have a cool little linkroll widget over there on the side. I’m pretty sure you can subscribe to del.icio.us links as an RSS feed if you’re all that interested.

Identi.ca just annouced that they’ve implemented the Twitter API, which is great because that means that every cool app people have written for doing Twitter updates will seamlessly work with identi.ca with just an address change. So Twitterific, can I have an Identi.cariffic for my iPod Touch?

Speaking of the iPod Touch. Its firmware 2.0 is great for two reasons: multiple message movemenet and deletion in email, applications. As for iPod Touch/iPhone applications I have three standouts: Remote, Pandora, and Scrabble. Scrabble is scrabble, so that’s a given. Pandora gives me access to my Pandora radio stations via my iPod Touch anywhere there’s open wifi (and that would be a huge win for an iPhone user, Pandora everywhere! Who needs XM?). Remote lets me control the iTunes on our mac over wifi with my touch. Let me say that again. I can sit on my couch, and with just a flip of my iPod Touch start browsing through our entire music collection (including videos and podcasts) and play them on our nice surround sound system. Of course I could do this before, but it involved: turning on the tv, switching to the computer video input, turning on the surround sound, getting the (sadly, wired) keyboard and mouse, and then going to iTunes and playing the music. Now I just have to turn on the surround sound, and start up Remote on the touch. Oh yeah. It’s really nice to be able to jump around our whole music collection while feeding Edward. It even streams the album artwork to the iPod just to be cool.

Getting paid to have fun

2008-07-12T03:43:00Z

So what’s being going on in my life, except for the whole newborn baby thing? A new job, that’s what. Two weeks ago I started work as the newest member of UNC-Chapel Hill’s University Library web team. Although this job move meant giving up my corner office (and its glorious floor to ceiling windows) in the Undergraduate Library for a cube in a windowless room in Davis, it’s been lots of fun. It’s just so great to have a job where I can actually apply the knowledge I’ve gotten from reading tons of programming and web design books. So far I’ve gotten to get into the CSS and jsp code for an upcoming catalog design (IE6, we hates you), had serious chunks of time to work on the reserves website that’s been languishing in my todo list for over a year, have been encouraged to explore an interesting project idea, and have had lots of collaborative fun with Nivex.

Today I also had the brand new pleasure of working an entire day from home. I’ve just never had a job that didn’t require me to be physically present. I gotta say, it was pretty enjoyable and genuinely productive. I wasn’t sure how well it would work, but I was really able to just hunker down at the kitchen table and hack out code for hours straight. Although library systems doesn’t allow telecommuting on a regular basis, I’ve gotten approval to do it for the rest of the Fridays this month to be be available for baby helping.

This job is also nice because I feel like I’ve finally completed a long circular journey. My library career started in Davis Library as a student assistant for the technical services department. When I was returning to the library as a reserves processor and exploring the (still on the horizon) possibility of library school I contacted one of my old bosses who put me in touch with the guy who is now my new boss in the web team. It’s weird, but it just feels complete. Like I’ve finished one major life stage and am moving on to the next. Although a lot of that may come from the whole baby thing, I’m still loving the new job. Programming has always been one of the “work” activities that just makes the time fly by until I find myself staying ten or fifteen minutes late just to try out one more idea, or wrap up to a stopping point. Somehow I’ve always ended up doing it no matter what job I’ve had, so it’s great to actually get explicitly paid for it.

Case of the Mummy's Gold

2008-07-10T01:26:00Z

The fifth Penny Arcade book is out, The Case of the Mummy’s Gold. If you are at all interested in videogames and funny, then you should already own a copy. The book spans the year 2004, which I consider to be the first year of the ongoing golden age of Penny Arcade. The art, the humor, the crazy storylines (e.g. Twisp and Catsby) really came together and created something wonderful. PA had always been funny, this is when they truly started making me laugh with every comic and I became a true fanboy.

Here are some of the gems (including my favorite PA comic ever):

Interact with any significantly large online environment and you will see the following theory in action.

As one who greatly prefers the chill of winter to the heat of summer, “Your star burns!” is practically a catchphrase of mine.

Some context for this, my favorite PA comic. It is set in the game Ninja Gaiden for the XBox. There is a room early in the first level that has several secret doors. When you enter the room, these doors open and out burst several waves of deadly ninjas. The skillful player can dispatch them with ease, leave the room, re-enter the room, and out come more ninjas! If you’re after the ultimate weapon in the game (and you are very patient) then this trick is a great way to make a ton of cash early in the game. No matter how many times you wipe the floor with your extremely dedicated foes, more keep on coming. This comic depicts what surely must be happening behind the scenes.

Edit the text of any website

2008-07-08T14:47:00Z

From Cut and paste one line of code to make any website editable:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true';
document.designMode='on'; void 0

What’s that you ask? That is an awesome small chunk of JavaScript that allows you to make the text of any website editable within the browser window. Just:

Copy the code to the clipboard
Browse to the site you want to edit
Paste the code into the address bar and press return
Edit the site’s text however you like

Let the pranking begin.

Like Twitter, but fast and open

2008-07-07T15:55:00Z

Dave’s article How to think about identi.ca on his excellent blog Scripting News pointed me to the nice new twitter replacement, identi.ca. I’m now on it as xyzzyb. Currently the service is really snappy, we’ll just have to see how it scales as more users load it up. One nifty feature (although I probably won’t use it) is that it can slurp your IM away messages as status updates. Now I just need an iPhone/iPod touch API.

So Adorable

2008-07-05T16:31:00Z

I’ve finally managed to overcome the incapacitating cuteness and capture a picture of Edward’s adorable smile. Enjoy!

Baby Bathing

2008-07-02T00:23:00Z

Edward just finished his first shower and was a very good little water baby (just like his dad!). The technique is a little tricky, but one hundred percent less annoying than setting up the baby wash tub. I just hold him in the shower with the water running at a comfortable temperature for him while Sarah washes him with the wash cloth and soap. No bowl of soapy water, no complicated rinsing procedure, and certainly no tricks needed to keep him warm during the bath.

When the water first hit him he cried for just a second, then quickly decided that the water was just fine with him. Even getting his face rinsed off was no big deal and, in fact, seemed to be a pretty enjoyable procedure. Cute!

And just so this post isn’t just boring text, I give you Blanket Baby:

And a rare snapshot of Plotting Baby:

Homegrown Edward

2008-06-28T14:58:00Z

Here’s Edward in his swing from the Undergraduate Library.

And here’s a nice set of three (all taken in a row!) of Edward being cute and awake in his hammock chair.