I saw Diary of the dead last night. I liked it in excess of what fault I found, most of which came from the somewhat burdened dialog. If you’re watching this it almost certainly isn’t the first zombie movie you’ve seen, nor are you unfamiliar with the social commentary embodied therein. Just add the thrill, chill and kill scenes to a story arc that give you a vehicle for your message, don’t push it through dialogue; it does nothing but make it harder to suspend disbelief. Recommended in proportion to the number of zombie movies you’ve already seen.

I’m watching Paprika for the third time since I bought it Saturday, but for the first time with just the English dubbing. It always find it interesting to compare the differences in the spoken and written english translations, including the different ways the voice actors portray their characters. Highly recommended for people who like pretty mental exercises and full length features with multiple subplots. Bonus points for already liking animation and foreign language movies.

Hope it was a good one.

I honor of Pi day, I whipped up this little quizlet: Test your Pi power!

Hope you all had some irrational fun :)

I have a template I apply before releasing a program at work, most of which is a header of documentation boilerplate. I included a “Bugs & Limitations” section, and prior to testing I list the limitations I can forsee that (I believe ;) fall outside anticipated usage.

More than once, just the exercise of writing this section has ”encouraged’ me to go back and make changes to the program, just so I can remove a limitation comment from the documentation. Not every limitation gets removed, especially for small, limited usage cases, and I find that putting in warnings for future maintainers provides an immediate sense of relief for some part of my release anxiety. If I’m unable to dump most of this anxiety by documenting or testing then it isn’t ready for release.

OK, so I also keep a to-do list, and will write down things I’ve done just to cross them off…

American Elf is the daily artblog of creative wonk James Kochalka. His band, ”James Cochalka Superstar“ has put out several albums and he has a few children’s books, including Monkey Vs Robot. He currently spends much of his free time composing bit-rock on his Gamboy.

I was prompted to write because not only did he recently open the archives of his daily, extremely candid, autobiographical webcomic American Elf to the public, but also because he and his wife just recently welcomed their second child into the fold. He may be one of the first fathers to capture some of the, um, funkier nuances of parenting.

American Elf updates daily.

Apparently those little blue imps are stocking their longships for another trans-atlantic invasion. that’s right. THE SMURFS ARE COMING (BACK).

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Having migrated all my data to an external drive, I’m hoping to squeeze my laptop’s windows partition down and install another OS this weekend. I plan on primarily using this new OS, but want to keep XP for gaming. I’m torn between Ubuntu and FreeBSD.

I’ve been into FreeBSD for a few months now, and I like it. I hesitate only because of the lack of native Flash support… while some people still grump about those new-fangled websites, and while I think it’s often inappropriately used, I watch a good number of videos (like the TED talks.) I know it’s possible to get some level of support, but it’s something I’ve failed to get working so far, and I don’t want to reboot just to watch a video.

Linux has better Flash support because Adobe decided to supply it to them. Not only do they not lend this support to BSD distros, Adobe expressly forbids BSDs from including it. It’s a commercial strategy based on their alliance with M$, as far as i can figure. There are Flash re-implementation projects, like Gnash, and there are ways of using the Linux binary code… but it’s a hassle, and Firefox seems to love to crash when I make the attempt (Opera just ignores it, but then, that’s to be expected.)

So if I install Ubuntu, it’s basically for the Flash. I guess at least I’ll be better able to help support others who want to migrate to Ubuntu. Some consolation…

I’m also on a simplification kick, so while I would typically just install both, I’m fighting that urge. For now. ;)

“The Commerce Department has been forced by Judicial Watch to turn over records of spring, 2001 meetings held between Dick Cheney and execs from global oil giants, records that suggest that the group decided months before September 11th that the US energy policy would center on taking control of Iraq’s oil”

From Jon Talpin via BoingBoing

Whenever I get an idea for a site project, I tend to run to the command line and bounce from whois to whois, looking to see if I can find a good name that isn’t registered. OK, sometimes I don’t even have a good idea, I just like to see what I can find among the ever diminishing top level domain namespaces…

I’ve gotten better (I don’t want to go on the cart!) about not registering my finds until I’m SURE I have something worth putting up… but at $10 or so for a year registration it can be pretty hard. In an effort to offload the burden I’ve decided to throw whatever I find and am definitely not going to register up here.

The funniest ones are the ones that can be parsed in multiple ways, or provide options for interesting subdomains or e-mail addresses. For example:

• meallover.com – As in “meal lover.” I was thinking ”me all over,” but who doesn’t love food? Good for a recipe / restraunt review blog. Ok, so there are other options too… like track, follow, lick…
• ssismine.com -How would you like to get an e-mail from “your@ssismine.com”? I don’t send enough threatening e-mails to register that one. Maybe a fisherman would like this.b@assismine.com? Or a metal reseller: all.br@assismine.com?

If anyone does register a domain I post here, please let me know so I can see what you do with it.

Hmmm, I think I just had a worthwhile idea for a new authentication scheme that would work really well with the distributed nature of service clients and persistant, uniquitous nature of accounts. Now to work it out a bit more and find someone who can vet the details…

“Mom, Dad, did you know I could shoot blood out my fingers?”

This is her way of engaging us, by calling us to question her weirdest fantasies.

“What if angry worms dropped out of the sky and ate our fingers?”

My dear little girl is three. I fear not for her future career as a horror writer.

(And no, I actually don’t watch scary movies with them, unless you count <u>Howl’s Moving Castle</u>. Maybe it’s hereditary)

Find an inexpensive food cart (or design and build) and sell noodles. Cheap vegan noodle dishes, like sweet potato noodles with peanut satay. FSM logo, obviously.

Organize groups of people who want to delve into a new area of learning. Take a semi-guided approach similar to book clubs, where each month or so a new area is explored, with a specific topic or list of topics for each week. Generate the areas, schedule, topics democratically by group poll. Make it easy for people to discuss with others via IRC channels, mailing lists, etc.

The first “hack” I ever came across doubled (!) the capacity for a 5.25 floppy, and could be performed with a hole punch. I learned it from my elementary school librarian in 2nd or third grade. While I didn’t have much use for it at the time, I recall being thrilled by the prospects it opened up… not for doubling disk space (mind the density!) but as an approach to exploring the world. To go beyond consensus and find the places not on the map.

This floated into memory last night as I was settling down to sleep, and it made me curious to hear about other people’s first exposure to such innovation.

“Haven’t you always wanted to play Guitar Hero… But with Jugs?? Enter Jug Hero.”

Hat’s off to the creators, k7lim, Lora Oehlberg, Seung Wan Hong, and Shawna Hein for their awesome Tangible User Interfaces Final Project. Ok, so it’s just a prototype project… but surely they’ve got a deal in the works?

More pics on flikr, tagged as  Jug Hero

The creators of Solar Empire and Galactic Civilization II are touting on the IGN blog that the lack of DRM on their games’ installation media as prime examples of how DRM is unnecessary in the digital media market. They’re right too, and have proven it with millions of dollars in sales. However, I don’t believe even they understand why.

The author of that entry portrays the game is a loss leader for sales of the download updates and extra content. It is, by concession, freeware. The incentive to purchase a copy supposedly comes from the desire for a “unique serial #” that will allow updates and extra content.

“With Galactic Civilizations II, we put no copy protection on the CD. But to get updates, users had to use their unique serial # in the box. That’s because our system is backed by TotalGaming.net’s unique SSD service (secure software delivery) which forgoes DRM and copy protection as we know it to take a more common sense (I think so anyway as a gamer) approach of just making sure you are delivering your game to the actual customer.

Any system out there will get cracked and distributed. But if you provide reasonable after-release support in the form of free updates that add new content and features that are painless for customers to get, you create a real incentive to be a customer.”

Err, not exactly.

The game, as they concede, will be made freely available by crackers whatever they do. Attempting to secure it is a waste of time and money, and a hassle for the legit user. But the same must then be said of any material not available initially as well. Attempting to sell something that’s freely available is chicanery, even if you are the producer. We’ve moved beyond believing in the entanglement of possessing media and the legal “right” to use it; it is great that the producers acknowledge the inability to glue these concepts together… but then why do they proceed to try to anyway?

The illusion that people paying them for this product are purchasing the game, is wholly illusory. Their customers are simply buying licenses to play the game legally, and the convenience of on-demand delivery (digital download or game-in-hand from a store, plus extra downloads later) is just an incentive. Digital Media Rule #1: All there is to sell is convenience and conscience. Here’s the pickle: the updates and extras can ALSO be distributed without inhibition once it is downloaded unless it relies on some form of DRM. Since they make a point of picking on DRM, I assume it doesn’t. They fold their argument into two halves by talking about “the CD” and “updates” I think they fail to see that the two are cut from the same cloth.

Why not divorce the content from the license completely? Clear the downloader’s conscience and give away (as in freedom) the game AND the updates. However, you can continue to sell instant downloads of the game and updates, for people who can’t or won’t go find a copy in the wild. You forgo the “license” since you’re beyond absolving the downloaders, you’re actually encouraging them. You make a game people want to support, and get them to love it. You also give them the chance to support it by funding it directly, taking what would have been a license payment and turning it into an investment. People hate to lose investments, even more than they desire to make gains. Let them buy in.

“HELSINKI (Reuters) – Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient’s upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.

Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spares parts for humans a step closer to reality.”

Which reminds me that there’s a new Michael Marshall Smith book on my reading list…

Finnish patient gets new jaw from own stem cells