GeekSpeak

TRON Geek Gathering

2007-06-16T23:24:00.001-07:00

Did the creators of the Gregorian Calendar have the wisdom to set things in motion so that the June 2007 Geek Gathering would come as early in the month as possible? That's some foresight, considering that its champion, Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius, got the nod from Pope Gregory XIII to put it in motion on February 24th in 1582.

Another forecast for tonight? Say around 9:00 PM? 78 F and clear skies.

Which works out well for us, as we will be screening TRON at this month's Geek Gathering on the big back wall of the Petrol Station (985 Wakefield) at 9:00 tonight. The preliminaries will kick off a little after 7:00 with Jay Lee and the crew of 90.1's Technology Bytes. St. Arnold will be on hand, though this is definitely an all ages venue.

Yes, that is Jay Maynard, aka the Tron Guy. He said that he would join us if he hadn't already made a promise to be in Sioux Falls, SD. Next time...

I'll leave you with the following TRON facts to tide you over until the Day Star goes down on the Big Blue Room.

*Peter O'Toole was originally signed to play Dillenger/Sark, but backed out of it when he didn't see any of the scenery, light cycles or tanks that were mentioned in the film's script.

*Because of a glitch in the production and emulsion ordering, flashes appear randomly throughout the film. The film crew covered this up by adding sound effects to coincide with these unexpected flashes, making them part of the computer world. This technique was later borrowed by Bill Gates to turn "bugs" into "features" in the world of windows. WoW!

*Jeff Bridges was fitted with a dance belt for the filming of TRON because of a certain bulge is his costume.

*While many people mistakenly believe that TRON's name was derived from elecTRONic, it is actually a reference to the BASIC debugging tool, which stands for Trace On. TROFF, Trace Off, disables the tool.

*TRON was passed over for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects because the Academy felt that the film makers *cheated* by using computers. In fact, a number of Disney animators refused to work on the project because they feared that CG animation would mean the death of hand-drawn animation. They we correct, though Disney didn't close the doors on its hand-drawn animation studios for another 22 years.

*E.T. the Extra Terrestrial claimed the award for Best Visual Effects that year (1982) with Cocoon taking it in 1985, Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988 (due to it's blending of traditional animation and live action) and The Abyss in 1989 for its use of that same cheaty *CG Animation*.

*The cast of Cocoon was made entirely of teenage actors, shedding some light on it's award for Best Visual Effects.

*The Petrol Station is the downtown expat sibling of the old Kaveh Kanes, ground zero for Houston's wireless movement.

*See you all tonight!!1!1

DRM doomed?

2007-06-16T23:23:00.001-07:00

If you've ever occupied space (IRL or in the digital realm) near me when the issue of Digital Rights Management has come up, you know my stance on it. Jeremy Allison, a rather well-known Google employee, shares my beliefs, though, unlike me, has found time to write a great piece outlining a simple case for why DRM is doomed from the beginning. I especially like the references to Scotty and the Underpants Gnomes. Check out what he has to say here.

Obama's space

2007-06-16T23:22:00.002-07:00

Techpresident.com is running a piece that outlines the battle between the Obama Presidential Campaign and the creator of the Obama MySpace page, Joseph Anthony, who had built up Obama's MySpace presence to include over 160,000 unsolicited friends. Today, the site has just over 18,000 friends and has been placed back in the hands of the Obama campaign.
What this really boils down to is a stand off between voter-generated media and campaign controlled content. Micah L. Sifry states, "The most intriguing thing about this whole mess is this is the first time I can think of where the grass-roots activist at the bottom of the pile has a megaphone as big as the folks who tried to boss him around."

Are you game?

2007-06-16T23:22:00.001-07:00

When video game cabinets first came on the scene, digital storage was expensive and music was analog. Think vinyl records and mix tapes... The Compact Disc was still nearly a decade away, and the only way to get "high fidelity" sound into a game was to throw a cassette tape player into the mix. Seriously.
A much more practical (lo-fi) way of getting music into a game was to include a computer chip that could take electrical signals from the processor and convert them into an audible waveform via a built-in speaker; the first music to hit the gaming scene was predictably monophonic and heavily looped. Even worse, most of the engineers responsible for coding music into games had no musical experience what so ever.
It wasn't until the birth of home console games that this new breed of digital composers found an audience. Upon completion of a game, names like Koji Kondo (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda) and Hirokazu Tanaka (Metroid and Kid Icarus) would scroll by, alerting us that video game music was on its way to becoming an art in and of itself.
Twenty years later, the video game industry is booming, requiring voice actors, live motion actors, the most gifted coders in the world, and...musicians. While some of us harbor unbreakable ties to the 8-bit music of the games in the 80s, there is no denying that the new breed of VG composers is fierce. Armed with everything from traditional studio instruments to the latest in digital re-sequencers, many of these new artists have their own following. This is especially true in Japan where makers ship both the games and their sound tracks. Hollywood caught onto this decades ago, generating quite a few MPAA/RIAA dollars in the process of selling the "Original Sound Track" on CD and cassette in addition to the movie itself. The US video game industry is just now wising up.
So what does this mean in terms of your Friday night? Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL or just JXL on many video game credits) is a musician who has contributed some pretty high profile work to both console and pc games during the last five years. Geek Street Cred: Junkie XL produced the theme music for the computer game The Sims 2: Nightlife, and the entire soundtrack for the Xbox racing game Forza Motorsport. Most recently, JXL laid down the entire SSX Blur original sound track, Blur being the newest snowboarding title for the Nintentdo Wii.
Pushing the industry forward from the sampler up, Junkie recently became the first artist to sign a record deal with Artwerk, the new label started up by video game publishing giant Electronic Arts. And starting in September of this year, he'll be heading back to his home country of The Netherlands to teach a Music Technology course at the ArtEZ Conservatorium.
JXL will be in Houston tonight at Planeta Bar Rio (6400 Richmond), doing a live set of whatever he feels like putting out there. I will be attending after the Geek Gathering, as will my Cylon girlfriend, Amanda Robinson. She'll actually be getting things started with a live dj set at 10:00 and another at 11:30. And about that Geek Gathering... I'll be at Tropioca Tea and Coffee in Midtown Houston tonight from 7:30 - 9:30 to hang out with the other co-hosts and fans of Technology Bytes at the May 2007 Geek Gathering. Bubble tea, free WiFi, and 80's arcade banter. Are you game?

Leeroy Jenkins!!!

2007-06-16T23:21:00.000-07:00

The scene: World of Warcraft, Laughing Skull Server, Upper Blackrock Spire Dungeon, the Rookery Room. You and a dozen clan mates have assembled outside one of the most notoriously difficult areas for players new to WoW. As your leader carefully reviews the strategy, Leeroy returns from being away from the keyboard and...

(This video contains a word or two that is inappropriate for office workers and younger viewers! You've been warned!)

While this is somewhat of an old story, Joel Warner of Westworld recently tracked down Leeroy for a new look into an old meme.

BTW, all of the World of Warcraft servers are down this morning for maintenance. Maybe this can get you through until they are back online around 1:00 PM today...

The bunny and I

2007-06-16T23:20:00.000-07:00

Some 22 years ago (I now find it more aesthetic to represent my current age in hexadecimal), Robert Metcalfe drafted a memo to his manager describing what is now known as Ethernet. In his own words, "On May 22, 1973, using my Selectric typewriter ... I wrote ... "Ether Acquisition" ... heavy with handwritten annotations -- one of which was 'ETHER!' -- and with hand-drawn diagrams -- one of which showed `boosters´ interconnecting branched cable, telephone, and ratio ethers in what we now call an internet.... If Ethernet was invented in any one memo, by any one person, or on any one day, this was it."
It being my birthday, I'm going to give myself a hall pass on a lengthy explanation of what Ethernet is and why it is important to anyone with a computer connected to the Internet. Let me, instead, leave you with this much more enlightened explanation of Ethernet: it is what one uses to catch the etherbunny.

Early April news

2007-06-16T23:19:00.000-07:00

For a number of years now, the likes of Google, Slashdot and ThinkGeek have fed users new products and rolled out ground-breaking services, all of which are announced on day one of the second quarter. If you weren't out surfing the sites Sunday, you might have missed some of them. Never fear, as I have taken it upon myself to compile a short list of some of my favorite products and services for Q2 2007.
For the coders out there, a rapid development framework for Python which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC was released Sunday. Check out the PythonOnPlanes 1.3.07 release notes for more information.
I'm bad about leaving the loft without my phone. I generally won't realize I have forgotten it until I am about to leave my parking garage, which means a trek back through the underground garage, up the elevator, down the hallway, into the loft, and back again. I'm also bad about going to the dentist as often as I should. AT&T/BellSouth/Cingular could change all of this, though, with a new technology that would allow dentists to implant a cellphone device into a user's molars. Howstuffworks has a good description of the technology, stating that, "once implanted in a person's molar, the transducer caused the tooth to vibrate in response to radio signals. The physical structure of the jaw carried the tooth's vibrations to the inner ear, where the user, and no one else, could perceive them as sound." Hopefully they'll have this rolled out in time for my next cleaning...
Google is at it again, this time with the launch of Google TiSP, a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users' plumbing systems. This project is years ahead of the City's recently announced proposal with Earthlink. It will be interesting to see if the aptly nicknamed "Dark porcelain" project will stay afloat amid Google's other projects and purchases.
While not necessarily a product or service, this next piece of news still merits a mention. We've already heard that actress Gillian Anderson has announced that she will not be returning in the long-awaited sequel to Chris Carter's The X-Files: Fight the Future. In her stead, actress Julianne Moore will be portraying Special Agent Dana Scully.
And finally, ThinkGeek is offering a special accessory for the Nintendo Wii. For gamers who can't quite muster the physical strength demanded of them by the Wiimote, the WiiHelm could be a much needed blessing. After all, who wants to spend hours at the gym just to play a videogame?!?! I think that the demo says it all...

Holy war

2007-06-16T23:18:00.004-07:00

Holy Wars are fought for principals and beliefs loftier than the concepts of tolerance and co-existance. In a Holy War, both camps are so entrenched in their own ideology that logic and reason go right out the window. Examples include one of the three "sacred wars" waged over the possession of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, the Christian Crusades and the longstanding war between the users of vi and emacs.
You may have already been a participant in a holy war (possibly unwittingly!) at some point in your geek life, as the Internet has proven to be a fast paced battleground where anyone with a dial-up connection is issued a weapon along with their access number. In fact, wars have been raging on the Internet for years: the aforementioned emacs vs. vi editor war, AOLers vs. Netiquette, Linus Torvalds vs. Richard Stallman, Red vs. Blue, and Mac users vs. the the poor, unwashed, Microsoft masses.
It's in a geek's nature to argue certain points to death.
Mainly because we know we're right.
But what happens when we are confronted with matters of faith rather than fact? M4th.com is running a piece that addresses the question of why geeks are often athiests. The article's "given" is taken from a recent Digg poll on religion. The piece may raise more questions than it answers, but is littered with hidden gems.
"The quickest and most reliable way to be rewarded for intelligence is to prove someone else wrong (critical thinking). Such a strategy gives you an immediate result and also establishes a sense of superior intelligence. Being constructive is much less rewarding."
I think that the author just summed up the reason why so many Holy Wars devolve into Flame Wars, though that is a topic best saved for a later post.

April Geek Gathering

2007-06-16T23:18:00.003-07:00

The April 2007 Geek Gathering is taking place this Friday, April 6th, at Tropioca Tea and Coffee in Midtown Houston. Located at 2808 Milam at Drew, Tropioca serves bubble tea, coffee, and smoothies in addition to pizza and sandwiches. The entire area is showered in 2.4GHz Goodness, so bring your WiFi enabled devices if you are so inclined. A few AC power outlets are available and someone will usually run out to their car for a power strip if one is needed.
If you've got a computer problem that requires some hands on attention or if you just want to come and chat with the hosts and listeners of Technology Bytes, start your Friday night right with some geeky banter and a bubble tea.

LED luminary

2007-06-16T23:18:00.001-07:00

Stop. Right now. Breathe. Now look around you and count the number of Light-Emitting Diodes (or LEDs) that you can currently see. There is generally a direct correlation between the number of LEDs you have around you and your Geek Quotient. (Depending on your current location, this could be an inaccurate measure of your true geekiness. I'll trust that you will adjust your sense of self worth accordingly.)
"Like a normal diode, an LED consists of a chip of semi-conducting material impregnated, or doped, with impurities to create a p-n junction. As in other diodes, current flows easily from the p-side, or anode, to the n-side, or cathode, but not in the reverse direction. Charge-carriers -- electrons and electron holes -- flow into the junction from electrodes with different voltages. When an electron meets a hole, it falls into a lower energy level, and releases energy in the form of a photon."
Coolness.
LEDs, a long-time staple in many a piece of tech gear, have been creeping into mainstream usage for years now. Whether newly found on your keychain or in the tail lights of your car, these heatless light sources have been with us for the better part of 50 years. Or so we thought.
New Scientist is running an article that sheds some light on a Russian radio technician named Oleg Vladimirovich Losev. It appears that Losev invented the LED some thirty years earlier than previously thought. Rather than regurgitate the small amount of information that has been found about Losev and his early invention, I would encourage you to read the paper by Nikolay Zheludev, the professor who brought Losev's work to light. I must warn you, however, that this part of the story is not a happy one; Losev died of hunger in 1942, during the blockade of Leningrad, at the age of 39. His legacy, though, can be found in every blink of a router or switch and in the hearts and minds of those individuals who endeavor to illuminate the world around us.

So it goes

2007-06-16T23:16:00.002-07:00

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."
Kurt Vonnegut, 1922 - 2007

Death and taxes

2007-06-16T23:16:00.001-07:00

Death and taxes certainly went hand in hand last night for the unlucky few watching over Intuit's TurboTax server farm. Due to the large number of last minute filers, the servers started to melt down several hours before the midnight filing deadline. From the TurboTax support page earlier this morning:
"Update, 6:30am, April 18: Outstanding issues with our servers have been resolved and we are currently processing all customers' returns and requests for status checks at a normal rate. As we mentioned earlier, we are working with the IRS this morning to ensure that returns will be considered as timely filed even if transmitted to us past midnight.
We encourage customers to continue trying to e-file; if you have been unable to successfully transmit, please try again."
I, myself, took mine to the downtown post office in the rain and at a very late hour.
Rushmore>
Max: How'd the math test go?Dirk: What math test?Max: I thought you had a math test today.Dirk: No. Did you turn in your paper on the Berlin Airlift ?Max: Yeah, I got an extension.
Rushmore>
And so did I.

A touching effort

2007-06-16T23:15:00.004-07:00

Gabe: Have you heard about this Japanese witch toucher game? Tycho: It's the one where you touch witches, right? Gabe: That's it. Gabe: I guess you gotta touch them with the stylus until their heart races. That's what I heard. Tycho: So if they get excited, does it mean they're a witch? Or does it imply an absence of witchery. Gabe: Who _ _ cares?
Yes, that's correct. A new game called Doki Doki Majo Saiban may soon be released for the Nintendo DS. From the kotaku.com site:
"Plot elements for SNK's witch-toucher Doki Doki Majo Saiban have surfaced over at Famitsu. The game stars naughty Akuji Nishimura, who is commanded by an Angel Lulu to search for [witches] lurking in his junior high school. When the search is narrowed down, the suspected junior high school witch is examined with the touch pen.
How do you know if the little girl is a witch? Usually, there's a "witch's crest" hidden somewhere on her body which can appear in "Witch Check Mode." The goal: Make her heart beat quickly. Players use the stylus to touch the girl, whose expression will change depending on how her heart beats. The background with change as well. However! Rush things, and the girl does not respond. Players must take it slow with the touching -- these witches are flowers, or something."
Odd fare for Nintendo, but not really that odd for Japan in general. Whether your weirded out by this or think that it's kinda cool, one thing is certain. A new gaming genre has been born: "touch-a-girl-to-see-if-she's-a-witch". Game on.

Free as in WiFi

2007-06-16T23:15:00.003-07:00

Up until very recently (today, in fact), most of the cable based ISPs were decidedly against their subscribers sharing their connection to the Internet via WiFi. Some ISPs like Verizon Communications Inc can actually terminate your contract if they find you hosting an ad-hoc hotspot. This creates a situation where geeks-on-the-go have to pay for broadband once at home and then again in the coffee shop.
Of course, there are several free options available, thanks in part to groups like HoustonWireless.org and the desire of shop owners to increase foot traffic as well as entice their patrons to stick around for another drink or snack. The situation becomes grim, though, as soon as you enter a public place where "they" know they "have you." In these circumstances, broadband access can go from free to tens of dollars per day; airports and large commercial coffee chains tend to be the biggest offenders.
I did not expect that it would be Time Warner Cable Inc. to break with the industry's current stance that sharing home connections via WiFi is a Bad Thing. Business week is reporting that Time Warner "will let its home broadband customers turn their connections into public wireless hotspots, a practice shunned by most U.S. Internet service providers" with the help from a Spanish WiFi startup called Fon.
Is this a lone shot in the dark or just the first in a volley that may end with subscribers gaining ground on the mobility front across all ISPs?

Geek mascots

2007-06-16T23:15:00.001-07:00

Below are some popular "tech mascots" as selected by Wired Magazine. Actually, Wired calls them the Lamest Technology Mascots Ever. While still one rung up from Lamest Technology Mascots 3V4R!, that's a pretty low disctinction to attach to some of these charismatic yet misunderstood mascots.

Here's your preview... Do you recognize any of them? Do you harbor any fear or fondness for any one in particular?

Take some guesses. Do some digging. I'll be back in a few days to give you their names, the products they are associated with, and maybe even some history. In the mean time, tune into KPFT 90.1 FM tonight to check out Technology Bytes tonight at 8:00 PM.

Mascots unmasked

2007-06-16T23:11:00.004-07:00

Here's your complete answer key to yesterday's tech mascot roundup. Though Wired calls them the Lamest Technology Mascots Ever, I have developed a certain fondness for one or two of them...

	Name: Tux Represents: Linux Wired Says: Inescapable. I Say: I've got a three foot tall plastic penguin in my window overlooking Main Street in downtown and a myriad of other penguins littering my server room. Wired says that's lame? I say that's a shame.
	Name: Clippy Represents: Microsoft Office Wired Says: Probably tested well in research. I Say: I love to hate Clippy. He's a geek culture icon that most everyone can agree is at least slightly annoying. He also had a fairly long run as a guest character in User Friendly.
	Name: Wikipede Represents: Wikipedia Wired Says: Go with the centipede -- he's a tenured professor of religion! I Say: He's a natural multi-tasker and he's in the know about yerba mate. That scores big points with me.
	Name: The VM Bear Represents: IBM's VM Operating System Wired Says: Harmless. I Say: A far cry from the eight blue lines that make up IBM's logo, the VM Bear might have inspired warm and fuzzy feelings in many an IBM sysadmins' shifts. After all, who isn't comforted by a green, glowing teddy in the middle of the night?
	Name: Hexley Represents: The Darwin OS Wired Says: Weird but lovable. I Say: Platypus are people, too. Well, kinda...
	Name: Mozilla Represents: The Mozilla Browser Wired Says: Ugh! Zog like tabbed browsing! I Say: Originally intended to be a Mosaic browser killer (Mosaic vs. Mozilla - get it?), Mozilla now fronts for the Mozilla Foundation. It's good work if you can get it.
	Name: Clarus Represents: Apple Wired Says: Isn't Clarums just the cutest widdle fellow? Yes he is! I Say: I've already weighed in on Clarus, the DogCow.
	Name: The BSA Ferret Represents: The Business Software Alliance Wired Says: A contest to name him attracted no apparent takers. Or maybe "Gestapo" was the winning name. I Say: A mascot that encouraged kids to rat out their software pirating parents? It's not just lame, it's evil!
	Name: Jeeves Represents: Ask.com Wired Says: Very good, sir. Will that be all? I Say: I never used ask.com very much; Then again, I never really enjoyed phrasing answers in the form of a question.
	Name: Glenda Represents: The Plan 9 Operating System Wired Says: Happy, fuzzy petaflop bunny! I Say: Every geek should be able to give a knowing nod at the mention of Plan 9...
	Name: The Jester Represents: Adobe Creative Suite Wired Says: Just when we were growing out of our recurring clown nightmare, too. I Say: Yeah, this one creeps me out, too. Coulrophobia, anyone?
	Name: Larry the Cow Represents: The Gentoo Linux Distribution Wired Says: Isn't Larry a guy's name? I Say: I'm more familiar with the symbol near Larry than with Larry him^H^H^Hherself...
	Name: OS-tan Represents: Microsoft Windows 98 Wired Says: Strangely compelling. I Say: I knew there was a reason I still keep a bootable Windows 98 box around...
	Name: Mike the Llama Represents: Winamp Wired Says: Good backstory, spits when angry. I Say: Odd that the sound byte, "Winamp, it really whips the llamas @55" was dropped right around the time AOL bought the makers of Winamp, Nullsoft.
	Name: Duke Represents: Sun Microsystems Java Wired Says: A 3-D Rorschach blot -- what does he signify to you? I Say: This one is new to me...and I've been around Java since its inception.

DST domesday

2007-06-16T23:11:00.003-07:00

We're reminded of time constantly. We fidget with mobile phones, often checking for the correct time more often than for missed calls or messages. Even our escapes remind us of time. The notion of night and day has creeped into our PC and console games and the passage of time has haunted music forever. Songs such as "Time Keeps On Slipping" and "Clocks" get daily play on the Houston airwaves. And as a geek, I feel a preternatural affinity for devices that promise to allow me a few more daylight hours outside of the office.
While Benjamin Franklin may have been first to suggest saving daylight in 1784, he made no mention Daylight Saving Time (DST). It was William Willett who first officially proposed DST to the British government, though he was unable to convince Parliment to adopt it. Though often referred to as "summer time" in British English, it was the Germans (during World War One, no less) who first put DST into practice, choosing the initial dates of April 30th, 1916, through October 1st, 1916. Not to be outdone, the Brits followed suit, first adopting it between May 21st and October 1st, 1916. Newfoundland lead North America in the charge, and in March of 1918, the U.S. Congress established DST from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, only to have Congress repeal it in 1919. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the repeal, but Congress overrode it. Despite the very American proverb, "Early to bed, early to rise," American's don't like to be told to get out of bed any earlier than they have to...
(The discussion so far has been very hemisphere-specific, as seasons flip-flop south of the equator and are virtually non-existant on the equator itself.)
Everything ticked ticked along just fine for a while... Mainframes came on the scene along with punch cards, home brew computers, then personal computers and now a myriad of devices with embedded CPUs. Then this happened:
"On August 8, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This Act changed the time change dates for Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. Beginning in 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday in March and end the first Sunday in November. The Secretary of Energy will report the impact of this change to Congress. Congress retains the right to resume the 2005 Daylight Saving Time schedule once the Department of Energy study is complete."
What does this mean for your average geek? Dates on affected devices will show the incorrect time for three weeks in March and one week in November, causing a number of problems such as email with incorrect timestamps, events in calendaring software being displayed incorrectly and some authentication software not doing its job.
If you're just managing a handful of personal gadgets and a few home PCs, then your workload is light. If you're one of the unfortunate souls in charge of a mail server, or some other beast that deals with time sensitive transaction processing, then you could be in for a long weekend.
To avoid these problems, users either have to update their devices manually when Daylight Saving Time changes, or update their software to newer versions. A great resource for finding updates specific to your OS can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K7
Incidentally, the band Coldplay's song "Clocks" was co-written by Chris Martin, great-great grandson of DST inventor William Willett.

Druid school dropout

2007-06-16T23:11:00.001-07:00

In college, I signed up for what I thought would be an easy (A)stronomy course. I imagined myself under a starry sky, pointing out the Big Dipper and Orion's Belt to co-ed classmates for an easy letter. What I got was Stellar and Galactic Physics. Not exactly the easiest of A's, but I can now calculate redshift in my sleep.
My starlust still not satisfied, I bought a Dobsonian mounted reflector telescope during my senior year. It had an 8" mirror (a virtual light bucket) that was capable of viewing Deep Sky Objects (things that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye) by jumping from brighter to dimmer to even dimmer objects. This is often called Star Hopping. I was after big game - things like the Ring Nebula or Messier 42. I would view the moon, but never really payed attention to the method used in finding it. I mean...it's the moon. It's right there.
It became apparent that my ability to locate celestial objects was less than stellar when friend and radio host Jay Lee asked to hang out on top of my roof to get a few shots of Saturday's eclipse. Rather than relive the lunarless experience, I'll let you read his account of it instead.
So... Anyone know the appropriate astronomical term for a celestial object being eclipsed by a building?

Travel tech two

2007-06-16T23:10:00.001-07:00

After a long night of packing and an unusually early morning in the office (Thanks, Y2K7!), I'm just hours away from leaving for Den Haag via London and Amsterdam. I'll be hotelling it this time, as opposed to renting apartments as I did in Brazil. My Cylon girlfriend has been in Europe for over a week and has been plagued with everything from sizzling power bricks to broken Voice Over IP adaptors. As a result, I'm carrying enough gear to rescue her and to keep me connected for the next few weeks.
I've got a long day of travelling ahead - IAH to Gatwick, Gatwick to Schiphol, Schiphol to Amsterdam Central and then on to Den Haag. I'll check in once I'm there. If you're going to be in that part of the world the next two weeks, drop me a line!

Transmeta case mods

2007-06-16T23:09:00.000-07:00

am fresh back from The Netherlands via the United Kingdom. While there are many reasons people travel to that part of the world, a select few go to have certain...procedures carried out. If one doesn't pass the psychological screening or if one would prefer something a bit less permanent, several specialty shops exist where one can find something a bit more desirable. I, myself, selected something in pvc leather that was fitted specifically for me. If you're feeling adventurous, have a peek.
I need some time to sort through pictures and organize notes before giving a very lengthy description of anything. Since you last heard from me, I have encountered overpriced WiFi, real ale, locked down Access Points, odd electrical issues, Knights that say "Ni" and the UK launch of the PS3. Oh, and someone stole my shoes in Amsterdam. I have the show tonight, but I'll be back with pictures and a story or two soon...

Get your geek on!

2007-06-16T23:08:00.000-07:00

The co-hosts of Technology Bytes will be hanging out with Groovehouse and Jennifer the Intern this Friday, February 2nd, at Tropioca, located at 2808 Milam at Drew. Friends and fans, alike, will be on hand to talk tech, goggle the latest gadgetry, and revel in all things geeky at this month's Geek Gathering. Free WiFi, a plethora of tapioca drinks, and ample parking make this a meetup worth making.
If Saturday morning rolls around and you find yourself still riding the silicon snake, you can head over to the HAL-PC headquarters to catch the first of two monthly presentations put on by the Houston Linux Users Group, aka HLUG. The meeting gets started at two in the afternoon, breaks for a few minutes around three, and by four, participants are ready to be re-released into the wild with some freshly learned linux skillz. Whether you're a Linux zealot or simply one of the Li-curious, chances are good that you'll walk out of this month's meeting with a smile and some freshly honed Linux skillz.

It is very cold in space

2007-06-16T23:07:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week, Dwight Silverman put together his list of what he considers to be the top fifteen geek movies to see before you die. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn made Dwight's list and was the first Star Trek movie that I saw in a theater. As a result, it is indelibly etched in my sci-fi subconcious.
One scene aboard the U.S.S. Reliant unfolds in the following manner:
Joachim: They're requesting communications, sir.
Khan: Let them eat static.
Joachim: They're still running with shields down.
Khan: Of course. We're one big happy fleet. Ah, Kirk, my old friend, do you know the Klingon proverb that tells us revenge is a dish that is best served cold?
(pause)
Khan: It is very cold in space.
While this is certainly true, the operating temperature of the Orion chip is about 500 times colder than interstellar space and roughly 750 times colder than the chilliest Klingon vendetta. With a base temperature of 5mK, or 0.005 degrees above absolute zero, the Orion will power a 16-qubit adiabatic quantum computer, set to perform some 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel "universes") during a demonstration in D-Wave's labs next Tuesday.
While the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach, you're free to ogle the pictures right now! Can anyone tell me at which temperature drool freezes?

Bruce Schneier facts

2007-06-16T23:06:00.002-07:00

The Internet is a wealth of information. For example, we now know that when the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris. Another hard Internet fact? Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants. The compendium of facts about Chuck Norris, the people's hero, grows nearly every day.
But who represents us? Who is the geek's hero? A person who employs might of mind over strength of sinew; someone who will keep us (and our data!) safe at night... I believe I have the answer.
Bruce Schneier.
Wikipedia tells us that, "Schneier's Applied Cryptography is a popular and widely regarded reference work for cryptography. Schneier has designed or co-designed several cryptographic algorithms, including the Blowfish, Twofish and MacGuffin block ciphers, the Helix and Phelix stream ciphers, and the Yarrow and Fortuna cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators. Solitaire is a cryptographic algorithm developed by Schneier for use by people without access to a computer, called Pontifex in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon. He is the author or coauthor of hundreds of academic cryptography papers."
I was seduced by crypto in college. I think that many of us "experimented" a bit as we came of age in the safe geek harbor of computer lab life... I would keep my copy of Applied Cryptography at the front of my backpack, letting it peek out ever so slightly at the passing geek girls. I realize now that this kind of behavior was much like dangling a set of Porsche keys while strolling down the grocery store aisles, but hey...cryptography was sexxy and I wanted to flaunt it. And Bruce Schneier was my hero.
If you're still unconvinced, perhaps some of the following facts will sway you.
Bruce Schneier does not leak information on the EM spectrum: he emits the theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
Bruce Schneier once killed a man using only linear cryptanalysis.
The spacing between Bruce Schneiers ribs forms an Optimal Golomb Ruler.
Compilers don't warn Bruce Schneier, Bruce Schneier warns compilers.
There are no prime numbers. Only numbers that Bruce Schneier does not want you to factor.
Bruce Schneier has a "compsci 100 life" tatoo on his back.
Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat.
The last person to attempt to steal Bruce Schneier's identity lost his memory and has never recovered.
There is no Information Theory. Just data that Bruce Schneier allows to be quantified and transmitted on a channel.
And remember... Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Geek Gathering Friday night!

2007-06-16T23:06:00.001-07:00

A Geek Gathering is exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of geeks meet up to, well, geek out over new technology, gadgets, and tales of digital adventure. In this instance, the crew of Technology Bytes will be hanging out with listeners of the show at a bubble tea house that serves up pizza, smoothies and tapioca, all showered in 2.4GHz goodness.
The details? Friday, January 4th, at 7:30 PM. Tropioca Teahouse in Midtown Houston, located at 2808 Milam at Drew. Feel free to bring any WiFi enabled devices as well as any new toys or gadgets picked up over the holidays. Hope to see some of you there!

iWant

2007-06-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

If you're already a member of the Cult of Mac, then you've no doubt spent all morning online buzzing about the new iPhone, Apple TV, and the even smaller shuffle. If this is news to you, then you may want to follow the above links before picking up your new cult robes in San Francisco.
This morning, my HTC Wizard (TMobile flavored) decided that it no longer desired to take a charge without a healthy amount of cooing and cajoling. Hopefully I'll be able to nurse it along until the release date of the iPhone. If not, the second generation of the device is out, which doubles the processing power, ups the WiFi to 802.11g, and doubles the resomolution of the built-in camera. I suppose that my uncertain iFuture is now in fate's hands...

Rio redux revived

2007-06-16T23:03:00.000-07:00

Below are some techy vacation photos from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you click on a thumbnail, you'll be taken to a larger shot of what is pictured. If it isn't working for you, make sure you don't have pop-ups disabled on your browser.

	I needed some portable entertainment of the electronic variety for all of the queueing I would be doing on my travel days to and from Brazil. The old-skool coloring of the Nintendo Gameboy Advance did the trick! Link and the Mario Brothers kept us company. You can see the flight map on the display in the seat back. We were about to begin our descent into Sao Paolo at the time this shot was taken.

	The TrendNet broadband router at the penthouse provided connectivity to the four bedrooms. Speed tests to a US server showed 538kbps up, 714kbps down. Connecting to sites within Brazil yeilded better results. Trendnet seemed to be a very popular brand in South America. Notice the array of patch cable crimp jobs adorning the back of the router...

	The Linksys WRT-54G AP/Router was connected directly to the TrendNet Broadband Router. Placement was determined by centrality to the balcony and bedrooms, and the location of the only un-overloaded wall plug in the house. Unlike downtown Houston, the Copacabana 2.5GHz band was not at all crowded. A spectrum analyzer showed more spikes caused by garage door remotes than it did WiFi traffic.

	My evening office, made possible by Broadband and WiFi. Life can be very harsh for an IT professional... The building to the right is the Copacabana Palace Hotel, sitting just yards away from the Atlantic Ocean.

	The Vonage phone adaptor connected to the ethernet jack under the desk in my bedroom. There was also a phone jack that connected to the penthouse's existing phone system, which consisted of two strands of twisted copper wire strung throughout the structure. Disconnecting the house phone network from the two leads coming into the penthouse proved to be no difficult task. All that was left was to connect the Vonage device to the house phone network, and viola! - 713 dialtone in Rio de Janeiro!

	McInternet? Broadband with cheese, please!

	What to do on Thanksgiving while in another country? Tired of tracking down turkey like I have done in years past, I headed to the American Staple, McDonalds. The McDonald's in Rio opened to the street, had a special streetside counter for deserts, and offered web surfing stations branded with the McInternet moniker.

	While petty crime is the most common in Rio de Janeiro, one must also protect against break-ins. In addition to the security guard at the entrance of our building, the penthouse was equipped with a video phone that allowed us to view and communicate with people in the elevator hallway before buzzing them in or unlocking our own doors.

	This piece of technology had some promise, but the MS Windows install wasn't playing very nicely with some of the hardware drivers. This computer, locked away in a weatherproof shell, sits atop the lower observation deck on Pão de Açúcar. It has a touch screen interface and webcam (with a powerful optical zoom) that allows tourists to magnify far away locations and landmarks. Based on the position of the unit's head, infomation about a particular area or landmark is displayed to the user. A planned WiFi link would then let tourists take pictures that can be sent to cell phones and email addresses in near real time.

I have a few more shots that I will post next week. They were taken on a techy shopping trip to what must be Rio's equivalent of Tokyo's Akihabara district.

Now that Dwight has returned from CES; we should have the regular crew on tonight's show. You can tune in from 8:00 - 10:00 PM on 90.1 FM or stream it directly from kpft.org. We'll also be hanging out in #techbytes on irc.cuckoo.com. If you don't have an IRC client already installed, you may use the java client located on the Technology Bytes site.

Ink refills and puppy-cams

2007-06-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

Knock-off iPods, inkjet refills and puppy-cams! Oh my!

These were taken on a techy shopping trip to what must be Rio's equivalent of Tokyo's Akihabara district.

	The Tech Mall was housed in the bottom four stories of a high rise office building in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Being the 6'2" redhead that I am, I drew some attention to myself when I was first lining up a shot of some Apple knock-offs. As a result, the rest of the shots were hastily taken. While the quality suffered, I was happy to be able to capture the shots that I did.

	Brazilian SPAM filters must be advanced to the point of forcing inkjet refillers to move to the malls.

	Has anyone come across one of these in the US? I hung around for fifteen or twenty minutes, but didn't get to see the technician in action.

	Since long distance phone calls are prohibitively expensive, most young people leverage voice over IP technologies from broadband connections or Internet Kiosks. The phone showed here is a Bluetooth cordless phone that makes VoiP calls from a Windows machine connected to the Internet.

	Hmmm... Some of these webcams don't really look like webcams... From the plush puppy-cam (the nose knows) that could easily be overlooked as such to the Aibo-esque robo-dog-cam, chances are good that you can find a cam that with fit your fancy.

	I really liked the 1950's sci-fi look of this assortment of webcams.

	iPods are definitely status symbols among the wealthy in Rio. Imported electronics are subject to tarrifs, driving the price of an already expensive piece of Apple gear to new heights. As a result, a large number of near-Pods have snuck in under the radar.

	At first glance, this looks like an older iPod. Take a closer look, and you can see that it is a rather nice knock-off.

Geek Gathering this Friday at Tropioca! See you there!

Rio redux

2007-06-16T22:57:00.002-07:00

The amount of work an IT professional must complete in order to go on vacation is eclipsed only by the amount of work waiting for said IT professional upon his or her return. While I still haven't managed to claw my way out of the black pit of nearly finished projects, I have managed to scrape enough time together to upload some tech pics from Rio de Janeiro and to talk a bit about how my equipment choices served me on the other side of the equator.

My primary goal for the first 2/3 of my trip was to keep as connected as possible. I did this on the data side by arranging to rent apartments that had a functioning broadband connection. I packed a combination WiFi access point and router to power the wired and wireless LANs. On the voice side, I equipped the apartments with a Vonage Voice over IP (VoIP) phone router, which provided a 713 dial tone to the house phone. I rented a mobile phone with a local Rio de Janeiro number and charged it with pre-paid phone cards.

During the last third of the trip, I was on actual "vacation" vacation and carried only the local Brazilian mobile phone to stay in touch with Houston in the off chance that an IT melt-down occured. Though no technical emergencies found their way to me, I did hit an Internet cafe in a moment of need and dealt with a medical emergency via a Blackberry device.

Below are a few teaser thumbnails from my next post.

I'm off to deal with a PHP CC Mail Injection issue in some old code, but will be back on the air tonight on KPFT 90.1 FM. Lucky from Rabbit in the Moon will be on the air at 9:00 tonight to talk about the technology behind visual productions like Rabbit in the Moon's NYE show.

A vote for technology

2007-06-16T22:57:00.001-07:00

C|Net's News.com has compiled a Technology Voter Guide for 2006 that rates and ranks both senators and members of the House of Representatives on their tech voting record. Since the House and Senate vote on slightly different pieces of legislation, the grading was tweaked for each.
The highest scoring House Republican was from Texas (Ron Paul with an 80% tech friendly voting record), though our own local representatives fared much worse (Sheila Jackson-Lee with an anemic 40%).

Some of the more high profile votes that went into the ranking were:

For a five-year ban on Internet access taxes
For Net surveillance without court orders
Investigating "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas"
Disclosing electronic surveillance to courts
Restricting social-networking sites like MySpace.com
How much of your voting decision is based on tech-related issues?

Bom dia from .br

2007-06-16T22:56:00.000-07:00

I have been travelling for two days and have finally set up my geek abode in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I brought some new tech along with me for the excursion; a new digital camera and a Vonage phone adaptor I haven't used. Ever. Actually, I still haven't tried it out. That should be remedied today, though, when I go shopping for a cheap cordless phone to plug into the adaptor. The Vonage rig has a 713 US area code, which should make doing a light amount of work from Rio easy. I have a local cell phone, and I'd like to expore the possibility of swapping its SIM card with that of my T-Mobile MDA.
I am staying in a penthouse in Copacabana with three friends, all of them IT professionals (two with one of the top national consulting firms, another from the financial industry) with their own laptops in tow. I have a broadband connection that seems to get decent speeds when shuffling packets to and from the US, though it certainly doesn't hold an LED flashlight to my six megabit DSL connection back home. ~sigh~

I'm showering the penthouse with WiFi goodness via a Linksys WRT-54G that has been restored to its factory default firmware. When you really need something to work, I find it best not to have bleeding edge firmware installed, no matter how cool the feature set. When casually scanning from the rooftop patio, I see only one other access point broadcasting its SSID. (Denise_home on channel 1; I'm not going to snoop any further, though I am curious as to the brand of AP.)

So... The geek packing list included the following:

A 17" MacBook Pro with an extra battery
A Linksys RTP300 VoIP Router
A Linksys WRT-54G Access Point running in mixed mode
A Canon S3 IS Digital Camera (chosen over the Canon G7)
An Axio Backpack to hold most of it
A Targus Battery Charger for the camera
An MDA Smartphone
Gameboy Advance in retro Nintendo fashion with "gamecase"
A small assortment of power adaptors, patch cables, thumb drives, storage cards, and blank CDRs to support the bigger pieces of gear
The only issue I've tackled so far has been the need for an specialized plug to take the ground out of my Apple Portable Power Adaptor and finding the ideal placement for the access point. Today's challenges will include finding a TIM phone card to re-charge my Brazilian mobile phone's account and a cordless phone to use with the VoIP adaptor. I'll let you know how that goes, as well as talk a little bit about my gear selection - why some things were left behind and why others made the cut. But for now, tchau from the .br.

Loose platters

2007-06-16T22:55:00.001-07:00

This is more fun than I've ever had with a hard drive...

Lord of the Merchandise

2007-06-16T22:52:00.000-07:00

Imagine if George Lucas directed Lord of the Rings.

October 2006 Geek Gathering

2007-06-16T22:51:00.001-07:00

The Technology Bytes crew will be hanging out with listeners of the show tonight at Tropioca in Midtown at the October 2006 Geek Gathering. Tropioca is located at 2808 Milam at Drew. Things get started around 7:00 PM and go until the last geek leaves. Bubble tea, smoothies and pizza will compliment the array of laptops, PDAs, smart phones, web cams, and USB powered aquariums that will be on hand. A college professor is actually giving extra credit to any of his/her students who attends; it should be a fun start to your night.

Geekspeak baffles Britons

2007-06-16T22:50:00.003-07:00

According to the BBC News, it appears that the country that gave birth to Cockey rhyming slang is having a bit of Barney getting their crusts around the recent proliferation of geekspeak (aka tech acronyms).
Millions of people keep in touch via instant messaging but some 57% of online Brits said they did not know that the acronym for it was IM.
This isn't 57% of the general population... This is 57% of Brits already on the Intarweb, so the percentages will be much higher across your non-geeky cross section. Also of interest is the relatively small market share Apple has in the UK with their iPod line of portable music players. Any expats or British readers who wish to weigh in on this?

Privacy Hurtts

2007-06-16T22:50:00.001-07:00

Is there an inverse relationship between the advancement of technology and the amount of privacy one enjoys? With the advent of RFID, wireless cameras, consumer databases, social networking sites, registration-only news site, supermarket loyalty cards and the like, are we selling our anonymity for pennies on the dollar? Are we trading away our privacy in exchange for a little security or, in some cases, for nothing more than ease of use?
MSNBC's article, Privacy Lost: Does anybody care?, is well worth a read if any of this has struck a chord with you. A little (or a lot, depending on where you're surfing in from) closer to home is HPD Police Chief Harold Hurtt's plan to put surveillance cameras in apartment complexes, downtown streets and shopping malls. His statement that "I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?" has inspired a prize of over $2200 for anyone submitting a videotape of Hurtt breaking the law.

Web rage!!!

2007-06-16T22:49:00.002-07:00

According to the BBC News, an internet user has been found guilty of what police said was Britain's first "web-rage" attack.
I don't think that the idea of web rage is anything new... We've all seen flame wars and the baseness that they seem to illicit from our fellow netizens. I'll admit, though, that nothing I have ever witnessed, even in the most heated flame war or pie fight, has ever led to someone grabbing the handle of a pick axe with which to bludgeon the object of their angst, some seventy miles away. Most of my acquaintances just don't have that kind of time...or temper.
When friends or office co-workers feel that they absolutely *must* convert an online issue into a physical skirmish, they do so in a much healthier way. Being geeks, the skirmish often degrades into discussions of spring replacement, dart orientation and wistful musings on entirely new fabrications.
(Anyone want to place odds on how long it will take Jack Thompson to weigh in on this?)

Oni-Con

2007-06-16T22:49:00.001-07:00

The crisp weather has brought with it a different kind of coolness - an anime convention! Oni-Con is back in the Bayou City, but this time in bigger digs - the George R. Brown Convention Center!
I'll have more up on this shortly. I just wanted to get the word out now so any anime fans out there can make plans to attend.

Page graphing

2007-06-16T22:48:00.001-07:00

If you've ever been curious about the page structure of your favorite website, surf over to Aharef's site to view his rendering of web sites as graphs. What Aharef refers to as graphs resemble the symbolic bonds between atoms in a complex molecule. You can check out graphs of the front pages of some of his regularly visited sites (cnn.com, boingboing.net, apple.com, yahoo.com, wired.com, msn.com, and the uber simplistic google.com.) as well as see how your own site looks when rendered in this fashion.

The following image, a graph of http://blogs.chron.com/geekspeak/, is a screenshot taken from this page. The graphs themselves are cool in and of themselves; watching them unfold is bonus.

Let them eat cake!

2007-06-16T22:46:00.000-07:00

It seems that the Microsoft Internet Explorer team sent the Firefox team something special on their release date for Firefox 2.0...

Human, mostly.

2007-06-16T22:43:00.004-07:00

Wired Magazine looked to Hemmingway's 'best work', a short story that reads,
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
for inspiration when asking a number of sci-fi, fantasy and horror writers to submit their best six word short stories.
My favorite so far?
"The baby's blood type? Human, mostly." - Orson Scott Card.
Among the featured wordsmiths are: William Shatner, Eileen Gunn, Stan Lee, Joss Whedon, David Brin, Bruce Sterling, Margaret Atwood, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Cory Doctorow

Ping of life

2007-06-16T22:43:00.003-07:00

My apologies for the long absence. Working a ton in order to go on vacation followed by the actual "vacation" followed by another hectic work week (playing catch-up) after said vacation has left this geek reeling. The situation was not aided by the fact that the "vacation" was actually a 197 mile relay race from Mount Hood, Oregon, to the Pacific Ocean below. It took nearly 30 hours to complete with only two small windows in which to catch a quick hour-long nap.
We'll pick up with the rest of the trivia answers before getting back on track with some regular GeekSpeak posts later this week.
What famed movie supercomputer did the University of Illinois have two birthday parties for, in 1992 and 1997, thanks to a script discrepancy?
HAL of "2001: A Space Odyssey" fame is your answer. January 12th, 1997 was, according to the Arthur C. Clarke story, HAL's birthday. David Stork, a California engineer and self-styled expert on "2001," claims there was some confusion when the script was read. "The actor who read that thought that 1997 was so ridiculously far into the future that he mistakenly read it as 1992," said Stork, who estimates he has seen the film more than 30 times. Stork is also in posession of a script that lists HAL's operational date as 1991, though the script subsequently underwent several revisions. Enthusiasts cite the book, not the film, as the definitive source on anything HAL.
What three-word phrase attracted millions of gawkers to Mahir Cagri's broken-English web appeal for feminine companionship?
"I Kiss You!" You can find the original page here.
What former Lotus exec co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help "civilize cyberspace"?
Mitch Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in July of 1990. The EFF is a non-profit advocacy and legal organization based in the United States with the stated purpose of being dedicated to preserving free speech rights such as those protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution in the context of today's digital age. Its stated main goal is to educate the press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to technology; and to act as a defender of those liberties.
What acronym applies to computer CD media that can be written only once, but read many times?
WORM, which stands for Write Once Read Many.
What term did Internet users borrow from angling to indicate a person who goes fishing for trouble?
Trolling. The contemporary use of the term first appeared on Usenet groups in the late 1980s, though its origins were very recently discussed before the U.S. Supreme Court (eBay v. MercExchange, 29 March 2006) in the following exchange:
JUSTICE KENNEDY: "Well, is -- is the troll the scary thing under the bridge, or is it a fishing technique?...""MR. PHILLIPS [attorney for eBay]: For my clients, it's been the scary thing under the bridge...."JUSTICE KENNEDY: "I mean, is that what the troll is?"MR. PHILLIPS: "Yes, I believe that's... what it is, although...maybe we should think of it more as Orcs, now that we have a new generation."

Trivia EOF

2007-06-16T22:43:00.001-07:00

Here's your trivia wrap-up!
What popular e-mail program was named for the Pulitzer-winning author of Why I Live at the P.O.?
Eudora Welty's Why I Live at the P.O. inspired Steve Dorner to use the author's name for the email client he wrote as part of his studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The story was also adapted into a movie by screenwriter/director Jodie Markell.
What demo for the 3-D modeling program Character Studio turned into an e-mail craze?
One of the eariest examples of an Internet phennomenon, the dancing baby, also known as "Baby Cha-Cha", hit the ether in 1996. Though wikipedia lists 3D Studio Max as the modeling studio used to create the dancing baby, the original author's FAQ agrees with the folks at Trivial Pursuit.
What zippy brand name did Microsoft create to market its OLE "componentware" controls?
ActiveX began life as Componentware and saw great success in Visual Basic for Windows 1.0. OLE 2.0, the next evolution of OLE 1.0, was renamed to ActiveX in 1996. OLE stands for Object Linking and Embedding.
What web development language do some critics consider a "pathological eclectic rubbish lister"?
My first O'Reilly book was pink and had a picture of a one-humped dromendary on it. "With only the weight of one rider, a dromendary can move at ten mph all day. Loaded down in a caravan, they will move at 30 miles per day." Leave it to the ORA editors and authors to boil down an entire language into the form of a single animal. My own copy was printed in March of 1992 and contained only minor corrections from the original January 1991 first edition. The language, of course, is PERL. The Practical Extraction and Report Language was adept at working with text: cutting it up, searching through it, sorting it, and formatting it. The web being mostly marked up text, this language fit the bill when it came to dynamic applications in a way that languages such as C could not.
What field of study did Apple researchers boast about with T-shirts reading: "I helped Apple wreck a nice beach"?
Ditch your Texas drawl for a moment or two and say this one aloud. I'll even give you some more to ammunition for the annoyance of your cubed neighbors: wreck a nice beach you sing calm incense. Very close to that old bit involving the king of sofas, this sentence highlights the difficulties with voice recognition software. What should be, "Recognize speech using common sense" is often misinterpreted by voice recognition packages due to lack of context.

Free as in beer

2007-06-16T22:42:00.002-07:00

Dwight Silverman passed this along to me. That's right... He put me up to using the word "sucks" in my blog. (Mom, if you'd like to write him a nastygram berating him for leading your darling son down the path of foul-mouthedness, you can find his page here. I'm also fairly sure I never made up words like foul-mouthedness before meeting Dwight, but a blog is no place for unsubstantiated claims! Oh, wait...)
What: Web 2.0 Sucks! (Unless it's accessible)Speaker: Sharron Rush of KnowbilityWhen: Tuesday, September 12th at 7:00 PMWho: NetSquared Community Members and other interested partiesWhere: Stag's Head Pub2128 Portmouth St.Houston, Texas 77098(713) 533-1199Bonuses: Free Beer and Appetizers
"In 1963 Frederic Fitch published Theorem 5, claiming that if there is an unknown truth then that it is an unknown truth is itself unknowable. Clearly there are unknown truths; we are non-omniscient. So, by Theorem 5, there is an unknowable truth. This conclusion threatens any theory that entails the principle of knowability, which claims all truths are knowable:
(KP) p → ◊Kp.
If one accepts the knowability principle she must deny that there are unknown truths. But that is to say that all truths are known. In sum, if all truths are knowable, then all truths are known."
-Taken from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in an article called Fitch's Paradox of Knowability
Not at all related to Tuesday night's event, I came across this paradox when digging up information on Sharron Rush's company. If you pull up the link and follow the paper through to its conclusion, paying special attention to the section on modal fallacies and non-rigid statements, you'll be more than mentally limber enough to tackle Tuesday's topic. If still in doubt, be sure to sample a pint of the cask conditioned ale, which usually takes the form of St. Arnold's Elissa IPA or St. Arnold's Amber. The Ginger Man and Stag's Head are the only two places in town equipped to serve it. Add free WiFi into the deal and you've got a great geeky night out.
And yes, apparently the speech will be free, too.

Apple bootdisk caffeine dongle

2007-06-16T22:42:00.001-07:00

The topic of standardized phonetic alphabets came up during last night's show when somone attempted to use an acronym to clarify which letter was being used in another acronym. This kind of recursion is a slippery slope, as one could expand an acronym infinitely. Take the following example:
ASCII (pronounced Askey) could be expanded to:
ASCII SCSI CLI IIRC IIRC
Which could in turn be expanded to:
ASCII SCSII CLI IIRC IIRC SCSI CLI SCSI IIRC CLI LMAO IIRC IIRC IIRC RTFM CLI IIRC IIRC RTFM CLI
Feel free to continue with this experiment on your own time...
Phonetic alphabets are nothing new. Current ones were developed many decades ago to help clarify letters during radio transmissions. Take a forward soldier during WWII who needs to radio in enemy coordinates so that a firing solution may be calculated on the gunship waiting just off shore. If the ship's radio operator misunderstands B for D, it could mean the difference between the enemy being shelled or the friendly forward soldier being shelled. So, instead of calling out B or D, the soldier would call out Bravo or Delta. Sound familiar?
Most people are familiar with the sequence "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie" but would not be able to recite very far into the alphabet without veering away from the standard. By standard, I am referring to the NATO phonetic alphabet, which was standardized around 1955. Regulatory bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the International Telecommunication Union have approved this version as their standard phonetic alphabet.
The full version goes something like this:
Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima Mike November Oscar Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra Tango Uniform Victor Whiskey Xray Yankee Zulu
I say something like this because while everyone agrees on what these words should be, not everyone agrees on their spelling. If you were to pore over the different agencies' handbooks in order to study their own renditions of the NATO phonetic alphabet, you would come across alternate spellings such as Alfa, Juliett, Juliette, Oskar, and Viktor.
We Geeks may not have a daily need to radio in firing solutions, but we do tend to give out a lot of URLs and the occasionally obscure command line sequence. Luckily, you have many available options these days. You could go out and memorize the NATO phonetic alphabet as I did many years ago when I was a pre-teen fascinated with things such as morse code, ROT-13 and secret ciphers. (These things still interest me and I would like to believe that my depth of knowledge in these areas has increased exponentially since I was eleven. For example, I ditched ROT-13 when I was twelve, trading up to ROT-26, a cipher I now use in every written communication I send.) You could also simply make up your own phonetic alphabet on the fly with no real rhyme or reason. I've seen these in action and how they often lead to even more confusion than just going by the letters themselves: "P as in phone" is an all-time favorite of mine.
Or we, as a community, could adopt our own phonetic alphabet that is both relevant and memorable. The crux of this is creating a working Geek Phonetic Alphabet (GPA) without using acronyms, three letter (TLA) or otherwise. After all, PCMCIA*. The following was hacked out during an IRC session on irc.cuckoo.com #techbytes during the second half of Technology Bytes.
Apple Bootdisk Caffeine Dongle Error Freeware Google H4x0R Intel Joystick Kilobyte Linux Microsoft Newbie Obsolete Printer QuickTime Reboot Serial Toolbar Unix Virus Webcam XModem YModem Zaxxon
*No, not Personal Computer Memory Card International Association, but rather People Can't Master Computer Internet Acronyms.

Avast, me readers!

2007-06-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

Today is the international Talk Like a Pirate Day.
No, really.
Also, an unidentified object was spotted below the space shuttle Atlantis. I know what you're thinking... "Arrrrrrrrrrr you sure?" Of course I'm sure! From our own Houston Chronicle story:
"The mysterious object, which appeared much smaller than the shuttle, was spotted by an alert flight controller about 1:45 a.m. CDT, as he monitored a video camera in Atlantis's payload bay."
More on this as things unfold...

The first sell out

2007-06-16T22:40:00.002-07:00

Son House (aka Edward James House, Jr.) used to tell the story of how the famous Delta Blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for a perternatural ability to play the guitar. The exchange supposedly took place at the intersection of U.S. Highway 61 and U.S. Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, shortly before midnight. Robert Johnson never publicly commented upon this cross roads exchange, though the older Tommy Johnson (possibly a cousin of Robert Johnson) had no qualms about recounting his own experience. It is interesting to note that the Coen Brothers' movie, "O Brother, Where Art Thou" had a character by that same name who also had made such a deal.
Earlier this week, Jay Lee posted a link in IRC that lead to Weid Al's video of "White and Nerdy", a parody of Chamillionaire's "Ridin'". That's Ridin' as in riding dirty. I'd throw a link to a great Penny Arcade strip if it didn't contain a four letter word as well as a seven letter plural quasi-obscenity often heard at AKC gatherings. The comic's title is "The Ecology Of The Suburban Thug" and can be found by hitting the Penny Arcade archives.
In the video, Weird Al receives a bag after a slightly shady deal goes down in a back alley. What's in the bag, you wonder? Drugs? A gun?!? A rare video cassette of a Star Wars special that George Lucas would like to bury?!?!? Well,kids, it's not drugs or guns. Kudos to Weird Al for paying homage to what is probably one of the worst sell outs in a franchise that has, in recent years, been known for selling out.
When searching out the seeds of Jar Jar, there are those that would point to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Some would even go farther back and look at all of the Star Wars merchandise that flooded toy stores after the success of the first movie. I, however, point to the Star Wars Holiday Special as the first sell out.
Made for TV in 1978, the cast includes such regulars as Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fischer and Anthony Daniels as well as new talent brought in to spice things up a bit: Bea Arthur, Art Carney, Harvey Korman and Diahann Carroll. Bea Arthur in a Star Wars special? It gets worse... We get to meet some of Chewbacca's family: his father Itchy and his son Lumpy. Yes, Itchy and Lumpy. Sure beats the pants of Jar Jar, eh?
It's not all bad... Boba Fett is introduced in this special.
. . .
. . .
. . .
I seem to be a bit stuck for what else is good about this. Unless you caught it on the original air date, you'll never see it on television again. Nor will it come to home video since George Lucas has done nearly everything in his power to keep this one under wraps. For the curious, you could try poking around on the net for a low-grade rip, searching eBay for a bootleg (illegal) DVD of it, or visit the next local sci-fi con and spend some time asking around in the dealer room.
If this has only whetted your appetite for more informaiton on the Holiday Special (I'm not entirely ashamed to admit that I sat through all two hours of it - even the part where Princess Leia Organa sings, "A day that takes us through the darkness, a day that leads us into light, a day that we celebrate the LIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGHHHHHTTTT!") you can surf over to this site to get your fill.

Six degrees of social networking

2007-06-16T22:40:00.001-07:00

Though there were tightly knit social groups existing on the ether for years before it, Classmates.com was the first large scale social networking website to appear on the Internet. It was also the first site to attract large numbers of what I would call casual web surfers. By that, I mean people who were on the Internet not to help develop it and push the technology, but to forward jokes via email, look up drink recipes, and pore over canonical lists covering everything from annoying your college roomate to lightbulb installation. (Oh yeah - and chickens. You can't leave out the chickens.) These people were mostly college students with fast Internet access and young adults entering the workforce who were given a shiny new email address along with access to the Internet by their employer.
Classmates.com still exists, though they would now like a chunk of your income to provide what was once offered for free. SixDegrees.com, the next large social networking website, was not so lucky, giving up the ghost in 2001 after a four year run and a peak of one hundred employees and one million registered members. SixDegrees allowed users to list friends, family and acquaintances, transferring real world connections to the digital realm. The site's limited functionality included the posting of bulletin board items and email-like messaging, heralding what was soon to come via sites like Friendster and LinkedIn.
Friendster's original intent was to explore the connections between its members; to represent a true social network. It stayed true to this vision for quite some time, often ignoring the desires of its members who wished to see the service grow and adapt to their own needs. Friendster did eventually come around, offering connections to "fanclub" accounts for bands, movies, television series and the like, though by this time they had lost their momentum, which, in turn, lead to losing members to sites like MySpace and Xanga.
Launched in July of 2003, MySpace has become the largest social networking site and the most popular site in the United States, accounting for 4.5% of all website visits. The ability to customize your MySpace profile page has lead to a myriad of sites catering to people who are not particularly adept at slinging CSS and HTML. This, in turn, has resulted in the multimedia equivalent of the tag. Read: annoying beyond all belief. Still, the popularity of this site has forced the arm of many a social networking purist, this blogger included, to grudgingly join the other 95,000,000 users in listing things in blurbs titled "About Me" and "Who I'd Like to Meet".
A much more geeky approach, Orkut, named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten, was invitation only and managed to stay under the radar of most casual web surfers. Well, at least in the United States. Brazillian users luv them some Orkut and constitute over 66% of Orkut's user base. The elitist invite-only method of joining combined with the inherent geekyness of the original user base created a haven for online communities centered around such things as development languages, beer, yerba mate, and obscure operating systems.
Currently, there are over 300 known social networking web sites in existence, catering to everyone from business professionals, the European jet set and social elite (aka "Snobster"), gothic industrial culture, college and highschool students, the geriatric set, and even recently departed MySpacers. Yes, social networking from beyond the grave.
Anyone know of a social networking site that will let young couples pre-register their unborn children?!?! It's only a matter of time...

BarretTime - August 2, 2006

2007-06-16T22:39:00.002-07:00

Thursday night the 1960 PC Users Group will be holding their General Meeting along with their Digital Photography Special Interest Group. This month's program will continue from July with some very basic photography techniques. The group will with be looking at the manual controls of the camera and what they do. The group invites you to bring your camera and play with it as they try to figure out exactly what your camera will do. They also suggest that you bring your manual, that is, if you can find it.
Surf over to www.1960pcug.org for a map to Cypress Creek Christian Church, located at 6823 Cypresswood Drive in Spring, Texas. Things get started at 6:30 PM, with the presentation getting underway at 7:00 PM.
And this Friday we have the eleven year and one month anniversary party of Technology Bytes at Tropioca. If you're looking for a place to take your date this Friday, you might want to consider swinging by 2808 Milam at Drew in Midtown. Tropioca specializes in bubble tea, coffee and smoothies. They also serve up desserts, pizza and free WiFi. For those not in the know, this is Technology Bytes' monthly Geek Gathering. A Geek Gathering is exactly what is sounds like; the geeks from the show as well as some of our listeners descend upon a single location and geek out over gadgets, technology and whatever notebook Dwight is carrying this week. Again, that's going to be at Tropioca at the corner of Milam and Drew.
There is a new users group in town. Well, North of town. The Open Source Houston Users Group meets once a month on the first Saturday on each month. There are NO dues or fees for attending their meetings and they have free WIFI internet access. The group is open to people with all levels of experience, though Newbies are especially welcome. You will never hear RTFM+ in response to any question or request for help! The group meets at 9224 FM 1960 West at the ITC Gaming Center from one to four PM.
And while all of this is going on in Houston, some of the Bayou City's tech community members will be in Las Vegas, Nevada, attending DefCon 14. You can check out the annual hacker convention's website at defcon.org, paying special attention to the contests section to see how our Houston people are faring. The most popular contest is probably capture the flag, though Spot the Fed and the Beverage Cooling Contraption Contest (BCCC) look to be a lot of fun as well.
That's that for your guide to goings on both North and South and that's it for BarretTime.

Plan 9 from Outer Space

2007-06-16T22:39:00.001-07:00

OK. Here's the scenario:
You're an alien imparted with the special knowledge that some pesky lower life forms known as Earthlings will soon build a bomb made of solarbenite that can "explode the particles of sunlight" and ultimately destroy the Universe.
What to do... What to do?
You plan to thwart them, of course!
Your first plan doesn't go so well, though, and sinks into the swamp right from the get-go.
You go back to the drawing board and devise a second plan.
That plan sinks into the swamp.
So you plan a third attempt, which burns down, falls over, then sinks into the swamp.
~sigh~
So on and so forth until your ninth plan: Plan Nine. From outer space!
What is significant about Plan Nine from Outer Space? A few things... First, it was directed by Edward D Wood Jr. and is possibly one of the worst science fiction movies of all time. It contains enough anachronisms, goofs and non-sequiturs to fill a dozen different Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes and almost stars Bela Lugosi. I say 'almost' because Lugosi died before principal photography ever began. The few shots of Bela that do appear in the film were most likely shot for another Ed Wood movie, "The Ghoul Goes West". Dr. Tom Mason fills in for Lugosi, attempting to obscure the differences in appearance by holding a cape in front of his face. Unfortunately, the cape does not obscure the obvious difference in height between Lugosi and Mason. Alas...the trials and tribulations of low budget B-movies. (The B stands for Baptist, by the way.)
The movie inspired some very sharp individuals over at Bell Labs to name a successor to the Unix operating system after it. Since this new OS was a terrestrial concern, Ken Thompson and friends dropped the outer space part and claimed only the moniker Plan 9 for their creation, a project that continues to be actively developed to this day.
Why mention this now? Originally shot in black and white, a colorized version of the movie has been released. This new version is being screened at midnight Friday and again at midnight Saturday at the River Oaks 3. I plan to attend the Friday night showing post Geek Gathering with the hopes that aliens may come to Earth not to prevent humans from destroying the entire Universe, only my beloved theater.
So... Why do so many geeks love bad science fiction? What's your favorite *good* science fiction? Farscape or Firefly? Deep Space Nine or Babylon 5? Sound off while you still have time, as the tenth plan might just survive the swamp.

Drug of choice

2007-06-16T22:38:00.002-07:00

During my last week of dorm life at the University of Houston, I came into possession of a large amount of IBC Root Beer. This was due to the fact that the balance on board cards did not carry over to the next semester; whatever funds you had left on the last day were a wash. Students hedged against this by buying a ton of silly stuff (as that was all that was usually left by this point) from the various cafeterias and concession windows around campus. I walked away with a flat or two of candy bars and several cases of brown bottles that I hoped would help fuel me through my last round of exams.
Two days and twenty root beers later, the caffeine from all those brown bottles had yet to kick in. I was later informed that this was due to the total absence of caffeine in root beer. In those days, while lauded, caffeine was not as readily available as it it now. Yes, there were colas, coffees and teas, but that was about it for caffeine delivery vectors.
A number of years later, I was at a large lan party when a tin of mints landed on my gaming rig. Familiar with the Altoids tin, I happily popped mint after mint until my finely honed twitch reflex hands were actually twitching. The penguin on the front of the tin did not herald the Linux operating system as I had previously thought, but rather the presence of caffeine. That was pretty exciting stuff; I vowed to go share this discovery with my friends...just as soon as my toes had stopped vibrating.
The last time my idea of how one could use caffeine was broadened was at Linucon, a Linux and Sci-Fi convention held in Austin, Texas. The delivery vector? Through the skin. Yes... Soap containing caffeine was placed in each attendee's bag-o-swag. I had heard of things like Shower Shock before, but this was the first time I had ever personally tested such a product. The jury is still out on whether or not this was a conspiratorial attempt by the con management to entice the Linux enthusiasts and Sci-Fi folk to bathe, but bathe they did. The smell of peppermint wafted through the halls of the hotel that energetic weekend in October as many a geek reached an all-time high in terms of personal hygiene.
What's your favorite method of caffeine intake? Bawls or Buzz Bites? Perhaps it is caffeinated lip balm that could awaken more than just romantic notions in the object of your affection? The original Jolt or the easy to carry gum? Or have you kicked caffeine all together? Grab some C8H10N4O2, up your double-click sensitivity, then ponder this mantra as the chemicals begin to do their work...
Caffeine for mind.Pizza for body.Sushi for soul.

Road to recovery

2007-06-16T22:38:00.001-07:00

As much as I would love to entertain with stories of a wild week-long caffeine bender, my excuse for being absent this last week is as boring as a nasty sinus infection coupled with a cancelled vacation and the loss* of my girlfriend.
In the midst of my malady, I happened to pull out a Trivial Pursuit game I had bought a year or so earlier. At the time, I had hoped to buy a Genus Edition of the game, but could only find a 90s Time Capsule Edition. I recall a vague sense of disappoinment. I believe I purchased a retro Game Boy Advance SP at the next stop, lifting my spirits and sending the new Trivial Pursuit game to storage for the better part of two years. Upon breaking the plastic bag seal, I was unprepared for the wealth of geeky questions in one of the 90s categories called Wired.
I'm not sure if the question writers delved a little too deeply into the depths computer culture for these questions or if the 90s saw such an explosion in tech that they believe that everyone should possess this knowledge. What follows is a sampling of questions (pulled at random - no cherry picking here) from the "Wired" category. If you want to play along, type your answers into notepad and then paste them into the comments section where the answers are located. You can see how you stack up against others in your grasp on 90s technology...
What six-letter acronym is web-speak for the world's largest bulletin board system?
What computer company trademarked both the Dogcow and its cry, "Moof"?
What famed movie supercomputer did the University of Illinois have two birthday parties for, in 1992 and 1997, thanks to a script discrepancy?
What three-word phrase attracted millions of gawkers to Mahir Cagri's broken-English web appeal for feminine companionship?
What former Lotus exec co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help "civilize cyberspace"?
What acronym applies to computer CD media that can be written only once, but read many times?
What term did Internet users borrow from angling to indicate a person who goes fishing for trouble?
What popular e-mail program was named for the Pulitzer-winning author of Why I Live at the P.O.?
What demo for the 3-D modeling program Character Studio turned into an e-mail craze?
What zippy brand name did Microsoft create to market its OLE "componentware" controls?
What web development language do some critics consider a "pathological eclectic rubbish lister"?
What field of study did Apple researchers boast about with T-shirts reading: "I helped Apple wreck a nice beach"?
Remember: no cheating/Googling. And feel free to discuss any related trivia with your answers... I'll be posting my own comments soon!
*A transparent attempt at adding an element of drama to this blog, I know... She didn't leave me as in break up with me. She left me as in took a business trip to London. This is the first time we've been apart, yada yada yada, so we'll be trying out various ways to communicate. I'll let you know how it works out.

Moof! Moof!

2007-06-16T22:37:00.001-07:00

Ready for the first round of answers from my Road to recovery entry? If you didn't catch it, you might want to take a look at it now before you pick up any unfair advantages...
What six-letter acronym is web-speak for the world's largest bulletin board system?
First, a word about acronyms... Geeks love them. I think we can all agree on this. As a group, though, we often tend to divide on what, exactly, an acronym is. I, myself, will take up the purist's banner and state that an acronym must be a pronounceable word formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the constituent words. For example, USENET sounds like Use and Net put together. FBI isn't pronounced Fuhbee, rather Eff Bee Eye. Not an acronym. There, of course, is a word for these near acronyms: Initialisms.
On the flip side, I like the initialism TLA so much that I'd be willing to argue its merits as an acronym, even against traditional conventions. For those of you who don't know, a TLA is a Three Letter Acronym. It's the slighly less verbose cousin of DFLA, which, of course, is a Disenhanced Four Letter Acronym.
Getting back to our trivia question... USENET is indeed the answer. Originally conceived as a "poor man's ARPANET", USENET offered mail and file transfers using the Unix to Unix Copy Protocol aka (also known as) UUCP. Moofing right along...
What computer company trademarked both the Dogcow and its cry, "Moof"?
The answer to this question lies in the early Apple developers' inability to draw. Not one of them could put pen to paper and produce anything they felt would be worthy enough to adorn their new groundbreaking OS. They were in need of tiny pictures that would represent common activities on the computer: starting up, waiting, deleting files, waiting, reading a disk, waiting, shutting down, waiting. This is when Andy Hertzfeld picked up the phone and called a high school friend of his by the name of Susan Kare who happened to be gifted in the arts. He asked her to do her work on graph paper, filling in the little squares to get the desired result. Susan, now the newest member of the Apple development team, did exactly that, creating such famous things as the Happy Mac, the Sad Mac and the little wristwatch that would appear when a user had to wait.
Susan also developed a number of the Apple fonts, adding a "hieroglyphic sort of character" to each of the original bitmapped fonts just months before the system shipped in 1984. She had such fun with these hieroglyphics that she created an entire font made out of these little pictures. It was called Cairo and it was to this font set that the Apple developers looked when completing work on the Laserwriter printer. They needed an icon for page orientation and decided to take the small dog from Susan's Cairo font to fit this bill. The only problem? The picture of the dog was too small; it needed to be enlarged.
The developers set off to redraw the image to a larger scale...and got something very close to Susan's original image. The following picture shows Susan's orignal dog (blown up to three times the original size) next to the Apple developer's redrawing. Very close, yet somehow off. The spotted dog looked remarkably like a cow. As with acronyms, there were two camps in this battle, too: the "It's a dog!" camp and the "It's a cow!" camp. In an effort to unify these two groups, or possibly out of sheer frustration that he was being bothered by this, Apple printing guru Scott Zimmerman declared, "It's a dogcow! Now get out of my office!" That answers the dogcow part of the question, which leaves us with the the following query: Just what kind of a sound would a cross between a cow and a dog make? Onomatopoeia Calculus tells us that Moo + Woof = Moof. And a legend was born...
Apple went on to embrace the dogcow and used it to designate any kind of software that was interesting or on the cutting edge but not quite ready for mass consumption. Today, the dogcow has become its own icon: that of the mythical beast that guards the gateway between regular userland and hackerland.

The geek speaks

2007-06-16T22:35:00.001-07:00

A geek is a person who is fascinated, perhaps obsessively, by obscure or very specific areas of knowledge and imagination. So says Wikipedia. Another description enumerates "gamers, ravers, science fiction fans, punks, perverts, programmers, nerds, subgenii, and trekkies. These are people who did not go to their high school proms, and many would be offended by the suggestion that they should have even wanted to." I will not try to delve too deeply into what a geek is or what "Geek Culture" connotes; that is best left for future posts during weeks when I am not feeling particularly prolific. Instead, I'll try to briefly gloss over my own credentials as a geek, setting the stage for what promises to be a lot of fun, namely: keeping readers up to date on the geeky goings-on in Houston; addressing current geeky interests; and occasionally reminiscing about my formative years as a geek.
Though I am a native Houstonian, I did most of my growing up in Colorado where the snowy winters would relegate us to hours spent indoors in subterranean strongholds known as basements. One such basement happened to be filled with more computer gear than you could shake an icicle at due to the fact that my best friend's father was an uber-geek himself, doing some rather hush-hush work for McDonnell Douglas, swapping share-ware programs by snail mail, and guiding us in our own early geeky endeavors. The year was 1980 and personal computing was arguably still in its infancy. A gifted and talented program kept me comfortably surrounded by my own kind until my parents moved back to Texas, placing me in a 4A high school in a small town just North of Houston. Looking forward to another year of Latin, I was highly disappointed (yet slightly amused) by the new school's foreign languages offering, consisting of Spanish I and Spanish II. In addition, the Texas summers were even more oppressive than the Colorado winters. Luckily, I had air conditioning and a pay-per-minute dial-up account to keep cooly connected to the outside world. Having Ultima VI certainly didn't hurt matters, either.
College brought me my first VMS shell account, excellent karma on Slashdot, and an introduction to Linux, still in the pre-1.0.0 releases at that time. A Red Hat Linux box on my kitchen table housed my first personal web site and mail server, which directly led to my involvement with the Houston Linux Users Group. In early 2001, the notion of ubiquitous Internet access (read: the ability to telecommute from my local coffee house and pub) thrilled me to the point of founding HoustonWireless.org with Steve Byrnes, a Rice Computer Science guy, and Mat Solnick, the then-president of HLUG. In 2003 I sat in on my first episode of Technology Bytes with Jay Lee, phliKtid and Peter. I've attended a number of tech, sci-fi and anime cons, look up to guys like Eric S. Raymond, and have even had a beer with Wil Weaton.
These days I can be found at various users' group meetings around town, the occasional con, and idling in a few select IRC channels. If you see me out, be it online or in the real world, be sure to say Hi. And if you know of any geeky gatherings going on, please let me know about them so I can help spread the word!

BarretTime: July 12th, 2006

2007-06-16T22:34:00.002-07:00

For a few years now, I have been on a radio program called Technology Bytes. It airs every Wednesday night from 8:00 to 10:00 PM on 90.1 KPFT. The last year or so has seen the rise of something called BarretTime, in which I give a breakdown of the geeky goings-on in the Bayou City. Below is a transcript from last Wednesday's show... Expect to see this as a weekly piece. And if you know of any cool meet ups, get togethers, or gatherings, please let me know about them so I can help get the word out!
Saturday July 15th is the date for the Houston Area Apple Users Group to host their semi-annual swap meet at the University of Houston Hilton Hotel. The swapping of both old and new apple hardware will begin at nine AM in the Shamrock Room. The Houston Area Apple Users Group goes by the acronym HAAUG. Throw a .org onto the end of that and you have their website, www.haaug.org, which is where you want to go for more info about this event.
A little farther from home, we have a SATLUG event. SATLUG being the San Antonio Linux Users Group. They'll be hosting 2006 Open Source Fest at the Alamo Community College District's Advanced Technology Center. The event will be a series of workshops held in the evenings Wednesday through Friday and all day Saturday with topics ranging from LAMP development to Linux for newbies. Representatives of Rackspace Managed Hosting will be recruiting UNIX/Linux experts at the event from 10am to 2pm on Saturday, so bring a resume if you're looking for work.
And, of course, this Friday is Karoake Night at Dean's Credit Clothing. Technology Bytes own phliKtid will be doing a three hour set of Willie Brown, Charlie Musselwhite, Jr. Wells, and Big Bill Broonzy covers. Or was that the plan for the after-party... I dunno... In any case, come on down to Dean's Credit Clothing at 316 Main Street a little after seven PM this Friday to help celebrate eleven years of Technology Bytes. All of the show's co-hosts will be hanging out with fans and superfans alike. Dean's is a bar, which means that adult beverages will be served. It also means that fans and superfans need to be 21 years or older. Unfair? Perhaps. But if you were ten years old when the show first hit the air waves, then you're plenty old enough now... And I think making the anniversary party to ten year old uber-fans is plenty fair. The logic behind that was donated by The SCO group.
All metered parking is free after six PM. There are also a number of pay lots within a block or so that will run you a five-spot. If you want to ride the light rail in, you can do so by parking at any of the stations and taking the Northbound U of H Downtown train to the Preston Street Station. A 24 hour light rail pass will run you two dollars.
WiFi is looking good, so if you think you'll feel the urge to get online, bring your internet enabled weapon of choice. Worst case, we'll just cache the entire internet on Jay's thumb drive and take turns passing that around. All in all, I think it's going to be a great night.
Here's the redux of that: Technology Bytes. Eleven Years. Geeks. Party. Dean's. Friday. Seven-thirty-ish in the PM. Be There.
That's it for your eleven year anniversary party notification and that's that for BarretTime.

Confessions of a Pockaholic

2007-06-16T22:34:00.001-07:00

For a number of years now, I have been under the spell of wicked stick-demons, consumed through the mouth, devastatingly addictive and destructively unhealthy. Yes. I am a pockaholic. I have woken up in a bed strewn with the wrappers of Pocky I don't remember opening. I have experienced the highs of discovering new flavors of Pocky and I have seen the lows of many a Pocky induced sugar crash. I have also been amazed at the depths to which Pocky has infiltrated geek culture. Check out one of my favorite Penny-Arcade strips as proof.
The Osaka Pocky Barons profiting from many an addicted geek do business under the moniker of the Glico Corporation. They launched the first variety of milk chocolate-dipped wheat sticks in 1965, priced JY60 a box. The success of "Chocoteck" - as they were known at first - astounded even Glico, with sales in the first two years reaching JY30 billion, three times the original estimate.
Chocoteck soon evolved into Pocky in recognition of the "pockin" sound they make when munched. The new snack was revolutionary amongst Japanese adolescents in the late '60s. The popularity of Pocky ensured the launch of a second flavor, Almond Pocky, in 1971, followed by Strawberry six years later. These days there is a new flavor released each fall and nobody seems to know exactly how many varieties there are in total as not all flavors are available in all places. Grape-flavored Pocky, from Nagano, are exceedingly rare. The local Kyushu specialty is a lemony-mikan flavored Pocky. Sightings of the Hokkaido omiyage-sized Giant Yubari Melon Pocky are highly prized by Pocky-watchers. Because Glico likes to test its new flavors on rural folk, some varieties pass in and out of the market without ever catching the beady eyes of the urban Pocky classes.
Pocky has since made its way into the pantries and backpacks of Geeks here in the US. In fact, at the last Linucon, a sci-fi and linux convention in Austin, Texas, there was an entire hotel suite dedicated to Pocky and other geek nutrients.
Now, a word of warning: Pocky is not a vegetarian food; the shortening with which it is made is hydrogenated fish oil. It is also highly addictive. Had Friedrich Nietzsche experienced it, I'm sure he would have placed it somewhere between the monster and the abyss.

GeekSpeak: History 101

2007-06-16T22:33:00.002-07:00

In the beginning, there was IRC. Well, maybe not the absolute beginning... Prehistoric man did not have the ability to,
/msg Oog OMG!1!!1! Wooly Mamoth on your left! Ph34r him!
I believe this was due to something or other about language not yet being that developed as well as the prohibitively high cost of prehistoric instant messaging.
Whatever the case, know that before there was AIM, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, or even ICQ, there was IRC. And before there was IRC, there was talk. Talk was Instant Messaging's hairy ancestor. Talk was raw and unforgiving, yet talk had character. In the early 1970's, when dinosaurs known as DEC PDP-11s roamed the land, the talk program allowed two users on the same machine to chat with each other on a split terminal screen. You could actually see the other person's keystrokes, backspaces* and faux-pas as these early adopters complained about how Al Gore needed to get off his keister, get into Congress, and invent the Internet so talk users could communicate with people on other machines, not just their local box. This eventually happened and the Unix/Linux "talk" messaging system came on the scene, allowing users on one machine to chat with users on another machine in a completely different part of their parent's basement.
There were drawbacks to this method of communication, though. Namely, the inability to "idle" on a myriad of talk sessions. Something had to be done, and something was done by Jarkko Oikarinen in 1988. Inspired by Bitnet Relay Chat, Jarkko (aka "WiZ") wrote Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to replace MUT (Multi-User talk) on a BBS called OuluBox in Finland. IRC took hold and gained its own place in history when it was leveraged to report on the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 throughout a media blackout.
/msg Mikhail OMG!1!!1! Soviet Hardliners on your left! Ph34r them!
Though not well known outside of the Geek community, IRC is still very much alive and well. These days, it is primarily used for file trading^H^H^H^H^H^H real time group communication in a number of Open Source projects, telling others how 1337 you are, and poking fun at unknowing callers during Technology Bytes.
/me is outty/quit
*Backspaces generally had a Unix key mapping of Ctrl-H, represented as ^H, and would sometimes show as such when a user would try to backspace over a talk faux-pas.

Geek gathering redux

2007-06-16T22:33:00.001-07:00

I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who came out for the Technology Bytes' 11th Anniversary Geek Gathering last Friday. Old fans and new were out to mix things up; so many, in fact, that I didn't get to meet everyone. Oh well - there's always August's Geek Gathering...
I thought the venue was great; thanks to Steve and Toby of Dean's Credit Clothing for the use of their space. Drop Trio provided their own brand of Space Ship Jazz to fuel the party; thank you, Ian, for helping make that happen. Also, thanks to all the personal friends who came out to show support. Everyone's combined efforts made it a very special night.
If you want to see what you missed, you can check out Jay Lee's take on it over at The Bald Heretic. The Chronicle also covered the event under their Seenster section.

BarretTime: July 20th, 2006

2007-06-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

This week's event calendar kicks off Thursday night with the 1960 PC Users Group. Their monthly Graphics Special Interest Group meets Thursday, July 20th, at the Cypress Creek Christian Church and Community Center, located at 6823 Cypresswood Drive in Spring, Texas. The second floor annex building is where you want to be from seven to nine PM. July's meeting will revisit some of the basic operations in Paint Shop Pro, concentrating again on "graphics from scratch" as opposed to photo editing. Alex Dumestre will be your SIG Leader, walking you through the training aids provided by Paint Shop Pro, with a look at some of the various tutorials available online.
Time will also be spent looking at the powerful customization capabilities of Paint Shop Pro so that you can tailor it to be as convenient as possible for the routine tasks that you do. Alex will also have a short show and tell of a restoration that he did on a cracked and faded precious photo from the ealry 1950s. Things will wrap up with a look at the new Google program called SketchUp, a 3D modeling program that, among other things, allows you to embed 3D buildings in Google Earth. It's important to note that the basic version of this program is free. Even if you don't attend the meeting, you might want to take a peek at this 3D design software.
This Saturday is the fourth Saturday of the month, meaning that it is time for the Houston Linux Users Group second general meeting of July. No specific topic has yet graced the front page of www.hlug.org, but check back there between now and Saturday for meeting details. Things kick off at two in the afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters, located a half mile or so from MicroCenter near the Houston Galleria. A short break takes place at three, and things are wrapped up by four.
And...on this day in 1935 the first automatic parking meter in the U.S., the Park-O-Meter, invented by Carlton Magee, was installed in Oklahoma City by the Dual Parking Meter Company. Twenty-foot spaces were painted on the pavement, and a parking meter that accepted nickels was planted in the concrete at the head of each space. The city paid for the meters with the funds collected from them. Today, parking meters are big business. Companies offer digital parking meters, smart parking meters, and, more remarkably, user-friendly parking meters. The user-friendly parking meters are an attempt to stem the tide of "violent confrontations" between users and their meters.
The tie-in to local events?
This summer, Houston will become the first major U.S. city to manage its parking meters over a wireless network. This according to Houston CIO Richard Lewis. Knowing how things go with the city, however, I wouldn't hold my breath until the first Wi-Fi enabled meter is turned on.
That's that for your Paint Shop Pre-Alert and that's that for BarretTime.

Stiff little fingers

2007-06-16T22:23:00.002-07:00

If you're not familiar with the movie High Fidelity, an adaptation of the 1995 British novel by Nick Hornby, it would behoove you to remedy that soon. The entire story is actually a geeky boil-down of Kierkegaard's Narrative, though pursuing that would be pandering to philosophy and literature geeks. That's not what I am here to do. No... Today, I am here to pander to music geeks/audiophiles and users of l337 5P34K. I would mention movie geeks, but that's a given.
Let's cut to a scene in the movie where the socially challenged Dick tries to chat up a girl in his record store using the language he knows best.
Dick: Well, the interesting thing about Green Day is that, um, so much of their music is, in truth, directly influenced by, in my opinion, uh, two bands. Anna & Dick: The Clash. Dick: Uh, correct, The Clash. Uh, but also by this band called the Stiff Little Fingers. Um, I think you would really love this band. *Dick puts on a Stiff Little Fingers song* Anna: It sounds great. My name's Annaugh. Dick: The name's um... My name's Dick. Shopper: Is this the new Green Day? *Dick and Anna roll eyes and exchange a knowing look*
From the geek perspective, this could have been about anything - Lisp and its relationship to Emacs, for example. Luckily for Dick, music is much more romantic than Unix text editors. (No, really.)
Another scene takes place after Barry (Jack Black) refuses to sell a rare record to an even more socially inept record collector.
Louis: You guys are snobs. Dick: No, we're not. Louis: Yeah, seriously, you're totally elitist. You feel like the unappreciated scholars, so you **** onto people who know lesser than you. Barry, Rob, Dick: No! Dick: Which is everybody... Barry, Rob, Dick: Yeah...
Of course they're elitist. And of course they deny it. Louis' observation is correct, though. In geek culture, the word has a very similar meaning.
Elitist -> Elite -> Leet -> 1337. Generally a compliment, but often used in an ironic derogatory manner...
Meaning: a group of users as belonging to a higher social echelon than other users. Also the basis for something commonly known as 1337 5P34K, pronounced "leet speak". Primitive 1337 would interchange characters. Phone Phreak would become fone phreak, noob (newbie) would become n00b. Over time, the language evolved and took its place in geek culture. Check out this early MegatTokyo comic for a look at look at the state of L337 5P34K in late 2000.
If you truly haven't caught on by now, Leet Speak, at its heart, is the act of replacing letters with similar looking numbers and characters. We'll take a look at some of these in weeks to come, paying special attention to how many of these 1337 constructs have become entrenched in modern internet slang. For now, we'll come full circle and wrap things up with Stiff Little Fingers, that punk band from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and their early use of l337 on the cover art of their 1980 album, Nobody's Heroes.

I'll leave you to g3 3k out over the implications...