"People should be ashamed when they are passed on the right"

I'm not a bumper-sticker person.  I really have never had one, and probably never will.  I guess my soapbox-ish feelings have never overcome my greater aversion to more visual pollution.  ...Except when it comes to driving considerately.  If I saw one, I'm sure I would buy and apply a bumper sticker along these lines:

Driving considerately depends on awareness.  If you're oblivious to what's going on around you, yes "mental auto-pilot" might keep you personally safe (somewhat), but it interferes with the effective flow of traffic. 

This "driving oblivion" is essentially a form of laziness.  People should be ashamed when they are passed on the right, and should feel the need to apologize somehow, perhaps by flashing their lights in acknowledgement of the inconvenience they may have just caused the passer.  But of course they'd have to notice that too... 

A similar symptom of driving oblivion is failure to indicate: just drift on over to wherever you feel like being, with no consideration for other drivers.

I guess flow and being considerate are big with me these days.

A not particularly-related frustration, but one which also breaks flow, is traffic waves.  I think I mentioned once that I'd meant to write about it as a form of compression wave, but fortunately someone beat me to it.  Traffic waves are actually not a symptom of laziness, but rather one of greediness -- never allowing enough space in front of you that someone else might be able to cut in line.  In the process, your foot ends up back-and-forth between pedals, magnifying the compression waves and actually slowing the flow.  (Imagine a sink drain that burps, back with the air, forth with the water).

(Normally I'd apologize for venting, soapboxing, etc.  But lookee there at my name up top!  Speaking freely is a blog's "why".)

I've bugged the Microsoft Scripting Guys to make a feed for their great daily Q&A.  "Coming soon" was the most I ever heard (and over a year ago)...

I don't know what the holdup is, but it doesn't matter to me now.  Thanks to etc., I just found Yoktu.com Feedmaker.  A moment later, I had the feed I want.  Sweet!

One note: Feedmaker has a Word Filter option.  Unfortunately it doesn't do positive filters, so "?" hides all the links I want, instead of the generic ones I don't.  No big deal (I'll choke doen the extras), but hey Yoktu, how about a googlish syntax like "+?" for specifying what to include?

Busy?  Oh yeah.

• TRAFFIC WAVE EXPERIMENTS -- I've been wanting to write this article for a very long time.  Someone finally did it for me (tho' at much greater length).
  
• You can improve IE.next - The Web Standards Project -- cool this is being done, uh, again.
  
• And interesting variations on a theme -- also interesting is that you'll never see anything like this on Slashdot or Digg (which is their fanboyism):
  • Seven reasons IE is better than Firefox (from a developer's point of view)
  • Firefox Myths
  • Firefox - A New Religion
    

Thanks to Clagnut, I'm observing CSS Naked Day on April 5^th.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

For the remaining dotText-ers out there who want this to automatically kick-in every April 5^th, I just added this condition to DTP.aspx:

<%
// suspend styles on April 5 to observe CSS Naked Day - http://naked.dustindiaz.com/
DateTime dtNaked = DateTime.Today; 
if(!(dtNaked.Month==4 && dtNaked.Day==5)){
%>
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/mystyles.css" />
<%
}
%>

I went to grab the new IE7 beta, and couldn't get past this complete Flash mess:

Yuck! ...It even says "everything you need, nothing you don't" -- very much unlike this Flashturbation.

I'd guess the Flash designer hasn't seen Microsoft's (great) parody of its own bad design habits, The Microsoft Ipod:

Looks like I'm:

• Participating in Scoble's

  brrreeeport

  experiment.
• Syndicating Digg's Programming news here now (in the sidebar).
• Considering participating in Technet ScriptCenter's Scripting Games event, despite my busy-ness. (Hey, I could be a contender!)
• Baffled why UC would require its own Alumni (aka "prospective donors" to UC's board) to jump through Stone Age hoops to get a transcript (this is 2006, and phone isn't even an option), and they'll still take "5-10 days" to process it.
• Downloading various free VMwares at the moment. Oh, and eating cookie dough.
• Wondering why the machine I've reinstalled at least 12 times in 12 months -- due to strange disk problems, but with different disks -- now appears problem free after switching its filesystem from NTFS to FAT32 (which is supposedly more fragile).
• Also wondering why the Virtual NT4 Server I spent the last week fighting with just refuses to run IIS4.
• Avidly tracking shipment of my new little Athlon 64-based machine, due here Tuesday.
• Chuckling at the recent surplus of general serendipity.
• Remembering that Tuesday is Valentine's day....

and so I was sad to see it go away again today:

Y'know, I remember seeing the early web on Lynx, and thinking "oh, like gopher, except harder to use -- what's the point?" Then I saw it on Netscape 1 and everything changed.

(Yes, I actually have a need for NT 4 Server right now. I never thought I'd be installing Option Pack this many years later. At least I've got Virtual PC & Server these days).

Hard to explain (I'm a geek, nuff said), but I just noticed my One-Billionth birthsecond is coming up soon.  Furthermore, my (almost 3yr old) son's One-Hundred-Millionth birthsecond will be about a month earlier!

Want to know when you/a loved one reached/will celebrate a major birthsecond?  In that case, I proudly (?) introduce my Birthsecond Calculator™ (;>) :

1. Date/Time of birth:
2. + a birthsecond:        100,000 - One-Hundred-Thousandth      1,000,000 - One-Millionth     10,000,000 - Ten-Millionth    100,000,000 - One-Hundred-Millionth  1,000,000,000 - One-BILLIONTH (RIP Carl Sagan) 10,000,000,000 - TEN-Billionth
3. = ?
    

Note: This surely won't work in a feed reader, so come visit for the fun.

(web geek colophon: This works thanks to jsDate, my port of VBScript Date functions to Javascript.)

Update 2007-04-15: My 7yo son wants to know when his 250 millionth birthsecond is, so here's a customizable version.

(yes color, not music)

I've been clicking on the wrong programs all day, so consider this my request to the world's icon designers to try something other than yellow, orange or red.

I hear purple and green are the new black.

Big fan that I am of Google Maps, here's a great ad for it:

The Windows calculator has Standard and Scientific modes... 

Suddenly conspicuous today in its absence was a Conversion mode.  (Heck, I've got a little app on my phone which does this.)  Cmon Vista, it just makes sense! 

Especially while we dumb Americans keep resisting metric.  Liquid volume is where it's hairiest, figuring out:

• 3 teaspoons to 1 tablespoon
• 2 tablespoons to 1 fl. oz
• 4 fl. oz to 1 gill
• 2 gills to 1 cup
• 2 cups to 1 pt
• 2 pts to 1 qt
• 4 qts to 1 gal

...We should really just drop most of those units.  (What's the point of ×2 units, anyway??)  It should be much simpler, like:

• 16 tablespoons to 1 cup
• 16 cups to 1 gal

If elected, I promise to simplify liquid volumes immediately.

I don't remember who (for reasons explained shortly), but some blogger I read recently said “It's sometimes difficult to remember that Technology exists to make things possible.”

This phrase is echoing through my head right now, as I watch my primary work machine slowly image a backup of its hard drive onto another machine, since the hard drive just crashed.  First strange sounds, then periodic freezes, and an hour later my screen is vivid abstract art.

Of course the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status is still “OK”.

Better than this, it took about two hours to find the right combination of BIOS settings, network boot disk, and Ghost disk before I could even start the imaging process.

This has been a very bad technology year for me.  Ugly details below (including grammar, I'm sure), but here's the gist: 

• Computers do a lot less helping me these days, and I do a lot more helping them. 
• They are much more prone to problems.
• Even when they're working “by design,” they are configured with stupid defaults and limitations which I have to fix (e.g. Windows Explorer).
• They claim to be smart, offering to configure, automate, or fix themselves, but they create more problems, or actually worsen the problem in the process!

<DETAILS type=“ugly”>
In January, a previously stable workstation had its hard drive die, or so it seemed after 6+ reinstalls.  See, when I replaced the drive, the installation would freeze randomly.  Turns out the BIOS was misdetecting the replacement drive's geometry, so I got to find and manually input heads, cylinders, etc -- something I haven't done in at least 10 years, and not my idea of a “trip down memory lane.” 
    That fixed the install, but the same spontaneously corrupt files issue has continued with the new drive.  ....I know drives die (moving parts & all), but drive controllers??

In May, the problems with my file server started.  It has mirrored drives.  One drive had a problem, the mirror broke, and the other kicked in (hurrah).  When I let the HighPoint RAID manager software fix the mirror, it “fixed” it alright ...in the wrong direction! (since previously visible partition info disappeared afterwards). 
    Drive now non-bootable, with much research I restored the drive's partitions with BootPart, and (hurrah) it booted, but Windows wanted to “fix” all the errors on the drive.  I let it do so.  Not until later did I realize that it was disconnecting most every file and subfolder from its parent folder, making them all Now “lost”.
    Oh, and Windows just “fixed” itself out of working.  So, time for a reinstall, happy that I keep the OS on its own partition, and careful to leave the others alone.  Ah, something worked, now about those files...
    Half a dozen file-restoration utilities found nothing more than a big jumbled mess of files without structure (and often without names).  At the end of that track, and crossing my fingers, I remembered I'd been doing nightly backups of important data...
    Whadya know, the backups are corrupt!  Again, very much effort to restore (so glad it was a zip file), and hurrah, I see files.  In fact, I think I've restored most of them, but we've discovered at least one missing, and I'm still wading through the “lost” files for possible luck. 

In the midst of the file server's woes, my web server's Windows Product Activation spontaneously went nuts.  At login, it would insist on activating Windows (which I'd already done), but when I said go ahead, it would say it's already activated and boot me out.  Much research, booting to safe mode, fiddling with files, finally a Windows installation “repair” operation.  Success?  I login once, twice to check, and stuck again! 
    I gave up on it for a while.  A server mostly doesn't need console access, so I was able to do a lot of things by other means.  The repair had made it completely unpatched though, which worried me since it's by necessity exposed as a web server.  Eventually I did fix this, but only because of research on another machine's WPA woes...

See, I was doing some “quick” troubleshooting of a friend's laptop.  Windows search didn't work, and there were a few other quirks, so I quickly ran System File Checker to fix possibly corrupted files.  No idea if this worked, because the subsequent login gave me the required WPA re-activation dialog, and again WPA was broken!  (blank this time).
    SO, I ran another Windows “repair” process, and it asks for a product key?!   (Duh, it's a repair, not a fresh install, get it yourself!).  I got the key, tried it and it didn't work. 
    Turns out it didn't match the CD -- there are OEM CDs, Volume License CDs, Retail CDs, and probably other flavors.  They're all the exact same OS, but with different classes of keys.  I have no idea what this accomplishes for the licensing folks.
    So I restart the repair with a different CD & key.  It works, but then I get mysterious error dialogs with sentence fragments “could not complete the file copy operation, you may need to retry or“ -- yes, or what?   I check and clean both disc and drive, but with no luck.  Fortunately it let me cancel that specific copy but continue the rest of the install.  I got the same error about 5 more times, but it worked.  Much re-patching ensued.
</DETAILS>

Aside: System File Checker is good.  Windows Product Activation is bad. 

I know drives fail.  I know software sometimes gets confused.  I could handle these much better if I still trusted the other software which is supposed to prevent, fix, or mitigate such problems. 

....And I'm seriously fantasizing about becoming a farmer. 

Have we reached the point of unsustainable complexity??

 

So a couple weeks ago I actually did a little wardriving for about three miles, just to see how many wifi networks I'd find.  At a stop, I connected to one, loaded Slashdot to test, and what do I see? Oh My!, Man Arrested for Using Open Wireless Network.  Hmmm, whoops?

Great quote: "worrisome as it seems, wireless mooching is easily preventable by turning on encryption or requiring passwords."

Yeah, kinda like putting doors on a building is a good way to keep people (and raccoons) out.  Maybe I should start asking before I use water fountains and public restrooms too.

There's been a massive amount of cool software and web development lately involving maps.  I just want to nail down what I've seen in one place.  I'll try it as a timeline...

• For ages there were the "classic web" map websites, which reloaded the entire page for every zoom, pan or other change.  MapQuest was one of the first (what, 10 years ago?), and has changed little since then.  In a word, "slooow".
• Eventually some sites like Yahoo Maps and MSN Maps evolved some, using DHTML to dynamically swap the map image, without reloading the entire page.  This was definitely faster.
• More recently, there was Google Maps, which actually slices the map into separate map "tiles", so that only the changed parts of the map are downloaded for each zoom/pan/etc (which is even faster).  Definingly-cool features include satellite maps, and the ability to "grab/drop" to move the map with your mouse just like you'd grab and move a real one.  This also put AJAX (aka "Remote Scripting") on the buzz map as a web development technique.
  
  Update: Don't miss the many amazing "remixes" of Google maps with other web apps, like phone books, housing ads, and crime stats).  Just Wow.
• Then NASA released World Wind, a desktop application which does this same trick, but leverages DirectX to provide seamless zooming/panning -- a true 3D app, and very cool.  It's mouse-enabled much like Google Maps, but adds UI features like Tilting (which gives panning the sensation of a fly-over!) The focus is more educational/scientific reference than convenience (sorry, no driving directions to Wal-mart.)
• Google Earth is the most recent, which is basically a combination of Google Maps with World Wind.  Its UI features are very similar to World Wind's, but it has more practical user features like Google Maps (how about Flying directions to Wal-Mart!).  (It also has some business features like demographic information overlays and the like, which puts it in the arena of Microsoft's commercial MapPoint software).
• Update: A9 Maps is a new one.  It's a different interface, and sports "curb-view" photos of addresses.  ...Or says it does anyway, I can't find any around me, so I'm not sure what use that is.

All of these are free, by the way.

If you dig this kind of map stuff and/or astronomy, I recommend Celestia, a free 3D desktop app (like World Wind and Google Earth) for extra-terrestrial (as in "off Earth") virtual exploration.  It's a great reference and learning/teaching tool, and my 5yr old and I love it.

So I played this game, half-a-lifetime-ago, called Hack.  It was a ASCII-graphical game for DOS, where you explore a dungeon, seeking the Amulet of Yendor.  You could play as a Wizard, Barbarian, or various other character types, and would of course fight monsters, gather treasures, and have various adventures along the way.

The user-interface was obviously very simple (even at the time), but the gameplay was amazingly rich.  I loved it, and spent many days of my life "in the dungeon," but eventually moved on to flashier graphical games.

So flash-forward 15 years to last week, I see this User Friendly comic mentioning "NetHack," and then another random mention of the game got me curious and googling. 

Lo and behold, Hack is still alive and kicking! (great history writeup here)  15 years of development (and enrichment) has added a simple GUI (mostly easier on the eyes) and richer (but completely faithful) gameplay.  I'm not at all disappointed. 

I am tempted to say I want some sort of multi-player version, tho.  Especially considering a favorite game of mine: BattleZone, an early 80s arcade classic, which Activision did an amazing (groundbreaking) job resurrecting in ~1998 as a multiplayer FPS.  I'm still playing it 7 years later.

But for now, it's NetHack again.  It's nice when old friends visit.

Trying out the new Windows Update v6 (now called "Microsoft Update").  Cool that they've finally integrated Office Update and other products (SQL Server for instance).

A few observations, though:

• It took several ActiveX installs, plus closing and restarting IE for it to actually load fully.
• Windows Update has been slooow for me lately (before this version even). Dunno why, but it still is. 
      Update: same slowness on sparkling fresh XPSP2 and SBS 2003 installs.  It ain't me.
• Still a ton of French Spell Checker updates?? (2 for Office, 1 for Visio, 1 for Project) I saw this a lot with Office Update too. I have no French anything on any machines, so what's the deal?.

About time to reboot...

Hm.. mixed feelings about participating in a meme, and moreso since the last few posts have been borderline shirking.

(But wait, how can I shirk?  Did I made an regular-original-content-creation-committment?!)

Anyway, it's a fun one via Ed Bott: load your entire music collection, randomize, and list the first 10 songs, uncensored. 

Here's what I got:

Porcupine Tree - Every Home Is Wired
Spin Doctors - Someday All This Will Be Road
Blind Guardian & Iced Earth - The Whistler
Flower Kings - Rumble Fish Twist
Earth Wind and Fire - Shining Star
The Fixx - Red Skies
Andy Grube - I Surrender
Audio Adrenaline - I'm Not The King
King's X - Mississippi Moon
Galactic Cowboys - Kaptain Krude

(Wow, rand()/fate was kind -- nary a Raffie or bubblegum pop song in the lot!)

"A modern computer is a magic box filled with ceremonial components that traps in a little evil spirit who is forced to work for you."

Nothing like a little Fenestredigitation, Open Sourcery, and Voodoo Debugging to start the day.

now see here →