random($foo) is the occassionally still updated blog of Leonard Lin. My pics are on Flickr, code is on Github. @lhl on Twitter. More »
My Treo 600 finally got in yesterday. It feels amazingly tiny (good in the hands) and the keyboard is squished, but fairly usable. More review stuff later. Interestingly enough, although it feels much smaller, it’s actually not too much smaller than my co-worker’s Treo 300. Here are the dimensions as compared to my Sidekick:
Kevin Werbach made some observations on the size in his recent article in The Feature: The Triumph of Good Enough.
Hmm, so this is pretty interesting behavior. Been noticing that AIM’s been giving me a system message that I’m signed on in different locations instead of kicking me off when I log in from multiple systems. It doesn’t have a jabber-like presence, but instead duplexes all incoming messages. Wackiness.
Ahh: AIM: Instant Message Routing
When you are signed in more than once, messages sent to you will be
delivered to all locations. You can control which locations will
receive messages by setting your Away Message.When signed into multiple locations:
- Your messages will generally be delivered to all locations not set as Away (or locations that have gone Idle).
- If all locations are set Away, then messages will be delivered to all locations.
Please note, that you will only receive these notifications from the screen name AOL System Msg.
I trucked out to the desert over the weekend to shoot my last short for my 519 class. I put a few pics online. Man, I can’t believe it was raining in the Mojave on Saturday.
Was randomly clicking through the Blogger site (finding the date created link Andy sent me a while ago) and saw suggestions on what to do when your mom finds out about your blog (also, less tongue in cheeck, how not to get fired because of your blog) in the knowledge base.
Good suggestions, but it also highlights the need for more fine grained publishing control (Towards Semi-Permeable Blogging), and (ideally), a concurrent wide adoption of some sort of federated trust infrastructure [this could help to alleviate the comment spam problem. implemented properly, this could retain privacy fairly well, pseudonymity is all that’s required])
Sorry guys, I think I have downtown nerdville covered.
I’ve been neglecting the blog recently as classes and work have conspired against me. A quick linkdump:
The WP’s Dana Milbank reports
that a British reporter of a reputable journalistic outlet asked
McClellan, “Just to clarify, why has the president chosen to do an
interview with the Sun? It’s a newspaper which publishes daily pictures
of topless women.” After detailing the Sun’s bread and butter (not just
naked ladies – there are stories about natives eating someone’s
ancestor and “German saboteurs plotted to bomb Palace with peas in
WW2″), Milbank notes McClellan’s answer, “It has a large readership.”
Notably, Bush hasn’t given one-on-one interviews to publications like
the NY Times, WSJ, Washington Post, Time or Newsweek this year (and
hasn’t given solo interviews to LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and Boston
Globe ever). Hypothesis: Rupert Murdoch is a billionaire, The
Sun-owning media baron and Bush is running for re-election next year.
Ta-da, Bush interviews with Trevor Kavanagh.
Economically, trade is no different than other technologies. Economist David Friedman
of Santa Clara University puts it most succinctly: there are two ways
to make a car — you can either make it in Detroit or grow it in Iowa.
You already know how to make it in Detroit. You get a bunch of iron
ore, smelt it into steel, and have an assembly line of robots and
workers shape it into a finished vehicle.To grow it in Iowa, you plant car seeds in the ground (also known as
“wheat”), wait until they sprout, and harvest them. Take the harvest
and put it into a big boat marked “to Japan” and let it sail off. A few
months later a brand new car comes back.
The sRGB working space has the average values of a CRT screen which are a gamma of 2.2 and whitepoint of 6500K.
The NTSC stands for National Television System Committee which is set to calibrate the monitor to a gamma of 2.2 and whitepoint of 6500K.
In the SL world, everything works on Linden$ (L$). Everything you build costs money. For instance, if I want to build a cube (or other type of primitive) it costs me $10. If I destroy that cube, I get my $10 back. If I decide to keep the cube in the game at all times, even when I’m not logged in, I get taxed on it. This is to encourage people not to leave stuff just lying around, cluttering up the landscape, and more importantly, the game server with processing your junk.
Every week you get a stipend, of roughly L$1000, which will never increase your account balance beyond $3500. To gain more money than that, you have to earn it. One way of earning L$ is to sell things, such as clothes, models, or scripts.
Unless you figure out an exploit, you cannot steal anyone’s things. Every note, script and object you create has a list of permissions, such as copyable, modifiable, moveable, buyable.
In most of the SL world, you cannot hurt anyone. In the areas where you can be hurt, if you die, all that happens is you get teleported home. That’s it.
You don’t have to worry about someone beating you up and robbing you 🙂
My favorite thing about SL is the scripting language. Like Hiro in snow crash. You can literally click an object in the game, and bring up the scripting code in a window, and start futzing with it. This is a really good toy version of the metaverse 🙂