Posted on by lhl

crim thinks developer dollars are a good idea:

I know many other professional development products (think filemaker, web objects, etc.) don’t have publically accessible support forums maintained by their own staff. You need to have a registered version of the product to get that support. This is sort-of the same idea, but they’re giving us a lot more.

Now, what’s interesting is that when you compare, say the two products he mentions, which have small/limited support, there are some common elements, when compared to their more succesful and open competitors (say, MySQL and PHP respectively):

  1. The open communities are much more robust
  2. These communities sustain larger growth
  3. Gain superior mindshare
  4. and community support/contributions
  5. As a result the respective products are of higher quality

Is Danger a dead-end? Time will tell, I suppose.

Posted on by lhl

It’s been awfully windy the past few days. Speaking of wind, last week I was doing some research after reading the Wired article on Hydrogen power, toying with the idea of wind farming.

Facts:

Investing:

Misc / DIY

Posted on by lhl

Danger has finally got their SDK sorta released. The website is buggy as all get-out (took about 6 times to signup, as WebObjects barfs if you have an address line longer than 32 characters [wow, this input stuff sure is rocket science!]). Also, you start out at Level 0 access, which, well gives you access to some docs. A danger rep posts on the forums for the reasoning.

First thoughts? If Danger is going to limit distribution of apps to 5 OTA / USB, they’re are going to be pounded into submission compared to palm and wince devices that can beam each other (wow, IR ports that actually work) or net downloads. First Program? Create a loader app to allow programs to be downloaded from the Net. And if the DangerOS really is insecure, well, if you can’t write a proper sandbox, you’re probably not in the right business.

[update] I’m now Level 1. The site is impossible to navigate due to pages lacking navigation and all the pages breaking the back button. Also, there’s a ‘Developer Dollars’ system whereby “tokens that can be traded for advice, shared code, ideas or booty.” This seems like a bad idea.

Posted on by lhl

So, here’s a little tale. I’m trying to use Aaron Boodman’s labels.js w/ my newly reinstated search box. But oddly enough, while it seems to mostly work, for some reason, the label isn’t being hidden. This seems odd since I’m not getting any errors with the insertRule/addRule.

So, what’s going on? Jesse pointed out something pretty obvious, but that had totally escaped my attention, which is that Aaron’s code is hard-coded to append rules to the last stylesheet (document.styleSheets[document.styleSheets.length-1]), which in my case, happens to be an alternate stylesheet. The ideal way to fix this is to add a new stylesheet, however there’s no standard way to do it.

What Jesse does for his bookmarklets that deal w/ styles is to use JS to create link/style nodes. Which is fine, except I’m lazy and I don’t want to bother with writing the branching code, so I did the easiest thing and wrote a for loop to add the style to all of the stylesheets.

for(i=0; i<document.styleSheets.length; i++) {

  var s = document.styleSheets[i];

  addStyleRule(s, "label", "position:absolute; visibility:hidden;");

}

[in Moz at least, you can query the styleSheet.disabled property to see which sheets are active, but, well, if you’re looping anyway…]

Posted on by lhl

I finally got around to setting up ASPseek. I wasn’t able to get the PHP extension to running, but hey, it works, you can sort of search for stuff. I’m still still waiting for a search engine (err, Google?) that understands permalinks.

Feel free to give it a whirl, you might find something interesting. For example, I just did a random search and found an old OpenGL presentation I did back in Spring 1998. Surprisingly, the OpenGL demo still runs. Hmm… for some reason the acknowledgements are missing, but here’s a page on my former roommate’s GL Setup code I used.

Posted on by lhl

The last of these type of posts for a while I think. At this point, it’s just beating a dead horse. It’ll be interesting to see the eventual geo-political fallout from the Bush Doctrine (correction, not pre-emptive, but preventive strike). A co-worker made a good point today, that it would take decades to repair international relations. Somehow, in a few decades, I doubt it’ll much matter. At this rate, by we’ll have long lost both our social relevance and technological dominance. It’s a shame that we’re also giving up our civil rights and founding principles in the same shot.

  • Newsweek Cover Story, Why America Scares the World: The Arrogant Empire

    • In fact, while the United States has the backing of a dozen or so governments, it has the support of a majority of the people in only one country in the world, Israel. If that is not isolation, then the word has no meaning.

  • NYT: A Decision Made, and Its Consequences
  • USA Today: War is not in U.S. interest

    • Where does it end? Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has laid out the road map, with Iran, Libya and Syria next on the list: “These are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons mass destruction,” he told visiting U.S. congressmen, “and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve.”

Of course, when the shooting starts, it’ll be a whole different ball-game. We’ll see, I suppose. I’ll just leave off this topic with something Rafe just wrote, which sums up my feelings and happens (if it is possible?) to be simultaneously succinct and eloquent.

I’ve given both sides of the debate very serious consideration, and unlike most neocons and warmongers, I’ve actually read The Threatening Storm. What I found today when I heard a reporter on the radio talking about how people in Baghdad were lining up at pharmacies to get all the medicine they can and filling up their cars with gas for all the good it will do is that my reaction against this war is a lot more visceral than I would have imagined. I grew up on the Gulf coast, and I can remember what it was like when we heard there was a hurricane coming. We did what we could and hoped against hope that the coming destruction would miss us, and it always did. What must it be like to be in a city in Iraq right now? You know the destruction is coming, and you know that the only thing that will save you now is luck.

I sit here in America, and I ponder the fact that we’re the people who are about to inflict that on another country. Not because they’ve attacked us, and not because they’re preparing to attack us, but because they might possibly attack us. I won’t argue with anyone who says that Saddam Hussein is a brutal, oppressive dictator who deserves whatever fate befalls him, but there are literally millions of people who are about to stop being Saddam Hussein’s victims and start being our victims. The United States is about to be the disaster that befalls them. And when I look at President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and their ghoulish set of war-loving minions, I don’t think they appreciate the gravity of that.

Proud to Be an Amerikan

Posted on by lhl

So speaking of scary stuff, I have another ‘traumatic experience’ while watching the news at SXSW moment to relate (note, I didn’t spend all of SXSW in front of the boob tube, both this and the CNN Crossfire thing were caught flipping the news channels for about 15 minutes before the Bruce Sterling party [and before I found and vegged on the really bad original Buffy movie on HBO before taking off]).

CNN had a live performance from some country singer with a ‘controversial’ new song, where he sang all kinds of mawkish jingoistic whatnot to slow-motion 9/11 footage. It gets you right there, if you know what I mean. After mentioning it to a friend, I looked it up, and via some slight google-fu, found the guy in some writeups, David Worley.

Here’s an RM for you’re aural pleasure. Oh, and the lyrics, you’ll love this (if you’re using IE, give Jesse’s paren_tips bookmarklet a try):

‘Have You Forgotten?’ lyrics
Verse

I hear people saying we don’t need this war

I say there’s some things worth fighting for

What about our freedom and this piece of ground

We didn’t get to keep ’em by backing down

They say we don’t realize the mess we’re getting in

Before you start your preaching let me ask you this my friend

Chorus

Have you forgotten how it felt that day?

To see your homeland under fire

And her people blown away

Have you forgotten when those towers fell?

We had neighbors still inside going thru a living hell

And you say we shouldn’t worry ’bout bin Laden

Have you forgotten?

Verse

They took all the footage off my T.V.

Said it’s too disturbing for you and me

It’ll just breed anger that’s what the experts say

If it was up to me I’d show it everyday

Some say this country’s just out looking for a fight

After 9/11 man I’d have to say that’s right

Repeat chorus
Bridge

I’ve been there with the soldiers

Who’ve gone away to war

And you can bet that they remember

Just what they’re fighting for

Chorus 3

Have you forgotten all the people killed?

Some went down like heros in that Pennsylvania field

Have you forgotten about our Pentagon?

All the loved ones that we lost and those left to carry on

Don’t you tell me not to worry about bin Laden

Have you forgotten?

Tag

Have you forgotten?

Have you forgotten?

Wow, can you say it with me? Wow. I think it speaks for itself.