Hogwarts Express Found!

With apologies to The Register, they've got it all wrong, this is the Hogwarts Express pulling into the station. It looks a wee bit different in real life than I imagined though.

Now all I have to do is locate the real platform 9^3/4, and my plan for a quick Winter's vacation at Hogsmead will be complete.

Shhhh...don't let the Wizarding folk know about this breach in security. We Muggles need our secrets too.

Anil on "Kramer"

Mr. Dash's analysis on the whole Kramer incident is spot-on.

As a white who has personally complained in public on several occasions about "loud black people", but who also thought quite seriously about pledging Alpha Phi Alpha (historically black service fraternity) in college, I've witnessed and been a participant on both sides of the "expression" issue. Well, at least as much as a geeky, but determined, college-aged caucasian could.

For the record I think, Mr. Richards was waay out of line on both professional and racial fronts. I also ended up not pledging for any service fraternities as I felt the additional workload would not accommodate my studies.

Btw, if you ever get the chance to attend an AΦA step-show, don't miss it. The dance moves and choreography illustrated in Spike Lee's School Daze are a pale almost spoofish comparison to the real thing.

The Wii "Help Cat"

Wow! What a wonderfully insidiously genius help feature (Quicktime MOV).

It trains you to use the Wiimote, whilst simultaneously entertaining. Usability purists will scoff at this, but the more enlightened and experienced Nintendo-philes will immediately grok the gestalt as something only Nintendo would dare put into a consumer-level digital entertainment appliance.

Our new senator

I know absolutely nothing about Jim Webb aside from his standard political stump speech shtick. Personally, I lean more towards libertarianism than any other political orientation. Nevertheless, I applaud his recent actions and rhetoric.

Obviously, it's a clearly designed media ploy (esp. the lack of picture-posing) and as a first-time freshman senator, he comes equipped with a few "freebie" political capital chits which he just bet against. Well played, Mr. Webb, well played.

Ze says thanks

No, thank you man for your daily doses of wisdom, humor, and duckies.

Code metrics

An enterprising research has come up with a novel measure of programming language effectiveness using Google's Code Search. Even accounting for normalization of the sample sizes, I'm shocked that C++ didn't come in dead last...err...first.

<voice inflection="Borat">Is Nice!</voice>

Open Source / Maker gift list

A nice collection of Open Source and relating items for the tinkerer in the family--or in my case, the tinkering family.

Hacking Zune w/ renamed file descriptors

Heh. Somebody's done the file type exploit I described earlier. The great thing about this vector is that it totally bypasses the assured boot sequence of the Freescale processor so no key exchange attack is required.

Fixed Gear Bikes: No Gears, No Brakes, No Problem?!

An article detailing the rather curious trend for fixed-gear bicycles.

I can perhaps understand the lack of gearing for fitness, but I can't grok the lack of brakes. Brake hardware and swtich-gear aren't, by an means, heavy. Without pedal clamps or special shoes feet can very easily slip off of the pedals--especially when wet and undergoing heavy loads and oblique forces necessary for reverse braking pressure. That's o.k. though because it never rains in San Francisco...

I'm curious as to:

1. How much weight savings is accomplished by the removal of all the gearing and brake hardware?
2. What is the typical gear ratio used?

If the primary, or even secondary motivations are reliability and ease of maintenance, a sealed-shaft drive would be a much better transmission system than a chain. Shaft drives are just slightly less efficient, but far more reliable.

Jay Allard on the Zune

A really informative, but poor audio-quality, lecture and follow-up Q&A on the Zune. It's very clear that Mr. Allard has the right vision ("Album v2.0"), what's most disturbing is that MS, with all of its resources, couldn't execute against it; even going so far as to doing the equivalent of payola to Universal Music. It's amazing how a company os detail-focused (the adeqdote regarding 'green' colored XBOX350 cases) couldn't manage to work a deal with existing studios for volume 3x3 (3 plays and/or 3 days) sharing of all Zune music.

MS is taking platform-first/device-second approach rather than building a device-first/platform-second strategy like Apple. I believe this is because:

1. It's most compatible with their pre-existing corporate culture.
2. They feel the media (music, movies, etc.) industry is far too recalcitrant for any other approach to be legally and economically viable in the near term.

MS would rather invest a few billion dollars as a loss-leader/corporate-education effort to gain the contacts and market insight, and let the entrenched media conglomroates self-engineer their own collapse. The Zune v1.0 is primarily a learning platform for MS--not a consumer media player.

This sends a very strong message to independant artists, established artists in the midst of contract renegotiations, and consumers. The first 2 have the freedom to explore other distribution and marketing channels and the latter can simply follow the 'spirit'' of the law with the knowledge that the emerging governance and economic powers will serve their needs. The wonders of the free-market (pun intended) in action.

Again, MS is takes an industry orientation, while Apple takes a consumer orientation.

Money vs. Happiness

It seems that Aaron isn't too happy working at Wired. No wonder there was a mass exodus shortly after the Conde Nast buy-out. I simply can't imagine working under those conditions for too long—even with his high six-figure payout (presumed) from the Reddit aquisition.

As one former Wired editor told me, "Wired is Tired".

Nano laser interfereometry IDs

Despite what this Guardian reporter thinks, using laser interference patterns for unique identification is most definitely not a new thing. In fact, Ravi, received a patent on this quite some time ago.

Sousveillance and the Force Continuum

Via Digg:

Yet another example of inappropriate use of force by law enforcement.

We don't have all of the facts, but given the context of the situation and the facts we do know, expect a civil lawsuit and more than one dismissal from the UCPD police force.

There are also larger societal issues vividly illustrated such as the effects of "i.d. requirement", sousveillance, and appropriate law enforcement force continuum policies, which I don't have time to touch on today.

If these issues interest you, quite frankly they should, I highly recommend Prof. Brin's remarkably prescient text The Transparent Society.

Follow-Up: By sheer coincidence, an article with similar themes is up on Queue today.

new Ipod Shuffle design thoughts

I got my mitts on the 2nd generation iPod Shuffle (linkrot) iPod Shuffle a few weeks ago. As usual, I was very impressed by Apple's design, but 2 immediate thoughts came to mind.

1. Why not emboss the symbols on the click-control so that orientation could be determined by feel?

   I envision most folks using these on their daily public transportation commutes or whilst exercising.

2. Given the incredibally low parasitic idle leakage currents of modern flash memory and digital-audio processors, does the Shuffle even need a power button?

   Why not simply have a idle-timer to power down the audio amplifier while not in use? Perhaps folks still have such a strong psychological attachment to an 'on/off' switch that Apple felt its removal would be too much of an adjustment.

Zune v1.0 software, crap-tacular

A wonderfully hilarious walk-through of the Zune player's software. Even without the accompanying crashes, MS is trying too hard to be cool. The 'hip' slogans and photos of painfully-happy 'normal people' are---painful to look at. MS still just doesn't get the whole out-of-box experience.

This feels just like the original XBOX all over again.

Wait for Zune Marketplace 2.0 since the software services is where MS can be competative with the Apple/iTunes experience. Imagine something like the original vision of Odeo except with the full weight of MS's wads of cash. Hmmm...

A thought about Transformers

Will Soundwave be in the new movie? If so, will he be an iPod?

Car, gun, and airplane designs are fairly timeless due to their physical requirements, but how many kids today would even recognize a tape-deck?

Mr. Bay, please don't fuck this up. You're playing with very precious childhood memories of a whole generation of Gen-Xers as well as an excellent animated movie adaptation of the original cartoon series. That "Wororeewowo" transformation sound is absolutely iconic and Optimus Prime, whom we've seen here before, is 'da man err...bot.

No-knead home-made bread

Guess what girlfriend and I will be cooking err...baking this weekend.

My father was a butcher, chef, and food consultant--never a baker. From his teachings as well as the writings of Mr. Ruhlman I've learned that baking requires an entirely different sort of mindset.

Looking forward to Sunday brunch with home-made bread this weekend.

Yum.

Hmm...merely a coincidence?

I kid you not.

I was browsing YouTube and saw this clip just before watching this episode (video--likely will be taken down soon) of South Park--spooky. I'm totally for an Eric Cartman in the 25th Century spin-off. It could so totally work. Heh.

Yes. I am a child of the 80s and Colonel Wilma Deering err...Erin Gray was....um...very fit in her lycra outfits.

Follow-Up: YouTube took down the original video. Several other copies exist of course. Just for spite, I posted another YouTube link. If that goes down again, I'll just host it locally and wait for a DMCA take-down notice. What a stupid law.

Dangerous Thoughts

1. Using foil balloons to smuggle metallic items (they would need to be slightly modified to obfuscate and blur (not block) x-rays.
2. Overriding the Zune's wireless sharing DRM at the file level (using steganographically encoded song data in image files) or changing the media-type descriptor in the file system so that it thinks a song is an image.

I just can't help it. My mind works this way. Best for all concerned to get these things out in public. (* Dr. Evil pinky-to-mouth *)

Heros

Go watch, bit-torrent, or stream NBC's Heros. It's the best network t.v. I've seen since BSG—although I rarely watch t.v. anymore and I'm a sucker for anything related to comic books so, in retrospect, perhaps I'm a wee bit biased.

Jay Leno's garage

Something tells me that Mr. Leno will have plenty to occupy his time after he "retires" from the tonight show.

C'mon Jay, dump the GM sponsorship. I'd be willing to pony up $1 or $2 a month for some video podcasts on vintage steam technology and modern aftermarket car mods. It's somewhat telling that his garage's kitchen has a full television studio key and fill light truss.