It's amazing how much Calvin and I have in common, although he has a better haircut.
UPDATE: I used to have a link here to a very amusing Calvin and Hobbes strip about Calvin starting a journal, albeit a paper one. Unfortunately, uComics.com leaves just two weeks of a comic strip available online for free at any single time. However, a premium membership at uComics will give you access to all the older strips, and it's just $10/year.
Get your daily fix of Calvin and Hobbes from uComics.com.
I caught "If I Should Fall from Grace: The Shane MacGowan Story" at the Roxie tonight. If you're a fan of The Pogues, music documentaries, drunk Irishmen, and/or bad teeth, I can highly recommend this movie to you. If there are more dental cases like Shane back home in Ireland, then I also urge you to write a letter to your country's health department urging them to immediately ship crates of toothbrushes and toothpaste to Dublin. Check out the picture of Shane on the page I linked to above and you will know what I'm talking about.
Long ago when I was a DJ at KTRU, a guy in a band I interviewed told me that they had been on tour with the Pogues and that Shane's toes were as ugly as his teeth. Given that in the film his fingers looked almost jaundiced from cigarette smoke, I'm glad he didn't doff his shoes for the camera.
Hygiene issues aside, this is a really great movie. While it's really sad to see how the vast quantities of drugs and, primarily, drink, have left Shane in such an addled state, permanently incapable of literally walking a straight line, it's hard to say that he hasn't enjoyed his life and wouldn't have had it any other way. Living in California, when I saw him drinking glasses of a clear liquid with lemon in the more current footage, I assumed it was water. Oh, no. That was a gin and tonic in some cases, and a gin and gin in the rest. At the end of the film, he goes for a walk with Victoria in the country with a bottle of gin to fortify him.
The classic footage from performances by The Pogues and his earlier bands were woven very nicely through interviews with Shane, his family, bandmates, and friends. The director, Sarah Share, did a great job of not trying to force the viewer into any specific conclusion about Shane's life so far. Instead, she gave us insight we wouldn't otherwise easily have access to regarding Shane's background, his relationships with family and friends, and the rise and fall of The Pogues.
For more info, check out the Pop Twist site.
Well, I was going to try to create a cool popup window that would play streaming video embedded in the window, but I got bored and gave up on it. Maybe it wasn't so cool of an idea after all. So, click the photo and watch the fish and listen to the new age aquarium music and the ritalin-deprived children in the background.
This is a 3 MB AVI file, so don't go clicking on it unless you've got enough bandwidth or patience. I shot this video (320x240 resolution, 15 frames/second) with my tiny Canon S400 digital camera. This clip is 34 seconds long. I edited it down from a longer clip. The S400 uses an MJPEG codec. The shareware video editor I was using doesn't support MJPEG, so I had to re-encode with an Intel Indeo codec. The Indeo-encoded video quality isn't as good as the original, but it uses a higher compression ratio. The original was 13 MB and 1:27 long.
Update Dec. 11, 2003: The codec used by the shareware program I tried out is apparently not commonly available on Mac and Linux platforms. As soon as I get a chance, I will re-encode it with a more common codec.
Update March 10, 2004: If you're looking for info on MJPEG, read the MJPEG HOWTO. The info is most useful if you have access to a Linux box and MJPEG-tools. There's also an OS X port.
On the way back from a recent trip to my homeland, I spent some time in New Orleans with my wife and my parents. We didn't have a lot of time there, but we did squeeze in a visit to the Aquarium of Americas and we watched The Matrix Reloaded on the big screen and big speakers at the IMAX next door. I heartily recommend both activities.
Now who doesn't love seeing the penguins get fed? Certainly not the even hungrier killer whales, but that next step up in the real world food chain is not part of the feeding exhibition at the Aquarium. There are three species of penguins in this exhibit. Can you spot them all? Important hint: many of the penguins are not visible.
I don't think I had ever seen a seadragon before, at least not outside of the influence of a couple hurricanes from a New Orleans bar. The weedy seadragon is sporting some amazing colors (and so is the starfish behind it), but the leafy seadragon would make any drag queen at Mardi Gras cry in envy.
Like any fine establishment with huge quantities of water behind polycarbonate, the Aquarium of the Americas is full of freaky acting fish. The razorfish are no exception. Because of the low light and my desire to not use a flash, most of the razorfish came out blurry. I think you get the basic idea, though.
While frog legs are a popular dish in the South, these little guys aren't going to end up in anybody's deep fryer. Not only are they way too cute to eat, but they would make the toothpicks seem meaty.
Mmmm, comb jellyfish doughnuts... Next up I will post a video of some of the other jellyfishes at the aquarium. For the camera freaks, these photos were taken with my incredibly awesome Canon S400. The originals were way, way bigger, but I scaled them down for obvious reasons.
And before you walk away thinking that my zoo and aquarium motto is "See the animals, eat the animals", I assure you that I always (well, almost always) go vegetarian when eating on site at the snack bars and restaurants. Of course, the general standard of rubbery chicken strips and dessicated hamburger patties makes it pretty easy to act like I have a conscience.
I just uploaded the 0.3 release of SoccerPhone to the SourceForge project site. This is a minor release. The only changes I made were to accomodate recent changes to the MLSNet.com live scores page. Unfortunately, they have been changing fundamental aspects of their HTML markup nearly every week. Sometimes I get lucky and their changes don't break my code, but too often they do.
While I would love it if MLSNet.com offered an XML feed, perhaps as SportsML, I would be happy if they used CSS more extensively to separate content from presentation. Removing the presentation markup and using meaningful tags to indicate structure would make my life a lot easier. Although they do this in a couple places, in many places they are still using a class called smtext to present unrelated content as small text. Also, the table-based page structure is a nightmare to parse and to understand.
The 2003 Statewide Special Election Candidiate Status Report is now available. I signed for Garrett Gruener, who is a close friend of one of my neighbors, but is probably better known as the founder of AskJeeves.
Amy Cowen wrote a great article on moblogging for the August 2003 issue of mpulse, the HP Labs cooltown magazine. I remember reading about cooltown a few years ago when HP first announced the initiative. As the economy turned down and out, I had assumed that funding for cooltown would've been one of the first things HP would cut. I'm glad to see they have maintained what appears to be a decent level of funding for interesting research in mobile computing.
"For several years, HP Labs has been working at the intersection of nomadicity, appliances, networking, and the web. We called our vision of the future cooltown - a vision of a technology future where people, places, and things are first class citizens of the connected world, wired and wireless..."
The article provides a very nice overview of moblogging and of some of the available tools. It gets fuzzy only when she delves into APIs and syndication formats, first referring to "XML-RPC and RCC" and then implying that the "new specification codenamed Echo" would not use "XML and RSS underpinnings for blogs". Echo might not be based directly on RSS, but it will definitely be XML-based. I'll cut her some slack, though, since the rest of the article is quite good and trying to summarize the current API and syndication format drama in a single paragraph is a challenge that I wouldn't want to take on.
In the section on the moblogging community, Amy wrote a bit about my PhoneBlogger tool.
"For example, the developer of PhoneBlogger, an opensource VoiceXML project that allows users to post voice entries to their blogs, blogged the following after learning about LISTENLAB's audblog: 'if you are willing to get your hands filthy with electrons, want total control over the blogging tool, and have plenty of free time to spare, let me know and I will help set you up.' This kind of techno, hands-on approach is a hallmark of the developer community, and its extension into blogging circles gives the blogging community an almost grassroots edge."
I'm starting to feel kind of bad about doing virtually no development on PhoneBlogger since I released the source code many months ago. I think this is the motivation I needed to get back into the code, add some new features, and simplify the install. Hey, I've got to live up to my newfound status of behaving like "a hallmark of the developer community", as opposed to my usual behavior as a hallmark card for the slacker community.
IndyMedia in Melbourne, Australia, recently announced PIMP, the Phone IndyMedia Patch system, as an automated system for anyone with a telephone to submit live reports to Indymedia. The first use of PIMP was to report on a demonstration. This is exactly what I imagined early on as a great use for PhoneBlogger.
The purpose of PIMP is very similar to PhoneBlogger. Their system is pretty low-tech, but it looks like it should work just fine. Sometimes, the simplest thing that works is best.
They definitely aren't using VoiceXML, speech recognition, or text to speech. Instead, they're using a program called vgetty to do much of the heavy lifting. When you call PIMP, you're actually calling a voice modem. Vgetty is used to save your recording to a wav file. They use SoX and LAME to convert the WAV file to an MP3, similarly to how I used them with PhoneBlogger.
For some people, setting up a voice modem and a couple Linux programs will be easier than setting up a VoiceXML gateway and bridging it to the telephone network. But, with the free hosted VoiceXML services provided by companies like TellMe, BeVocal, and Voxeo in the US, I think the VoiceXML approach ends up being a lot simpler, and definitely a lot more flexible. In countries without free hosted VoiceXML gateways, of course, Indymedia's approach makes a lot of sense. However, the installation instructions for PIMP are a bit intimidating and somewhat less than clear. But, then again, so are the ones I wrote for PhoneBlogger.
I'm not sure if Hugh is using the same approach as IndyMedia, but he has a service called VoiceMonkey that also essentially acts like a voice mail system that can publish recordings to a website.
