If you've been watching my site over the past few hours then you might have noticed a lot of test posts fly by. I've been cooking up something and here it is.
Keyur mentioned earlier in the day that it would be neat if we could take advantage of the trackback feature of MovableType to create a page that shows each of our latest entries to our blogs. Well after about an hour of work, I think I've almost got it, with some minor hitches. You can go to moorehill.net to see the results. I'll fix up the style sheet soon.
The trackback URL is: http://moorehill.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1
All you fellow bloggers have to do is either:
a. paste this URL into the 'URLs to ping' box of each message you post, which is sort of a hassle
or b. paste the URL into the 'URLs to ping' box in the category attributes for each category that you post under. I don't know what to do when you don't post under a category, and that's the hitch I mentioned earlier. Maybe we'll figure something out for that later.
Until then you can check moorehill.net instead of each of our individual blogs for new posts. (Assuming everyone plays along.)
Have you ever wondered how something you use every day works? Maybe as mundane as a lawn sprinker or as complicated as a continuously variable transmission. Here are two excellent resources for figuring out what's going inside whatever you are wondering about:
First, there is the book, The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay. I bought the 'New' version of this book a few years ago, after I saw it at friends place and couldn't put it down everytime I went over. (Thanks Mary) On the surface it looks like it geared toward children, but the subjects and concepts that it covers are hardly meant only for children. There are some simple explanations like the level and screw, and other more complicated ones like the coin tester in coke machines. The elephant-filled illustrations are simple but still descriptive. It's a book that satisfies curiosity of all ages. Definitely one of my favorite books on my shelf.
Second, there is one of the most awesome sites on the web HowStuffWorks.com. It covers a TON of topics, it is constantly updated, covers currently hot topics (e.g. SARS), is searchable, has neat flash animations, and best of all is free. Too much information all in one place I think. It scares me sometimes. I finally understood how automatic transmissions really worked after I watched the moving flash animations on howstuffworks. Many friends and I have spent countless hours on howstuffworks. As soon as you are done reading one topic, you scroll to the bottom and see "Related topics" and the madness never ends. It's one of the best sites on the web.
So if you've ever wondered how a differential works, or if you don't even know what one is, just head to HowStuffWorks.com or check out The New Way Things Work.
So my website has moved for the 10th or so time. Now we're being hosted at Dathorn.com which has come highly recommended. A few friends (Keyur, Akash, Dan, Gautam, Sheelpi, Jackson, and Mike) and I split up a reseller package, and we're getting superior hosting at a very low cost. I think we've ironed out all the kinks over the past 36 horus, but if you see anything fishy or broken, let me know. Till then, enjoy!.
So what's on the menu today? Juice! If you drink soda every day, you should think twice before you grab you next drink. The caffeine is addictive, and a very large percentage of the population in the US is hooked. On top of that most soda will literally dissolve your teeth over time. Most sodas are carbonated and also contain phosphoric acid, which drops the pH down to 2.5 (That's low trust me). Juice is an excellent alternative, and here are two you should try.
Juicy Juice rocks. It's 100% juice, not watered down. On top of that, there's no sugar added, but they still manage to have 26 grams of sugar in 8 ounces of juice. I'm still not sure how they pull that magic off. Also it tastes great. I've switched over from Capri Sun to the juice boxes, and I love it. I know some of you might have a strong allegiance to Capri Sun, with the cool pouches and childhood memories, but it just isn't on the same level as Juicy Juice. The taste difference is astonishing. Also don't let the kids marketing campaign deter you. Unlike Trix, it not just for kids. (aside: I feel your pain, Rabbit.) When it comes to Juicy Juice flavors, I go with Kiwi Strawberry, and sometimes Berry, but they are all pretty good.
For a more 'grown-up' drink, try Ocean Spray Ruby Tangerine juice. It's got grapefruit bite with tangerine to mellow things out - but not too much. The taste and tanginess of this juice are hard to beat. I can't get enough of this stuff. If tangerines aren't your thing, there's a whole line of Ruby products including Mango, Strawberry, Lemonade, and of course, pure Ruby.
So next time you are at the supermarket, think twice about your coke/soda (not pop) and get some Juice!
So where do you get your news from? Over the past few years television news has undeniably gone to crap. When the Laci Peterson story leads on all the major news outlets, less than a week after a war ended and the fate of a powder-keg like region lies in the balance, I know the TV news has gone to crap. Fox News is the best indicator of that. My family, like many families I assume, stopped getting the news paper at home. I suppose the radio isn't as terrible as TV, but it's still Ameri-filtered. (and I'm ignoring the talk shows, just talking about straight news). So of course where am I leading? The internet.
The major news portals that pop to mind are cnn.com and abcnews.com. While they are surely better than TV or better than Fox News's website, they are still far too Americentric to get a good idea of what's really going on in the world. And if you don't think what's going on outside the US is important, just stop reading now. So let's push those to the side for now. If you are like me, then you skim headlines and pop in on stories that interest you. The right sidebar on Yahoo! was my staple for a long time. I got a mix of headlines, usually from AP or Reuters. This was pretty good for me, and I used that method of getting news for a long time...until I found Google News.
Ideally you shouldn't stick to one source for your news, but if you do, Google News is the way to go. It's an index of 4500 or so news sources, worldwide. It doesn't actually have any stories - only links to news sources. The headlines are categorized and chosen by some sort of proprietary computerized ranking. I know that sounds fishy, but it does a really good job. For example, at this moment, there isn't a headline involving Laci Peterson. The page is cleanly laid out, it doesn't eat bandwidth, and there are no ads. So go check it out!
What scares me is that Google is so awesome that now I depend on it even more. As long as they stay a private company, then maybe their morals will hold them afloat in a sea of bastard capitalism.
So now that I have a weeks worth of perpspective, I'm going to be hard pressed to actually post something interesting and original to sell every day of the year. Especially considering my audience mostly consists of my 'ram-cynical' group of friends. So in light of that I'm going to have to put in 'blog-like substance,' as Gautam calls it, to fill in the days between cool ideas.
That and I don't want to sell inferior goods. Everything I post about will be worth following up on. They don't call me a crack dealer for nothing. Shipments just don't come in every day.
Hopefully you've heard the Billy Joel song We Didn't Start the Fire. If you haven't go find it and listen to it now!
The story goes the Billy Joel was talking to a disillusioned kid in the late 80s about how things were so bad in the world at the time. The kid said Joel was lucky to have grown up in the 50s, when not much happened. In response, Joel wrote this song. The lyrics are rapid fire allusions to political, cultural, and historical events between 1949 and 1989.
I thought about making a page describing the references, but there are a zillion of them already out there, so I just went looking for a good one. After dogding a bunch of sites with obnoxious colors schemes, I found this one. All the references are linked for your laziness.
(Edit: Removed the link because it was dead. There's a good page with links on Wikipedia.)
If you are feeling adventurous, you can watch a crazy flash representation of the song. It has pictures that pop up in sync with the references in the song. Once you get past the annoying text, subliminal messages, and crazy colors you might enjoy it.
My high school US History teacher, Coach Bryan, played the song in our class, and went over the references as a cultural review of the time period just before our AP exam. I'd heard it before, but hearing it in class gave it more meaning, and I had a chance to learn about all those significant events which led to the world that we live into today. All that in a #1 pop song...
Soon, Keyur and I will be unveiling a Mozilla switch page. We're hoping to target IE users much like Apple has targeted Windows users. I don't know if our page will be as snazzy as their campaign, since they have a somewhat bigger budget than we do. I do guarantee you this: Switching from IE to Mozilla will make the browsing aspect of your life much better. And we all know how important browsing is.
Until then, Mozilla users (2/3 of the visitors to my site) can feast on these cool little add ons:
(credit to Keyur on this one) Ever wanted to quickly look up a word in a dictionary or spell check text from a web page or form? It's not too difficult to copy what you need, find the appropriate bookmark, and paste, then click, but here's a little trick you can use to cut two steps out of that. Highlight the word below, and then click on the lookup link. (hit back to come back afterwards...)
amortize
The neat part is that you can bookmark that link. Anytime you highlight some text and go to the bookmark, it'll take you straight to the lookup for that word at The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Also if you just need to type a word and look it up, leave the page unhighlighted, and then it'll popup with a box for you to enter text into. It doesn't work with text highlighted in forms, so you'll have to copy the text and place it in the Javascript popup.
You can also do the same for spell checking a word or phrase at spellcheck.net by highlighting this text and using the link below. (It only catches the first misspelled word.)
a mispelled word.
Finally you can make it ultraconvenient by placing the bookmark on your personal toolbar for easy access. Hope you guys enjoy this tip, I love it and use it all the time. Even while writing this post...
In an effort to push non-radio music:
I thought the Clone High theme was kind of catchy, so looked into it, and the the band that does the theme is called Abandoned Pools. The frontman/main dude is Tommy Walter. He left The Eels a few years ago. The music is popish (isn't everything I listen to) and mixes lots of melodies in typical alt-rock fashion. Not sad or angry, but bittersweet and angst-filled. (to steal words from the following link) There's info on the band at allmusic.com. Also, there's a review of their first album, Humanistic. Bands that are supposedly similar are: Radiohead, E, Weezer, Oasis, and Travis.
I think it's interesting, and you guys might want to check it out.
There's a new cartoon on MTV called Clone High. The premise is that some super secret government people dug up the DNA of famous people and cloned them in the mid-80s. Today these clones, such as Abe Lincoln, JFK, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Gandhi, are teens in high school. The show does a great job of mixing historical and cultural allusions, downright stupid humor, and witty dialogue. There are some instant classic quotes and unforgettable characters.
The show is in the middle of it's first season on MTV, and is on hiatus at the moment. It'll be returning in the next month or so, so be sure to catch it then. You can look for showtimes at TV Guide or MTV in a few weeks. For those of you without cable, or who can't manage to get to a TV when Clone High is on, contact me and I can tell you where to find them online or send them to you. The whole first season has already aired in Canada, so I have all the episodes. They are worth the effort.
For more cool info on the show and all it's wackiness go to The Unofficial Clone High Interweb Whatever or this Clone High Forum.
Don't miss out on this awesome show and Mr. Butlertron, Wessssssly!
Also Buddyzoo is over 1,000,000 screennames. Go sign up if you haven't already.
(Edit: For a more recent post on this topic go here.)
Bittorrent is a file distribution protocol that works well at distributing a single set of files to a large number of people while only using a small amount of upstream of the original server. It does this by using the upstream of all the downloaders to send pieces to other downloaders. Since the data isn't sent sequentially, you effectively add to the servers bandwidth with every downloader who joins. (supply scales with demand) You can read more about it how it works and download it at the above link. An upstream bandwidth limiting client is available here.
Recently Bittorrent was used to distribute Red Hat 9.0 isos since Red Hat's servers were slowed to a crawl with downloaders. The huge experiment was a real success, and the system has averaged a 4 MB/s upstream over the past 15 days. That's a total of 31.52 TiB (tebibytes). Here are some stats on the first three days of distribution.
I don't care about red hats, you say? You can also find movies, games, music, concerts, programs, and a ton of tv shows over bittorrent. All of these things to download fit the description of 'lots of downloaders, not a lot of servers.' Some places to look for torrent files are:
For links to other sites:
http://smiler.no-ip.org/BT/BTlinks.php
http://www.torrentzone.tk/
For torrent downloads:
http://torrent.milfclan.com/ for TV shows (http://torrents.noneleft.bm/ is down)
http://www.torrentse.cx/ (for everything)
Also on Buddyzoo: It's growing insanely fast. There are almost 810000 people signed up at the time of this post. Go Join
Also on Audioscrobbler: There are some problems with the submission server that's causing it to miss some songs. This will be fixed soon, says RJ.
This site looks interesting. You can submit your buddylist and then see how you are connected to other people by them having you on their buddy list. This leads to all sort of social network theory discussion and other stuff which could be cool if they added more features. To get it running, you basically have to send the bot an IM, which is your buddyzoo password, then login and upload your buddy list. You can't save your buddylist in Trillian, you have to have a real version of AIM. (I tried AIM express, it doesn't have the save feature) Check it out at www.buddyzoo.com.
And sign up, because no one who has me on their list has out of almost 300000 people!
Conquest is a show on the History Channel where the host/narrator, Peter Woodward, takes on the challenge of learning a new form of competition or combat and teaching it to a group of laymen. Some of the topics the show has covered are the Bow and Arrow, Stone Age weapons, and today's episode was Urban Ops (SWAT team type stuff). You can read the episode summaries here, and see when the next few episodes are airing, by clicking here, and then typing Conquest in the search box at the bottom of the page.
I think the show is filled with a ton of interesting facts and I learn something new and cool everytime that I watch. Sometimes Woodward gets a little dramatic, but I don't mind as long as he's presenting things well. I've been capturing episodes as they have aired over the last two weeks, so if you are interested in seeing it, but can't find time to watch it on TV, then contact me. (This is assuming of course that I know you personally, because I'm not sending eps to random people).
The site is bordering on professional now. I'm paying money for hosting! Now you'll never have to worry about URLs changing again. It'll always be www.ramk.net
To save myself some trouble, here's a description of Audioscrobbler from the front page of its website:
"In a nutshell, Audioscrobbler endeavours to be your personal music advisor. It grows to know what music you like by monitoring what songs you play on your computer. From this information you can discover other users that share some or all of your taste in music. You can also view data showing what your most-played artists are, and find out who likes a particular artist the most. Basically The Audioscrobbler Project is turning into a fantastic way of discovering new music, and discovering people who like the same music as you."
I'll say that it's very interesting, and it's beginning to do what it says it can do. The setup is really easy. Go to the website, register, then download and install the winamp plugin, and make sure you enable it. That's it! The plugin runs completely transparent, and even caches data if you are offline. Then you can go to the Audioscrobbler home page and view your statistics as well as the statistics of others. To give you a feel for what you will see, here are some stat pages to look at:
My personal stat page
What people are currently listening to
The most popular artists. (It's pretty rock-centric)
What Jackson, Keyur, Dan and Gautam are listening to. Tag your songs G!
The the creator, RJ, made it has a project for one of his CS classes, and it just took off. There are forums with active people, and they are actively improving the system every day. It's a little rough around the edges some time, but still pretty neat. Hopefully people will find new artist they like with this system. If nothing else, it gives stat-whores like me something to look at.
Well my page looks much spiffier than before. Keyur set me up with MovableType, a personal publishing system, and he also taught me a little bit about stylesheets. Mix with my existing web knowledge and you get what you see here.
The main purpose of the page is to show people some really cool things they might like. Friends have called me a 'dealer' for trying to get people to try new, addictive things. I only sell things that people will enjoy, so if you've found your way here, be assured you'll find cool stuff that you'll hopefully like as much as I do.
So keep coming back to see what's new. This is sort of blog but not really. More of a sales front for all the things I like.
Tetrinet is one of the best multiplayer internet games I've ever played. It's a multiplayer tetris that allows up to 6 people to play on teams or individually against each other in Tetris (much like the old game boy head to head). Also it adds a twist with the option of adding special blocks. You can use them on your opponent or even yourself to add lines, clear lines, shake a field, or even switch fields between players.
It's been around since 1997, and people still use the same version! I don't know many other games that I still want to play that zip up to less than 400k...except maybe Oregon Trail - that rocked. Click here to download one of the best games out there, byte for byte. After you get it, just read the readme and you'll be set. If you don't read it, you WILL ask someone a question that's already answered there, so save everyone some time. If you sensed a change in my tone, it's from having to explain how to play over AIM 100 times, when people could just RTFM.
If you want to play, drop me a line or message me. If I'm not around you can play with random people. Go to tetrinet.org and click on Servers/IP list.