Captain's Log

Google Maps Applications

I'm sure everyone is onto Google Maps by now, and you may have also noticed that lots of people have the Google Maps Interface on their own websites. Google has done a great job of sharing the API for their interface and allowed other people to build applications using Google Maps data. Here are some examples, some of which you might have already heard about.

Google Maps Pedometer allows you to mark out a path by hand and find the length. This is useful if you are marking a path you take for a jog or a bike ride, and you want to estimate the distance you travelled. If you cross areas where there are no roads you can switch to the hybrid or satellite view to use landmarks or the terrain to guide you. There are several website in the same vein as this one, and many of them also retrieve elevation data to show you the change in height you went through along your path.

If you need very specific data on weather conditions, then there are a few sites that integrate Google Maps to deliver you precise condition information. Weather Underground (centered on Austin) has tons of independent weather stations that report conditions back to the website. So if you want to tell whether it rained much on a field or a golf course (Pease Park, for example) in the past 24 hours, you can find the station nearest your location, and then see what the weather history has been like.

WeatherBonk has most of the same information, since Weather Underground data is openly available but it also adds a neat feature where weather radar is overlaid on a Google Maps interface. (shown in the picture above, where it's raining over Downtown Austin) I used to try to zoom in on Weather Underground's radar and try to guess where things were by distance from the major roads, but this is much better. Also Weatherbonk integrates nearby outdoor webcams to give you an idea of what it looks like at the location also.

World Wide Webfoot integrates a bunch of publicly available census data into a Google Maps interface, which gives you a neat view of demographics in an area.

If you have a java-capable phone with internet access you can access Google Maps for Mobile, which was released by Google itself. Better yet, if your phone is GPS capable, you can download a third party appilcation, Mobile Gmaps. It integrates GPS tracking into the mapping feature, and can even do things like save/load location files or ping Gmap-Track to save your location as you move. Both Mobile Gmaps and Gmap-Track are currently under development so more features will be coming in the future. Mobile GMaps GPS feature even works on my Samsung A900 (Sprint), where other third party GPS apps wouldn't work. (Credit to Dan for informing me about MGmaps)

Flickr

Some time ago I stopped using Gallery to post my pictures for a few reasons. One it took effort to resize, upload, and caption my pictures and I got a little lazy. Eventually I was going to run out of space, because I'd have to pay for more and more hosting space to store pictures that are almost never viewed. Also I wasn't satisfied with how accessible my pictures were. Searching is so ubiquitous on the internet now that it's odd to use any application that doesn't have good searching. At some point I went in and used the keywords field in Gallery to note all the people present in a picture. This sort of hack solved part of my problem, but I still wasn't excited about Gallery anymore. Part of me loves messing with PHP and coding, but there's only so much time and sometimes you just want things to work. I decided that I was dumping Gallery.

After some discussion about how to store and share my pictures I decided to go with Flickr. It's a photosharing website with a community approach. It's full of cool features and there's a huge group of people who develop programs/hacks for it. It does cost $25/year but you get unlimited storage, they store originals up to 3.2 MP, a 2 GB monthly upload limit. It's easy to search your pictures or anyone's pictures on Flickr. The really neat features are the tags, notes, and geotagging. I use the notes to mark each person in a picture so that they are searchable later. With geotagging anyone can check the approximate location that the picture was taken. It's neat to go to where you pictures were taken and find the other pictures taken nearby. I even found someone I know randomly on Flickr that way. There's tons more to describe, but the easiest way to tell you about it is just to have you go look at my Flickr page:

http://flickr.com/photos/ramk13/

I spent a lot of time over the last week or two to post the large majority of the pictures that I want to share on Flickr. About 1300 total pictures with 500 of those being family pictures. I took the time to title, tag, note, and geotag the 800 public pictures, and it's easy to search. For example, if you wanted to see all my pictures of Parker you just do a search for Parker and limit it to my photos. You can click on one of the disc golf pictures and see when and where it was taken. And if you don't know who Parker is, mouse over the picture and there'll be note boxes over each person. It's pretty easy to navigate around and find lots of stuff that could interest you with Flickr. It's WAY better than Gallery, and I worth the money I paid so far.

Speed Demos

Ever wonder how long it would take to beat a NES or PC game? Well after Quake came out, people started speed running it - trying to get from the start of the game to the end of the game as quickly as possible. A website kept track of records, and eventually expanded to all games. There are all sorts of rules on what makes a legal speed run and what doesn't. Some of the games are done ridiculously fast. You can download videos of the runs and see for yourself. There are lots of games for all console systems and the PC. You can check out the game list and looks for your favorite old game. Just to give you an idea of how fast these games are finished, here are some of the current records:

Contra in 11:25 (minutes and seconds...)
Super Mario Bros. 2 in 9:42
Half-Life in 45:45
Super Mario World in 10:56

Another neat aspect of the records is that you get to see people pull off tricks that you might not have even imagined before. I've also watched a few games that I couldn't beat myself back in the day. If you're a gamer at all, you should check out some of the videos on this site.

Best of Craigslist

Craigslist has become one of the more popular classified ad/personal ad websites out there. It started small in San Francisco, and has since mushroomed to include almost every major city in the us. It has developed its own culture over time, and as you can imagine there are plenty of quirky posts. Craig himself scans through posts and picks out the Best of Craigslist. They are often funny ads or rants and usually use adult language or even contain adult content. There are some pretty funny reads in there, and if you are looking to kill some time at work (who isn't?) I suggest you give it a try.

(Gautam pointed this out to me a very long time ago (months) but I've been lazy about posting to the blog. Also I haven't had much content to post, or much content that I felt was worthy of your attention. I guess I'll have to either lower my standards or not post much.)

Optical Illusions

So I haven't posted for a while. Partially because I'm lazy, but mostly because I haven't found many things worth posting. Well I just ran into a site where I wasted a good amount of time. If you've got time to spare and like optical illusions then check out this site:

55 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena

There are a ton of neat illusions here, and you can spend a long time looking at each one. Some of my favorites are:

Rapid colored afterimage - This one is just cool. It's a neat effect and you can easily shift your eyes to break it and see how it works.
Face in Beans - This one freaked me out for a second once I snapped into seeing it.
Spoke Illusion - Another neat one that makes sense when you think about it.

I'm sure there are tons of other good Illusion sites out there, but I haven't spent the time to catalog them. Feel free to drop links into comments on this post.

Name that candybar!

I ran across this site along time ago while killing time at lunch with a few other grad students. It reminded me of the classic Seinfeld episode, The Dealership, where George creates a candy bar lineup in an attempt to entrap a candy-bar-stealing mechanic.

This site is pretty straightforward - look at the candybar cross-sections and name the candy bar. It's fun and a good waste of time on the web. My favorite candy bar is pictured here. And in case you missed the link buried in the first paragraph, here's one standing on it's own:

Name that Candybar

dvdpricesearch.com

Just thought I'd post a site I use somewhat often. If you are looking to get a single movie or DVD and are looking for the best deal on it, a good site to check is dvdpricesearch.com. Just search for a movie and it'll come with the different versions of the movie for you to choose from. Unfortunately it makes a popup window to show you prices, but it isn't that bad. I tried looking at one or two other dvd price comparison sites, but they weren't as good. This one has a good number of sites that usually have low dvd prices such as Buy.com, amazon.com, DVD Soon, Deep Discount DVD, overstock.com, Best Buy, and Walmart. If anyone knows of a better site with the same function purpose, post a comment.

Search engines and Songmeanings

While showing Firefox features to Parker, I noticed that the Mycroft home page had a lot more content. The Mycroft project 'provides a rich collection of search engines for Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox.' If you use Firefox there's a convenient search bar in the upper right hand corner of the window. The search bar defaults to Google, but there are ton of other options you can choose from. Firefox 1.0 comes with a few extras like Amazon and Dictionary.com, but you can visit the Mycroft home page and install a bunch more for basically anything you'd ever want to search. Some of my favorites are Wikipedia, IMDb, and the All Music Guide. So if you use Firefox, go add the search engines you use most. You can basically get rid of the useless page load you go through to hit these search boxes anyway. How often do you go to IMDb's front page, just to type something in the search box?

A cool site I ran into while browsing the list of music search plugins was Songmeanings.net. It's a site where user contributed opinions and analysis on songs are collected for everyone to browse. While user contributions aren't authoritative, something close to the true meaning (if there is one) is likely to appear in the sum of a large number of opinions. Parker and I learned that 4 am by Our Lady Peace is probably about the lead singer's father, and that AM are his father's initial. For AM. Also, Dan and I were puzzling over the meaning of a song by Era which seemed like it was in Latin or Italian. There were definitely some Latin words, but not all of them were. One of the users posted that the song was actually written in 'psuedolatin' or part French, part Latin and that there was no easy way to interpret the meaning. I've only looked up two songs, and learned something interesting both times. It's a cool site.

And now I continue my procrastination...

mobile.yes.com

To further disprove Akash's repeated statements about no one outside our circle of friends reading our blogs, I give you this email I received:

So I followed up on this, and there's another way to get the realtime radio play information that yes.net had. You can go to mobile.yes.com with a WAP enabled browser, which is found usually mobile phone. But you can get to it with your desktop too:

If you use Mozilla/Mozilla Firefox, then you can download the WML browser extension. After you install it, you might need to go to the options for the extension and download the WML DTDs to your computer. (All it involves is pressing one button) After that it should work.

If you use Internet Explorer mobile.yes.com should work with no problems, because IE has WAP support built in.

Spammers getting smarter

So I got my first two comment spams in forever in the past 3 days. Not exactly sure how the spammer is getting past the SCode, unless the spammer is doing it manually.

Here's the info my apache logfile:

Looks like an IP from Poland. One weird thing is that the browser ID from the image GET doesn't match the one from either POST, which leads me to believe that it's some sort of automated system, and not a person at browser. On top of that, the second POST (which resulted in the comment, I'd guess) was done 3 seconds after the GET request was received. A person would have to be pretty fast to have the image load, read it, then enter the 4 digits, and finally submit all in 3 seconds. But it's not impossible.

Just in case it's an automated system, I decided to spice up my scode with some code taken from a comment left at the SCode post above by timtak. (An English professor in Japan, from what I can tell). My scode should hopefully be a little harder to read. If lots of people started adopting SCode, it was only a matter of time before someone wrote a script to read the numbers from the image. But if someone is leaving spam by hand, then more power to them. I'll just have to delete them by hand.

If anyone wants my updated mt-scode.cgi, just leave a comment (faster) or send me an email.

Television without Pity

I mentioned Tv Tome as a good website for finding TV show information and episode guides in a previous post. The guides have paragraph long recaps and can't really tell you much in terms of details. If you are interested in longer episode recaps of current shows, and wouldn't mind a little 'snark' or sarcasm along with some good cultural allusions, then a good site to visit is Television without Pity. It has episode 'recaplets' in the day or so after an episode airs, which are followed by length in-depth recaps of the episodes in a few days. They are usually pretty well written. Sometimes they can be funny, since they are sprinkled with opinions from the recapper, but sometimes you just want to find out what happened when you don't have access to the episode. In any case, it's worth a visit sometimes to read a recap of an episode, even after you've just seen it, because the writing is pretty good. Give it a try on a show you like...

Sports Statistics

If you have a few hours to kill (or even if you don't) and you are interested in sports statistics then you should take a visit to Baseball Reference or it's sister sites Pro Football Reference and Basketball Reference.

There's tons of stats to dive into. Did you know that aside from being a historic playmaking duo, Malone and Stockton are 1-2 in career turnovers? Rickey Henderson's stolen base record is pretty safe considering no active player under the age of 35 has cracked the top 100 in SB. Tons of 'useless info' to browse around for.

If you have any other good stats sites (that are free) post them in a comment.

Mirrordot, Coral, and Google Caching

Tired of seeing a cool article on Slashdot only to have the the poor webserver it's hosted on burnt to a crisp by the tidal wave of traffic? People have been asking the /. mods to work on a solution for years to no avail. So some people took the initiative to create a mirror for the most recent stories at /. It's called Mirrordot and it captures the page before the server gets toasted and then hosts it for a while. Not sure how they're going to manage to handle the traffic only using donations, but it'll be great if it stays around. It's only in beta at the moment, but I don't know if that really means anything. It works, and that's what counts.

Another option for mirroring high demand content is Coral: the NYU Distribution Network. It uses peer to peer caching to store high demand content on all the participating cache computers. When a request is made for a high demand page, then there are multiple servers which can serve the content. All you have to do to use it is append .nyud.net:8090 to any URL you are having trouble visiting, and it'll throw you the cached version. I don't know how it updates the cache, and how recent the data is, but it has the potential to be useful. Just to show you how it works, you can visit my main page through Coral. Or even CNN, Slashdot, or even IMDb.

One more option for viewing content that you can't get to anymore is to try Google cache. Just search for cache: followed by your URL (no spaces) and it'll pull up the google cache of the URL. For example, here's Slashdot, in case it gets slashdotted... Pretty simple, but very useful.

Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections

I ran into a really cool website while looking for historical election results, Dave Liep's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. It has TONS of info and interactive maps with election results. It also has some neat tools for evaluating the current election situation with integrated polling results. At the moment, it's not looking that great for John Kerry, but there are still several weeks (and more importantly 3 debates) to go. His current estimates have Bush at 285 electoral votes (270 needed to win), because Florida and Pennsylvania, two big swing states, are currently leaning Bush. It's scary that at the moment other than the New England states and the Pacific states, Kerry only has Illinois and Michigan. What's the middle of America thinking?

On a side note, did you know/remember that in 1992, Ross Perot had almost 19% of the popular vote? What's even crazier is that he actually got more votes than Bush Sr. in Maine. I thought they lived in Maine?

Sidebar spillover in MT Blogs

Many people I know have MT 2.x blogs with sidebars that spill over when the main content area becomes shorter than the sidebar. This usually happens when the person gets really lazy, and all the content gets removed because it's old. A good example is G's Page at the moment. (of course he will probably fix this very soon after reading this post).

The simple fix that worked for my page (and G's page too) is to add overflow:auto; to the css for the #links div. That's it...

Not "the IMDb of music" anymore

In an earlier post I mentioned AllMusic as a great website for comprehensive music information (biographies, discographies, etc). Well I don't recommend it anymore...unless you still use Internet Explorer. But I definitely can't recommend doing that, so it looks like I have to have to rescind the recommendation altogether.

Allmusic did a big site redesign, and on my visit I was greeted with a little message at the top saying that the site was designed for IE 5.5 or higher. All the tables (with the useful information) are sized incorrectly and information is squished, covered up, or truncated because of the non-standard layout. Well I guess they decided to screw Mac and Linux users, along with the enlightened windows users who have left IE behind.

So I left a comment about the bad site design, and if you used (or still use) AMG, you should leave a comment telling them using propriety web pages is, well, stupid. I didn't word it that way, but I got my point across. Anyway, now I'm on the hunt for new music catalog sites, lest I fire up IE in desparation. I moved from the venerable CDNOW to AMG at some point, I guess it's just time to move again.

A quick google search for the "the IMDb of music" found me a bunch of blogs referring to AMG, but nothing new. At least one other person shares my opinion on the matter. If you find any good sites, leave a comment here.

Edit (7/16): So if you go to the site now it works. Looks like they've changed it within the past 2-3 days. It was messed up a little, but didn't have the message at the top when I wrote the post. I did see the IE-only message in the day or two before this post. I kind of liked the old interface a little better, but maybe it'll just take me some time to get used to this one.

Internet Explorer still sucks, and the government knows it.

If you are still using Internet Explorer as your browser, then you should RUN away and go download something else. It's gotten so bad, that even the Department of Homeland Security has issued a warning telling people to avoid using IE. This follows the discovery of more serious security holes that were finally exploited. Holes so bad that you could have trojan software installed, which could steal other entered passwords, just by first visiting a website using the exploit. (This is not a joke or exaggeration) So ditch IE and go try out Firefox, Mozilla, or even Opera. This blog post has been a long time coming, and the DHS announcement just made me decide it was time.

Let's recap: IE is so horrible that several important computer security agencies (CERT, DHS) have said to use other browsers. This has been the case for a long time. So if you are one of my friends still using IE, let me know, and I'll help get you setup with a real browser.

RSS and RDF Syndication

If you have a MovableType blog, then you might have wondered what the 'Syndicate this site' link at the bottom of the sidebar is. It's a link to a short document that summarizes the content on your site, usually the last 15 items/entries. It's a fast, compact way of delivering the content of your website without people actually having to visit. You can submit your 'feed' to site which collects and publishes feeds (aggregators) and in the end bring traffic to your site. (Technorati for example) It's also handy for keeping up with changes to sites, as you can just grab the feeds from all the sites you follow with your own aggregator, instead of having to visit each site and try to remember the last thing you saw.

So there's a whole history to RSS/RDF. It was started, dropped, and then picked up by two independent groups, which didn't work together. So what we have now is an old but simple RSS 0.91, an independent, unrelated RSS 1.0, and finally RSS 2.0, which is an update of 0.91. If you are curious about all the versions and more description of RSS/RDF, there's a good page with lots of info.

My original MT installation come with RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0, but I just upgraded the RSS 0.9 to 2.0 according to the instructions here.

The main reason I delved further into the topic is that I wanted to use an aggregator to keep track of the blogs of my friends. For all those who are on moorehill.net/keyurp.com I already get notices of new posts, but for my friends who aren't (Sunny, Jackson) I don't remember to check very often. There are hundreds of RSS aggregator/reader packages out there, and a quick Google search will take you to bunch options. If you use Mozilla, there's a handy little extension called Sage which builds this function right into a sidebar in the browser. All you have to do is bookmark all your feeds into a single folder, and Sage takes care of the rest. Now I can check everyone's blog by opening the sidebar, and hitting one button.

By the way (see I typed it out), two of the expansions I found for RSS were Real Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary. RDF stands for Resource Document Framework.

My disclaimer: You may not find syndication useful, but if you follow lots of entry based websites (not just blogs), they are very useful.

BugMeNot.com and Bookmarklets

Again from a /. discussion I ran into a useful website. Do websites that require free registration (e.g. The New York Times) bother you? Well if you don't want to deal with the hassle of registration or keep track of 100 different logins, you can use BugMeNot.com. It keeps a database of working logins for a bunch of sites that require free registration. Just type in the URL to the site you are looking to get into, and it'll give you a login/password. If you are curious about how it works or just want more details you can read the BugMeNot.com FAQ.

Also instead of having to copy/paste the URL of the site into a new BugMeNot window/tab, you can use a bookmarklet. A bookmarklet allows you run a small piece of javascript code on a page to perform a useful function. It works on all platforms, and doesn't require any installation. In this case, it pops up a window from BugMeNot.com for the site that is in your currently active window, just by clicking on the 'bookmark.' You can bookmark the BugMeNot bookmarklet here. There are a ton of other useful bookmarklets available at Jesse's Bookmarklet Site.

In case you were wondering the earlier post I made about m-w.com and spellcheck.net was actually using bookmarklets, but I didn't know what they were then.

Vote Smart

The democratic primaries are coming up and I'm not sure were I'm going to toss my vote. For that matter I haven't registered in Austin, and I doubt I'll make a trip down to Houston just to vote (like I did in 2000). So i need to figure out a few things. So I needed information and a quick search lead me to a pretty good website that's impartial as far as I can tell with information about all the candidates and information on voting in general.

Vote Smart is an non-partisan, independant organization started by several national leaders several years ago. The website contains tons of information on candidates at many different levels. They sponsor the NPAT (National Politcal Awareness Test) which is a chance for candidates to state which way they lean on many important political issues. You can see the results of many candidates NPAT at th website, but unfortunately a bunch of the more important candidates have done them, suck as Kerry, Dean, and Dubya himself. The site also has congressional voting records and other biographical information that can help you make your choice. It's hard to tell anything useful from watching TV and not much easier reading print/media articles, so I think the site really helps.

Also if you haven't registered to vote in your area, you can follow the links straight to your county/states registration form, print it out, and mail it in. The democratic primary in Texas is March 3rd and you need to register 30 days before hand. Get moving!

(Edit: forgot to mention this. Another neat thing is that you can look up who different people are endorsing. We all know Gore endorsed Dean, but do you know who Aaron Sorkin endorsed?)

Google Pollution

I was doing a search for 'bet isotherm' on Google. The BET isotherm is one theoretical description of how molecules adsorb onto surfaces. Basically some physics and chemistry. Well FIVE out of the ten search hits on the first page are about sports betting. That's ridiculous. I know Google was doing some revamping in November to prevent stuff like this, but maybe they need to do more...

Wiki + Encyclopedia = ?

The Wikipedia is a collective effort to create a multilingual, complete, free online encyclopedia. A Wiki is a document where anyone can contribute, add content, edit, and format. This is an encyclopedia implemented as a wiki (hence the name). There are over 150000 articles in the english version now, and it's growing.

The neat part about an encylopedia is that it's high density information. There's no room for fluff, usually just the facts. On top of that this encyclopedia has terms linked, so you can jump from topic to topic. It highlights what good about the web, open source, and collaborative projects all at once. Check it out next time you need to look a general topic up and a Google search would be too specific and a directory (dmoz, Yahoo) search will probably lead you to half dead and half not-so-informative sites.

I've known about it for a while, but I got more interested today. It seems like a quarter of the posts on /. are some sort of inside joke, and I was trying to find out what a reference that kept popping up was. (Natalie Portman and hot grits if you are wondering.) So I did a Google search as most would, and I ended up with just what I was looking for, an article on /. trolling phenomena at the Wikipedia.

(Edit: 11/26)

Jackson has just pointed a really cool link on the left side of the wikipedia page - a link to a random page of the wikipedia. It's pretty neat.

Another funny entry, l337.

yes.net

(Edit: yes.net doesn't work anymore, but you can try mobile.yes.net. See my updated post.)

Have you ever been driving somewhere while listening to the radio and tried to figure out what song is playing? Sometimes you can't figure it out, because you might not know the artist. Sometimes the lyrics are so hard to understand you can't remember a phrase to look for later. Or worse the only phrase you remember is something like "I love you." and there are 50 million songs with that line. Well here's one solution to this problem.

yes.net is a website that keeps track of what a lot of radio stations play on the radio. You can look up a station and a time (when you know you were listening) and see what was playing. The last 24 hours are on the page, and most popular stations (but not all) are listed. It's pretty neat and it might help you find out the name of the song you've been looking for. One bad thing is that it actually identifies the song by actually listening and looking for matches in a database. So if the song isn't in the database, then it won't show up. This was the case with the last song I was looking for, It's My Life by No Doubt because the song hadn't been released. I guess it does mean that it will catch requested songs, where as something that reports a playlist wouldn't.

This isn't a very new idea. Sony came out with the eMarker a few years ago that makes note of the time you heard the song, and then you can plug the marker into your computer (USB) and pick out which radio stations you might have been listening to. It's was a free service once you buy the product. I say was, because they discontinued the service a long time ago. I don't know why Amazon is still selling the marker...

Cool Tools

Per ARM's request, here's a fresh post.

I'm looking to avoid the standard 'what did I eat for breakfast' blog as Parker called it, so I decided I post on stuff that I though was cool or interesting. Stuff that would provide actual content to readers instead of just telling them what's going on in my head at the moment. (Which isn't always interesting.) While reading a thread on /. I ran into a website that's sort of like mine, only much much better.

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools is a website that lists all sort of neat recommendations that range from a pocketknife shaped like a key to a book on finding/renting firetowers and lookouts for cool wilderness views. I think there's something that just about anyone would find interesting. Take a look and see if you find anything that interests you.

Side note: I'm pretty sure the website just changed its name from Recomendo to Cool Tools, but I could be imagining things.

Moon Junkie

Nick just borrowed From the Earth to the Moon from me, and I realized that I had never posted about it here. It is one of the best pieces of film/TV that I've ever seen. If you have any curiosity about the space program or the moon at all, you should give it a try. Amazing moments in the space history are recreated from a first person point of view. The set design, cinematography, and acting are awesome. Most importantly, it faithfully recreates the mood and atmosphere of a long gone era.

Nick said that he visited the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal after watching each episode. The journal has TONS of information and media on the Apollo program, and someday when I get time I'll spend hours and hours just looking at the pictures.

One of the episodes features the Apollo 12 mission of Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean. Paul McCrane and Dave Foley played Conrad and Bean extremely well. The episode was funny, informative, and interesting. Nick and I were talking about the episode, when I decided to do a search for some paintings by Alan Bean. He started painting in the mid-80s, and I think he has the unique perspective of an artist who has actually visited the location he's painting. I came to a great website that has a gallery of Alan Bean's paintings. Some of the paintings were just really neat. Some of the originals are on sale at some galleries for $20,000+, and if someday I become a rich rich man, I'd like to acquire one. Until then I think I may order a print or just marvel at the cool ones on the web. Like this one.

Useful media websites

If you are looking for comprehensive media websites, look no further. You'll find all you need here.

• IMDb offers comprehensive movie info. Pretty much everything you can imagine is there.
• Rotten Tomatoes is the best movie review site I've seen by far. Uses the reviews of tons of critics to come up with a fairly reliable Tomatometer Rating.
• BoxOfficeMojo has nightly and weekend box office estimates way before any other sites I visit. It's like a sports score ticker for movies. (sort of)

• TV Tome is the IMDb of TV shows. It has episode guides for every series I've ever been interested in, along with some news and actor info.

• The All Music Guide has informed me about tons of bands I would have never known about it. It has discographies, band bios, and more.

I refer to these websites daily to satisfy my media curiosities, and I hope you can too.

"Piracy is progressive taxation"

While browsing around, I ran into an article Tim O'Reilly wrote a while ago titled "Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution". I read this article a long time ago, but it's so good, I read it again. It's about the evolution of publishing with advent of the Internet, and I think it's a great read if you are interested in the matter.

The Best Keyboard layout?

After following through a link on /., I came to an article about the QWERTY and Dvorak keyboard layouts. It seems that most people think that QWERTY layout is inferior, because it's slower than the Dvorak layout. This article seems to say that's not the case. I pull out the most interesting paragraphs (to me) and have excepted them here:

So given this info, I'm a little more confortable with my QWERTY layout, how ever non sensical it may seem. Another /.er posted that the QWERTY design wasn't intended to slow typists down, but to let the typewriters work faster, if that makes any sense. Engineering at work, it seems.

Good Bittorrent Links

(Edit: For a more recent post on this topic go here.)

It seems that as soon as any good bittorrent download site comes up it gets hammered by a combination of massive traffic and DDoS attacks. Throw some slashdotting on top of that, and you get not very many usable sites. At least not for very long anyway.

If you are looking for links, a good place to start is btsites.tk. It gets updated frequently, and has links to most good torrent sites. Here are the ones I frequent currently. Some of these aren't up, but hopefully will return sometime soon.

• ByteMonsoon
• SuprNova
• torrentse.cx (down at the moment)
• torrents.co.uk (down at the moment)

If you have any other good ones, feel free to throw them in as comments.

Skyscrapers.com

I was told at some point that the Capitol was the tallest building in Austin, TX and that no building could be built taller, but this is apparently incorrect. Here's a link to the Austin, TX page of a cool website that has tons of info on skyscrapers. As you can see the Capitol is only #7 in Austin, and there are new tall buildings being built. Or you can go the main page and explore yourself.

XHTML 1.0 Compliant!

Woohoo! After wasting several crucial hours in the middle of the finals rush, I've made my page XHTML 1.0 compliant! If you don't know why web standards are important, then read here. If you are curious about XHTML, you can read a little here.

I couldn't have made the standards compliant without the use of the MT-Textile plugin for Movabletype. It converts all the escape characters (like &) into the appropriate codes, and does a bunch of other neat things too. If you use MT, paste URLs with &s, and you want to be standards compliant, you should check out this plugin. Also, checking for standards compliance helps you find bugs like unclosed tags and stuff, which I had one of.

You can now catch this button, , along with some other cool buttons that I jacked from Keyur at the bottom of my sidebar. The RSS buttons are for syndicating the posts on my site. With an RSS file you can get a summary of all the info on this page in a single file and standard format. The Geo URL button is probably the coolest of all. You can click on it to find other bloggers and web pages that are physically near me. Keyur found a guy blogging across the street from him. I think it's pretty neat, as it gives a physical context to web pages that you visit.

Don't you just love a paragraph chock full of links?

An archive of the ENTIRE Web.

Have you ever wanted to go to a web page, but then you found out it wasn't there anymore? Or maybe you miss the old look of ESPN.com and want a look for old times sake. Well you can do all that at archive.org, an archive of the web dating back to 1996. They don't have *every* page, but they've got a whole lot. You can pop in whatever URL you are looking for, and it will show you all the old versions it has. They have over 100 Terabytes of storage space, and the archive is growing insanely fast. Some, but not all, of the links even work! If you don't believe me, search for yourself, or just take a look at some of my favorite flashbacks:

slashdot.org in 12/98 - Headlines include: "So IBM announces a 25 gig hard drive..."
CNN.com in 11/00 - Recounting votes in Florida.
ESPN.com in 12/98
Yahoo in 1996! - Do you remember Yahoo looking like this??
Google in 12/98 - The one and only search engine, before it was the one and only. The form works! (for present time, of course)

You even try searching for your old homepage. I found a few of mine. Overall the site is just really cool. The sheer amount of data, combined with the availabilty makes it just awesome and unbelievable at the same time.

How things work.

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.

Where should you get your news? Google!

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.

Buddy Zoo

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!