“You have thorns on your face”

From my 2 1/2 year old as I kissed him goodnight tonight.

Tim Bray goes and says something that’s sure to stir up discussion but doesn’t have comments enabled on his blog. Common Tim, it’s time to enable comments.

So, commenting on his post, I generally have an easier time finding a library for what I need in Perl and Python than in Java. In fact that’s the order of ease.

“Quality of the libraries” is actually what Tim writes about, but that’s a bit ambigious for me. I haven’t looked at the code for any of the libraries, but they generally work as advertised, so they’re “quality” in that sense.

[Update] Picasa eventually gained APIs, see the comments for pointers to the location and details.

It’s a little odd that in this day and age of Web 2.0 and plug-everything-into-everything-else Picasa doesn’t have a plugin API. What’s the story with that?

Inspired by Matt Croydon’s Backing up Flickr Photos with Amazon S3 post, I figured I’d automate the whole process: from Picasa upload all new photos to S3 for backup, and the ones with a special tag, or keyword as Picasa calls them, to flickr. The flickr part is incredibly simple, as Matt shows. The S3 part is relatively simple. Picasa? No way to connect to it. Shame, shame. Reason enough to dump Picasa, perhaps. Any good alternatives out there?

I noticed my pants are getting too short for me. Odd. I’m not getting any taller.

The realization hit that the pants are not shrinking. My waist is moving up.

WTF?

How does this happen? I’m 34 now. The waist has moved up maybe 1/2 an inch. Am I headed to old guy waist? Will the pants rise with each passing year, eventually reaching my armpits?

Very disconcerting.

A bunch of great tips for being an evil overlord (Via Seth). Favorites:

• One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
• When I capture the hero, I will make sure I also get his dog, monkey, ferret, or whatever sickeningly cute little animal capable of untying ropes and filching keys that happens to follow him around.
• I will make sure I have a clear understanding of who is responsible for what in my organization. For example, if my general screws up I will not draw my weapon, point it at him and say “And here is the price for failure.” then suddenly turn and kill some random underling.
• If an advisor says to me “My liege, he is but one man. What can one man possibly do?”, I will reply “This.” and kill the advisor.
• If the beautiful princess that I capture says “I’ll never marry you! Never, do you hear me, NEVER!!!”, I will say “Oh well” and kill her.
• I will not tell my Legion of Terror “And he must be taken alive-” the command will be “And try to take him alive if it is reasonable practical.”
• If I am fighting with the hero atop a moving platform, have disarmed him, and am about to finish him off and he glances behind me and drops flat, I too will drop flat instead of quizzically turning around to find out what he saw.

Found a great tool for monitoring processes running on windows boxes. A bit like Task Manager on steroids. It’s called Process Explorer, it’s free, it’s a single program with no install, and it just works. Should be part of your toolbox if you are a windows user.

Fascinating report from Topix.net on the success of their forums once they removed the requirement to register (via Greg Linden):

Since removing registration, our volume has exploded and just this morning we just passed a quarter-of-a-million aggregate posts on our system. And the quality of posts? To our surprise, our post kill-rate has actually dropped — hovering below 2%. This is less than half of the number incurred when registration was in place.

And here are the lessons from Ni-chan, apparently the largest internet forum in the world:

Registration keeps out good posters. People with lives will tend to ignore forums with a registration process.

Registration lets in bad posters. Children and Internet addicts tend to have free time to go register an account and check their e-mail for the confirmation message. They will generally make your forum a waste of bandwidth.

Registration attracts trolls. If someone is interested in destroying a forum, a registration process only adds to the excitement of a challenge. Trolls are not out to protect their own reputation. They seek to destroy other peoples’ “reputation”.

Anonymity counters vanity. On a forum where registration is required, or even where people give themselves names, a clique is developed of the elite users, and posts deal as much with who you are as what you are posting. On an anonymous forum, if you can’t tell who posts what, logic will overrule vanity.

Now this is interesting. Looks like they’re creating and editing video specifically for Flash, and the result is much higher quality than you normally see on the web.

I started reading the NY Times again since the redesign. Watched a video from their site for the first time.

They’ve chosen Flash as the video player. This is the right choice – it just works, no fuss, embedded in the web page.

But the quality of the video is surprising, much better than normal Web clips. Looks like the reason for this is they’re producing and editing the content specifically for the Web, specifically for Flash. You’ll notice, for example, that they use plenty of photos with simple effects like pan-zoom, which in Flash is just a photo plus some move-the-perspective instructions. Compare this with digitizing a video made for other media – the photo would be just another piece of video and would get encoded at lower quality.

If they’re really smart they can use the time spent displaying the photo to download the next bit of video, effectively increasing their bandwidth. Some of what you see is static photos requiring less bandwidth, giving you more bandwidth to get better quality video.

I think they’re also having the video portion include only the subject (eg. the person speaking) while the background is a picture. What I mean is, the background is a separate layer, a static photo, while the video is only the speaker with the rest of the scene blank. Effectively a green-screen setup where the overlay is done in Flash. This means they have less screen real-estate to encode as video, again increasing quality.

I’m very impressed, this is good stuff. I was already convinced Flash is the best option for video on the net, but I didn’t think about producing and editing specifically for Flash. It’s pretty powerful stuff.

I’m wondering if video authored for Flash can easily and with high enough quality be used for DVD, etc.

Looks like Technorati hasn’t been picking up the tags for my posts for some time. I’m trying to figure out why. The Technorati bot still visits right after I post:

"GET /say HTTP/1.0" 301 347 "-" "Technoratibot/0.7"
"GET /say/ HTTP/1.0" 200 33132 "-" "Technoratibot/0.7"
"GET /say/index.php/feed/ HTTP/1.0" 200 19817 "-" "Technoratibot/0.7"

I use Jerome’s Keyword Plugin, which seems to be functioning – my posts are tagged within my blog.

I think what’s going on is that Technoratio is only picking up my RSS 2.0 feed, which, best I can tell, doesn’t contain any tag information. My Atom feed has the tag information in it.

So, is the RSS 2.0 feed supposed to have the tag info in it? Or, can I get Technorati to pick up my Atom feed?

I like the NY Times redesign a lot. Finally a web page that fills up my browser instead of wasting all the space on the sides. Somebody create a wordpress theme for this so I can steal it.

A while back I wrote a post on Street Wars titled “How To Become an Assassin”. For some reason this post shows up fairly prominently in search engines and gets a fair bit of traffic.

Anyhow, I had a policy of not censoring comments, letting everything on unless it was absolutley obscene. But the comments on this posting have gotten pretty creepy. Everything from school kids to single moms asking about how to kill, maim, and do other unsavory things. It’s odd getting this type of traffic on the site, a bit like having drug dealers loitering by the house.

I deleted several of the comments and I’ve turned off comments on this post. If you’re looking for tips on how to become an assassin I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere.