My parents have the Akai PT50DL14 TV (the Costco deal from last year) and recently got digital cable service from Time Warner. The cable box is a Pioneer, and the remote is the “CheckMate IV E/V Model TR-U49C”.  The Akai remote is the BP59-00100A.

I can’t get the cable box remote to control the TV volume, nor the TV remote to control the cable box. I’ve tried all of the codes listed on both remotes.

This must be a fairly common combination. Has anyone figured out how to get either remote to work with both devices?

I watched Babel last night. Interesting, enjoyable movie. The most interesting part was that the majority of the movie was in a language other than English, but there were no subtitles.

I decided to try to look up the meaning of the Japan story, because I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I’m beginning to realize that perhaps  the movie was supposed to have subtitles after all, but my questionably attained copy  was missing them.

Hmm. I thought the director is very brave, and I’m very patient to sit thru so much untranslated dialogue. I now realize the director is not quite that brave, and I’m quite the idiot.

Babel has subtitles for the foreign language parts, doesn’t it?

Well, on the plus side, I did get to make up my own stories for what was going on…

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1.1 in the hopes of finally being able to include syntax highlighted code in my posts. Please let me know if you see any problems with the site.

I finally watched the latest James Bond flick, Casino Royale. Let me first say, fun, enjoyable movie, worth a watch. The best of the Bond movies of recent times.

Now let me start the complaints.

The Daniel Craig Bond is a good Bond. He’s different. He’s a muscle bound action hero.

Gone is the sophistication. Gone is the subtlety. Gone is the cool. This guy is a bouncer in a nice suite.

That by itself is fine, and the movie is a lot of fun, but it’s not James Bond. James Bond is the guy who slept with every woman within a 5 mile radius. Bond is the guy with the self-satisfied smirk and the above-it-all attitude in every situation.

This new guy orders Champagne and caviar for one, leaving the amorous woman behind to catch a bad guy. This new guy gets flustered. He gets sartorial advice from a woman that he later falls head-over-heels in love with. He actually refers to her as bitch. He looks more comfortable at the gym than he does in the casino.

Would you associate “suave and sophisticated persona” with Craig’s Bond?

The real James Bond would never, under any circumstances, refuse a woman’s advances, unless of course he was about to strangle her with her own bikini top. He would never comfort a woman in the shower unless he was planning on relieving her of her clothes. The real Bond is a womanizer. It’s right there in the book. It’s a core part of his character.

The new guy is much more violent, much less subtle, much more politically correct.

He is, in short, American.

Where is the British Bond? Can we have him back please?

Anyway, this Bond is better than the other recent Bonds, including Brosnan, but he’s not really Bond. I guess I’ll have to get used to him.

But kids, go rent the old Bond movies to see who the real guy is. Get yourself some Connery and throw in a few Moore while you’re at it.

Oh, and a request to the makers of future Craig Bond movies: it’s ok to dispense with the dialogue and the story completely. I mean that. This guy is great at action, so give us one long action scene. Watching Craig profess his true love is like watching Silvester Stalone give a presidential speech. It just aint quite right.

Fascinating comparison of government spending 50 years ago versus last year:

Defense spending and social security have neatly swapped proportions. Interestingly, we’re spending a significantly smaller portion on defense and a significantly higher portion on social security. I wouldn’t have guessed it, but in hind-sight it makes sense. Via Greg Mankiw.

I’ve long talked trash about JavaScript (why use Java-like syntax for a scripting language? why not use one of the myriad other existing, stable, fast scripting languages?), but necessity has forced me to take a second look, and I’m finding a fairly reasonable, capable programming language in JavaScript.

In the Web 1.0 days you had behavior on the server, presentation on the browser. HTML was easy enough for anybody to pick up, Web sites were ugly, and interactivity on the client (browser) was minimal. In short, it was heaven.

Today’s Web is different. It’s client-server, where the client can be, and often should be, sophisticated. The client manages state and has programmatic behavior, just like a desktop app, but is written in CSS and JavaScript.

That, to a back-end guy like me, is bad news.

The good news is that JavaScript is not nearly as bad as originally thought. Most people (myself included) don’t ever learn it – they just pick up enough to hack together a widget or two and get a terrible impression of the language.

It is a bit of an odd language. There are various inconsistencies and syntax aberrations. It can’t decide if it’s class based or prototype based.

But it has lots of niceties: functions are first class objects. Arrays and Hashes (both of which are actually just Objects) are capable and behave as you’d want them to in a scripting language (allowed mixed types, etc). Closures are not only supported (ooh, aaah), but are an important part of how you use the language.

Sure, I’d take any of the other popular scripting languages over JavaScript any day, but JavaScript is the de-facto language for Web clients, so it is necessary to learn it. If you’re going to learn it, approach it as an actual programming language, as opposed to something you can hack DOM with, and you’ll be much happier. Simon Wilison’s “A Re-Introduction to JavaScript” is a wonderfully complete yet concise introduction, and he recommends a few books for further study.

I just noticed James Bennet’s JavaScript Knowledge Gap post that talks to some of the same issues. He brings up some excellent points, including yet a further reason to learn JavaScript: it’s a ludicrously widely-deployed language.

I saw that the new Yahoo Mail had integrated IM functionality and thought, well, that’s nice. This morning I tried it and I have to say it’s actually quite useful.

I’m an IM client polygamist, using the normal Yahoo IM client, trillian, or Meebo, depending on the mood and/or machine I’m using.

Two of the machines I regularly use are underpowered and groan under pressure. Even better, I travel a lot and have limited bandwidth via a Verizon Wireless EVDO card. This has made me very CPU and bandwidth conscious.

This morning I’m running Eclipse, a couple of local web servers, and various other things, so I thought I’d go with Meebo to run one less process. I also opened another tab with Yahoo Mail to check email.

Well, the combined AJAX goodness of those sites was just too much for my poor browser, sending it into a catatonic freeze. I watched my CPU at 100% for 2 minutes and finally hard-killed the firefox process.

On take 2 I decided to check email first and then get on IM. That’s when I noticed the IM integration in Yahoo Mail and gave it a try.
I’m using it right now and it’s really not bad. The contact list appears in the left panel for easy access. Each conversation gets its own tab. It’s responsive and even shows when the other person is typing.

So that’s one less desktop app to run, one more step towards the firefox computer, one less Web app to run, and a good reason to keep Yahoo Mail open as a permanent window in Firefox.

I finally got High Def cable service, and in the process subscribed to HBO. The service provides on-demand access to the various series, and in particular to the entire season 2 of the show Extras.

Extras stars Rick Gervais, creator of “The Office”. It’s a great show, give it a watch if you get the chance. Highly recommended.

I’ve long enjoyed Philip Greenspun’s technical work – he was one of the pioneers of Web technology, and his use of scripting in building Web applications (think AolServer, way back in the day) foreshadowed a lot of what we see with today’s frameworks.

A little while ago he wrote a blog post entitled “What does Jew-hatred look like when it goes global? Jimmy Carter“. I read this post several times, trying to figure out his logic. I couldn’t figure it out – he seems to say that it’s easier to hate Jews that you don’t know, and therefore Carter is a Jew-hater. He reaches this conclusion without having read Carter’s book.

The first few comments on the post character-attack Carter, labeling him irrelevant, incapable, etc. None of these folks have read the book either.

I left a comment, a respectful one I thought, asking Philip to better explain his logic. How did he make the leap from “it’s easier to hate a Jew you don’t know” to Jimmy-Carter-is-Global-Jew-Hatred. I would quote you the actual comment, but he has since erased it, so I don’t have it.

This is all pretty surprising to me – I always naively assume smart technical people are generally smart and that they take a considered, logical approach to the world. Here Philip, an emminently smart guy, seems to take a very extreme position without much explanation. To top it off, he removes a comment that questions his position.

This reminds of another case of people engaging in character-attacks and name-calling over a book without actually having read it. Think back a few years to Mr. Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Everyone was in an uproar, and some idiots called for his head. I remember talking to people about it, and everybody had an opinion, but nobody had read the book.

It is ridiculous, of course, to compare Philip’s blog post to the fatwa against Rushdie, but I figure if Philip can call Carter a Jew-hater in the title of his post without apparent cause, I can call him an intolerant Mullah with no apparent cause.

I normally cycle between Adsense and YPN ads on this blog. The CTR hovers in the neighbourbood of 1%, sometimes above, sometimes below, for both services. These are contextual text ads targeted based on page contents.

A little while ago my friend launched facedouble, a service for finding your celebrity look-alike. I threw together a simple banner ad for him and started running it. To my surprise I’m finding the click-thru rate to be significantly higher – consistently about 5%.

I wasn’t expecting this – I thought contextual ads were more targeted and had better click-thru rates than banner ads, but apparently not.