This video of controlling the Wii with your fingertips is extremely cool. Basically you get Minority Report style control of your Wii or PC.

I really wish I had time to experiment with this stuff. The PC is moving to the family room. The existing interaction devices (keyboard, mouse, remote control) don’t work very well in that setting. There’s tremendous room for innovation in human-computer interface design.

So I spend a couple of hours wrestling with CSS, FF, IE, and Safari, trying to get my floats to clear and still get my CSS based rounded corners, because I’m such a big believer in standards, semantic markup, and separation of presentation and content. It turns out to be a sad comedy of sorts, with one brand of browser invariably throwing up on whatever I try.

I get sick of it, go do some other things, and return a couple of hours later. I’m staring at what I’m trying to do, and it occurs to me that table based positioning would knock it out in about 30 seconds. Sure enough, 5 minutes later, I have a table positioning everything exactly as I want and all of the CSS hacks and trickery gone.

So I’m heeding Dustin’s advice and going with the Web 1.0 pimped out retro technique. Hey, I think I’ll even use the <big> tag; I hadn’t heard of that one before.

CSS is great, but I still don’t get why it doesn’t include a simple table based positioning scheme that troglodytes like me can wrap our heads around and maintain semantic hipness. I appreciate the semantic markup arguments, but when the alternatives are spending 5 minutes versus hours of per-browser-css-hack, I’m going with the Web 1.0 .

I’ve been having strange gmail send / receive problems in the last week or three – emails show as sent but are never received. I’d blame the internet in general, but in several cases the sender and receiver are both on gmail. Apparently this is happening to others as well – my friend asked why I hadn’t replied to his email from last month, and I replied it was because I hadn’t received it. His response:

this happened way too often to me in the last 1-2 months. Gmail is really having a lot of hick-ups… not always very reliable anymore.

Anyone else seeing this?

Who produces the most oil, who consumes the most, and what paths does oil travel? Nicely visualized by the FT:

Oil: Key players and movements.

Via Kedrosky.

Saw this today on FaceBook:

Nicely done. First Round Capital asks if I’m leaving Yahoo to start a startup. That’s some targeting…

Simon Funk does a fantastically good job of explaining a machine learning algorithm for the Netflix Prize. This is one of the most readable and intuitive explanations I’ve seen anywhere – gets into the math but does it in a friendly way. Via Joshua Schachter.

UPDATE: Google has released an official contact list API for GMail. This should supersede the various libraries out there. Really folks, I mean it. Instead of asking for the library please check out the Google Contacts APIs, they’re the right way to get at contacts.

I’m looking for an API to extract contact lists from Gmail accounts. I’ve tried both libgmail and gmail.py, and neither work for me, returning “HTTP Error 302: The HTTP server returned a redirect error that would lead to an infinite loop.” and “LoginFailure: Wrong username or password.” respectively.

Ian Murdock’s post on the topic brings up the very intriguing possibility of using XMPP to access the contacts, but doesn’t get into details. I might give that a try. If you’ve tried it or have a code sample for how to get at the contacts please leave a comment with details.

There’s also Open Social’s People Data API, but I don’t immediately see the path to getting the contact list and it doesn’t look like GMail supports the API yet (I’m not particularly interested in the Orkut friends list). Perhaps there’s a way in there somewhere.

So if you have a way of getting at the contact list from GMail (or hotmail, MSN, or Yahoo for that matter), leave a comment and clue me in.

There are so many good movies outside of the mainstream worth seeing. Here are 14 of my favorites; tell me your favorites in the comments so I can check them out.

Cinema Paradiso. One of my favorite movies. Nostalgia done masterfully; if you’ve ever left home, you owe it to yourself to see this movie. I found the theatrical release to be significantly better than the director’s cut, so make sure you grab that version. Keywords: sweet, beautiful.

Bread and Tulips is the story of a mother, accidentally left behind at a rest stop on the family vacation, who decides to have a vacation of her own. She finds new life and new love for herself and a host of other unlikely characters. Keywords: sweet.

Iranian movies have to walk a careful line past the censors, and are therefore often very clever in the devices they use to tell their stories. Children are often the subject, and the message subtly embeds itself in your psyche instead of jumping out and screaming in your face.

The White Balloon follows the adventures of a little girl and her brother in their quest to buy a gold fish for the Persian new year. It’s beautiful and sweet, completely engaging. Keywords: sweet, beautiful.

In Children of Heaven, Ali mistakenly loses his little sister’s shoes. Too poor to buy a new pair and determined not to let their father know, they embark on an epic adventure to get her a replacement. A lovely and sweet movie. Keywords: sweet.

Color of Paradise examines the adventures of a blind boy, unwanted by his father, returning to his village on his summer vacation. Where the last two were sweet, this is sad and deep. The cinematography and color of the village scenes are stunning, and the blind boy’s experience of the world is wonderfully relayed. Keywords: beautiful, deep.

Taste of Cherry is quite different from the other three – it’s much darker and abstract. You have to have patience for this one, but it’ll be worth your time. This movie generated by far the most post-movie discussion of any movie I’ve ever seen; some hated it, some loved it, but everyone had something to talk about after seeing it. Keywords: abstract, surreal.

Kung Fu Hustle. I was laughing from the moment the gangsters started doing the hustle with the hatchets and didn’t stop till the credits. Keywords: comedy.

Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the story of 4 small time crooks who get themselves into a big mess and try to work their way out. This is a Guy Ritchie movie – humor, violence, a good story with unexpected turns. If you liked Snatch you’ll like this; if you haven’t seen Snatch, go see it. Keywords: violent, british.

Equilibrium. If you like The Matrix, you’ll like this. Christian Bale is in it, so you can’t go wrong. Keywords: violent, matrix.

Oldboy. Now this is a good one. Story of a regular guy who gets kidnapped for no apparent reason and held prisoner in a small room for 15 years. The fun starts when he gets out goes straight for revenge. A lot of violence, a lot of fun. Part the revenge series from Chan-wook Park, along with Sympathy for Mr. Revenge and Lady Vengeance. Keywords: violent, revenge.

Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down. Antonia Banderas, before he was famous in he US, plays a mental patient who ties up a porn star in her room and tries to convince her she loves him. Despite what it sounds like this is actually a love story. I enjoyed it a lot the first time I saw it many years ago, less when I saw it more recently, but still worth seeing. Keywords: almodovar.

Touching The Void is the story of a mountain climber on a perilous climb who has a nasty accident and falls to his death. Except he doesn’t die. Quite impossibly, he makes his way back to his climbing partner and his camp and survives. This is a documentary of sorts, told by the two climbers who actually went through this. Really good. Keywords: survival, documentary.

City of God tells the story of kids growing up in Rio de Janeiro’s lawless ghettos. Fascinating look at kids as young as 10 wielding guns and violence all over the city. Highly recommended. Keywords: violence, brazil.

And finally, Yojimbo, or pretty much anything else by Akira Kurosawa. His movies inspired a bunch of westerns, including A fistful of dollars, and often resemble a western in blank and white set in Japan with Samurai instead of cowboys. Hopefully you’ve heard of Yojimbo and Kurosawa already, but I was surprised at how many hadn’t, so I’m including them here.

So I’m checking my stats and I notice I’ve got a big spike from GigaOM on the 4th and 5th of Oct. Awesome! I didn’t know they linked to me. Let me check it out.

Sure enough, here it is – an article on PayPal fishing, something I wrote about a while back.

Odd though, I can’t find the link…

Oh, I see. They’re using my screenshot in their article. Not copying it mind you, instead having me serve up the bandwidth. Sweet. So I get dinged for the bandwidth and I don’t even get any link love out of it.

Oh well, I still like GigaOM.

Shortly after incorporating my S Corp I received two official looking letters from Corporation Compliance Filings. Both looked very much like state compliance forms. One quoted sections 9510 and 9511 of the California Corporation Disclosure Act, and the other also included section 1500 and 600. Each asked for detailed information about the corporation, including number and amount of shares. One had a fee of $125 ($175 if filed late) and the other wanted $175.

I completed each along with my other corporate paperwork, and even got as far as getting the check book out.

Then I got suspicious. Not sure why – they both looked very much legit. I called the 866 number on the form, and it picked up on the first ring. Hmm. Government agencies don’t typically provide 866 numbers, and they never pick up on the first ring. The voice on the other end was even friendly. I asked a few basic questions (eg. who do I make the check payable to) and the lady on the other end of the phone had no idea.

So I asked her if I was speaking with a government agency. She immediately went into the “no, this is a solicitation for …”

Beautifully done really. I came very close to sending these bastards $300.

So, inspect the paperwork you submit very carefully, particularly if it has fees attached.