The blog went bonkers, couldn’t be easily fixed, so we have a new Wordpress install and a new theme. Lots of things are probably broken; let me know what and I’ll fix’em. 

The boys (4 and 5 years old) got the Shrek the Third game for the Wii a month or two ago and have been enjoying it since. It’s a great game for young gamers; the controls are easy and the game is very playable. It doesn’t throw artificial frustrating roadblocks in the way, opting instead to let them play through and reach far into the game. I’d definitely recommend it for younger players.

Facebook grew by providing a safe-haven from spam, an access controlled area where interactions could be limited to those desired by the user.

Facebook respected users, famously limiting the amount of advertising to protect the user experience.

The Facebook platform was brilliant, bringing immense value to the system.

Now, however, Facebook is one giant spam-fest. Facebook itself is still respectful of its users. The Facebook apps, however, are anything but.

I’m not just getting spammed by apps that I installed; I’m even getting spammed by apps my friends installed.

Facebook needs to re-evaluate how to limit the reach of these apps. They’re eroding one of the key values provided by Facebook, devaluing the entire system.

I send my older son to get my middle son so they can get to bed. The conversation that ensues:

“My dad needs you upstairs”

“Why, did I do something bad?”

“No, just come upstairs”

“Why?”

“He wants you to brush your teeth”

“Did you brush your teeth?”

“No, just come upstairs”

“Are we going to bed?”

“Just come upstairs”

“I don’t need to brush my teeth”

“My dad needs you upstairs”

“Why?”

…

DSLs pop up as a Good Thing(TM) every once in a while. I’m not entirely opposed to DSLs – there are certainly many cases where they make a lot of sense. But I am opposed to them as a general, let’s throw it in there kind of tool.

The problem with DSLs is that they’re domain specific. In all likelihood I’m not interested or engaged enough in that domain to learn a new language for it. While a DSL might be more beautiful or concise than a general purpose language for a particular domain, I’m much more likely to be conversant in the general purpose language.

DSLs create significant barriers of entry for casual users, since they force the users to learn and remember brand new languages.

Looks like I’m going to the ETech Emerging Technology Conference March 3rd-6th in San Diego this year. Let me know if you’re going to be there and want to meet.

Billy Volek. Sproles. Turner. McCree. Those are the names that beat the world champions.

That was just a beautiful game. The calls were going against them, the crowd was unbelievably loud, Rivers and Tomlinson were out, and Gates was barely in any condition to play. They got a clear touchdown taken away from them on a bad call (even Boomer said it!). Still, they won and won it beautifully.

The whole team had to play today, and they all played. They earned this one. Beautiful.

This is absolutely disgusting. If you search for a domain at Network Solutions they lock the domain so you can’t buy it from anyone else. That’s about as low as you can get. Avoid them at all costs.

… is what I’d like to see.

I find myself less and less motivated to update my Facebook status. In fact the whole facebook experience is becoming one big spam fest these days. I don’t update much, and I don’t see much updates from my friends, so all I end up with is spam from the various apps my friends have added over time.

I get the sense a lot of people that weren’t really the core users (ie. me and people my age) have started to lose interest. The only people whose status changes regularly are those that have their facebook status connected to their twitter feed.

Looking to get a new cell phone and service, what a pain.

The iPhone is very nice, but the monthly service charges are unreasonably high, it doesn’t support high speed data, and can’t be effectively used as a modem for the laptop.

The Blackberry is pretty nice, I have some experience with it, and is pretty cheap. The 8300, for example, is free after rebate from AT&T on Amazon right now. But it requires a special data plan, increasing the monthly charges. I’m not sure if it can act as a modem.

The Motorola Q9C is available from Sprint SERO, which means I can get 500 minutes and unlimited high-speed data for $30/month and can use it as a modem. But it’s a windows mobile phone and support for Gmail is iffy. Plus it’s also kinda old-school ugly looking.

I’m leaning towards the Q9C, but it’s not really the phone I want. Bah.

For a long time I’ve wanted a solution for converting documents into easily digestible formats – namely, I want word docs, excel spreadsheets, and powerpoints to automagically convert to html or flash so I can view them in the browser without the need to open a separate app. This is particularly urgent on my lovely mac that I love, since opening powerpoint melts the titanium and strains the California power grid. I also want to eventually move email out of email apps and view them as proper documents, possibly as a wiki.

So after much futzing around I finally got the conversion working today. The magic solution is simply to use JODConverter with OpenOffice.

In particular, I downloaded OpenOffice 2.3.1 for OS X, started it as “headless”:

/Applications/OpenOffice.org\ 2.3.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice -headless -accept="socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=8100;urp;" -nofirststartwizard &

and then used JODConverter commandline to convert files:

alias ooconv='java -jar /Users/parand/Packages/jodconverter-2.2.1/lib/jodconverter-cli-2.2.1.jar'
ooconv SomePowerpointFile.ppt -f swf

This works well, I’m happy with it. Ideally I’d have liked to get the Python conversion script working but the uno library supplied with OpenOffice seemed not to like my Python version. Oh well.

I also have a Python script to pull down my mail and convert it to threaded html, look for meeting notices, attachments, etc, and call the converter on them. A little bit of spit and polish and I’ll be close to my email-in-a-twiki idea, but I probably won’t get around to it for another year…

Writing proper Javascript is not quite intuitive (at least for me), so I’m recording these two patterns for creating a module and a class here for future reference:

myModule = function () {

    var myPrivateVar;
    var myPrivateMethod = function () { }

    return  {
        myPublicProperty: "something",
        myPublicMethod: function () { }
    };
}();

function myClass() {
	var  private_var = 1;
	var  private_function = function() { alert("private!"); };
	this.public_var    = "something";
	this.public_method = function() { alert(private_var); private_var += 1; }
}

var myInstance = new myClass();