/dev/null/kevin

I think one of those jobs of tommorrow should be spell checker.

Tags: hillary clinton | spelling | tommorrow

Yet another really bad example of lazy and inaccurate reporting.   Other examples: 1 2

Headline: Brosnan, wife helps Honolulu school kids

First Line: Pierce Brosnan and his wife Keely have donated $100,000 to help replace an unsafe playground at an elementary school on Kauai

Now, I don't expect everyone to be an expert on Hawaiian geography, but I would hope that someone who calls themselves a reporter would know that Honolulu, the capital of Hawaii, is on the island of Oahu, not Kauai.  This is like saying he helped kids in Sacramento when he lives in Los Angeles.

Go play with Google's Street View now!  Sample 1: San Francisco.  Sample 2: Las Vegas.  [via]

Tags: google | maps | street view
 

Since today is the 30th anniversary of Star Wars I am required, by law, to tell my Star Wars story.  That's me on the left there, cut and pasted into the Special Edition of Star Wars that came out in 1997.  I wrote a web page about it in 1998 and it's still there, looking like I wrote it in 1998.  Can you say "looks best when viewed with Mosaic?"

Something that I didn't mention is that I didn't know if I would make the final cut of the movie until I actually saw it in the theater.  We had filmed quite a few sequences so I didn't know what to look for, or even where to look, other than somewhere in Mos Eisley.  I ended up being quite easy to spot and everyone who came with me saw me right away.  I was lucky that you can see my face as most people's faces were covered.  The guy on my right was wearing glasses when we filmed that scene and was told to remove them, because glasses don't belong in the Star Wars universe.  I guess they worked around his glasses by covering his face with a building.  Tough luck, dude.

This was the first scene we filmed and I remember trying to stand as close to the camera as they would let me.  We were told to have a conversation so what I'm actually saying to the two other guys was, "If this shot gets into the movie, we'll be right up front!"  And I was right! 

Tags: star wars

My daughter learned to play duck-duck-goose at school and then wanted to play at home with just her and me.  It's really not the same game with just two people.  Such is Twitter.

Twitter has its uses but it only works when everyone plays. A lot of Sun bloggers twitter, but (and no offense) none that I really want to follow.  I like to read John Clingan's blog, but I don't need to know that he's stuck in traffic.

The truth for me is that almost none of the people that I would twitter with use twitter.   Like everyone, I have family and friends I stay in contact with, along with my coworkers, ex-coworkers, my band, and my hockey teams.  Each group has a different method of communicating and staying in touch.  Some could use twitter, but not all can or will.  With so many methods out there today for communicating (phone, email, IM, and just plain old conversation), it's hard to add another one.

So far, the best use of Twitter has been to follow some blog sites that also have Twitter feeds.  However, I can already see the amount if noise rising to the point of uselessness.  Twitter also goes down often.  And my often I mean every day.  You will tired of their LOLCATs error pages quickly.

I also tried Jaikuat the recommendation of some bloggers.  While it does have a lot of nice features it also has some drawbacks. The best feature it has is called channels.  Like and IRC channel, you can broadcast your message to just the channel and only people who subscribe to that channel get the message.  This is perfect for sending a message to one circle of friends that another circle wouldn't care about.  I could send a message to my hockey team without bothering my family, who doesn't care that the game time moved.  Unfortunately, Jaiku doesn't allow people to create their own channels yet, and the few channels they created have a VERY high noise to signal ratio.  In the end, it wasn't worth subscribing to any Jaiku-created channels.

Another good Jaiku feature was the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, so you can pretty much follow any feed out there, including twitter.  This is a double edged sword in that you can quickly overload yourself with too many feeds.  Also, the feed reader is slow and can delay the receipt of messages.  So, you really have to balance out what's important to receive using Jaiku and what you just want to load into a regular feed reader.

The last Jaiku feature that I liked was a simple one.  On Twitter you are http://twitter.com/user but on Jaiku you are http://user.jaiku.com.  The difference is that I can search for old Jaiku posts easily using Google's "site" parameter.  e.g., I can search for "foobar site:user.jaiku.com" and find any post with "foobar" in it from that user.  I don't think I can do with with Twitter.  If there's an easy way to search Twitter, let me know!

And, of course, no one I know well uses Jaiku so I was in the same duck-duck-goose boat as Twitter.

Here is my comparison between Twitter and Jaiku.

In the end, I'll stick with twitter.  I may even write some tweets, but I don't know who I'm even writing to.  I'm http://twitter.com/kevinchu.

Tags: twitter | jaiku

One of my favorite games, StarCraft, finally gets a sequel.  Yesterday Blizzard confirmed the game is coming with a preview at Blizzard's World Wide Invitational in South Korea. 

• Screenshots
• Video of Cutscreen
• Video if Gameplay
• Same video, but direct feed (better image, but no crowd reactions)
• Update [05/22/2007] Hi-def devloper's walk through.  Wow!
  

Should be fun!

Tags: starcraft2 | starcraft | blizzard

OK, I'm a little late on this (two weeks) but since I had an anti-Segway post, I felt compelled to follow up here.

Presenting The Onion's In The Know: Do You Remember Life Before The Segway?

Tags: segway

There are two humpback whales stuck in the Sacramento river system, some 90 miles inland from the ocean.  Scientists and the Coast Guard tried to lure them back out to sea using recorded whale songs, but it didn't work.  I have to assume that the sounds they played were actually whale karaoke and the whales swam away as fast as they could.
Tags: whales
May 17, 2007 11:05 PM PDT Permalink | |

There's lots of buzz about a computer programming language for kids called Scratch.  It's from MIT so decided it was worth a look.  I'm pretty impressed with it and wish my daughter was a little older (she turned 4 today!).  I'm still going to show it to her and make the kitty dance and play music, but I don't think she'll be programming herself just yet.  Give her a few more days. 

These teaching languages have some a long way since Logo and Basic.  It's good to link the concept of programming to something tangible, or visible, like Scratch and Lego Mindstorms do.  For me, learning Basic in the 6th grade on a TRS-80, the "hook" for me was trying to draw a picture on the screen.  I could "set" and "reset" individual pixels on the screen using the command line, but they would eventually scroll off the screen.  When someone showed me how to write a program to do it I could suddenly draw anything I wanted.  At first I still drew each pixel one at a time, but that lead me to learn about control structure (loops) and variables.

To me, this is what makes for a successful learning process: first create the need or desire, and then learning the theory is easy.  When you try and teach the theory first, without a need, or even a frame of reference, then kids (and adults) have a harder time learning.  That's why I like the Scratch program because it lets the student start off with something simple.  Hopefully, this will trigger a need and then the student will be driven to find a way of making it happen.

Tags: programming | computers | scratch | computer programming

As an old geezer, I think this is awesome.  Watch it before NBC sues YouTube. 

 Tags: sms | morse code | jay leno

Here's a story that the $10 million eBay bid for John "Bo Duke" Schneider's General Lee was a hoax.

I had to chuckle at the fact that part of their revenge is to gave the winning bidder a negative rating in eBay's feedback forum.  On noes! Not that!

IM IN UR EBAY NEGATIN' UR FEEDBAKZ

Yesterday I wrote a post about how the gestural user interface from the movie "Minority Report" will never replace the mouse as a primary interface device.  While perhaps I was being glib on calling it a "really bad idea," I stand behind my prediction that, other than a few niche cases, such an interface won't find widespread popularity.

Today, there are many alternative interface devices that people use instead of a mouse, but no one is talking about replacing the mouse with them.  There are touch screens displays, graphics tablets, the laptop touch pads and "eraser" mice (and trackballs, Brian.  .  There are experimental devices that track your eyes and can tell what you're looking at, there are projection keyboards that project an image of the keyboard on a surface and then track your fingers.  I assume that the same technology could be used to track your hand as a mouse.  These devices all exist today, but none of them are threatening the mouse as the default device.

Now, the success of the Nintendo Wii has proven that a gestural interface has a place and people will accept it for some things.  But a three dimensional interface is best used for manipulating three dimensional objects.  So, until such time as everyone has a 3D display device, I don't see widespread demand for the "Minority Report" interface.

Commenter Brian noted the "innovation happens" and I agree with that.  Any replacement for the keyboard and mouse will probably evolve organically.  No one will boastfully declare it while it's still in the experimental phase.  If you haven't figured our by now, it's not the device that I'm bashing, it's the arrogance of the developer who says he's working on the replacement for the mouse, and the silly reporter who propagates his claim.

Tags: user interface | computer mouse

For some reason, not one, but two really bad ideas made the news today.

Bad Idea #1: Microsoft Invents Split Screen PC

This story from slashdot spawned a whole new tag: dumbestf*ckingidea.  Each half of the screen has its own operating system, desktop, applications, cursor and keyboard.  All this just so two people can share the same computer.  Y'know, sharing is great, but there are just so many better solutions out there, not the least of which is switching to Solaris (or any flavor of Unix).

Bad Idea #2: A Real "Minority Report" User Interface

Some reporter thinks it's so cool that something from a movie could be real, and some misguided researcher thinks that The mouse has had a good run, but it's time to say good-bye.  Sorry, you're both wrong.  Like voice recognition interfaces, there could be some limited uses for gestural interfaces, but I don't think the mouse is going anywhere anytime soon.  It actually doesn't matter if something better comes along, the mouse is too entrenched to go away.  How do I know this?  You don't need to look any further than the mouse's neighbor, the keyboard.  The history of the QWERTY keyboard is that it was designed to be a bad interface.  Over time, many  improvements have been tried, from keyboard layout to split keyboards, but none have stuck.  I know that people do not want to put on gloves to use a computer, and I don't think they'll want to look like a traffic cop while online.

As for the reporter who think Hollywood designs good user interfaces, she needs to get a clue.  What's next? The friendly "Unix" system from Jurassic Park?  Or how about that ridiculously stupid virtual reality interface from the movie Disclosure?  Nothing like virtually walking down a hallway and flipping through virtual files instead of just typing some search string into a web page.

Tags: bad ideas | user interface | microsoft | split screen
 

Here are some punchlines that are in need of a set up.  Let those creative juices flow: 

1. That's nothing!  I've got a bionic ass.
2. And that's how the expression "when the cows come home" started.
3. Harry!  Your invisibility cloak fell off ten minutes ago!
4. I guess that wasn't my final answer.
5. You were right.  That's not butter.