Every time Facebook launches a new feature (such as Places, or Questions), they seem to add a few new categories for e-mail notification.
The problem with this is that these new notifications are always enabled by default, forcing me to go back to their settings page and uncheck a bunch of checkboxes again.
So, while I haven't been able to solve the problem of being opted in whenever they launch something new, I wrote a little bookmarklet to uncheck every checkbox on a web page. This is useful when dealing with the notifications settings page on Facebook which is starting to have many, many checkboxes.
Many resumes for technical positions tend to read like a list of all the tools a person knows how to use. I've already compared programmers to chefs. To illustrate what is so meaningless about this emphasis on tools, let's pretend that instead of a programming job, you're applying for a job building stuff in a workshop, and your resume looks like this:
2004 - 2006
Gilbert's Gadgets - Townville City, WA
Sr. Gadget Builder
Responsibilties included using hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers and pliers in a fast-paced environment.
Used a hammer to drive several different types of nails.
Participated in the use of a phillip's head screwdriver on the BigGadget project.
2001 - 2004
Wilbur's Widgets - Metropolis, WA
Gadget Builder
Responsibilities included investigating the use of saws, hammers, glue, sandpaper, and wood stain.
Used glue on at least four different furniture projects.
Cut wood for several projects using both power and manual saws. Responsible for keeping the saw sharp in between projects.
Skills:
Hammers: ball peen and claw
Wrenches: open and closed, familiar with both tightening and loosening
Stanley-Certified Screwdriver Turner - 2007
Really, all the person reading the resume wants to see is what you actually built with your skills. Not how you used the tools.
This is a response to Steve Jobs' recent open letter to Adobe posted on the Apple web site.
In this letter, Mr. Jobs explains his (and Apple's) official position on why Flash is not, and will not be, available for the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
I think he raises some valid points about the shortcomings of running Flash on mobile devices, such as lack of a "hover" interaction. However, many of his arguments against the use of Flash do not sound to me like valid justifications for preventing use of the platform entirely.
For example, take the following paragraph.
Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the
full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t
say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern
format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with
an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all
Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube
discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo,
Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The
New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People,
National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users
aren’t missing much video.
What is the problem with Flash, here? "Almost all" is not all, and I think he vastly overestimates how much of the internet's video is available in formats that will play on the iPhone.
The YouTube app that ships with the iPhone cannot decode all of the video that is available on YouTube. It does not take much probing to uncover the stark difference between the quantity and quality of videos available on the web versus on the iPhone app.
What about other important and popular video sources, such as Amazon Video on Demand, or Hulu? It is disingenuous of Apple to suggest that users will not miss videos from these sources because they are available to purchase through the iTunes store. I can play my Amazon videos on my Zune, my computer, my TV, and other devices as well. iTunes only allows this on Apple-approved devices such as the iPod and iPhone. My $99 Roku will play Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand movies, but not iTunes purchases.
I would go on, but I just discovered a response to Steve Jobs' letter by Jesse Warden which already says most of the points I was going to make, as well as many others, so I will just link to that instead.
I searched high and low for evidence that someone else out there had run into this particular problem, but I was unable to find anything. So I am writing this in the hopes that the next person who faces this particular problem will have an easier time.
I had just used Picasa to import about two thousand photos from memory cards onto my new Windows 7 computer. I then noticed that these files were stored in C:\Users\Jake\Pictures, not the "My Pictures" folder like I expected (On my system I set up "My Pictures" to be on a larger drive since my boot drive is a relatively small SSD). I changed the location in Picasa's settings, but this didn't move any of the files it had already imported.
I closed Picasa and copied the files to the My Pictures folder, then re-opened Picasa. Then I started to notice that every file now had a duplicate (both in Picasa and on disk). For whatever reason, Picasa created an extra copy of each file. For example, IMG_5435.JPG now had a twin, IMG_5435-1.JPG.
I searched high and low for an easy way to use Picasa to remove these duplicates. However, it does not appear that Picasa's search feature offers wildcard search. The way it handles characters like - and . and ? is a mystery to me. Searching for "1.jpg" will return results such as "IMG_3145.JPG".
So in the end I used Windows Explorer to find the duplicates, as it is happy to search for wildcards. Since all the duplicates ended in -1, I just searched for *-1.JPG and it showed the 1,982 duplicates. I then hit Ctrl-A to select all, and Del to delete them. Close and reopen Picasa, and boom. No more duplicates.
I have been trying out Ableton Live for the past few weeks, and last night decided to buy it. (I should write a separate article on the virtues of full-featured but time-limited demos). The product registration process for Ableton Live is very easy to use, and I think more commercial software vendors should adopt this process.
After making the purchase, you simply start up Live again, and instead of clicking the button to get a trial usage authorization for the demo, there's a link to the Ableton web page to authorize the product. Since I was still in the same browser session as when I just bought the product, I was still signed in and it was able to determine quickly that yes, I had in fact just paid for a copy of the product, and it gave me a link to use to authorize my copy of Ableton.
Clicking on this link took me to a file type that opens directly in Ableton Live (you know when you get that Save / Open with dialog when clicking a file - this one had pre-selected "Open with Ableton Live"). Opening the link authorized my copy of Live.
This was fast and easy. No need to wait for the box to arrive, no need to cut and paste auth codes or type in a lengthy CD key. They have found an easy way to link the fact that I paid for the software (their web site) with the software that is installed on my computer.
Their explanation of this new feature is to allow top news stories to stay in the "News Feed" based on some criteria of interest that Facebook establishes based on your interaction with the site, while fresh stories scroll by on the "Live Feed".
This seems like a plausible explanation, but it leaves me with some doubts.
For one thing, Facebook will revert to showing the News Feed by default eventually, no matter how many times you click on Live Feed.
I suggest there may be an alternate explanation to the new feature, as well as some other changes the site has seen. Scaling problems.
This is only conjecture based on some observations I have made in the past two weeks, but here are some of the observations:
Facebook reverts to News Feed, which would be much easier to cache and give better performance than the Live Feed.
The feed no longer auto-updates to show new posts using AJAX like it used to.
The page shows fewer stories and does not auto-fill when you scroll down as often.
Apparently I coined this, I'm not seeing any results on Google for it. Nor "cthulflu", but there are results for "cthulhu flu". I don't want to be Hastur in making this judgment, though.
A Spoonerism, named after Rev. Spooner, is a phrase in which syllables of certain words have been swapped, often so that they form new words. A popularly used example is "Mardon me, padam, but this pie is occupewed, may I sew you to another sheet?"
Here are some new ones I've come up with I thought of*:
A Chinese man known for irony once commissioned a wooden sculpture of himself, which he titled "Chung in Teak"
Looking to start her day off with a kick, the martial arts instructor would often order a Tai Chi Latte.
* but it turns out other people have thought of these before (though I didn't think to search before making this post. doh!)
Ever wonder how characters from video games and other 3d animations are made to move around, and how their movements are getting more and more realistic with each new generation of movies and games?
One of the key components to making this happen is something called rigging, also known as skeletal animation. This is where a technical artist sets up a 3d model of a character or other object so that it can move and be moved. The animator makes the model jump and dance and swordfight and run, but this is possible because of the setup done by the technical artist.
Here is a demo reel made by my brother Dave, a technical artist and character rigger. The beginning clips show some examples of the various types of work he has done, while the second portion of the reel goes through some characters he has created for a new game as he explains the rigging available on each 3d model. See the explanation below for what some of the terms he is using mean.
And now a brief explanation of what some of these terms mean. And how this is done.
Suppose you want to animate a human character for a game. This character needs to be able to walk along, to jump, and to have facial expressions.
Some of the movements provided for the animator are set up to support something known as Forward Kinematics, or FK for short. This describes the computations necessary to make sure that, for example, when you move the upper leg of the 3d model forward, the knee, lower leg, and foot move along with it. The position of a particular piece of the model is calculated based on the angles of the joints and the length of the "bones" that connect it to the rest of the model.
FK is also typically used to tilt and turn the head, open and close the jaw, open and close eyelids, etc. With FK, you manipulate joints and the system figures out how the model moves accordingly.
Another technique used for rigging is called Inverse Kinematics, or IK for short. This describes the computations necessary to set a portion of the model to a particular position and figure out the angles and positions of the joints accordingly. For example, if you want to make your 3d person walk, you can just move the foot forward to take a step, and IK figures out how the leg joints need to move to make that happen. Additionally, the foot can then remain on the ground while the body moves above it, and IK will figure out how the joints move to make this happen.
Prior to Inverse Kinematics, the animator had to manipulate each joint to put the foot in the proper place using Forward Kinematics to make the 3d person take a step. Worse, they then had to counteranimate the foot to get it to stay on the ground while the rest of the body moved forward. This sometimes resulted in walking characters looking like they were sliding, or made the walking look jittery and unrealistic.
For facial animations, the rigger sets up scripts that do math that calculates how the various components of the face should move or deform to make the mouth move for speech, raise the eyebrows, scrunch the forehead, puff out the cheeks, and whatever other tools the animator will need to make the character speak, show surprise, fear, anger, and other emotions, and do other things like smile and frown.
Ever wanted to get better at speaking and writing in another language? You're not alone.
A former coworker of mine, Natalie Gordon, left Amazon to go travel, and in the course of her travels in Spanish-speaking Latin America and South America, recognized the potential to create an online tool for people who speak English and want to learn Spanish, and people who speak Spanish and want to learn English.
She created a web site called Lenguajero (www.lenguajero.com), and it connects Spanish and English speaking visitors with each other so they can improve their language skills. It provides themes for discussion, such as favorite food, current events, the movies, and even learning to swear.
Their most recent addition is a feature called "Write in Spanish - Escribir en Inglés". This provides a topic for discussion and encourages visitors to leave a comment in the language they are learning, or to leave feedback on another visitor's comment if you are a native speaker. Today's topic is Favorite Food, and some members are already describing ecuadorian food, pizza, sushi, and cebiche.
If you've ever wanted to improve your Spanish skills by interacting with native speakers directly, or if you speak Spanish natively and want to improve your English, this is an incredible tool that can connect you with other people who are also trying to learn. Try it out! I just wrote about sushi.
