Dead Programmer's Cafe

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  • Man, These Guys Must Have Been Really Baked

    I was looking through my favorite home automation catalog when I found this: a remote controlled rabbit ears antenna. You might still have to get up to wind more wire hangers onto the “ears” to improve reception, but now you can wiggle it all you want from the comfort of your couch.

    One of the few top google results to “remote controlled antenna” is an entry at halfbakery.com – a site that either is ripping off or is being ripped off by Dilbert’s Lazy Entrepreneur.

    What is really weird, is that absolutely independently of this find I recently had a conversation about halfbakery.com with the owner of http://www.dailyroutine.com whom I met at MS training in Atlanta last week.

  • Ach, We Call It Coffee With Milk Around Here, Ya Latte Drinking Surrender Monkey

    After many, many tries I think I am finally getting closer to figuring out “latte art” – making patterns on the surface of espresso crema with specially steamed milk. Here’s my best attempt to date:

    It’s a weird hybrid of a rosetta and an apple.

    To see much better examples of latte art, see this outstanding guide or just look over google’s results.

    David Schomer has a commercial video for sale (which is terribly overpriced – $49.95 for 18 minutes), but fortunately there are a few free demonstrations out there.

    I have to warn you, watching these is absolutely hypnotic :

    http://www.coffeegeek.com/video/artigiano.mov
    http://www.coffeegeek.com/tempphoto/sammy.mov
    http://www.latteart.org/latteart.htm (click on “demo” for the movies).

    Once I figure out the process completely I’ll post my own tutorial.

  • Homeless Blogging

    A while back I wrote a short post titled “Whatcha Gonna Do?” about my thoughts about what it would take to survive as a homeless person. Now somebody started a whole blog about that : “Survival Guide to Homelessness”. I may know how to make my own caffeinated mouthwash, but this dude has be beat at making his own adult wipes.

  • IHA: I Heart Acronyms

    I am reading blogs with bloglines.com aggregator these days. I have four categories of blogs there : FIMB, PIMB, RB and LJ.

    FIMB stands for Famous Incontinent and Mostly Boring. These are “A-list” blogs like Scobelizer, which are updated with the frequency of bunny poop and are so full of mentions of wiki, podcasting and other buzzwords that it’s not even funny. Still, amongst bunny pooplets there are often interesting links. FIMBS rarely generate original content, but mostly comment on what’s going on. Being gadflies they do that pretty well.

    PIMB stands for Pompous Incontinent Multiauthor Blogs like Gothamist. These are usually for-profit blogs with several authors that post even more frequently than FIMBs. There’s mindless link and meme propagation galore, but with a twist. First of all they often have a unifying topic, like NYC or gadgets or politics. Then there’s the attempt to emulate print journalism with things like editorials. The most bizarre trait of some PIMBS is when different authors start to express opinions on behalf of the blog : “Gothamist will go back to finding baseball kinda boring” or “All Gothamist can say is we can’t wait to see Douche or Turd”. My guess is that PIMBs happen when a couple of IMBs or FIMBS get together. I separated PIMBS because they are not as boring as FIMBS, but left unchecked they fill my reading with buzz and white noise.

    RB is a set of regular blogs, authors of which make well crafted and original posts. There are some FIMBsh blogs lumped in there, but those usually don’t have the most annoying traits of FIMBs. LJ is a set of all of my livejournal reading.

  • How Are We Gonna Live a Few Years Without a Total Lunar Eclipse?

    “Young people, why aren’t you looking at the Moon?” – a Russian man standing in front of our building along with a few other moon gazers asked me an my wife. I failed to come up with a snappy answer and just left him unridiculed to enjoy the last for the next couple of years 3 hour long lunar eclipse.

    A question that I had a bit prior to that encounter was : “What would a wide angle lens handheld photo of a lunar eclipse look like?”

    Now I know.

  • Happy Birthday Dear IRT!

    Empire State Building is lighted Red/Gold/Red today. Handy ESB lighting schedule tells me that this is in honor of Subway Centennial. A better color would have been a rusty gray-brown, the color of steel dust that covers the tracks and most other subway surfaces, but I guess they don’t have lights like that, do they?

    To celebrate Interborough Transit Corportation’s 100’s birthday I decided to try and sneak a peek at the fabled City Hall station, the one where Mayor Bloomberg and a bunch of bigwigs recreated Mayor McClellan’s ride 100 years ago. It’s nice to be NYC’s Mayor – you can fly NYPD helicopters and drive antique trains.

    Unfortunately the restored City Hall station was not open for regular shmoes, but I tried the old trick – taking 6 train through the last stop. Number 6 loops through the old City Hall station without stopping. I asked the conductor to let me stay, but since it was around 8PM she said – “not at this time of night” and kicked me out. I went for a walk around City Hall and took this picture of the pretty entrance to the current City Hall station.

    When I took the train back I saw the most upsetting sight – there was an intoxicated bum sleeping in a middle car with the conductor not paying any attention to him. He was holding an empty popcorn bag an there was small sea of popcorn and other rat attracting garbage around him. Apparently he went through the loop unharassed, although the old City Hall station was of no interest to him. I guess next time it would probably be a good idea to try asking a few conductors – maybe some are not as strict.

    This is like living in Manhattan – Donald Trump in his tower, a bum in a box on church steps, a low income person in a housing project. Middle class not allowed.

    On the bright side, tomorrow the special museum train will be making regular stops on the B/Q line between 10AM and 3PM. They call it “Catch me if you can“.

  • The Guardian Of the Notes

    For a while now I’ve been trying to organize all of my notes. For years I had great hopes of finding a perfect electronic organizer. My first love and biggest disappointment were devices created by Jeff Hawkins and Celeste Baranski.

    I owned my share of Palms and Handsprings, even the first Handspring phone module, but the damn things just kept crashing, running out of charge, loosing data and breaking exactly when I needed them the most. Also, the phone module was probably the worst cell phone I ever owned. Arrrr, just the memory itself of the scurvy thing be driving me nuts.

    Funnily enough, three or four of my co-workers who did not even want to listen to my raves about Handspring in those days now own latest Treo cell phones which are a little less terrible, but still not as good as what I use these days. What high technology do I use? I use an ugly brick of a cell phone with Verizon service which is easy to use, keeps charge well, never crashes, is comfortable to hold and manages to get reception even in some shallow subway stations. For a phone book and notes I use little black books made by Moleskine.

    Because of its slowness and bad text recognition my Tablet PC is sitting on a shelf waiting for a Linux installation, but I am trying to organize all of my notes and transfer them from random pieces of paper into neat new Moleskine notebooks. Tilde the cat keeps a watchful eye over them.

  • Deadprogrammer.com Update

    Last couple of weeks were rather stressful for me, thus no posts lately. I would like to break that non-posting streak and work on my site a bit as well.

    First order of business – following antonme’s suggestion I installed MTLJPost plugin which will duplicate my posts in my Livejournal making dprogrammer_rss unnecessary. I will be turning off MT’s commenting feature and directing all commenters to Livejournal. I am too lazy to install the threaded comments hack in MT, and there seems to be almost no comment spam in Livejournal. I still need to do a lot of work on MT templates – the layout I have right now is rather ugly and not very usable.

    I pretty much achieved what I wanted on the ad front – in about 30 days I’ve earned $7.99 with 1.8% clicthrough rate and $2.49 CPM. That’s a Fair und Balanced newspaper for every weekday! CPM by the way is a mysterious marketing term which means Cost Per Mil, where Mil (or Roman numeral M) stands not for Million but for for 10^3.

    This cornucopia of revenue should be of course offset by my hosting costs, taxes and a purchase of $227.00 (+$5 s&h) Gretag McBeth Eye-One (aka i1) monitor color calibration thingy from an advertiser that google ads showed in my post. This might actually be the first time I ever bought anything from an online ad. Oh, Eye-One is outstanding. I will write a review sometime, but it’s definitely the way to go.

  • Steampunk

    Steam powered taxicabs are all the rage these days.

  • 100 Views Of the Empire State Building

    I am moving ahead with my “100 Views of the Empire State Building” project. If you are just joining the readership of this journal, 100 Views is my attempt to take 100 interesting pictures of the Empire State Building.

    I did not know this until now, but apparently “24 Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai” is a Hugo winning story by Roger Zelazny, and the actual number of prints featuring Fuji by Hokusai is far greater. For instance there is one book of them that is called “Hokusai: One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji“. Zelazny’s story seems to be a bit obscure, even though “24 views” is a rather common expression. I found the story in question in “The New Hugo Winners vol 2” through Zelazny’s bibliography, one rare example when Amazon’s search sucked.

    I need to do a bit more research into this whole matter of “views” and organize my own photos a bit better, but for now here are two more bringing the total count to 21:

    #20 : There can be little doubt about a multitude of parallel dimensions. Multidimensional travel is a part of our everyday life : socks, subjected to 100 Gees in washing machines are frequent interdimensional travelers, so are keys and wallets (they mostly travel in the morning before you leave for work). Now I present you with a visual proof: Empire State Building’s doppelganger from the other dimension:

    #21