Table stuff

Posted on May 30, 2007 by Arthur

Via Slashdot, I read about the announcement of ‘Microsoft’s Surface’ (actual website): it’s a table with a (touchscreen)1 LCD and can be used for a variety of purposes. The idea is neat, but not original: Earlier in 2005 or 2006, Phillips Research announced the ‘Entertaible’ as a concept. Generally, Phillips engineering department is worldclass so I wouldn’t blame them for giving the ‘taible’ such a horrible name.

Popular Mechanics has more details on Microsoft Surface. Skimming through the article, I can’t really tell if Microsoft is thinking about rolling out the hardware or just wants to focus on delivering the software that drives this kind of hardware.

Interesting, for sure: particularly, now that prices of touchscreens have been going down.

1 (add 05/31/07) ArsTechnica goes ‘under the table’ and finds out that the Surface doesn’t work with touchscreens (as the Popular Mechanics article claims), but with near-infrared camera devices and plain light.

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That, SerialPort stuff

Posted on May 29, 2007 by Arthur

The log files reveal that a lot of people are looking for help using the Serialport component of the .Net Framework. Once again, lets summarize:

  • There are two ways to access data from a serialport:
    1. Using the DataReceived event (non-blocking)
    2. Using (individual) ReadLine statements in your code (blocking)
    For a more detailed description, I mentioned the difference in a different posting. Which method you’re going to use depends on how or when data becomes available to you and where you want that data to appear in your application. If your GUI needs to be updated frequently, use non-blocking. Note that you can mix ReadLine statements in your DataReceived events, but most likely you will need to clear your serial port buffers before closing off the program.
  • Know the difference between the various way of reading data (Read, ReadLine and ReadExisting). Experiment with them.
  • If you need to read a certain amount of bytes, check into the BytesToRead property.
  • If you’re going to use blocking methods, make sure to adjust both read and write timeouts appropriately.
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That’s impossible

Posted on May 29, 2007 by Arthur

A Blue pill or red pill?couple of weeks ago, I was watching all the ‘Matrix’ movies back to back and I discovered that the sentence ‘That’s impossible’ (or ‘It’s impossible’) is mentioned way too many times.

Yesterday, Islanders went to the polls and voted the Liberals in government. But then if you read the other political news items about the muck in the Legislative Branch and the (nationwide) attention for the upcoming Schwarzenegger visit, maybe that PEI thing is good news.

Say, I read about this show in The Netherlands, about a terminally ill woman and the reality show about who gets her organs. ‘The Kidney competition’ as some mention it. The best comment in BBC’s forums:

I thought organ recipients were chosen on who is the closest match, not who the donor likes the most

Me too. Me too. Me too.

Microsoft has released a FaceBook Developer Kit, which you can download from and around here. I was looking into this earlier this week. Now that Microsoft officially has thrown in support for the FaceBook API, how long will it take before FaceBook will be in the hands of that company?

1. Slightly related: a speech from a British MP on Web 2.0 and politics (via Paul Miller’s)

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Are you a wookie?

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Arthur

I read that it’s exactly 30 years ago that Star Wars was released in theatres in the US. Links that might help you through the weekend: Wired has plenty of stuff. Metafilter discussion and (of course) Slashdot. I was too young to watch Star Wars in the theatres: I remember the buzz, the huge following and if I’m correct, it even (although slightly) touched some members of our families. Star Wars was probably one of the first movies we ever rented for our first VHS player. I can’t remember the brand. It was a top-notch one with both ‘Hi-Fi stereo’ and Dolby N. Or S.

Via Slashdot, also the 25th anniversary of the movie TRON. I haven’t seen TRON recently, but (always) thought it had impressive effects for that time and age.

Will this ever become profitable? Eurotunnel has (once again) been bailed out.

I hear that Facebook is the rage. I assumed that Facebook was meant for students and others related to the educational industry, but apparently, it isn’t. What is Facebook? From what I can tell, it’s sort of a LiveJournal, but instead of open to the outside world, users write (blog?) safely behind the gates of the site. Only members can browse around in Facebook. Earlier this week, the company behind Facebook announced that it opened its API: and for a change, the API actually looks interesting (Facebook API). The documentation is far from complete, but if you’re into Facebook and you’re familiar with both XML and REST, it’s probably worth to take a look into this stuff.

I watched TV a couple of times this week and discovered the ‘reality show’ “On The Lot”. 36 or some aspiring directors vying for a $1 million price and an office at Dreamworks studios. For a change, the show is interesting (and predictable) and it has Carrie Fisher as one of the judges. How appropriate.

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I forget

Posted on May 24, 2007 by Arthur

I forgot that there was an update for WordPress, followed the regular procedure. I forgot more: while copying data over from one directory to the other I noticed that I missed too many files: Uh, I missed the -R.

Then after logging in I saw I had forgotten to turn off the plug-ins, something that is highly recommended before you even do the upgrade. I think I forgot this the last time too, to find out that it doesn’t really harm anything to leave them on. I guess, it depends on the scripts you use.

And last but not least: there are so many new things in 2.2 that even I haven’t found them yet (that is, unless you look at WP’s bugtraq pages). Don’t ask me to update CommentCentral just yet.

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Bommelthing

Posted on May 23, 2007 by Arthur

Bommelthing
n. 1. An obstacle, roadblock, or a barricade, a thing that can’t be undone without calling in ‘reinforcements’, or ‘brute force’. 2. An explosive situation. 3. A carefully planned trick or question with the goal to upset the people, class, friends or opponents
ex – “The History teacher set us up a bommelthing with his question about quantum mechanics”

Origin: Comes from the Dutch word ‘bommelding’ (bomb threat), which, if pronounced differently, can also be a non-existing word (compare “bom melding” vs. “bommel ding”).

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Bumble fee

Posted on May 23, 2007 by Arthur

Bumble fee
col. 1. An outlandish high (or low) fee or gift, or, a made-up, improvised (in a spur) fee or gift. 2. An unexpected pay or present for a job done right.
ex – “For her magnificent work in the field of quantum physics, Marge received a bumble fee in the form of a chocolate bar”1

Origin: Comes from the odd flight pattern of bumble bees.

1 Hey, I like chocolate.

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More cards

Posted on May 21, 2007 by Arthur

Since A bunch of cardsthe weather was bad yesterday and (it appears) it’s going to be same-o-same-o today, I decided to check into (this last month’s) Card objects project. All earlier created objects were ‘non-visual’ objects and since we’re playing cards, it probably makes sense to create a couple of visual components that show the player’s hands.

I decided to base my custom component on the PictureBox control, mainly because I’m not concerned about using specific drag and drop effects at this stage. If you make a descendant of the PictureBox and plan to do some custom drawing, you should override the PictureBox’s OnPaint event:

Continue reading →

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A gorilla and tulips

Posted on May 19, 2007 by Arthur

Yesterday, I skimmed the headlines and noticed the one about that escaped gorilla (“Gorilla escapes at Dutch zoo, injures 4”) and read the following quote:

“He got over the moat, which in itself is remarkable, because gorillas can’t swim. He got onto a path for visitors and started running and went at full speed through tables and diners at the Oranje restaurant”

Maybe the good director of the zoo was misquoted. From the MadSci Network the answer to the question ‘Is it true that gorillas can’t swim?’:

So, my best guess for an answer to your question is that gorillas can swim, but they are not very good at it. Given the choice, they will go to great lengths to avoid putting themselves in a position where they would need to swim.

This weekend is 10th annual Tulip Festival and if you live around the area, look out the window right now. It looks like the rain will be around for the next couple of days too, so if you plan to visit one of the (outside) events, better take an extra raincoat.

Posted in Truro NS | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Tele and then that

Posted on May 14, 2007 by Arthur

I read that CBS’s Evening News is falling behind in rates (originally via Alan). Some media reports blame this on America’s first (female) anchor, Kate Couric.

And a recent Gallup poll reinforced the notion that Ms. Couric had become a polarizing figure: 29 percent of respondents said that they did not like her, as opposed to 51 percent who said that they liked her.

I’m not sure about the polarizing part, but just this last weekend I saw an episode of Larry King with Katie and was utterly surprised that this time Couric was actually interviewing Larry King on his own show instead of the other way around. How low can you go? And what is that with those softball questions?

I have been ignoring TV recently and that’s not because of Couric: what’s on TV is nowadays not all too interesting because it appears that most commercial broadcasters seem to play on ‘safe edu and entertainment’. You know, ‘safe programming’. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems that only public stations are willing to broadcast the controversial stuff, or rather, in-depth (and generally, independent) reports. Take for example PBS’ ‘America at a crossroad’, the BBC’s Scientology report (Panorama) and their landmark Planet Earth series. And we can all laugh about the silly Eurovision Song festival, but, if you think of it, American Idol: that’s a classic example of brainless entertainment. Brainless entertainment is fun, but if everything else on the TV is of the same quality, what do you do?

That said, I think I mentioned before that I frequently check out ‘Smashing Telly’s list of online videos (great set of interesting documentaries). Earlier this weekend, I decided to give up on YouTube and move on to ‘DailyMotion’. I assume that since this site is set up by a French company, it has less reasons to fear for the wrath of the media corporations..

Posted in The Chest Desire | Tagged | 3 Comments

Bring the Buzz

Posted on May 12, 2007 by Arthur

I found UK’s Scoochout that today it’s Eurovision Songfestival day (all related items at xsamplex). Actually, was: the winner is a Serbian ballad singer, who apparently beat a Ukranian drag queen. The final results can be viewed here.

The BBC has some pictures (here) and the one with the British band Scooch had me laughing. I don’t know why: I guess the Brits1 ended up at the bottom 5 at the list but for some kind of reason I think their act might be a great fit for the KLM’s new Frequent Flyer commercials. “Did the right song win?”, the BBC is asking their readers:

We do not deserve points for entering a song that sounds like it was written by BA (editor: British Airways).

The last time I flew BA, I’m pretty sure the flight attendants didn’t have light-blue suits. You’ve got your facts wrong, bud.

1 Scooch’s (official) website

Posted in We-reflect-news | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Hyper-stations

Posted on May 8, 2007 by Arthur

Links to make it through the week:

Via Metafilter (discussion), this excellent set of YouTube videos of presentations hosted at Google with too many luminaries to mention in this post. Most of the videos are a hour long. As asked at MetaFilter: Do Google employees really have the time to attend these presentations? (More good stuff)

I linked to the news before, but you might just as well head to its source: NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory recorded the brightest stellar explosion. I read that the same team of astronomers is waiting for a star in our galaxy to go supernova, Eta Carinae. From that same page:

“We don’t know for sure if Eta Carinae will explode soon, but we had better keep a close eye on it just in case”

You’d almost say that was a joke: Eta Carinae is “only” 7,500 light years away. How soon is soon?

The web reminds me of a commercial so once in a while: Take for example this blog post about 9 attitudes of creative people’. Uh. OK. At least the web is about amusement, right? If you’re in a rush, the posting at that link suggests that creativity can be learned. I’d like to see a study on that.

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Twisted

Posted on May 6, 2007 by Arthur

Before Hiroshima vs. Greensburggoing to bed last night, I read a brief report about a town in the US hit by tornadoes. This morning, this thread at Metafilter reported that the tornado that hit that town (Greensburg) seemed to have just flattened the town. The pictures reminded me of the damage after the first nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima (1945) [see Little Boy].

Currently 10 people have been confirmed dead but news media (CNN and others) fear that the number may rise the next couple of days.

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