I recently stumbled across a program called MyPaint for my Nokia Internet Tablet (a handheld device similar to a PDA). It’s a little slow on the low-power 400 MHz mobile processor, but it’s usable for low-detail doodling… and I really like the idea behind MyPaint (which is available for at least Windows and Linux–possibly other platforms). Here are a couple drawings I made while experimenting with it:

A few weeks ago, my manager mentioned to me that he’d won “photo of the month” on a web site back in the mid 1990′s for a picture he took of hoarfrost. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to find the photo.

I wasn’t familiar with hoarfrost, so he explained to me that it was a somewhat unusual form of frost that occurs during prolonged fog. The next morning, I coincidentally had a chance to take some pictures of hoarfrost. Here is my favorite of them:

We had the stump removed today. Unfortunately, during stump removal the Utopia fiber line to our house was cut. As far as I know, there wasn’t really any way to avoid it–we didn’t know (or didn’t remember) it was running under the ground by the tree, and neither did the tree guy. Still, he is planning to pay for the repair work (which is fortunately going to be pretty inexpensive if the Utopia guys were correct).

The Utopia repair guys were here a few hours after the line was cut, but didn’t have enough conduit to fix it, so they’ll be back tomorrow. That’s pretty quick turnaround!

Recently I learned that Verizon Wireless had re-priced their Internet plans to be very reasonable, so I’m using my mobile phone for Internet right now.

Update: We’re back online. Total downtime was a little over 31 hours. Good job, Utopia!

You can’t google dead trees.

I googled for the phrase “can’t google dead trees” and found no exact matches. That means I’ll have created the first google-indexed occurrence of that phrase. Awesome. I win.

Since I work on Microsoft’s enterprise search solution (and Microsoft is somewhere below number 3 on the list of Google fans), I considered the more hand-that-feeds-me-friendly “you can’t search dead trees” but that doesn’t have quite the same meaning, and it doesn’t have the appeal of the replacement word starting with the same letter as the word it replaced. “You can’t Live Search dead trees” just made me laugh, and inspired another similar phrase that the branding guys might want to think about:

You can’t verb Live Search.

This post probably doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of Microsoft. Any similarity to view or opinion reflection is purely coincidental. These are not the droids you’re looking for.

Update: Less than fifteen minutes after posting this, my google search found it.

When I searched the web for information about using the N800 to browse the web through my Verizon phone, I found people spreading a rumor that Verizon would discontinue service or charge incredibly high rates if you did that. I contacted Verizon and explained exactly what I wanted to do, and they assured me that it was not a violation of my contract. Of course, my contract includes a $5/month per-minute data plan, and if I were to exceed my minutes, I’m sure Verizon would charge for overage. If I transferred massive amounts of data, they might also have an issue… but for simple on-demand web access anywhere (within Verizon’s coverage areas), I finally have a solution.

Here’s a sample at 24 point. Amnesia is on top, and DejaVu is on bottom.

Here they are at 8 point:

I made the top of the 1 more slanted, made the tails on the comma and semicolon more pronounced, and increased the size/readability of the asterisk, percent, less-than, and greater-than. These differences are subtle, but they help me.

Update (March 13, 2008): The images are slightly out of date. Since making them, I have restored some of the tail curve I had removed from the comma and semicolon, and I slightly tweaked the “1″.

If they were to start selling DRM-free downloadable movies or make a public statement denouncing the use of DRM in general, I would drop my boycott.

Eventually I think media companies are going to realize that they’ll make more money without DRM. I won’t be using Amazon’s Unbox until it’s DRM-free.

Update: I bought a DRM-free Sony/BMG MP3 album from amazon.com.

It comes with bundled software, which I’m sure provides some sort of Nerf interface to the video files… but I’m not really interested in being locked in to bundled software that only runs on Windows. I haven’t even installed it (although it’s possible I will, so I can see how it manages the files).

So far I haven’t found documentation on the directory structures and file formats, but here’s what I’ve figured out:

For a given “program” (a collection of video files), there are three file types; MOD, MOI, and PGI.

MOD and MOI (MOvie Data and MOvie Information?) files come in sequentially named pairs (MOVxxx.MOD and MOVxxx.MOI, where xxx is a three digit hexadecimal number starting with 001). Each pair apparently corresponds to a single video segment (the time between starting recording, and stopping). I haven’t tested whether a sufficiently large segment will span MOD/MOI pairs.

MOD files contain MPEG2 video with AC3 audio. DVDs use MPEG2, and AC3 is among the supported formats for DVDs, so MOD files are extremely DVD-ready. (Unfortunately AC3 is heavily encumbered by strongly enforced patents, which creates some problems for me.) From my limited testing (I’ve tried mencoder, mplayer, Media Player Classic, and Windows Media Player), any program that can read MPEG2 files can read the MOD files, although less clever programs (like Windows Media Player) actually require that the file be renamed from MOD to MPG.

MOI files are a tiny fraction of the size of their MOD counterparts, but there does seem to be a loose correlation in relative size. MOI files do not contain essential video or audio information, but they may contain interesting and valuable movie metadata. In searching the web, I’ve found at least one claim that MOI files contain “timestamp” information.

Each “program” has a single PGI (ProGram Information?) file.

I have spent almost no time digging through the PGI and MOI files so far, but I’m preserving the files for now because they’re small and might contain information I can use.

Once upon a time in high school, I had a really cool computer science teacher named Clarence Whetten.

Our computer lab consisted of a Unix system with 4 Meg of RAM and about 30 dumb terminals. As I understand it, Mr. Whetten approached a local company (ICON, where I later worked as an intern briefly) and convinced them to donate the system.

At the same time, people in the nearest high school were using Apple ][ computers and having a much less interesting (in my opinion) experience.

Because we were all using the same computer, we could interact with other users in very cool (and not always desirable) ways. A mischevious user could write to other users’ terminals. As I learned, a mischevious user who was not currently enrolled in a computer science class could lose his account that way. A single student could hog more than her share of CPU or RAM, and other users would check the process list and say “hey, cut that out!”

Among other things, the environment emphasized the importance of writing efficient code.

A little while after school ended (with a reasonable time buffer to allow students to stay after and get a little extra work done), a scheduled “cron” job would turn on public access to games.

When a student demonstrated trustworthiness and skill (or something), Clarence could be convinced to grant “root” access, allowing that user to perform administrative tasks (and occasional mischief such as turning on games when they weren’t supposed to be on). Eventually, I became one of those privileged users.

One day a fellow student was pestering me to turn on games, and I finally got sick of it, so I decided to play a trick on him. I called him over, typed a command to REMOVE games, then took the terminal offline, pressed enter, then put the terminal back online, quickly erased the command, and hit enter again.

He freaked out. I thought it was pretty funny, but after he told everyone in the room, I had to I reveal my trick. One of the other students quickly double-checked and said “no, they really are gone!” I checked too, and sure enough… they were! Apparently I had blown the trick somehow. CRAP!

I did not earn popularity points that day, but I probably learned a valuable lesson. I wonder what it was.

I wasn’t actually the one who ended up recompiling and reinstalling the games. That was a friend of mine. From time to time, he reminds me about the time I removed all the games. He did it recently, so I thought I’d write the story.

Fortunately, a friend recently pointed out ViEmu — it’s a Visual Studio plugin that does an outstanding job of providing Vim functionality without breaking Visual Studio.

After using it for a couple days, I found a few issues that impacted my use patterns, and mentioned them to the author. He was very responsive, and provided an update within days.

For vi/vim users who also use Visual Studio, I highly recommend ViEmu. Now I want a plugin for Firefox/Thunderbird.

(I also recommend vim/ViEmu for developers who use laptop keyboards and find themselves frequently slowed down when looking for home/end/pgup/pgdn/insert/delete.)

A few days ago I read an impressively thorough digitalcamerainfo.com review of the camera based on limited experimentation on a show floor. I’ve spent some time exploring the camera’s interface and reading the manual, and I have a couple minor corrections to that review:

1. Although it may appear from the camera’s interface that the “Auto” ISO mode will result in ISO 400, the ISO does actually vary. I believe the “Auto400″ indicator means that auto ISO will not exceed 400.
2. By default, ISO is reset when the camera is powered off, but it is possible to make the camera remember the ISO setting. There is a “memory” menu that contains a list of checkboxes for settings to preserve through a power cycle. The “memory” setting includes many options, and seems useful.

Overall, the interface seems pretty straightforward. So far the biggest weakness in comparison to my DSC-T1 is an on-camera focus lamp. The biggest surprise benefit over the DSC-T1 is manual focus capability.

The biggest down-side I knew about before buying the W30 was that it uses Quicktime motion JPEG for video. I would’ve preferred mpeg4 or mpeg1.

I’ve had my current pocket digital camera (a Sony DSC-T1) for several years. It’s not a high-end camera, but it’s an excellent set of features packed into something I can always have with me, which means that I take a lot of pictures with it. My DSC-T1 has served me well. I’ve had a difficult time finding a non-Sony replacement (since Sony’s DRM rootkit fiasco, I’ve stopped buying Sony products) that matched or beat the DSC-T1 for my purposes (basically, a durable pocket-sized camera with super-close macro capability).

A while ago my DSC-T1 began allowing dust into the optics. It’s difficult to clean out, but quick to accumulate (since I keep the camera in my pocket), so I’ve been looking for a replacement.

A week or so ago, I identified what looks like an excellent replacement, with the main feature I’ve always wished I had in my DSC-T1: it’s waterproof and dust-proof! Today I pre-ordered my Pentax Optio W30 and an 8 Gig SDHC card.

The one major down-side is that it uses QuickTime Motion JPEG for video. I hope that doesn’t turn out to be too much of an inconvenience.

Switching to Vista would require that I buy new hardware (for several computers), and the operating system itself is pretty pricey. The cost of moving to Vista far outweighs the benefit for me.

For a new computer, I could switch to Vista, but I can also buy a Mac. With a Mac I expect a better user experience, and the fact that MacOS X is Unix underneath appeals to me on a geeky level.

For my existing computers, I can continue running Windows XP for now, but I need to plan on Microsoft discontinuing support for XP at some point.

I’m reconsidering Linux as a primary desktop operating system.

Since I tend to read words on my computers, I care about how clear they are. I recently compared Windows ClearType font rendering with subpixel anti-aliasing on Linux. Below is an image with the two side-by-side (Windows on the left, Linux on the right) — click it to see what I had to say about it.

(Note that ClearType and subpixel font rendering may actually look worse than traditional anti-aliasing on a CRT monitor. They’re intended primarily for LCDs.)

If you’re eager to get people to close their browser or madly click the Back button as soon as your page loads, make some noise.

There are pretty much no situations in which I want my computer to make noise unexpectedly. On the other hand, I have no issue with pages that let me click a button to turn on sound.

Even if you’re a Harry Potter movie web site (ahem!), please don’t start off by making noise at me. I might be at work, or in the same room someone who’s sleeping, or listening to music, or browsing the web from the closet while I wait for the burglars to leave. Give me a chance to put on headphones, pause my music, decide that I’m just not in the mood to be reminded that my web browser can emit sound, or whatever.

If you still want your web page to make noise, you’re in the wrong place now. Try this HTML sound tutorial… but PLEASE don’t start making noise automatically. Let your visitors decide when it’s time to break the silence.

Thanks!

NUnit – NUnit seems to be the most common solution, and definitely looks promising.

NUnit has a stand-alone GUI and a command-line mode, and although that’s sufficient, it doesn’t appear to integrate with Visual Studio 2003 like JUnit integrates with Eclipse, so I’ve decided to look around a little more.

csUnit – Another option is csUnit. It didn’t take me long to decide against csUnit. In fact, it made me want to rant. I have to confess up-front, it was an emotional response. I’m only *assuming* that their solution is inferior.

I didn’t make it far through their FAQ because it evades the questions rather than answering them. For example:

How does csUnit compare to XYZ? How is csUnit better than XYZ? (XYZ being a different tool)

The answer?

csUnit and XYZ offer different sets of features. Depending on your requirements and based upon your selection criteria, csUnit or XYZ may be the better fit. It is your decision! (blah blah blah)

Right… they’re “different”… I’ve heard of that happening, and they’re saying that I may want to use those “differences” as “criteria” to make my decision… but they’re not going to help me AT ALL in identifying the differences. Gotcha. They go on, using way too many commas, to explain that their “ethics and morale” make it undesirable to provide any sort of comparative analysis. Fine. OK, you csUnit guys go off and do your thing. I’ll go where the information is.

I wonder if csUnit was a school project that hasn’t been abandoned yet. It doesn’t seem to have an underlying philosophy that makes it different than other solutions — just an assertion of differentNESS.

So, what’s next on the list?

Visual Studio 2005 – It looks like Microsoft has added integrated unit testing into Visual Studio 2005 (and they seem to be claiming that they’re the first ones to offer unit testing integrated with the development environment — whatever). Unfortunately, this isn’t a good time for me to upgrade.

I’m not seeing anything else prominent, so it’s NUnit (for now at least). From what I can tell, switching from NUnit to Microsoft’s solution won’t be a major undertaking.

January 8, 2006 Update: Zanebug claims to be an NUnit-compatible solution with VS2003 integration. Like NUnit, it is open source. I will probably be using Zanebug instead of NUnit.

January 9, 2006 Update: I installed and fiddled with Zanebug, and although it ALMOST worked, I never succeeded in getting valid test results.

Rather than spending more than a short amount of time troubleshooting the default install with a very simple set of tests, I switched back to NUnit (which works just fine, although it doesn’t have IDE integration).

IDE integration is a nice idea, but actually working (without wasting my time) is much more important. I will probably not give anything else a chance until I switch to Visual Studio 2005.

A few days ago I stepped on my pocket digital camera (a Sony Cybershot DSC-T1) and broke the LCD. I am very sad about that. It wasn’t my high-end camera, but it was very respectable (5 Megapixel, 3x optical zoom, and excellent macro capabilities — most photos I’ve posted were taken with it), and more importantly it was the camera I had with me all the time.

Here’s what the LCD looks like while the camera is powered off. It’s pretty. Looks kinda like a fractal…

Now I’m in the market for a new ultra-compact digital camera. Unfortunately, Sony’s recent digital rights management rootkit demonstrated such a severe disregard for the rights of the people buying their products, I’m boycotting them. (If you’re my wife or one of my kids, I love you, but this is why we’re not getting any more Playstation stuff. Sorry. *DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT DID THIS TO YOU!*)

If you know me, you probably realize that it’s a big deal to me to boycott Sony. As I write this post, I’m using a Sony VAIO VGN-A190 laptop a few feet from my son who’s staring intently at a Sony WEGA TV. My wife is in the next room playing a game on her Sony VAIO desktop PC, and my daughter is downstairs chatting and listening to music on her Sony VAIO desktop PC. (Of course, I’ve uninstalled the support.com semi-spyware Sony bundles with VAIO computers.)

I’ve spent a lot of money on Sony stuff: at least seven digital cameras, three digital camcorders, several Clie PDAs, at least four laptop computers, at least six desktop computers, multiple monitors, an HDTV, some VCR/DVD players, various Playstation stuff, bafrigginzillions of videos and CDs, countless accessories, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot.

I could explain WHY I’ve bought so much Sony stuff, but I don’t advocate them anymore, so I’ll refrain. I’ll just say that I’m not some kind of Sony nut — I buy what makes sense. It no longer makes sense to buy Sony.

In the past I’ve advocated/recommended Sony hardware and digital cameras to many people. Now I discourage people from buying Sony, and Sony is definitely losing a digital camera sale that I would have been happy to give them. In fact, it’s my annoyance with having to shop around so much more that inspired this post. (I had become extremely familiar with Sony’s product lines.)

To Darth Sony (and other people pushing DRM), I say: The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

To the Good Guys: “Digital Rights Management” is your enemy. It is an attempt to “manage” (i.e. strip you of) the rights granted to you by law when you acquire a license to use Copyrighted material. Sony’s DRM Rootkit takes this WAY too far. In addition to attempting to prevent you from pirating the “protected” CD, the software installed on your computer takes measures to hide itself, avoids removal, spies on you, degrades system performance, and even makes your system vulnerable to attack.

(If you can direct me to a good authoritative non-technical summary of the Sony DRM Rootkit, I’d like to link to one. I’m currently linking to a boingboing timeline and the original sysinternals announcement, both of which are highly informative, but not casual reading for the average person.)

Oh, and back to the camera tragedy… some statistics. I took 8440 pictures/movies with the Sony DSC-T1, starting on 3/18/2004. At about $500 for the camera, that’s about $0.06 per picture, which seems worth it to me. Of course, there were other expenses, but the base camera cost me $0.06 per picture. That’s satisfactory.

Here’s a picture of the power lines I took on a walk a couple weeks ago:

Most people don’t run resolutions lower than 800×600, and most people who do run 800×600 probably run their applications maximized, because 800×600 is so tiny.

There are a few sites (like Tucows), pushing the browser width envelope. I assume they’re thinking everyone runs at a resolution of 1024×768 or greater, which is probably practically true (except for people who browse from mobile devices), but they’re also assuming that people run their browsers that wide. That’s where their assumption breaks down. At 1024×768, people probably maximize their browsers, but I run 1920×1200, and it just doesn’t make sense to run a full-screen 1920×1200 browser.

At 800 wide, Tucows (I’m picking on them, although there are other offenders) looks like this to me:

Well, actually it’s much larger than that, but you get the idea.

To navigate, I have to choose between the following unappealing options:

• Continually scroll left and right (not fun at all).
• Resize my browser (which will change my default browser size).
• Maximize my browser (which wastes space and still looks bad).

Here’s what Tucows looks like with my browser maximized:

If you want, you can make a web site look reasonably good at a variety of resolutions — for example, the web site for Silkthread, my business, looks like this with a width of 800:

It looks like this at 1920×1200:

I admit, it doesn’t look great at 1920, but most people running 1920×1200 probably don’t use a maximized web browser. Amazon doesn’t look great at 1920×1200 either, but they do make use of the available space.

Microsoft uses a different (and also reasonable) approach. They actually detect the browser resolution and generate different HTML based on your resolution. At 1920×1200 they don’t completely fill the browser, but it looks better than if they did.

So, whenever I encounter sites that expect a browser wider than 800, I choose one of the unappealing options I listed (maximizing, scrolling constantly, or resizing my browser, risking changing my browser’s default width). As a result, my experience is less positive, and I get a bad feeling about going back.

It’s usually in the best interest of web designers to appeal to their users, so if you happen to be a web designer, hopefully you’ll agree that it’s reasonable to make your sites work well with a browser 800 pixels wide, even if many of your users will be running 1024×768 browsers.

It’d probably help to have some browser size statistics… maybe I should compile some.