Baltimore Squirrels

3 AM

Hillary asked a serious question in her latest campaign spot. We thought it deserved an equally serious response.

Hilarious (though I never saw Hillary’s ad).

Via Daring Fireball

Via Neatorama.

iPhone mod:

On a cold november morning I set foot in the clean room with the sole purpose of determining what the heck my $500 iPhone was really made of. This may not seem like a big deal at first but let me again describe what goes into taking SEM images. The sample is placed in a small chamber which is pumped down to an operating pressure of .00005torr. Normal atmosphere is 760torr…. So you are basically subjecting whatever you put in that camber to the vacuum of space. iPhone LCD, battery electronics…

Microhoo: Sergey Brin is Annoyed, and Unnerved:

(Note: Quote is from another Google employee, not Sergey.)

(…) Google’s marketshare is so large in terms of the eyeballs that see it, and so synonymous with the Internet, the best way to really grow the core business is to get more eyeballs on the Internet. The best way to do that is to make the Internet more easy and fun to use.

(Via Mashable!.)

I know it’s stereotypical of me to dislike Microsoft (since I’m an Apple geek that used to be a Linux geek), but you know that Microsoft would never think like this. The Microsoft stance has always been to be the only choice for consumers, not to make themselves more appealing. If Microsoft was in Googles shoes here, they would go and strike very friendly deal with Honda that required anyone who purchased a new car to create a Passport account to before they could drive it (for some supposedly beneficial reason).

I like Apple because they have a “make a sweet product” business model. I dislike Microsoft because they have a “you have to own our product to get anything done” business model.

Duty Calls:

(Via xkcd.com.)

The fact that someone built a robot for this completely tickles my geeky funny bone, but what really impresses me is how long the iPhone keeps up with the robot. According to the creator:

In the first part, I show the robot solving all 7 levels at 5 moves per second. After a few closeups, there’s a short clip of the robot running at 7 moves per second. It managed to solve the first few levels but then errors started popping up and it was unable to finish the whole game.

Pretty impressive considering it takes 2 taps to make one move.

Via MAKE.

Apparently there was some kind of mixup when they put together the Flash CS3 documentation because there is no mention of editing AC_FL_RunContent to get FlashVars to work.

I’ll state it here for anyone who is searching for answers after 2 hours of confused testing. To use FlashVars you have to (in addition to what the CS3 docs say) add two arguments to the AC_FL_RunContent call in your HTML, specifically 'FlashVars' and 'key=value&key2=value2&...etc' (you know, the actual vars).

Granted, to any seasoned Flash developer this gotcha is probably known, but as this is the first ActionScript I’ve touched in a long time I was bitten.

On Microsoft buying Yahoo:

It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

- Fake Steve Jobs

It will be a sad day when Yahoo takes this deal (they don’t want to, but they don’t have much choice). Microsoft has no interest in Yahoo technology, they just want to buy up their customers.

(Quote via Daring Fireball)

I do most of my local web development under my userdir (/~tvon), but I don’t like dealing with relative URLs (and some webapps prefer to think they live in your document root). So, I fake it.

Edit /etc/hosts to give localhost some extra aliases:

127.0.0.1       localhost local1 local2 local3 local4 local5

Then tweak apache config to add a few VirtualHosts (in this case in my home dir /Users/tvon):

<virtualhost *>
    ServerName local1
    DocumentRoot /Users/tvon/Sites/local1
</virtualhost>
<virtualhost *>
    ServerName local2
    DocumentRoot /Users/tvon/Sites/local2
</virtualhost>
<virtualhost *>
    ServerName local3
    DocumentRoot /Users/tvon/Sites/local3
</virtualhost>
<virtualhost *>
    ServerName local4
    DocumentRoot /Users/tvon/Sites/local4
</virtualhost>

Now when I want to work on a site, say example.com (assuming it lives in the example.com directory under /Users/tvon/Sites) I symlink it to an available local alias, e.g. ln -s example.com local1 and I can access it as a root site at http://local1/.

Not very fancy, but it makes my life a little easier.