Now, this is a president-elect with some common sense!  Barack Obama weighs in on the biggest ongoing debate in College NCAA football… the horrible BCS system vs. a logical playoff system. You may say that he should concentrate on larger issues, but I say: This man can multitask!

Throw his weight around?  Yes We Can!

update: Mack Brown agrees

Bullet-time 2.0 is Timesculpture.

I’m slacking…

Everyone who uses Firefox regularly has a core of extensions that they have grown to use so much as to make them necessary to browsing.  One of the most tedious parts of browsing and then posting material is the saving and organizing of large amounts of pictures.  I fully use 4 extensions every day for this task, and have several others that I use at least weekly.

One of the most useful of these extensions was Bazzacuda Image Saver.  I loved this app because it could detect images in tabs, save them to a predefined folder, and close those tabs, all in one step.  Plus it has the separate ability to find the largest image on a page opened in the current tab, and will save that image and close the tab.

Upgrading to new Firefox versions takes a little bit of finding, updating,  and re-installing of extensions.  For the most part, everything works at least the same as before, but with each new version, we all lose a few extensions that were orphaned by their developers.  I lost Bazzacuda when I upgraded to Firefox 3.0.  The extension would work every so often, but for the most part gave a very generic error and did nothing.  I tried to find other extensions to replace it, hoping that eventually the developer would fix the extension.  I was let down on both counts.  No other extension (or combination thereof) would replace it, and the developer website is now redirected to something completely unrelated.  Despite many comments asking for updates, the developer has been silent on the Mozilla Addons page.

So, a few days ago, I set out to see if it would be a simple change to fix it.  I had already overriden the version number to allow it to install, and unpacked the code to take a look.  Unfortunately it wasn’t something simple to find, but I eventually found it and fixed the problem and the little cascade of other problems it caused.

So, since it wasn’t something superficial, I am releasing the modified code.  I changed the name to be generic, just in case the original developer decides to release more versions of his own program.  This updated for Firefox version 3.0.2 extension is called simply Image Saver. Both the original extension and my updated version are under MPL/GPL licensing, so it should be no problem.

I also wish to add-on functionality in the future, such as more folders and more hotkeys.  So renaming it now seemed best.

Download it from the Image Saver Project Page.

update 10/9/08: If you are one of the people that downloaded this yesterday, please redownload it and install again.  A bug not allowing the default folder location to be saved has been fixed. Eventually I’ll put automatic updates in.

The hype team behind Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles has released a multi-platform metagame, named Terminator Ambush.

Play consists of two levels.  On one hand you are the hunted.  Use an iPhone to check in using your GPS location via their Ambush iPhone application.  Which looks like this:

You get points for putting in more location, but then the other portion of the game comes into play.  On the Terminator Ambush website, you are tracked by your check-ins on a non-descript virtual map.  Hunters can use this data to try and determine your next check-in point and lay a trap.  If they get you, you are terminated.

I’m not sure if it’s entirely working, as I used the iPhone app while running around town today.  It shows my plots but my score has not been updated at all.  The plot points were much shorter distance apart on the virtual map than I had thought, that with the large trap reticle, it should be easy to terminate people.  What I mean is, I went in 10 mile sweep through Austin while running errands, and my path markings are just about contained in a one-inch square area.

Yes, it’s a little big-brothery that you are uploading your GPS data, but luckily it doesn’t show any real-world tie-in for people to actually track you or anything.  But, meta-gaming like this is a fun idea, that I expect will become even more popular now, with all the iPhones and other GPS phones being released.  There was a another game announced previously called Parallel Kingdom which has a more involved concept of building virtual buildings and such as a sort of GPS MMO.

As seen at Dragoncon 2008 and posted on this flickr page.

The Nerf machine gun in action.  

I had no idea there was a Nerf bazooka.

The Great Office War from Runawaybox on Vimeo

In fact, I am posting from it now.

I was skeptical, and I wasn’t alone in that feeling, but I only had one day to be skeptical because they only announced this thing yesterday!  (Kudos for keeping it under wraps).

Google Chrome is a web browser built on WebKit, which powers other well known browsers such as Apple’s safari and KDE’s Konqueror.  Google included a cute online comic book to explain the technology here.  The gist being that the web browser uses entirely separate processes to load each separate tab.  This goes beyond simple multi-threading, and gets into OS territory.  They want to do this to eliminate browser hangups from ultiple tasks needing to use the same process.  While this can and will usitilize more memory and processor power, it also allows one to regulate it easier, especially memory-wise.  Plug-ins (when they appear) will also use separate processes.

The comic gets into computer science territory when they explain how they built their V8 from Webkit.  It streamlines object manipulization and pointer calls and other things you can read about there.

I’m impressed.  First off at the ease of slipping into it right from Firefox.  It handles the same keyboard commands I’m used to, and tabs behave much the same.  Two things it does not have that firefox has:

• Memory munching.  Yes, it uses a spearate process and memory space for each tab, but these are confined spaces, unlike Firefox which could eat all my memory if I let it.
• Addons. none. Zilch.  Yeah, it’s a beta, but man I need my add-ons.

The lack of add-ons will make me only piddle with Chrome when I feel like, not use it for a main browser.  For one, I have many that are hard to live without.  And two, Firefox is damn snappy without any add-ons, too, so it’s unfair to compare Chrome until it’s got the same capablities as a fully-loaded Firefox browser.

But the technology is impressive, and obviously since everything is open source, we are going to have a flood of add-ons coming very soon.

While they extremely oversimplify the assets of parallel computing, and discounting the fact that even low-cost CPU’s do plenty of parallel computing nowadays with multi-core systems, there can be no mistake of the sheer awesomeness of 1100 paintball guns firing at once.

And so I give you Adam and Jamie of the Mythbusters in their painting class 101 (filmed at Nvidia’s Nvision show):

Well, the wife and I got iPhone 3G’s today.  But they really should be called iPhone 2.5G’s.

After Wired’s article about the survey they did of 3G users in various locales across North America, I was ready to discount the iPhone 3G’s troubles with the 3G network as mainly due to faulty local networks.

Then again, something didn’t sit right in that conclusion.  It all became crystal clear as the young, stoked Apple attendant was ringing up the phones.  We talked a bit about the Wired article, and I told him I was confident about the iPhone being ok here in Austin, because of the article and my current phone.  I have had a Samsung Sync SGH-A707 for almost 2 years now, and the one problem I have never had with it is bad reception.  I have 5 to 7 bars (which is max on the phone) on 3G almost the entire time I am in town.

Then he said, “look at it now”.  I did and it showed 5 bars of 3G on the Samsung.  It never wavered while my wife was getting her iPhone setup.  Then as my iPhone was setup, I saw that it has only one bar of 3G for a brief moment and then switches to 3 to 5 bars of Edge.  That was enough test for me.  The Apple store employee says they never get 3G at that store or around it on the iPhones.

I sit here now, in South Austin (the store was in North Austin) with the new iPhone showing 5 bars of Edge, reading this rebuttal to a rebuttal of the Wired article…  essentially saying it is ‘mostly’ still the network.

It’s not the network.

I remember that the Samsung Sync is known for its exceptionally high radio strength.  But Wired’s survey chart certainly shows Austin as solid green for network stability/strength.  And yet the phones we just purchased have a very hard time connecting anywhere in town with more than a couple bars, and drop to Edge a majority of the time.  It was a good theory, and I appreciate the survey, but unfortunately it isn’t backed up in reality.

An eon in modern time ago (a year) I posted a small extrinsic blurb about the upcoming Microsoft technology dubbed Photosynth.  I thought the link explained and showed it better than I could, so no need for a further post.  But now it is released, and now it deserves the shoutout.

This is a simple “synth”. It was taken by some guy in Austin on his cameraphone. He took a few shots of the 360 bridge (a pretty noticeable landmark), just across the river from where I used to work at Origin. I think this shows the power of Photosynth. First of all, this was easy to find, I just did a Photosynth search for Austin, and it was the first choice. Second this was only a few short photos in a cameraphone. This isn’t the Taj Mahal demo with 400 shots with a $5000 DSLR camera. No, this is normal guy with possibly time on his break from work to snap a few shots through a window and upload them. You can still zoom in on them and skirt all around his view.. and it captures his view amazingly well.

That’s all I have to say, except one more thing, kudos to Microsoft to allowing embed code. Normally that wouldn’t get kudos, because every website on earth has some free embedable content on it nowadays, but kudos for finally coming around. (but an iframe? seriously?)