Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Krissy has not been able to access the Primary manuals on the Church’s webpage for the last couple of weeks, so I thought I ought to look into the problem and see if there might be a solution. What follows is the email I sent to lds.org.

There seems to be a problem with at least some versions of Firefox. I haven’t had time to extensively test it in anything but Linux. Anyhow, the backslash in the this URL is not parsed correctly and returns an error page. If I remove the backslash or the %5C (that’s the ascii character code for the backslash that Firefox translates the “\” into) then the page loads normally. I don’t have access to MSIE at present, so I can’t test if it works there as well.

It works in Opera no matter whether it’s a backslash, a forward slash, or completely omitted. But it only works in Firfox if I replace that %5C with a “/” or nothing at all. I don’t know what the standard says is the right way to handle backslashed in URLs, so I don’t know if this is a bug that should be filed against Firefox or if it’s a problem on your end.

Good luck getting it ironed out. Keep up the good work!

After conquering the Double Peak Mountain overlooking San Marcos, Randy and I came back to the apartment for a bit. While he was here he looked at the light switch in the bathroom for me. He was quickly able to determine what needed to be done to swap the switches in the closet and the bathroom. After hooking the sensor switch up in the closet, though, we ran into some problems. The light came on, but the switch didn’t seem to be functioning. The LED on the switch itself never illuminated and the button didn’t do anything. Worst of all, the light would come on, then, after ten seconds, turn off again. It would only stay off for one or two seconds, then turn back on again. This behaviour made no sense.

I went on the internet to find out if there were others that might have had similar difficulties and I found the company’s website. I never found the information I was looking for, but I was able to find a product catalogue with switches that were similar to mine. On one of the pages was a layer by layer photographic diagram of what was inside the black box. Nothing too useful about that, although it was interesting. Also of note was that the diagram showed the switch with its faceplate removed exposing the sensitivity and duration controls.

Sensativity and duration controls!? This was just what we needed! Randy put the switches back the way they had been and turned the sensativity and duration controls to maximum. I started a timer to see how long the light would stay on if no movement were detected in the bathroom. The light stayed on almost exactly thirty minutes! This is a much better solution because now I don’t have to worry everytime maintenance people popped in to check on things.

Thanks to Randy, the light switch formerly known as evil has redeemed itself.

Update: the light switch is not at bad as originally though. Click here to see why.

A few months ago there was some maintainance performed in all of the apartments in our complex. Our normal, up is on, down is off, human-style light switch was “upgraded” to the monstrosity pictured at the right. Now, I’m a technical kind of guy, and I was intrigued at this new hi-tech switch. There is a motion sensor on the top and a button on the bottom. When you click the button it always returns back to the same position. The green LED flashes intermittently, and sometimes seems to flash when it detects movement. All of this is fine, so far. But there is one really annoying “feature” of this light switch: it shuts off after 5 minutes of no motion detected.

I am assuming this was installed to save electricity. The first time I took a shower with this thing, the light turned off while I was rinsing soap off of my face. My eyes were closed at the time, and when I opened them, it was pitch black. I got to finish the shower in the dark. Thank you crappy light switch.

Every time I take a shower now, I’m always paranoid that this thing is going to shut off on me, so I wave a towel over the top of the shower curtain every one to two minutes. Sometimes I am really relaxed and forget about waving the towel, and just when you least expect it: “Click!”

I came up with what I thought would be a solution. There should be a mechanism to detect if the shower is on, and if it is on then the light won’t shut off unless the light switch is manually turned off. The problem with this comes when someone wants to take a long relaxing bath. The water won’t be running, and the light will still turn off!

I could see where this type of switch might be useful. If it had been me, I would have installed this thing in my closet. That’s the light I tend to forget is on when I walk out of the bedroom. I can’t recall forgetting to turn off the bathroom light. Anyway, I had some ideas for fixing the problem. I unscrewed this switch to see if it might have an adjustable timer. Unfortunately it was just a black box and I didn’t want to risk breaking it because I don’t own it. My next idea was to actually switch it with the normal light switch in the closet, but I didn’t know what the maintenance people would say to the landlord if they came in and noticed it.

Finally, there are the paranoid theories I keep thinking about. How do I know that this thing doesn’t have a hidden camera in it instead of just a motion sensor? This thing reminds me of HAL, a little bit too much. It’s just a switch with a light in it, but it still creeps me out sometimes.

I hate this stupid, evil light switch.

The Japanese seem to be lightyears ahead of everyone else on the technological front. It may not be so, tadalafil but it certainly appears that way when there are such evidences for everyone to see. Check out this video to see just what I mean.

I am taking a History class that has an online component and is taught in a computer lab with Internet access. The teacher lectures while everyone looks at myspace, checks their email and basically does anything to avoid actually learning. This can be distracting, but is bearable.

Enter Flash games.

Imagine the sound of a spacebar being hammered between ten and twenty times a second followed by hushed jubilation in the form of, “Yes!” and, “All right!” Next, picture this happening every thirty seconds for ten seconds at a time. Now picture this going on for five minutes with no obvious signs of stopping! Something had to be done.

I tried for three of these attempts to give him the crook eye, but he wasn’t looking in my direction. He was too busy concentrating on irritating me to notice me staring at him. By this point I noticed the student next to me shaking his head incredulously. Knowing that I wasn’t the only perterbed pupil in the classroom boosted my confidence. It was at the precise moment that I felt this surge of assertiveness that keyboard crusher happened to glance in my general direction. Without any conscious thought I let loose with a crook-eyed head shake with shoulders hunched and palms turned upward immediately joined by mouthing the words, “What are you doing?”

The student to my left that had once shared in my frustrated head-shaking immediately went stiff and almost magically removed himself from the situation. It was his reaction that started my paranoia. Had I overdone it? The kid in the row behind me didn’t look amused by my harsh reproof. He was sitting next to at least one good friend who had seemed to be enjoying his role as spectator until I ruined it for him. I began to feel ill. I only knew one other person in the class, and she was nowhere near me at the time, so I emailed her. I was hoping she might check it, see my dilemma and offer backup in case of emergency. She was too busy learning to find my plea for help.

The hammering of the keyboard had stopped, but the hammering in my head was just beginning. I thought I had met my objective, but I was still not able to concentrate and learn. I waited until class was over and pretended to be working on an assignment at the computer. I was fearing eye contact as I worried that that may act as a catalyst for the punks who saught my suffering. I waited five long minutes. I mustered the courage to chance a look back; they were gone.

I packed up my belongings and was on my way. I watched my back during the long walk across campus and to my car. I will see them again on Thursday. I only hope that they don’t remember me.

I am considering starting a petition requesting the removal of Flash plugins from all lab computers.

I was looking at “Weird Al” Yankovic’s album “Poodle Hat” on Amazon.com today and couldn’t help but be reminded of that old Sesame Street song “One of These Things is Not Like the Others.” This is what it said:

Customers who bought titles by Weird Al Yankovic also bought titles by these artists:

• Dr. Demento
• Rammstein
• Adam Sandler
• Bob Rivers
• Allan Sherman

I find it increasingly preposterous that the BIOS updates I want to install are distributed in the form of executables with floppy disc images buried within them. I really would find it a lot more useful if they would allow you to download just the image files. Then I’d be able to use dd on *NIX machines to write floppies.

Of course, this is all rather interesting considering that the laptop I wish to flash to BIOS on doesn’t even have a floppy drive, but that’s another point altogether.

Dasher is an amazing technology for inputting text in the absence of a keyboard interface. When I saw this for the first time it just blew me away. From their website:

Dasher is a zooming interface. You point where you want to go, and the display zooms in wherever you point. The world into which you are zooming is painted with letters, so that any point you zoom in on corresponds to a piece of text. The more you zoom in, the longer the piece of text you have written. You choose what you write by choosing where to zoom.

Dasher is being developed by the Inference Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge.

This really has to be tried to be understood well. I believe an interface very similar to this will be finding its way onto handheld devices in the very near future. It’s currently in active development for handheld devices and there are videos of Dasher being demonstrated on an iPaq.

As if this functionality weren’t enough, the team is also working to develop mechanisms for people with disabilities to reach high-speed and high-accuracy levels by innovating multiple interfaces to control Dasher including tracking eye-movements, using large buttons, and breathing as an input method.

Well, I’ve arrived in Las Vegas without critical incident. I happen to have realized my mind is becoming feeble. I don’t know if it was because I was tired or just excited to be leaving, but I have discovered that I can’t remember anything anymore.

Krissy and I stayed the night in Barstow. I learned quickly that a “data port” is a fancy name for a telephone jack in the wall. My laptop’s modem doesn’t yet have Linux drivers released for it so that precluded anything useful from happening that night. I popped in my wireless card and fired up kismet to look for nearby access points; there were none. I was sitting on the bed and wanted to conserve energy, so I popped out the wireless card and layed it on the bed. I later moved the laptop to the desk.

Later that night Krissy realized we had left nearly all of our dress clothes for church back home. I was less than pleased that I had hidden them where we would easily forget them, but quickly realized everything would nonetheless be okay. And everything was okay. We visited some outet stores in Barstow that happened to have some really smoking deals on exactly what we needed. We then continued on our merry way to Las Vegas.

My Grandparents’ new place is huge compared to the place I grew up in. There are really high ceilings and I think they’re really happy with it. I wanted to post to this blog so I proceeded to set up the wireless router I had brought with me so I could get on the Internet in the living room of the house. Then I realized the wireless card was not in the laptop where I almost always keep in, even in transit. I frantically scoured my backpack and my pockets. I ran out to the car fearing the worst. Krissy hadn’t seen it, and I knew all along where it was: blending into the colorfully cheap Motel 6 bedspread in Barstow. We had two beds in our room because it costs the same as having only one and at the same time gives you a larger room.

So I’ve already wasted nearly $80 replacing clothing I already had and now I’ll have to fork over another $30 to replace the wireless card I so deftly left for a confused cleaning lady to toss in the trash or give to her manager.

This has been the best vacation ever!