On CNN.com a story titled “Gates: Vista all about the Wow” had running right next to it the video for the Apple Get A Mac “Surgery” ad.

I love it. (more…)

Gates Proclaims Internet to Revolutionize TV in 5 Years.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs yawns and says “So last MacWorld“

Found in the manual for the new Airport Extreme (of which I am anxiously awaiting) is this tidbit which might help us iChat users out there:

You can set up NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP). NAT-PMP is an Internet Engineering Task Force Internet Draft, an alternative to the more common Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol implemented in many network address translation (NAT) routers. NAT-PMP allows a computer in a private network (behind a NAT router) to automatically configure the router to allow parties outside the private network to contact this computer.

Included in the protocol is a method for retrieving the public IP address of a NAT gateway, allowing a client to make this public IP address and port number known to peers that may wish to communicate with it. This protocol is implemented in current Apple products, including Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express networking products, and Bonjour for Windows.

This could prove very interesting indeed.

Nintendo release the Wii News Channel today and I must say – it rocks!

I won’t be using the Wii News Channel to get my news, but as a tool to teach children geography and what is going on in their world, this is fantastic.

First off, the news channels presents news like any other RSS aggregator. You get a list of categories, Sports, International, etc. Selecting one of those gets you a list of articles. Nothing new here.

However, little Apple-esque touches are apparent. The letters of the text fly into position, vs just a straight cut to the text. Pressing +- zooms the text in and out, with the same letter to position animation. Very slick.

Then you notice on the right its showing a map with the city of the news story blinking. If you click on the map, it zooms out to a world globe, with icons for every article in the database! They pile up based on locale, and as you zoom out from Earth, the areas congregate into larger piles, named “Tokyo Area”

Using the Wiimote, you can rotate and tilt the globe, noticing some news from Beijing. Click on the news icon, or press + to zoom in. You’ll either get the article, or a list of articles if there were more than one in the pile.

Wiimoting to the bottom of the screen pops up controls, such as Back, and with these simple controls you can navigate the entire planet looking for news.

A very fascinating application and best of all, Nintendo has released it for free.

The text is very clean with component cables and by using +- you can zoom in making the text very large and easy to read.

Gotta love Nintendo.

My job has been hectic for over a year, with schedules missed, money tight, etc. Things are coming to a head, one way or the other, but the work remains interesting and exciting.

Today, I took a list of must-have fixes and got my two done. Not only that, but in the process, sped movie playback up 70% by eliminating a lot of extra processing and also fixing some glaring bugs.

It is interesting how projects go from cobbled up demos to real code – For me over the last year, I’ve learned that documenting your intentions – What you mean to do, verus relying on the code to speak for itself is essential. The code lies far too often – Either because of a bug, or a rushed demo, etc. Self documenting code forces the engineer reading the code to infer what you meant, and this often leads to even more headaches and time lost.

So I’m going to start documenting my code much more. I was thinking – Wouldn’t it be nice if we had line-by-line comment source control? meaning, you could comment a line of code, and have it disappear. These comments would follow the code through cut/paste, etc, and could be shown via tooltip or some other UI.

I have no idea how to implement this in a text based world, but it sure is intriguing to me. Often engineers say they hate reading through the comments, but if you could comment, have it disappear but always refer to it later, I think we’d end up with much better code.

As for me, having my movies on thumbnails code I wrote in June but could not use until my movie rework was done in December just work was quite satisfying. And now that movies play across pages and while resizing is a really nice end to my day.

While it sucks eating soup and left overs, I can tell you that I love how quiet my neighborhood is. Not a peep outside, no road noise, nothing. Its amazing how noisy the city is with just background noise – And I live in the burbs!

I’m staying in – Watching the video of all of the cars getting crunched, no thank you.

I woke up to over 2 inches of snow. I guess I won’t be going to the chiropractor today, what a mess, but a beautiful mess!

Pictures

Picked up the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft tonight. Pre-ordered at 7pm, bought at midnight.

There were about 300 people wrapped around the mini-mall that Gamestop is in from 11pm on. It was 29 degrees and Crocs are very cold, even in socks. My toes are sicles

Am now installing the four CDs. I’ve already entered my code.

I hear people on the east coast are already 61. They were smart and had 25 quests ready to turn in for experience.

I think you should be able to lay your middle finger vertically on the iPhone’s screen to reboot it.

rofl

Charles and Janet returned from MacWorld and as a thanks for taxi servies they got me this:

USB 2.0 drive adaptor

How cool is that? I really appreciate it and it works great! My external laptop drives enclosure is being repaired so I had not been able to backup to it for a couple of weeks. I popped this cable onto the end of the bare drive, set it on the desk, plugged into USB and I’m backing up!

A very, very handy utility any geek should have in their arsenal.

Thank you very much!

Elizabeth is getting FIOS next week! Her apartment complex has opted in and every unit is getting installed, whether the individual renter pays for it or not. Every unit gets a ONT and UPS.

Awesome!

haha my Congressman is funny. Click more for video. (more…)

So I was at Fred Myers buying Madden, two gamer geeks come up “Do you have any wiis?” “no” “Did you get any thurs?” “No, but we have 4 ps3s, nobody wants those” “We don’t want a damn ps3, we want a wii”

I thought I had posted these, but I guess not!

So Aperture is happily importing my iPhoto library in the background. I’ll mess with it next week, after this milestone release, but now I can start in earnest with the export SDK on BHE.

The Airport Extreme will be here in February or March sometime. All of you PMUG members be sure to take advantage of your discount at the Beaverton Mac Store!

I have insurance through Allstate. A month ago I used their website to look at my account information and they had to snail mail me a PAK (Personal Authorization Key) for security purposes. Thats fine.

I get the PAK but due to holidays, etc I don’t use it. Yesterday I get an email from Allstate reminding me that they had sent me my PAK, and in the email were two links, both ending in the domain “rsc01.net”

Ok, this is fishy I thought. So I used their website (going there manually) to complain about this.

Lastly, I get an email followup whose links go to rsc01.net, and you can be damned sure my phising plugin for the Mac caught this. Even the “Email us” link is to that domain, and not allstate.com.

Allstate.com’s response:

Please be advised we outsource our email – that is why your email is from rsc01. Allstate does not sell any sort of email address – rsc01 is a trusted source.

And my response:

John I understand this, but you are missing the point. Any customer would be a fool to use those links because the customer has no way to know it is a trusted source.

In this day and age of identity theft it is with sever lack of judgement that Allstate send out emails with some odd domain in the content. At the very least, there should be an allstate.com email address that the outsourcers access, or something.

Please reconsider this policy. It is in very poor judgement to train customers, especially the elderly, that it is ok to click a link from a unknown source.

Blast from the past – Found P-Nuttles at the store today. I think I used to sell these as a kid for school trips, etc. Its been decades.

I’ve been trying to learn regular expressions for years, but never had a good use for them, because the tools that used them were so obscure. Now with TextMate, I have plenty of uses.

In the blogging bundle, the preferences format was:

Blog Name http://www.blogurl.com/

The regular expression for parsing that was:

^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\.+)

I’ll break this down, mainly as an exercise for myself (talking helps understanding) and others can chime in. I’ll bold what I am commenting on.

• ^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) – Start at beginning of the line.
• ^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) – Grab at least one character, reluctantly, which means pay attention to the following patterns
• ^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) – Set a variable $1 to whatever is found inside the parenthesis
• ^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) – Find any breaking space (space, tab), one or more of them. 0 and the pattern fails
• ^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) – followed by http
• ^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) – followed by an optional s (the ? means 0 or 1 times)
• ^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) – followed by a colon
• ^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) – followed by a / (/ is a special char, so we need to escape it, with \)
• ^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/.+) – followed by a second /
• ^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\.+) – followed any any characters, at least one of them

Whew! That is a lot of stuff. Ok, but I wanted to add an optional timeout value, spaces or tabs followed by numbers. Here is what I came up with:

/^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/

• /^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/ – Here, I changed the .+, which was overly aggressive, to \S+, which means match any non-space characters, one or more
• /^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/ – followed by white space, 0 or more. Has to be 0 or more, or a line without a timeout would fail
• /^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/ – followed by one or more digits
• /^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/ – capture those into a third variable
• /^(.+?)\s+(https?:\/\/\S+)\s*(\d+)?/ – Specify that we can have either 0 or 1 of the digit patterns

Thats it. Now both of the following lines are valid blog entry lines:

Blog Name http://www.blogurl.com/

Blog Name http://www.blogurl.com/ 60

Thanks to Digi on #mac for the assistance.

I cancelled my order for AppleTV and Airport Extreme .n. I’ll pick up an AE at The Mac Store when they are in (am going to preorder today) and with my 1080i TV, I just can’t see the 720p of AppleTV working well with my cruddy scaler.

So I’ll pick up Aperture instead and get to work on an Aperture compatible BetterHTMLExport.

If you use Parallels and notice your machine horribly slow, you might want to try changing Parallels virtual memory cache policy. Change it to optimize for Mac OS X and see how things behave: