Monday, March 31. 2008
FIRST Overdrive Robotics Competition
| Thanks to my coworker, I heard about the First Robotics competition that my nephew and I took in this past weekend. Both of us were very impressed. For each match, there was Red Alliance and the Blue Alliance, which has three teams in each alliance. The object was to score as many points as possible during the match time. (Here is a video that details the scoring). You had to admire the ingenuity of some of the robots and there was definitely a good crowd on hand with a lot of enthusiasm. The touring of the pits (where the robots were worked on in between races) and being able to talk to some of the students was also very interesting. Each team (usually consisting of a fair number of members {some teams had up to 35}) had six weeks to build their robot and had to stay under 120 lbs. Here are some of the photos that I took of the competition (please excuse the quality  ) and here is the final results of the competition. |  |
TV Show: Big Bang Theory
One of my coworkers tipped my off to yet another awesome TV show: The Big Bang Theory. One of my favorite lines so far is by Leonard (setup: Penny's ex-super-macho boyfriend sees Leonard {who is dressed up as Frodo} kissing Penny during a Halloween party):Yeah, you saw what you saw. That's how we roll in the Shire. Another one of the priceless scenes is where Penny is helping Leonard pick out a suit to wear for a conference that he is presenting a paper at. The funny part of it is I can easily imagine my sister and niece playing the role of Penny and me playing the role of Leonard. Wikipedia (of course) has a nice overview of the show (far better than I could give ), as well as an episode listing.(Of course, here is the official CBS page for the show as well). (Minor Note: Interesting article by a physicist on some fellow physicists reaction to the show and why such critisicm might be off the unwarranted. |  |
Sunday, March 30. 2008
Dith Pran Dies
| Sadly, Dith Pran, one of the more famous survivors of Cambodia's notorious Killing Fields, has passed away. His story was told in the 1984 movie "The Killing Fields", which won three Oscars (sadly, Haing S. Ngor, who played Dith Pran in the movie, was killed in 1996 during a robbery). Dith was also instrumental in setting up the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Musuem to help raise awareness for the Cambodia survivor's plight. |  |
Saturday, March 29. 2008
Skillet Concert
| Took in the Skillet concert last night (Thousand Foot Krutch also performed as well as Decyfer Down) at the Club 3 Degrees. This was the first time that I had seen any of the groups in concert (I actually ended up missing Decyfer Down due to parking difficulties, but my friend told me that I didn't miss too much ). Thousand Foot Krutch was the next performer (after Decyfer Down) up and they performed a good set (nearly all of my favorite songs made it onto their song play list ). I especially liked the rendition of "What Do We Know?" with the lead singer walking through the audience while singing.Skillet then took that stage and put on a highly energized 90 minute set (which might have been even longer if Club 3 Degrees didn't have to close the doors at 11:00 pm due to the number of under-18 people in the crowd). I have never seen Skillet in concert before, but it was very obvious that they had been performing together for awhile - the band played very tightly together and all of the musicians definitely had great stage presence (the spinning around of various instruments certainly didn't hurt that impression ).All in all, a good concert. Reasonable ticket prices (since tickets didn't go through Ticketmaster, I could avoid the outrageous additional fees ), good sound, nice venue (they had the air on, so the place didn't turn into a furnace, especially since the concert was sold out  ). |  |
Friday, March 28. 2008
Adobe Photoshop Express Beta Released
| Adobe has released a beta version of their Adobe Photoshop Express, an web-based image editing tool. It is being touted as a striped down version of Photoshop, aimed at users who only need to do basic editing of images (therefore there are no layers for example). (Note: For those Firefox users, I have been having issues {on MacOSX only it seems - seems to work fine on WindowsXP} getting the sign-in page (both for new members and existing members) to render properly on both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 beta - all that is displayed is a blank page - fortunately, the page renders just fine in Safari ).You have to upload the photos to the site (and there has been some discussion about copyright issues over photos uploaded). Once that is done, you have the standard photo editing options which are broken into through categories: Basics (which includes: Crop, Rotate, Red-Eye, Touchup, Saturation), Tuning (which includes: White Balance, Highlight, FillLight, etc), and Effects (which includes: PopColor, Hue, Black/White, Tint, etc). Looks interesting although I definite want to put it more thorugh the paces. |  |
Apple Airport Update
| Apple has released an update today for Tiger (10.4.x) to improve the reliability of Airport connections and is recommended for all users with Intel-based Macs equipped with Tiger. I have this installed, so we'll see if there is any change in my wireless reliability. An additional update has been released for the newer (early 2008) Mac Pros to bring the firmware level up to 1.3. According to MacNN: Details are sparse for the Mac Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.3, simply stating that it resolves several stability issues and updates the BootROM version to MP31.006C.B05. Firmware updates require uninterrupted installation, so users are urged to pay special attention to the installation instructions. |  |
Thursday, March 27. 2008
iPhone SDK Beta 2 Released
| iPhone SDK beta 2 has been released (although good luck in getting it right now since the Apple download site is getting hammered currently). |  |
Flush DNS Cache - Mac OSX Style...
| It is easy on the Mac OSX system to flush the DNS cache (especially if your ISP has a flaky DNS server ). In a terminal window, do the following as a superuser (depending on which OS you are on):
• Leopard (10.5.x): dscacheutil -flushcache |  |
Wednesday, March 26. 2008
Firefox 2.0.0.13 Released
| Firefox 2.0.0.13 has been released, mainly containing security fixes. Here are the release notes for the interested. (Note: For all you Mac users who have been using Beatnik's optimized builds, there is now a 2.0.0.12 version available. I have used these builds in the past with great success (I am currently beta testing the Firefox 3 beta builds at the current moment however. |  |
Monday, March 24. 2008
A Moment of Silence Please.....
After 16 years of faithful service (and never once leaving me stranded), my 1992 Mazda Protege went to Protege heaven.  The replacement is a blue 2005 Honda Civic LX SE (which also brings me the always joyful perk of car payments again - *groan*). Rest in peace, Protege. *sniff* |   |
Friday, March 21. 2008
Flash for the iPhone (at last?)
| The fine folks at Adobe must have read my previous blog post, because I just found out that Flash client is supposed to be made available for the iPhone (no mention on exactly when yet). |  |
Thursday, March 20. 2008
Fiddler: Version 2.X released
| For those users of the handy Fiddler HTTP Debugging proxy, version 2.x has been released. Also, if you are one of the Firefox users, there are several links (here and here) that give instructions on how to make Fiddler work with Firefox. |  |
Thursday, March 13. 2008
iCal (overlooked) Feature
| Thanks to one of my co-workers (again), I was made aware of yet another handy iCal feature, the ability to set event reminders in the future (i.e. if you are waiting for a call back after a doctor's appointment). In my case, I am making use of it to track my long awaited Blu-Ray DVDs from the Sony Free Blu-Ray DVD offer (and yes, I am like everyone else who has yet to receive their five free Blu-Ray DVDs ). (Note: for those of you wondering what the status of your rebate is, call this number: 1 (800) 598 - 9671). |  |
Wednesday, March 12. 2008
iPhone 2.0 Jailbroken Already?
| Some pictures are up are that are allegedly showing a jailbroken 2.0 iPhone. The 2.0 iPhone firmware is expected to debut in June along side the iTunes App Store. | |
Firefox 3 Beta 4 Released
| Firefox 3 Beta 4 has been released today. According to the release notes, it promises improvements to performance and memory usage. One of the bug fixes that I noticed immediately is that the cut-n-paste quirk with the Serendipity postings is corrected, however, I am bumping into some problems with some web pages rendering improperly from time to time as well as the disappearing Bookmarks Toolbar whenever the browser crashes (it returns once you restart the browser - BugID 319196). Update (3/20/08): Might have found another bug - looks like the Clear Caches option (under "Tools" menu option) doesn't actually clear out the browser cache (ended up having to do it manually, which then cleared up my page rendering issues ).Note: For those interested in following the progress of Firefox 3 Beta, here is the wiki page on the builds and the status on Firefox 3 Beta 5 test day. |  |
