Clayton's Weblog

Paul’s first 3d movie

Clayton — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:05:09 +0000

I took Paul to see Journey to the Center of the Earth this afternoon. I had forgotten it was in 3d until we were walking in and they handed us polarized 3d glasses. He seemed to really enjoy it, although I didn’t notice until the credits that he was dodging things coming out of the screen

Hiveminder SSB

Clayton — Sun, 18 May 2008 12:57:30 +0000

I used Fluid to put together a site specific browser for Hiveminder, but the favicon scaled up was really ugly. I hit Jesse up, and he sent me a SVG version of their logos, and I converted the Hiveminder bee to a high resolution PNG. I promised him I’d post it, so here it is.

It would be nice to use the Fluid javascript hooks to display the number of outstanding tasks, but I’m not sure if there is an easy way to get that information out of Hiveminder. Let me know if you try this and have any problems. I’ve not distributed anything as a DMG before, so it’s entirely possible I did something wrong.

You can download the DMG here.

And if you haven’t checked out Hiveminder before, you should!

Technorati Tags: gtd, hiveminder

Flat tires

Clayton — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:17:53 +0000

The odd thing is that the tire didn’t actually lose pressure after I ran over this. I only noticed because of the noise of it hitting the fender each time it went around. This was a brand new tube too, and the first front flat I’ve had on this bike in a year. I patched it, but looks like the patch isn’t holding. The tire was only at 20ish PSI this morning, and was soft again when I went to ride home today.

Technorati Tags: cycling

I think Plaxo thinks they’re funny

Clayton — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:44:24 +0000

So I don’t use full screen Expose on my Mac very often, but I was looking for my Time Machine progress bar, and found this:

At first, I thought that the “Trust me…it’s super legit” was some value in the certificate, but it’s not. The cert is apparently from the blue socket wifi gateway we have here from work. I was puzzled as to where this came from, until I realized the icon here must be from the application, and that the icon over the lock is almost certainly the Plaxo icon. I’m sure someone thinks they’re “super funny”, but this is pretty lame, and likely to freak out anyone that sees it at first glance.

I’m guessing some developer at Plaxo never imagined that their Mac client would get back an invalid certificate when making a request to the Plaxo servers, but again, this is pretty lame. I’m guessing this is also a Cocoa dialog (or OS level dialog). If so, this is pretty lame on Apple’s part to not force the application name into the dialog somewhere.

Here is a screenshot of the details view. Click on it for a full resolution version.

Technorati Tags: plaxo, security

Things you don’t expect to see in traffic: Unicycles

Clayton — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:09:10 +0000

I was driving home on Wednesday and pulled up to the head of the line at the corner of Route 7100 and Foxmill Road near Herndon. As I’m sitting there, I see this guy filter forward through traffic, and dismount off of his unicycle:

I was a little surprised to say the least. However, I wasn’t completely shocked, as I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this same guy commuting on the bike path on 7100 once before, in even weirder circumstances. I was looking forward to seeing him mount up, and ride across, but unfortunately (for me), he just walked the unicycle across. I’m guessing that’s probably a lot safer, but unfortunately I didn’t really get to see him riding.

Unfortunately the quality of the picture is pretty bad, but you can click the photo to see the higher resolution version at Flickr. I pulled my formerly trusty Canon S400 out of my bag, but it appears that the sensor has bitten the bullet. Well, I’m not positive, but I do know that all the pictures on the LCD show up purplish, and really wavy/fuzzy.

I need to decide now whether or not I should buy another Digital Elph, or wait until the 3G iPhone comes out, and just use the camera that is on that. I’m thinking I’d like a separate camera, since on multi-day bike trips it would be a lot easier to keep a camera charged than a phone

Technorati Tags: cycling

Geeky License Plates

Clayton — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:20:11 +0000

When I see license plates like this, I always wonder if they were thinking of the same acronym I am.

Keen Cycling Sandals

Clayton — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:34:31 +0000

I’m a big fan of the Shimano bike sandals, and I’ve been wanting to get a pair of normal Keen sandals for a while. So I was pretty pleased when someone on the PPTC mailing list mentioned this morning that Keen is now making a bike sandal:

REI is selling them for $115.

Update: I picked up a pair of these, but haven’t had a chance to mount cleats on them yet. Once it’s a bit warmer in the morning I’ll start using them for my commute and hope to post a review.

Technorati Tags: cycling, keen, sandals

In Verizon Land 40% = 100%

Clayton — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:34:34 +0000

So, I checked my FIOS order status late Friday night, and it was around 80%. I also checked the “Reschedule Installation” option, and surprise they had a slot open for today, 8am to 5pm. I spent a few hours cleaning out the basement Saturday, and then rescheduled. I sat around all day playing Lost Odyssey and finally around 5:10, I called Verizon to find out if the guy was going to show up. As you’d expect he showed up while I was sitting on hold.

The whole install took about an hour or so. After he was done I hooked my laptop up to the Actiontec router they give up, and got 15mb symmetric on Visualware’s speed test. Then the installer said I had to install some software on my PC, or else they would cut me off in 30 days. I’m not sure if that’s just bullshit they tell the installers or not, but I tried installing it on my Mac, and it never wanted to finish the install, so he said I could install it any time in the next 30 days and it would be fine. That was about it, and he headed out.

One thing I knew I wanted to do was figure out how to put the Actiontec router into bridging mode. I’d read already that they suffer from a really small NAT table, and when they run out of entries (1k max), you just can’t make any more connections for 3 minutes. I found a guide on dslreports, and screwed around with the Actiontec for about an hour, and finally got it put into bridging mode.

Seems to be working pretty well at this point. I downloaded some stuff from news and get about 1.7 to 1.8mb/sec downloading. One problem I did run into is that the version of SABnzbd I was using was old, and was chewing up about 1.5gb of virtual memory on a box with only 768mb of RAM. Turns out someone else picked up development of it, and turned it into SABnzbd+. Works really well and out of the box never went over 40mb of memory used.

So while that’s downloading, I’m installing the Verizon software in a Parallels VM. After the install finishes I’ll just roll the VM back to the snapshot I made before, and not have to worry about what crap it installed.

As far as the title goes, after I got all the routing worked out, I went to check my order status, and this is what I found:

Technorati Tags: fios, mac

FIOS order status, Part 2

Clayton — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 22:01:51 +0000

So my order status has moved to 59%. I’m not real sure how this is supposed to work. Perhaps it is keyed to the time left, or maybe the number of customers waiting for install?

Technorati Tags: fios

My gift to Steve Jobs…

Clayton — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 04:36:20 +0000

I have a simple suggestion: put a single mouse button on your laptops but put two switches under it, one on each side. Have the OS ship configured to treat both sides as the same. Give me the option to tell the OS to treat each side of the single mouse button as left and right mouse button.

PS: I’d rather have dedicated page up/page down keys than a two enter keys and a dedicated eject key.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac