Wayne D's Blog

While browsing for a method to input Korean characters on a touch screen the other night I ran across Dasher. It a new method for information-efficient text entry. While not as fast as touch typing it is a m interesting alternative text entry method and also is really cool. It has a number of potential applications including text entry on non traditional keyboard based products and as a text entry method for the disabled. On the site there is an explanation of the technique along with a java applet where you can try it out. Before trying the applet I'd strongly recommend you read the How Dasher works section of the website. The Google video below is 54 minutes long and I thought I'd watch the first five minutes and ended up watching the whole thing. I challenge you to do the same and see if you can stop.

Yahoo Live refused to let me go live once again but after speaking to some other I realized that the service is suffering from the classic two place problem. Keep some information in two places and they will invariably get out of sync.The symtom here is that when you log into Yahoo Live everything works fine until you try to push the GO LIVE button, you can see the video from your camera in the preview but the GO LIVE button wouldn't activate. Looking at your status in the chat window show the bright green activated symbol. People report that your video screen in the chat screen is black, You can't broadcast your video because the client thinks you already are, You can't shut it off because you aren't broadcasting video.

The only way to get around this problem until the Yahoo Live team fixes this problem is to use a different Yahoo id. In some database deep in the bowels of Yahoo there is an entry that says you are broadcasting video. The last time this happened to me it was fixed when Yahoo took Yahoo Live offline for maintenance which probably had the side effect of clearing everyone's broadcasting flag. I'd report this to the Yahoo Live team but they haven't made it easy to leave them feedback. Of course they may already know about it, but who knows.

I don't know if it's blogging late at night or blogging on the eeepc but I have noticed that my posts are gettng published with more typos now then previously. I shall try to be more diligent in my copy editing in the future.

I managed to miss watching Guinea Pig on Monday night. I really must put together a Myth TV PVR soon. When I went to Discovery,ca to see if they offered the show in a streaming version I was delighted to find that even though that particular episode wasn't available they did offer flash video streaming of other episodes. Flash streaming video works great on Linux. For many years Linux users had to be satisfied with a not so good implementation of flash. Macromedia didn't release Flash 8 for Linux. That changed when Adobe decided to make simultaneous releases of Flash 9 on Windows and Linux. Now Linux users enjoy the same web experience that Windows users do.

Microsoft, seeing the success of Flash in the marketplace has decided to release Silverlight which is their version of Flash. They call it cross platform but to Microsoft that means Windows and Mac. Some hardy souls hve announced that they are going to do a Linux version of Silverlight, but how much help do you think they will get from Microsoft? For a more in depth discussion of why Silverlight is such a bad ideas see silverlight bags another one at the malocite blog.

I don't believe anything I read on the Internet and I blame that on the training I received as an undergrad. I was trained as a physicist and one of the few pieces of knowledge that has stuck with me is the scientific method, or at least my understanding of it. Create a hypothesis, design an experiment to test said hypothesis and then draw your conclusions. I remember doing a lab where the goal was to measure the speed of light using spinning mirrors and a laser. The point wasn't to measure the speed of light, the actual number was probably in most of my textbooks but was to help inculcate a healthy scepticism of what we read in books. This attitude has continued to this day.

Last week I challenged some people I work with to prove to me that Gimp was not as good as Photoshop. One person attempted to make the argument based on some things he had read on the internet. I was not impressed and told him so. I'm not competent to make an assessment because I am not familiar enough with what the requirements for this type of software is. What I was hoping for was for someone to try both of them and give me their studied opinion. A guy who's comments I read on the Internet has no credibility with me. I don't know what axes he has to grind or his biases. All he can offer me is directions on where to start my own evaluation. It's intellectual laziness to believe what you read and not to question the conclusions yourself.

If someday you run into me and get into what I consider a lively debate and you think is me being obnoxious and mean. don't blame me, blame my undergrad profs.

I didn't watch the Oscars tonight because I haven't seen any of the nominated movies. I think that the only movie I saw in a theatre in the past year was Beowulf. I guess that's why most of the movies made now are targetted at youngoer people. I have watched a few movies on DVD over the past year. There is one award show I watch every year and that's the Grammy's. New music is something that I do continue to buy. I'm not so interested in who wins the awards but I watch for the musical performances.

The TV writers strike seems to have also curtailed my TV watching and I really don't miss it that much. I think the writer's strike will be looked back on as the point where network TV became irrelevant. I have been watching a few TV shows like Big Love which is being shown on Global here in Ontario. There is also Mythbusters, Nova, Dirty Jobs and a few other non network shows. I will also be watching (or taping) the season premiere of Guinea Pig on Discovery. Their whole, "so shocking we are going to show it at 1 a.m." has completely sucked me in. I'm also still trying to determine if Yahoo Live will be the next big thing or an interesting flash in the pan. When you have more than one thousand people watching fifty to eighty people it appears to be more of a voyeuristic endevour than something more people will embrace as a communication medium.

I still love my eeepc, I'm writing this blog post on my lap right now as I watch Mythbusters. As long as I don't cut my nails too short I should be fine. One other TV show I watch Smash Lab, planes blowing over trailers and trains smashing into cars, what's not to like?