September 2003 Archives

I bought a GameBoy Advance a while back. One of the things that sucked about using it was that without some kind of lighting rig you had to contort into weird positions or cram up against a lamp in order to see the game. Travelling and playing was not easy to do, and isn't that what a GameBoy is for?

With the new GameBoy SP, Nintendo included a light builtin to the LCD. What drove this change? A kit called the Afterburner released by Triton Labs. Having heard good things about Final Fantasy Advance Tactics, I wanted to give it a try but I didn't want to have to buy an SP when my Advance was perfectly fine. This was the perfect opportunity for me to check out the Afterburner kit as well.

I'm not going to go into the installation step by step, as the manual is good enough at that. I will say this, though: use the online manual with helpful hints as opposed to the one shipped with the kit. The hints are excellent. Some things I'd like to add: 1) the adhesive that holds the screen cover on can accidentally be transferred to other things that you don't want it on (like the interior portion of the screen cover) causing blemishes that are very apparent when the system is in use. Do your best to avoid touching the adhesive and if necessary, clean the adhesive off of the casing. You can always use double sided tape or glue (glue is a little permanent, though) to reattach the cover later. 2) When trimming the interior of the case to fit in the Afterburner, do this in a separate room. Also wash the casing and check your clothes for casing material when you're done. This will avoid getting casing bits inbetween the numerous screen pieces. I ended up with very little dust stuck to the various pieces but I got a lot of casing shrapnel in there. The little flecks show up very well on dark colored game screens.

Overall the installation went well, but I wish I'd been able to do a practice run first. It still turned out well; the kit is great and it enhances the system a lot. If you're technically inclined and done't want to replace your Advance, you should look into the Afterburner. It's affordable and definitely makes a great upgrade for your system.

Well hello there. It seems like it's been a while, eh? It hasn't really, but sometimes when you're really busy the time seems to slow right down, dragging out and turning days into millenia, weeks into aeons. I've been storing some things up for you. Let me share them with you now.

• Susan Mernit posts a portion of an article about the coming search wars between Micrsoft and Google. In a world of too much information, the search engine is our floation device. For a search junkie like me, this is interesting stuff.
• The WonderChicken is back, "I learned an important lesson about living in Korea today, and I learned it at the point of a gun, which may just make it stick for a while, for a change." It's a long, rambling post that goes here, wanders there, and finally rolls around back for the finish. Exactly the reason I started reading the old 'bottle to begin with. Welcome back man. Again. Hopefully this time we'll get to have your company for a little longer.
• James talks about the Sox, Kerry, and Dean. I have a few things to say: 1) The reason you love the Sox? Check this out and see if it rings true for you. It did for me. A quote: "Growing up in New England taught me that [baseball's] true value lies in the bonding it promotes among otherwise disparate fans, and in the connective tissue it builds, game after game, season after season, within the region it symbolizes and represents." 2)I went to a Dean rally yesterday. People had signs that said "Red Sox 03, Dean 04". I'm sorry, but what does your favorite team have to do with your ability to be President? Kerry should get back to work doing the job the MA people elected him for, at least for a few more months. As for Dean, my mind isn't made up about him yet. I'm glad I have over a year left to choose.
• Jason Kottke links to an article about pirate radio in London. It's interesting how the broadcasters use technology, including texting and voicemail on their cellphones. Great article.
• Joe Clark on weblogs and ISSN numbers. I mentioned that I wanted to apply for one, but as of yet have not filled out the application. Must move this higher on the to do list.
• ALA is getting a redesign. But you knew that. Right?

Over at SNE Bloggers I've been busy learning and implementing. Last night I started getting a handle on OPML so I could export our member list in a format that people could import into their favorite aggregator. I had some difficulty determining which portions of the spec different aggregators support. Today I tried to figure out the bookmark format. I ran into similar problems, but I'm relatively sure I found something that works there. I'm still not sure if my OPML file willl import.

After OPML, I got back to working on an aggregator. Using Mark Pilgrim's feedparser I got a python script up and running that grabbed RSS feeds and stored them in a mysql database. After thrity two rounds with my host I finally figured out how to rewrite my scripts so as to work with old versions of python. This after I wrote the whole thing in php first and then figured out that PHPs file handling routines were slow and kept timing out. I'm glad it's done, though.

I've always found that the satisfaction of learning something new and then getting it to work is worth all the trouble. I look forward to more development on the aggregator in the future. I won't look forward to the mess that is RSS, though.

• Over the last couple of days, Zeldman has made some excellent posts, reminding me why I thought he was so great to begin with. With superb writing, excellent insight, and great links if you haven't been stopping by regulary, go and read of it.
• An interesting piece summarizing "The Future of Database Research" as determined by some of the industry thinkers. Includes a link to a pdf report from the meeting. If you dig data, check it out.
• Some information regarding a variation on the scrambled letters meme. David was studying the progressions of memes through the blogosphere and released several variations of the quoted text so he could track them. Quite interesting.

James has a post about the way we read. I don't want to spoil the surprise, as at first it seems like some kind of code. Go check it out.

In a related vein, Ed hits on the blog versus traditional media issue, responding to a post by David Pinto. Both Ed and David are quality writers who I thoroughly enjoy. I'd love to see them receive awards for what they do. They'd deserve it. Whether you're published in the New York Times, on your blog, or on a poster on the corner of two busily trafficked streets shouldn't matter. What should matter is what you say and how you say it.

They're all just words.

Bill Simmons :: A Black Sunday for Boston sports"My Dad calls for the final word: 'Can I just say how much I was totally looking forward to today's games? I got up early, read all the papers ... now I feel like I want to hang myself. Just another day in the life of a Boston sports fan.'" Simmons was excellent during the Patriots' SuperBowl run, hopefully we'll get to see his stuff during some post season Red Sox action.

In the "You never know what you'll see on the T" department: Today I offered the female half of an older couple my seat. Across from her was a girl in her twenties. Sitting next to the woman was an Asian man who was sleeping. His head kept falling side to side, coming to rest on the shoulders of the women sitting by him. Each woman did their best to get farther and farther away, the husband of the woman who took my seat getting slightly annoyed. After ten minutes of this, the girl and I looked at each other and started to laugh. The next thing I know, the Asian man's head falls backwards and he snaps awake, aparently having hurt himself slightly. After a quick self massage, he was back to bouncing off the women's shoulders, at one point completely resting his head on the woman to his left. "He must have had a rough night," I mouthed to the girl as we both snickered under our breath.

It happened that she and I got off at the same stop. As we left the train she said "I bet you're glad you didn't sit there."

"You never know what you'll see on the T," I replied. No sooner had I said this than the kid in front of her stepped out of his shoe (which flew backwards down the stairs), fell on his face, turned and bumped into her while taking his shoe from the person who caught it, and went stumbling up the steps, tripping over his extra long pants and his other untied shoe. "Your shoe lace, your shoe lace!" someone yelled. I looked at the girl, she looked at me and we both laughed.

You never know what you'll see on the T.

Root Envy :: Out of Town "The other day a Delta jet sucked a goose into one of its engines and lost the engine and splattered goose guts all over the side of the jet. Now, that would have been the plane to be on! Not only landing on one wing but goose guts. I mean, how much cooler does air travel get?"

Caterina.net

Check out these links to online sketch books over at Caterine.net. In particular, this image from this set of images of men wrongly convicted of crimes and then freed from death row is extremely thought provoking (although not exactly a sketchbook).

sylloge: Water Under Ground

This post by Stuart over at sylloge has illustrations of the systems beneath New York City. The scale illustration at the National Geographic site is very interesting.

I came across a link to an article at a zine called GuluFuture about the new "Superworm" they think will storm the net on September 11th. Quite honestly, this may happen, however this article seems a little over the top to me. From the article:

Perhaps not. Maybe Sobig.F was delayed a month so that the imminent Sobig.G release would fall on the 11th September target date.

Therefore the 9/11 Sobig release date is a clear warning of a catastrophic attack on 9-11-'03. The author(s) are hinting of a calamity.

Way to jump to conclusions. Is all of this possible? Yes, I think it is. There are many vulnerable computers with many troublemakers, malcontents, and even terrorists. It doesn't seem to me, though, that this type of an attack would come from the type of groups responsible for 9-11. First of all, they use the internet to communicate, so destroying it wouldn't help them any. Secondly, more focused and terrifying attacks seem to be the modus operani. It wouldn't suprise me to find out they were specifically targeting Pentagon computers, but Microsoft? Terrorists going after Bill Gates is the stuff geek dreams are made of, not 9-11 v2.

Don't get me wrong, I think a super virus is possible, if not inevitable. Having it appear on Thursday, though, seems a little far-fetched to me.

Couple of odds and ends for you. Ryan sent me a favicon. Thanks man! Check out Ryan's site, it's pretty excellent. For starters, read this post.

In other news, Mozillazine has reached 5 years old. I've been reading the old lizard zine for probably close to five years, and it's been a great ride, from clunky milestones to usable browser, the guys there have been with Mozilla right along. Congratulations and keep up the good work!

My post about finding your voice and that of your blog has been received pretty well, leading to some new blogs showing up in the referrer log. I've added some of them to my daily reading list. Many of them have come from Linkpool. Check it out.

In other news, I wrote a few posts about the Red Sox for another blog I was going to start, and then had the hosting outage. In the meantime, those posts have gotten a decent amount of traffic. If you happen to be looking for more Red Sox posts, I hope to have a few in there soon. Keep your eye on the ball.

The redesign has also been well recieved. Thanks for the great feedback and comments from everyone who's written both in email and in the comments. I'll try to flesh out the templates and work in the suggestions and advice.