the life and times of endenizen » 2005 » October

On the classic cartoon Transformers, none of the robots ever turned into a bicycle because, well, that would have been lame.

Wired 13.11: START

Wired is always a good source for all things interesting and tech-related. After reading a few articles recently posted on their website, I came across one about making robots from old bike parts. By itself, the article didn’t provide too much insight into making actual “robots” but instead works of art that resemble robots and will never actually move. Disappointing as it was, the idea intrigued me as I’ve recently been looking for parts that could be used in robot construction. I even have a few bikes laying around at home that might work well for such a project…

I’m still not sure what to be for halloween. This won’t be such a problem if I go through with my current plans (none). I have the feeling, though, that somehow, I’ll get sucked into going to a halloween party and I’ll really want a good costume. Or any costume. Or even a good idea for a costume and some really great excuse why I couldn’t pull it off.

I was gonna go as Jermaine Dye but someone caught me while I was trying to steal his jersey.

I was gonna go as Eeyore but they didn’t have a costume my size.

I was gonna go as a tootsie roll but again, nothing my size…

Too bad my excuses aren’t even that great… But seriously people, make some costumes for adults. And make more than adult costumes for adults.

I want to be a frickin tootsie roll for halloween but I can’t cause the only size they have is TINY!

In other news: I’m not so excited about the White Sox winning the World Series but… the Astros losing? That’s cool. And I guess I don’t mind one Chicago team doing well every once in a while. The Cubs are still my home team though. By the way, I don’t like baseball.

I do like Star Trek though. I’m not a trekkie by any measure but I thoroughly enjoy the tales that Gene Roddenberry brings to the TV. I’ve been renting the DVDs with my Blockbuster membership online. I started this summer and I’m up to season 4 (The Next Generation) now. They just fought the Borg.. and WON! I’m so excited, cause the season just started… so … I mean I wouldn’t want them to die and just have one episode. That’d be a pretty lame season.

In conclusion, I think that the number one thing I would do if I could change anything would be, world peace.

Example: 1. Highlight a passage on a web page that you would like to blog about. 2. Right-click that selection and choose Blog This. 3. The blog editor opens with that selection already inserted. Not only that, the selection is properly formatted as a Blockquote and appropriate citation is included.

Flock

I heard about Flock a couple months back and since then I’ve eagerly anticipated the earliest release. I’ve always wanted a browser that integrated the social aspects of websites, blogs, and link sharing. Flock has released their developer preview and it’s got some support for these nifty things. Already included are integration with certain blogs (like WordPress) and Flickr. So far, while it’s extremely easy to set up access to the supported web services, there are a few quirks (as can be expected with any .5 developer release) that make it a little frustrating at this early stage. Editing text for your blog entry (which I’m of course doing right now) presents some problems with line breaks and certain shortcuts (Ctrl+V) not doing what they should. That said, I haven’t had a problem I couldn’t get around (in my limited evaluation of this browser). Of course, if this post goes into the Internet Black Hole…

Link - Wikiversity- Your Free University

For the sake of this entry, “Genuine knowledge” will be defined to mean any attainable knowledge that is respected and valid for use in the workforce, further education, or elsewhere. We’re currently in an age where this knowledge is prohibitively expensive. To make sure the knowledge we gain is valid, we must pay people a lot of money to share their 10-30 years of accredited research and study. How do we know that they’re giving us good information? Well, because we trust that the titles after their name were given because they have proven their usefulness in a given area. Mr. Smith could be anyone, a plumber, a student, we don’t know for sure because the title doesn’t convey enough information. Dr. Smith, PhD, however, tells a completely different story. Somebody, somewhere, (hopefully an accredited institution) claims that “Dr. Smith” has proven to have knowledge in some given area. In fact, he has so much knowledge that the institution (that we hope exists) has staked its reputation of producing knowledgeable people into the world on this one man. If he goes on to get a job and it’s discovered that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, that institution will be less respected.

Where does the reputation of an institution come from? Is it something that takes a very long time to build up? Can a new institution sprout up and instantly become well-known and respected if they produce just one class of knowledgeable graduates? What if this happened… soon.

In the future, degrees will be attained without ever leaving home. Everyone will have access to the sum of human knowledge and everyone will be able to contribute to further it. In this flat earth, there are no barriers to learn. In the future, knowledge will be free.

XuQa.com is the latest in a wave of online communities for college-types. Initially, it appears to have many things that other web “portals” are lacking. 5 gigs of space for pictures is certainly impressive. That is, if they can deliver. So far, I haven’t seen any sign of where the money comes from to support this site. It’s certainly not cheap. Everyone loves math though, so let’s do some math…

• 5 gigs of space for each user (assuming 5,000 megs instead of 5,120)
• 100,000 users (less than the actual number)
• 500,000 gigabytes, or 500 terabytes

At the risk of a horrible flaming, let’s just grossly underestimate and assume $3 for every 4gigs. That’s $75,000. Let that fact set in while we move on.

Here’s a brief snippet from the “About XuQa” section:

XuQa.com is the illegitimate child of a few zany ideas, two months of toiling in front of shitty half-assed PC’s, a lack of consensus on a name and lots and lots of bickering.

This isn’t a big deal though. Lots of projects start this way and end up being great. Problem is, it’s currently being supported by 4 students and I don’t see any mention of a way they are paying for the site. (remember, the storage alone would be a *minimum* of $75,000, assuming they actually have the capacity to support that many users, which I’m pretty sure they don’t)

On further inspection, the site wasn’t very thoroughly tested. Not by anyone outside the group anyway. To add someone as a “crush” you only need to pass &cmd=crush to the end of the url when viewing their profile. So, to add the entire database to your crush list, you only need to do a simple loop and load that url in a popup (which I am currently doing - 861 crushes so far).

With that, I think XuQa has some potential, but it would need a lot more support. There’s some things that are interesting and new, and some things that hauntingly remind me of myspace, which I detest. If you’re a programmer yourself, go have some fun and hack what you can before they actually code it correctly.

PS. All in good fun, of course. XuQa Team, if you’re reading this, I commend you on the current system and wish you good luck in the future. I’ll probably get bored and stop hammering your server soon enough…