TevSpace

Why don't modern cars have more external sensors?

Sure, some minvans have backup sensors so it beeps if you're about to run over little Timmy, but it seems like sensor technology hasn't gone anywhere in a long time.



Why not a series of like 8 sensors arranged on the outside of the car, with a range of like 4 feet or so? I'm not sure the best sensor for the job, perhaps a laser tape measure type device, it just needs to return a reasonable directional distance to large objects.



This would give you a rough sensor sweep of the car's immediate surroundings.



You could sort of visualize it in a force-field style display.



If a car or other object triggered the sensor's proximity radius, the indicator would change color.



On the dash it would be a simple display, much like the door-open indicator on some cars.



This would not be a replacement for mirrors or anything, you would not rely solely on this indicator, but it would be an added safety mechanism to alert you to pay attention to that area, in case you didn't know there was a car there.

Another similar idea, but one that might be more distracting, would be a roof-mounted camera system that would provide a composite overhead view of your car and the immediate surroundings, so you could tell at a glance if there were a car in your blind spot.

Yesterday I sold some Apple stock I had purchased. It worked out well for me, I bought it when the economy was shaky and the stock market in shambles, it cost me $85 a share. Now, a year later, I sold it for $199 a share. So I made some money, not a huge sum, maybe $3K after taxes.

It got me thinking about the nature of money. After all, what had I done here? I had clicked a mouse a few times, waited a year, and clicked a mouse a few more times, resulting in almost doubling my money. It was very little effort, and a very abstracted process.

Now here's the thing - the amount I made was based on the amount I had initially. If I had millions, I would have made millions. It had nothing to do with skill or work, it was based entirely on what arbitrary amount of money I had to begin with. There is a sort of snowball effect that happens, the more money you have, the easier it is to make more money.

It reminded me of playing World of Warcraft three or so years ago. When you start playing in WoW, you have a low-level character. Tasks you do and enemies you defeat don't give you a lot of cash, so you earn copper and silver. For a low-level character, getting a gold piece is a big deal. I never played long enough or hard enough to build a high-level character, but built up to something like level 14 and ended up playing the auction house.

The auction house is essentially like an in-game eBay - you can put items you have found up for auction, set a price and an end time and then people can bid on them. I used a plug-in someone had written (legal in the game) which monitored the market, and tracked the going rate for each item. I would then look for items selling below market value, but them, and sell them for a competitive but profitable price.

Out in the wilderness, my character had to fight monsters and save up meager coins to buy slightly better weapons. At the auction house, a little buying and selling made easily more profit than fighting monsters. And the more money my character had, the easier it was to get more. There was a leveling-up effect to trading - at first I could only afford to buy and sell cheap items, but then finally had enough cash to buy and sell some more expensive items. Eventually I moved from selling things worth silver to things worth gold. Suddenly, the gold that was hard to come by in the wilderness was flowing to my character with relative ease.

I eventually stopped playing WoW, as it was eating up a lot of time. But it had been fun while it lasted. What it had done is made true for me an old adage, "the rich get richer".

Money these days is such an abstract concept - with direct deposit and debit cards, we often never even see it in physical form. What's interesting is that there is little difference conceptually between money in WoW and money in the real world. They are both abstract representations on a computer somewhere. The difference is that people have agreed that virtual dollars can be exchanged for goods and services, while virtual WoW gold cannot. Even that's not entirely true, black markets exist that sell WoW gold for dollars, allowing conversion of one virtual currency into another.

I think this is part of the mentality of the rich, being able to deal with money as an abstract, to treat the system as a game. Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle, not poor but not rich either. I can think of an investment as a game, but at the same time, I have a mortgage to pay every month, and food to buy.

People are always talking about some "get rich quick" scheme, but the sad truth of it is that most of the time, "get rich quick" schemes only work if you are already rich. Even if you can double your money, it doesn't amount to much if you only had a small amount of money in the first place. Meanwhile, someone who is rich can earn an 8% return on an investment and make more than a pile of poor people do in a year.

It's a disparity that's a side effect of the capitalist system as a whole. The thing is, poor that decry this system usually support it at some level, because they see themselves as someday achieving wealth and getting their "piece of the pie". It is often a complaint of envy, not of justice. They don't object that the rich exist, they object that they are not rich themselves.

I find the whole thing very interesting, and sad in some ways, but don't have any solutions to offer. Alternative systems like communism tend to fail for the same reasons, corruption and the rich using influence to get richer.

Anyway, just something I was thinking about the last day or so.

I Sell the Dead
8/7/2009
Grave robbers discover that selling the undead is very profitable.

How did I not hear of this? It looks Awesome!


District 9
8/14/2009
Aliens land in South Africa and become an oppressed minority.

Based on the short film Alive in Joburg by Neill Blomkamp, which was awesome. Should be good.


Inglourious Basterds
8/21/2009
An elite team is dropped into Germany to kill as many Nazis as possible.

Quentin Tarantino does WWII, so expect lots of swearing and blood and violence, and probably a good time. Also, yeah, it's misspelled - on purpose, apparently.


World's Greatest Dad
8/21/2009
A poetry teacher cannot relate to his son.

Actually looks pretty good, a dark comedy written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait.


9
9/9/09
Post-apocalyptic world where living toys try to fulfill a mission.

Looks awesome, I am so there!


The Invention of Lying
9/25/2009
In a world of only truth, one loser discovers the secret of lying.

Looks Ricky Gervais-y... kinda like Ghost Town, pretty good but not amazing. But worth a watch.


A Serious Man
10/2/2009
A man is overwhelmed by daily life.

Looks good, Cohen Bros doin' their thang.


Whip It
10/9/2009
A quiet, shy girl finds an outlet in roller derby.

Dunno about this one, but it stars Ellen Page and is directed by Drew Barrymore, so there's two reasons I wanna check it out.


Where the Wild Things Are
10/16/2009
A movie adaptation of the Maurice Sendak classic.

Looks great!


The Box
10/30/2009
Based on a Twilight Zone episode, a couple is given a box with a button in it, and told if they push the button, someone they have never met will die, and they will be given a million dollars.

I dunno... was a cool Twilight Zone episode, but dunno if this looks as well written. Might be good, though.

If anyone's curious, here's a look at the development tools I use, day-to-day.

I use a Mac, so these are Mac-based, but many are also available for Windows.



MAMP

Free all-in-one webserver package, instantly sets up Apache, MySQL and PHP. Great for developing locally without all the hassle of trying to build a server yourself.

Zend Studio (plugin for Eclipse)

Eclipse, in my opinion, is slow, bloated, and lacking in some basic features like soft text wrap. Why use it as my primary IDE, then? PHP debugging. Zend Studio (which used to be a nice stand-alone IDE, but is now just a plugin for Eclipse) has a set of tools for runtime PHP debugging which in my opinion are essential to PHP devlopment.

TextMate

Although I work on big projects in Zend Studio, when I just want to try something out, I'll often fire up TextMate. It's small, quick, and pretty full-featured. Some people I work with prefer BBEdit, which I'll admit has more features than TextMate, but TextMate feels cleaner and... I dunno, more *modern* to me.

Photoshop

For graphics and occasional mockups.

Navicat

For working with MySQL, I love, love, love Navicat! If you are currently using PHPMyAdmin, ditch it and switch to Navicat. You won't regret it. I've heard a couple people complain that Navicat's icons look too "Windows-y" - good god people, get over it. They look fine, and it's certainly a lot better-looking that PHPMyAdmin. If you're not sure, Navicat Lite is free and does most of what the full version does, try it out!

Omnigraffle

Good for whipping up quick page wireframes and site flow diagrams for requirements documentation. Believe me, that doesn't sound like much, but it's important and the clients love the clean diagrams produced with it.

StarTeam

If I had my druthers, we'd probably be using SVN or something more industry-standard, but it's what we use at work, and someone else maintains the server so I don't have to, which is reason enough to use it. I have no desire to become a sysadmin. Like Eclipse, the StarTeam client is also Java-based, meaning it's slow and bloated. Plus Borland dropped Mac support, so it takes some hacking to get it working on the Mac, though once it's set up it works fine. There might be better packages out there, but StarTeam gets the job done, and that's all I need out of a source control system.

Parallels with Windows XP
IE Collection

For IE testing. IE Collection is great, lets me run IE6, IE7 & IE8 side-by-side.


Firefox

Although I test in multiple browsers, Firefox has great plugins available that make it my favorite browser for web development. I tried Webkit for a while, but the better plugins for Firefox brought me back.

Firefox plugins:

- Download Statusbar

Better display of download status than the standard window on Firefox.

- Firebug

A super-useful suite of web development tools. Essential!

- Screengrab

Take a screenshot of the entire page, regardless of scrollbars, automatically.

- Web Developer

A handy collection of tools for web development. Essential!

- Zend Studio Toolbar

Hooks into Zend Studio, allowing PHP debugging with the click of a button.


There are other apps I use now and then, but these are the primary ones that I use every day.

"If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."
Thomas A. Edison, Encyclopaedia Britannica

"Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration."
Thomas A. Edison, Harper's Monthly, 1932


"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor."
Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931

The last one was a rough cut, this is a better version, cut down from over 6 minutes to under 3.

Hastings Cakes recipe (edited) from Tev Kaber on Vimeo.

I shot my first real video with the new camcorder this morning. I did a mini cooking show on how to make Hastings Cakes.

I shot it and edited it this morning before heading out to work, just before leaving I started it uploading.

It came out kind of long, 6 mins 16 seconds, I can probably get it down to 4 minutes by cutting out the washing and waiting to cook parts. But I think it came out OK for a first try.

Hastings Cakes Recipe from Tev Kaber on Vimeo.

I was riding home yesterday, Carl was driving, and we were listening to that iTunes Weekly Rewind podcast, which is just a few people talking about music and playing a variety of clips.

There were a few that sounded interesting, and I wanted to remember what they were.
My first instinct was to reach for my iPhone and write myself a note, however, I decided it would make a good experiment.

So there were 3 phrases that I wanted to remember, either band, album, or song names. The phrase would be enough to find out more with a Google search later.

The first phrase I converted into a visual mnemonic.
The second phrase I converted into a mixture of visual mnemonic and text.
The third phrase I left as text.

I forgot to try to remember them when I got home (metaforgetting?).

So today I remembered the experiment, and was trying to remember the three phrases.

The first was easy to remember. I visualized a clothing iron and a glass of wine. This is for a band called "Iron & Wine".

For the next phrase, I could remember the visual part of the mnemonic, but not the words. I had been visualizing one word, with a line drawn under it, and another word underneath. But I don't remember the words. It was something like "____ under ____" or "_____ below ____" the second blank mighta been a longish word.

The third phrase I didn't remember at all.

Clearly, visuals are extremely easy to remember when compared to words.

When a new programmer was hired to our team at work, I came up with a visual mnemonic for his name, and can now recall it easily. I pictured a guy with lots of keyboards and a camera, "John Tesh" and a "Konica". His name, therefore, is Shantesh Kanekar.

Reminds me of an example Derren Brown gave for how he does a card trick. He said he visualized a room, and in that room are 52 objects, each representing a specific card. When a card had been played, he would visualize putting a bright ribbon tag on that object. In this way, he would be able to remember which cards had been played, and which were still in the deck.

I guess to remember the missing two items from that podcast, I'll have to download it and listen to it again. I checked for show notes, knowing my memory would be jogged if I saw the missing phrases, but oddly they list the songs for every episode except that one.

Started using jQuery yesterday, just starting to get into it, but so far I'm liking it. It's a Javascript library that has a bunch of predefined functions and structures set up to make it quicker to write stuff. There's also a UI component to make it easy to do stuff like dialog boxes and such.

Nice to be able to write something quickly and have it work in all browsers.

Here's my first test, a simple box with a slide animation between 4 boxes of content when you click buttons.

For some reason it has a slight tearing happening during the animation in FireFox on Windows, but looks good on every other browser (even FireFox on Mac). It only does that for the 1/5 of a second during the transition animation, so I guess I can live with it.

I could do the same thing without the animation pretty easily with basic Javascript, but jQuery's animation makes it look that much slicker. I'm also starting to do some drag and drop tests with jQuery UI which I may use in a project at work.

Metaphysical ramblings...don't expect them to make any sense.

I was thinking today about the whole religion and afterlife thing. It started with me not being ready to present at a meeting, and that meeting being fortuitously delayed until tomorrow, giving me time to finish getting ready for it. Which made me think "you know, I am a strong believer in the adage 'It all works out in the end'..." Now of course there are instances where a situation or outcome is undesirable, but in that case, could it be a matter of perspective, that either the attitude was mismatched to the situation, or a misperception of scope.

In the short term, dropping an ice cream sundae on the ground does not seem to have worked out in the end, but expanding the scope, and viewing it holistically as part of a pattern of causality, perhaps it caused your food intake for the day to be healthier, or not eating the sundae put your schedule ahead by 5 minutes, which cause you to get home in time to catch the cat about to knock something off a shelf, thereby averting a disaster. Everything's more fun with causality thought experiments, after all (bringing to mind another fun adage, "This is the best of all possible worlds").

Now, of course, general circumstance may seem so overwhelmingly negative and perhaps lead to death. Which made me think "I can see the appeal of religion, for it lets you artificially expand scope beyond the point of death, and say that things worked out, even when it would be extremely difficult to argue that ordinarily." Now, granted, you can expand scope beyond your life simply by switching focus to a new generation of offspring, or to humanity as a whole, but being a very self-centered sort of person, I'm choosing to focus on the individual here.

Of course, I have no such handy religious views myself, and here is why: I believe that which is termed "an individual" is at best a gestalt organism. Let me explain what I mean by that.

For the sake of argument, let's take as a given that each individual has a "soul" which exists beyond the physical plane and persists after death. Yay, you're immortal!

Well, not so fast. Your "soul" may be immortal, but is that "you"? I say no. Take, for instance, brain chemistry. Get whacked on the head wrong or fed the wrong chemicals, and your personality can radically shift, to the point where it can be argued you are no longer the same person. We are saying the soul is beyond the physical plane, so those chemicals aren't affecting your soul. So what you perceive as "you" is a gestalt, then, of the soul and the physical meat that is your body. Separate the soul from the body, and you no longer have the same gestalt as before.

So even if your soul is immortal, without the body, it's no longer "you". At best it is an aspect of "you" but it's no longer the same perspective, same chemical-engine of emotion and thought, or optical- and auditory-based perception. It's not the same person. So even if your soul is immortal, when you die, that's it, "you" are dead. That particular combination of flesh and soul is no longer.

And through all of this, the presupposition granted at the beginning is that there is an invisible immortal soul - but if that's not true, if "you" are in fact just the byproduct of a lot of neurons dancing around in your meat brain, then when that shuts off "you" are also dead.

Now of course there are alternate ways around this - nonlinear time, branching universes, quantum interactions and the interconnectedness of all things - but for all practical purposes, dead is dead.

None of which, strangely, deters me from still believing that Everything Works Out In The End. Which I guess is the nature of belief, getting a fundamental feeling of "rightness" from a concept despite any possible logical arguments against it.

The last couple days I've discovered how to put comics and manga on my ebook reader.

There are not a lot of sources for legal comics and manga (the Sony eBook store has a handful of titles, mostly just a few that came out at the launch of the store and hasn't been updated since). However, there are lots of sources for technically illegal (scans of books) and quasi-legal (fan english translations of scanned japanese books, out-of-print comics whose publishers are no longer in business) sources of comics and manga.

To be honest, I'd be willing to (and have) purchase legal copies, but most publishers are unwilling to provide comics in digital form, or do so in a restrictive form, like limiting viewing to special software on a computer only. So they simply aren't interested in providing digital content.

Thankfully, there are lots of comics fans out there scanning and posting. A few searches on Google should yield you a wealth of golden-age comics and manga titles.

To put manga and comics on the Sony PRS-505:

1. Download .zip of a manga book (or create a zip of sequentially named .jpgs)
2. rename the .zip to .cbz
3. Drag the .cbz file into Calibre (free, cross-platform app: http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/download).
4. Click "Convert" in Calibre to convert it to an .lrf file. Leave all the Calibre settings at default except check "Keep Aspect Ratio" otherwise it will be stretched to fill the screen.
4. Copy the .lrf file onto your reader or onto an SD card or memory stick and put that in your reader.
5. enjoy!


Caveat:
In some cases MacOS creates metadata files that may trip up Calibre. To remove metadata files, copy the files in the command line like this:

cp -X /path/to/original/folder/* /path/to/cleanup/folder

The -X switch will prevent extended attributes from being copied.

More detailed info:
Metadata on OSX is stored in hidden files that start with ._ so if you download an image from a webbrowser called "page_01.jpg", an invisible file called "._page_01.jpg" will also be created, which may contain info like the fact the image was downloaded from the internet, and the URL it came from. This is how OSX knows to warn you the first time you try to run an application downloaded from the internet.

A Cheez-it promo for the new Star Trek movie.
Reminds me of a Java applet for doing a 3D animated head - from like 10 years ago.

A promo for the new Terminator movie has a little flash-based photo manipulator. Not bad, but could have been better.
terminateyourself.com/

Still not as cool as the Simpsonizer.
simpsonizeme.com/

I've been playing with making chocolate things recently... I've made chocolate-covered mint oreos, chocolate Lego bricks with a graham cracker and peanut butter center, and most recently, I got a Space Invaders mold and made Space Invaders chocolate:



Each one has an espresso bean in the center.

An examination of ASCII chars

A bit of background: the extended ASCII chars 145-148 were meant as control characters. However, Microsoft instead used them for some custom characters, namely "curly" quotes. Apple stuck with the original charset definitions, meaning that curly quotes from Word sometimes still show up as broken on MacOS. Although oddly, the entities for the same char (like “) work - apparently functioning as aliases to the "correct" upper-ASCII characters (like “).

My question is, why doesn't this same remapping happen with the literal character? Isn't it worth the sacrifice of some unused control characters to allow the user to see quotes as the copy editor intended them? Why punish the user because someone else used char 147 instead of 8220?

Also, if Microsoft hadn't used those slots for their own stuff, and left it alone, then we would have those standard ASCII codes for other uses now - non-character delimiters, anyone? How great would it be if you had characters specifically for string delimiters, so you wouldn't have to always be escaping quotes? I even notice that the original name of char 150 was "Start of guarded area", 151 was "End of Guarded area", 152 was "Start of string" and 156 was "String Terminator". Sigh, for what might have been.

ASCII Num	Entity	Bad Char	JS charCodeAt of Bad	Good Char	JS charCodeAt of Good
145	‘	‘	145	‘	8216
146	’	’	146	’	8217
147	“	“	147	“	8220
148	”	”	148	”	8221

I was thinking about it yesterday, I've had quite a few PDAs over the years.
I'm probably forgetting one or two, but here's the ones that come to mind:



Casio BOSS organizer
I actually had 2 or 3 of these in succession, but I don't remember the brand/model of the first ones. The Casio BOSS was handy - it fit easily in my pocket and stored all my phone numbers and schedules. It didn't have any fancy extras, but it got the job done and had great battery life.


Casio Databank calculator watch
Ah, what nerd hasn't had a calculator watch at some point? I was really fond of this one, though - although the memory was limited, it was still plenty to store all my phone numbers and schedule. And being a watch, the battery lasts for YEARS.


Palm Pilot
The first PDA I got with the ability to install apps. The Palm OS was lightweight and efficient, and there were a lot of people releasing free apps for the Palm. Good times.


Palm III
The Palm III improved on the Palm Pilot's screen and memory and was just better in general.


Palm IIIxe
The PalmIIIxe was the same as the Palm III, but with more memory and I think a faster processor.


Kyocera Smartphone
Combined a Palm with a cellphone in a form factor that was not unlike duct-taping the two devices together. Still, I could check my email when out and about, and even though the web browser was hacky and barely better than Lynx, at least it was something.


Dell Axim X5
A capable PDA with a color screen. Bulky in design, but a nice device. Running Windows Mobile, it was more capable than Palm OS, but also not very optimized. There were also less apps than on Palm OS, and unlike Palm, most Windows Mobile apps weren't free.


Tapwave Zodiac
I really wanted to like the Zodiac, it used the Palm OS and had a pretty color screen. The controls were perfect for games... however, the underpowered processor, small RAM, and terrible camera meant I ended up returning it after a week or two.


Dell Axim X50
A big improvement over the Axim X5, the X50 had a beautiful full VGA screen (even today, many PDAs are lower-res than that), a fast CPU, and WiFi. The mobile IE was pretty bad, but usable. App selection was ok, although one flaw with Windows Mobile is that if an update to the OS was released, each PDA manufacturer was responsible for working with Microsoft to create a custom build of the release for that PDA. Which meant that you were pretty much stuck with the OS on the PDA, and could only gaze wistfully at updates.


Danger Hiptop 2 (aka Sidekick 2)
Sexy design with a swiveling screen. However, a crappy CPU, crappy camera, poor app selection, and bad web browser had me returning it not long after getting it. It did do AIM real well, but that was about it.


iPhone 3G
My current PDA. Sleek and powerful, it comes at the expense of battery life. I didn't get the original iPhone because at that point there were no apps for it. With the 3G iPhone, Apple launched an app store and a flood of applications quickly appeared. Interestingly, the main menu GUI is pretty much the same as the Palm Pilot, from way back when.


One thing I have noticed: over time, CPU and RAM has gotten better, but batteries really haven't improved much. Which means I have over time gone from a PDA that could run for weeks or even months on a charge, to the iPhone, which can go maybe 2 days.

Another great video by The Buddy System, about everyone around you being cheerful while you're in a bad mood.

There's only one thing you can do with Satanic Horses:

Specifically, what is it about stepping on a slug in our bare feet that causes us to recoil?

Physically, we are no danger, aside from the small possibility of slipping and falling. We are not expressing concern over the fate of the slug, indeed it probably barely registers to us. We are concerned with the sensation.

Why do we find it unpleasant?

Is this a learned opinion, or something hard-wired? Would a baby crawling along the ground burst into tears if he crawled over a slug, or would he be curious? Or would he not notice at all and just keep crawling?

If it is an evolved response, why? Why is it beneficial to find a squishy, sticky goo "icky"?

I've been playing around with chocolate recently, making chocolate-covered oreos, graham crackers, etc. I've been using a Lego ice cube tray to make some, which has worked out well.



I wanted some more molds to play with, so I looked around, at a bunch of kitchen supply places, but... no luck. So I tried Amazon, and ordered a whole bunch for like $2-$3 each. They arrived yesterday, now I have all sorts of new shapes to try!