Month: April 2003

  • Gender differences in navigation

    Some usability researchers reported that with a 35 degree viewing angle, women are slower at navigational tasks than men, but when the viewing angle opens up to 70 degrees or more, the gender difference disappears. The improvement only shows up if the animation is smooth like reality, not jumpy. Somehow I feel just a little…

  • Everlasting Bliss

    by

    in

    Why would you pay $200 for a ketchup bottle? If it made me smile like that guy is smiling, I’d pay. Isn’t $200 a small price to pay for everlasting bliss?

  • Life at Microsoft

    This description of life at Microsoft is pretty accurate. There’s more to it, of course. Every big company has politics and culture “issues”. Also, not every employee of Microsoft is so privileged to work at a level where they can control their own fate as much as the article implies. But for a certain class…

  • Shoes

    Girls, listen up!

  • Aggressive Caching in TiVo.pm

    So, it appears that too aggressive caching in TiVo.pm is the culprit. Even after I changed which services it was supposed to be advertising to the TiVo, it still sent down the old stuff it had cached in files in /tmp. Removing everything in /tmp owned by apache solved the problem. Not graceful, but it…

  • Update to tivo-beacon

    I made a new version of tivo-beacon, with the length bytes included that TiVo seems to send on TCP connections. That makes it quite a bit happier. Now I just need to figure out why TiVo.pm is sending down messages about services (“Music” in my case) that are commented out of example.cgi.

  • TiVoConnect Hacking

    Tonite I set out to make my Tivo use my remotely-hosted Linux webserver as my MP3 server. The eventual goal is to teach WinAmp to play from the same collection of files, so that I can have one copy of my mp3’s in the “cloud” and still get access to them easily on each device.…

  • College of the Future

    Why is it that so few people ask the interesting questions that turn institutions on their heads? Philg contemplates colleges optimized for learning.

  • MySQL making in-roads in enterprises

    You heard it here first folks. And it appears MySQL AB’s intends to make version 5 the one that really puts the hurt on Oracle and MS SQL Server. Note to Larry: Sell short.

  • Countrywide Home Loans

    The little loan on my house got sold to Countrywide (though a closer inspection of the paperwork makes me think it was probably sold to the Bank of New York, which is having Countrywide service the loan for them). They kick ass, because they have real people, not lawyer-automatons write their letters. Here’s an excerpt:…