Daniel Von Fange

Vision.

I keep wishing I could use my new TiBook while it's in its case. some kind of chording keyboard, and video glasses, would be great, but right now they are way to expensive. Oh well. I'd give it two years for things to get to reasonable price levels. When that happens, the "chess team on wheels" will be sending emails, snapping pictures, and chatting while , dashing around on their segways. Talk about a smart mob - of geeks!

Segway kid.

Find out what happens when a teenager gets to borrow a segway for a week and makes a movie about it. It's the last scene that really makes you want one. ::Grin::

Pulling cable.

A year after we moved in, my house is now getting onto the family network. In the future, being able to work from my house, instead of a nearby attic will be wonderful, but pulling the ethernet cables was not wonderful. Dad and I spent six hours today pulling cable, much of it in messy, uncomfortable places. I sure hope I never have to do this again.

Farmer Daniel.

John, my brother, is off for a week at the Olympic Training Center, so I get to take care of his dog, and his llamas. Seeing John leave.. with luggage ..made Buckie become 120 pounds of Sad and Lonely Dog - Buckie just mopes around, barely moving his head when you walk into the room. (Give him five days, though, and he will probably come back to quasi-normal. ) The llamas are a lot of fun, as they peek and peer at you as you bring their food buckets to them, so skittish and yet so curios.

XML-RPC .

So what did I do on Christmas Eve? I learned XML-RPC. The same folks that brought us Smarty have a great XML-RPC library for PHP. I'm in love with the concept now that I can see that it is doable and usable by humans..

What a paint job.

I've never seen a paint job like this before. At least five different colors of paint are in various states of peeling off, or spray painted on. It's pretty unique.

Mobile Entertainment Center.

Elizabeth played CD's off of her laptop for us, since Harvy does not have a CD player. We also watched quite a few DVD's from her iBook during the three days we spent on the driving.

We are Back.

We are back from a quick trip to Arkansas for Chirstmas. Good to be home.

Elizabeth Runs Camera.

My little sister got to run camera for the first time at our Church's Christmas service tonight. Naturally she was thrilled at being "Camera Two", and taking orders over headset.

Learning by diving into to something is a family habit I guess. I ran the lighting board on my first paid show at the age of twelve, and John ran his first paid show on the spot light at the age of seven. No one batted an eye when we turned around and saw Elizabeth sitting behind a camera, we just waved and went off to find a seat. I love it that Dad trusted us with such stuff, and is willing to "hand us the keys" and then walk off and let us be responsible for whatever.

Bored Part II.

"Damage to the building is estimated at $75." -- Found on of the local TV stations home page. Heh, it probably cost the stations around $1,000 to put this on the news.

Charlotte Area Bored for News.

Going in to get my driver's license today (which I finly got around to getting), the parking lot of the local DMV (Division of Motor Vehicles) was swarming with news trucks, from several stations. Inside a news reporter was briefing a employee on where to stand in front of a camera. As soon as the camera person from one station left the building, a camera person from another station came in and began recording. As we went through the inevitable lines, I was wondering,"What is going on here?". After more waiting in line, taking my road test, and getting the final paper work done, it was time for me to get my picture taken. Even 45 minutes after we pulled up there was still a camera person in there. I may be on the news tonight, because he was looking for pictures of me getting my picture taken.

So after he'd stop recording, I asked him, "What is this all about?" "Oh", he said, "Someone tried to steal the camera and the computer attached to it. Now we're doing a follow-up story about how the DMV is back in operation now." There are many DMV offices in the area, so it's not like the entire state of South Carolina can't get driver's licenses. The only thing I can conclude from this is the Charlotte must be really bored for news today.

Broadcast news outlets - indeed probably any news company that depends on advertising for their money - has to have news to put on. That means that they're sort of more like entertainment than real news. If you have a lot of important news on one day, some of it may be bumped aside. If they have no important news, well, they will go find something and make it look important! It's not terribly good system for finding things to think about.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

I'm using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to type this post, and it appears to work wonderfully. Straight out of the box, Dragon NaturallySpeaking gets about two out of three sentences correct. Considering that IBM ViaVoice got perhaps two sentences correct - in yesterday's entire day of use - this is pretty good. Correcting mistakes is easier with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I just tell it to pick the word that it missed, and then choose from a list of correct phases - using only my voice. The program's interface is also much better. The only sad thing about it, it only works on a PC. I do all my work on Macs, including e-mail, web site browsing, and writing. I will likely write a small program that takes what I speak on the PC and places it in the Mac's clipboard.

IBM Via Voice.

I got IBM ViaVoice but sadly it's quite terrible of debt its intended use and. All well and is it like a return of a tryout in Dragon's NaturallySpeaking I hear the Dragon NaturallySpeaking is much more effective. I got all listed funny as it did of sentences I tested out with the dance that you concede live with said and what it put down paper. I've gone through the training routines but sadly its not packer yeah.

Wallenstein at IBM's ViaVoice the (Well, I'm testing out IBM's ViaVoice thingy.)

Its accuracy is incredibly superb in fact understand anything rights clearly what I'm thinking (It's accuracy is incredibly superb. In fact, it understands anything and writes clearly whatever I'm thinking.)

In 1994 in Xenophon cross the Ellis bought the 10,000 sheets and not at this but this part is for a dramatic them and came back up and walk the talk of (In July of 1994, Xenophon crossed the Hellespont with his 10,000 soldiers and attacked Athens, but the Spartans came up and whopped the tar out of them.)

After dictating the course sentence is a time she get the feeling to the state does not save much time (After dictating four sentences, I'm begging to get the feeling that this thing does not save much time.)

Marriott to read and then a perhaps 32 sun dress entirely missing (Maybe I ought to read the manual. Perhaps there are a few tips that I am entirely missing.)

Your perhaps the most foolish person, and I pointed Mr. ViaVoice. (You are perhaps the most foolish person, in my acquaintance, Mr. ViaVoice.)

get Italy has promised to appreciate how much the man speaking one rather than the IBM (It definitly has problems. I think I should have gotten the dragon speaking one, rather then the IBM.)

I think that the Navy Seals system is more accurate (I think that the Navy Seals' system is more accurate).

know I have to do one deer herds G4 Power up in back and so I don't really need a key to (No, I have a G4 PowerMac, and so I don't need a cube.)

"Fade out in a blaze.

"Fade out in a blaze of glory. " - and other farisms.

Setting up printing on my Powerbook..

Last night I needed to print for the first time from my new Powerbook. I went to File > Print, and there was my PowerMac's printer in the printer list. I hit print, and it printed perfectly. I never had to set any thing up. I never had to walk through any "Plug-and-Pray" wizards. When I was ready to print, there the printer was. Macs Rule!

The Dave and Andy Book.

I went out and bought "Programming Ruby" which is also known as "The Dave and Andy Book" in the Ruby community. It is a perfect book for learning a new programming language. It gives the big picture, and the little details, with plenty of examples along the way.

The fun thing is that the entire contents of the book are available online. In fact, it's from the online version that I learned the basics of Ruby, and learned what a cool language (and book) it was.

I love people that trust you. Two of my favorite "shareware" programs that I have registered are available completely un-crippeld (Transmint and TextPad)

I-Beam.

American Institute of Steel has a unique website design. I've never seen a menu in the center of the page layout before, but it does make a good looking I-beam.

Remote Music.

This morning I needed to wake my brother up for breakfast. Not feeling like walking over there myself, I quickly searched google for "mac os x ssh applescript itunes", then ssh'ed into the mac that was in that room, typed

oascript
tell application "iTunes"
play
end tell
^d

..and music began playing. Mac's are soooo cool.

Dell Optiplex.

FedEx just sent us a new Dell computer. Some kind of tech bribe for shipping lots of stuff with them. I've never seen an Optiplex before. It's a kinda cute computer. Network card and graphics card are built into the motherboard. It's almost as easy to open up this computer case on the Optiplex as it as to do so on my PowerMac.

Powerbook.

I've just joined the ranks of the elite - a G4 powerbook has arrived! Got to go show the family. Later I'll post a report!

Ouch!.

Bad times in Venezuela. Ouch, I had no idea this was going on down there.

.

Licenses Down, Services Up

Relational databases are a commoditized product, and their market price has been driven to zero by the generous efforts of open source database developers around the world. This is bad news for Oracle and their shareholders, but very good news for the rest of the economy, which can now spend those billions of dollars a year on anything else they want, on things that generate more business and economic value.

This would be fun.

Sousveillance

* ask them why they have surveillance cameras there;
* accept a typical response such as ``Why are you so paranoid? Only criminals and terrorists are afraid of cameras!'';
* photograph the respondent;
* observe reaction.

Computers for Albatrosses.

Computers for Albatrosses [Dec. 03, 2002] is a fascinating article about how much can be found out about the habits and travels of an Albatross using just a light sensor. Heh, It would be fun next vacation to put a sensor like this on cruise ship and check the ship's migration patterns.

Good bye, Finger..

I just got my glove sucked into a half inch drill bit, along with one of my fingers. Even though their is no finger left on the glove, suprisingly my own finger is not broken or even cut. Thank God for protecting me. I was not expecting to see much left when I first looked down at my finger after getting it free. Right now my finger feels like it got slammed in a car door...

Sunrise.

Sunrise viewed from my bedroom window about a week ago.

Winter, Part 3.

Forbes.com: Duke says storm cuts power to 1.2 mln in Carolinas

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Duke Power said about 1.2 million Carolina customers, over half of its customers, were without power early Thursday after an ice storm downed lines in what Duke called the worst weather damage in its history.

The number of outages was expected to rise as accumulating ice continued to bring weigh down power lines and tree limbs, Duke Power said in a statement.

"This ice storm surpasses the damage from Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which had 696,000 outages," the company said.

Duke Power is a subsidiary of Duke Energy Corp. .

The company, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, has about 2.1 million electricity customers in North and South Carolina.

We got off with only four hours of no T1 while both phones and power stayed on for the most part.

Ice.

Ice on the trees this morning by the office, though it's beggining to melt away slowly.

Uptime 305 days.

One of my linux computers is up to 305 days of running without shutdown or reboot. Why am I posting about it? I'm afraid we may be without power for a while if a tree takes a dive onto a power line. :D

Winter Part 2.

By bedtime tonight the ice is a quater of an inch thick on everything. We already have one little tree touching the ground, bowed over with the weight of the ice on it. The outside steps around here are not exactly safe to walk on either.

Haiku for today.

Sometimes seventeen
Syllables ain't enough to
Express a complete

Found on the Mozilla Whiteboard

Winter.

Winter has hit the Carolinas. Today is a grey overcast day, with falling ice-rain sounding like Rice Krispies crackling in milk .

Don't do that Daniel!.

So there I am, reading the list of recently code changes to my web broswer, when I see someting about a tool tip bug on the tabs. So I move my mouse over the tabs, and wait for a tool tip to pop up. Poff! the browser crashes a few seconds later. Duh at me!

Good bye, NetNewsWire.

Well, I've suddenly got a ton of web site work, plus a possible "real" application to program. Time is going to be a little more scarce now, and I realize I'm spending too much time reading blogs and news from around the net (With the help of NetNewsWire). I'd read all the new posts, then refresh looking for more, then go follow links around the web, and then suddenly a whole hour was gone.

So for a while at least I'm just pulling net NetNewsWire off my dock, and getting read to dig into work. Off course I'll still be reading books (lots of books). Just not not keeping up with the news around the net on an hourly basis.