Staticfree Blog

Well, I safely moved back to Newton for the summer. It's a bit crowded here in my dad's 2-bedroom apt., but hey - at least it's not rochester. The sun actually dares to come out here as well as almost all my good friends are around here.

Work begins again tomorrow. With any luck, I'll get the project done soon and move on with bigger and/or better things. Maybe I'll actually finish the code for this blog...

D00d... check out the 1337, VB-writing h4><0rz.. the Digital Underground. (Wasn't that name taken back in ... the 80's?) It's sorta sad how poor a S/N ratio they have. I mean, where're the über 1337 "hacker tools"? Their "tools" are just a few lines of shell script. Oh well, I guess you need some source of entropy for the script kiddies to suckle on.

I've recieved some strange spam in my day, but never this strange. Often, you just get one email that almost makes some sense in some manor, but really must be spam. The first email looked sorta like some things I've seen before: someone either with a confused understanding of the electronic world seeking assistance or some sort of scam under a very weird cover. That's well-and-good, *files into interesting-spam folder* but there was a follow up. A second email from someone else (this time in HTML as well as text) appeared in my inbox. I guess it's just one of those things that happens when you have a heavily-connected world.

I've been thinking up a way to hear the doorbell better from downstairs. No, I won't simply run a wire with a bell at the end - that's too easy. Instead, I'll come up with a network-level event system (top-quality name there) so that i could build a system that would wire the doorbell to a server and have the server broadcast messages to a given set of peers.

Anyhow, I thought it might be useful to think this one through. Or has this been implemented already in some manor (I'm thinking XML::RPC, SOAP, or something like that). Like it? hate it? have no idea what i wrote but are interested? contact me.

I just found a very cool digest that goes all the way back to '85. Risks is a "Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems". If you design software or hardware that may be used in a way that effects the real world (ie: you don't just write games) you should read this. Good design is highly underrated.

Kate and Meredith, Ari... mm. I need to get paid so I can get more tasty albums.

Melissa pointed it out to me, as I don't use hotmail, but if you try and edit your preferences with Mozilla (perhaps the most standards-compliant web browser out there), it gives you this cute message: Browser not supported. While at the same time, with lynx you get the following:

                                              MSN Hotmail - Browser Limitations

   Browser Limitations
     _________________________________________________________________

Your Current Web Browsing Software Will Limit Your Ability to Use Hotmail

   As you know, Hotmail is web-based e-mail. If you are seeing this page,
   we have detected that you are using a web browser that Hotmail does
   not support. Hotmail supports the following web browsers:
     * Microsoft Internet Explorer - version 4.0 or higher. 
       We recommend that you upgrade your web browsing software, and
       invite you to download Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0.    
     * Netscape Navigator - version 4.08 or higher.             

   If you continue to use your current browser software, we cannot
   guarantee that Hotmail will work properly.

                        Continue using Hotmail
                                              
    © 2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. TERMS OF USE
   Advertise   TRUSTe Approved Privacy Statement   GetNetWise       

Someone's playing favorites here, while trying not to get blamed for being unaccessible. I bet the only reason that mozilla's blocked out is because it's got so much control of what you can see and do. Or perhaps because it's open source? <sarcasm>"If anyone can view the source code, including hackers, how can it give me the security I need to prevent hackers from stealing my information?"</sarcasm>

Finally: some good words on accessibility in an easy question-answer form. Web Accessibility Myths. If you've ever made a "designed for " website, you should read this. The web isn't what it was 3 years ago.

TMBG + Suzanne Vega & Patti Smith + good friends @ The Boston Hatch Shell == a very happy Steve. I'm so very much looking forward to school to end.

Yeah, this link is straight off /. but it's still cool. How would you design a way of marking radioactive waste buried underground? Some very smart people thunk it around a bit and came up with this (and maybe this summary. I dunno, there were a bunch of typos...)

Also, recently, William McDonough gave a very interesting speech on design, environmentalism, and how to not destroy our world. I'm glad there're people who realize it's not enough just to go hug trees, you have to show other people why hugging trees can be such a fun and profitable activity.

Well, the robotics competition went well. We got second place out of the two entries into our league. ah well, at least it wasn't an honorable mention or something. Our robot, after many hours of coding, actually followed its way to gps coordinates. Sadly, the robot's chain kept getting loose, the laptop's battries kept dying and the thing couldn't turn very well on the grass. After not sleeping since friday, I decided to get some rest. 14h of sleep still isn't enough, i think.

Well hopefully it's us crunching on getting everything finalized, not the robot crunching small children. Although the later might be nifty depending on how annoying they are.

The code is almost complete! Well, by complete I mean mimimally functional. Which is useful as the competition is a day or two away and we've not yet tested the bot as a whole. Let's hope the unit testing works out as well as it is supposed to. Andrew, Zac and I pulled an all-nighter in the labs, tossed the code into CVS (finally!) and just coded as much as we could.

"It may sound simple to have some absolute rule that no foreign citizen may have access to certain fields of science, but in fact America has benefited enormously from talent that comes here from other countries to study in the United States," said [George Leventhal, policy analyst with the Association of American Universities]. "There's a long tradition of groundbreaking discoveries made in the U.S. by researchers born in other countries."

Apparently our President took inspiration from 1984 - in the entirely wrong direction. this article is frightening. Remember kids: if they don't teach it in schools, you'll never ever ever be able to learn it, no matter how hard you try. Especially if you have ulterior motives.

So's this one. ug. Canada's looking like a mighty fine country these days.

On an entirely less stupid note: We have robot pics! Physically, it's pretty much done. Now if the software were only the same...