The Ownage

Wow, Microsoft (well, their marketing team), actually made some halfway amusing ads to push IE8 (which sucks no matter if the ads made me grin).  Check em out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aA_PEltVTw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjUzzxAKs20

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyQolo0Xdqw

I finally succumbed and got an Apple IPhone 3GS. I will really miss some features of my old Sony Ericcson K850i, especially the camera and video features (5MP camera, xenon flash, image stabilizer, video calling, etc).

I was really tired of typing on a T9 keypad though. And they did upgrade the camera in the new IPhone (3MP now) and added some features to it like selective focus that pushed me over the edge. I’ve seen firsthand all the cool stuff you can do with an IPhone once you “jailbreak” it. Jailbreak is a quick process of hacking the phone so that you have full access to it and can run third-party applications. Apple has limitations on what apps are “allowed” to do if they are sold on the official App Store. With a jailbroken phone you can run anything you want, and also unlocks the power of BSD (unix) on your phone, which means you can ssh into it, get a shell, and run various unix commands and such, which a geek like me finds cool

I will have to tweak my video moblogging scripts, as the iphone records in .mov format. Nothing that ffmpeg cannot handle though

Check this one out
Play This Game

If you want to skip all the ads and whatnot, you should be able to get it fullscreen via this link: http://www.the-ownage.com/downloads/littlewheel.swf

I made a prediction some time ago that “within 5 years games will no longer use controllers”. It looks more and more like this is coming true, in multiple ways. There is the Microsofts “Project Netal”, which basically uses multiple cameras and voice recognition to do full motion body capture - a fancy way of saying that it can accurately track subtle movements of your body, which allows you to play games just by moving. For instance, to play a driving game, you would just use an imaginary steering wheel. For a shooting game, just use your forefinger as the gun, and “pull the trigger” to fire. Here’s a video to give you an idea of how this works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWyO5nOelzY

But, I digress, what I am really interested in, is a neural interface. In other words, something that reads your brainwaves so that you can do things without moving at all, purely the power of your mind (or level of concentration). These sorts of things are not years away, they are out NOW, I actually have a Neurosky “MindSet” on order (http://www.neurosky.com/). It is a pretty simple device, and while this cannot yet replace a keyboard and mouse for everyday games, I’m looking forward to just simply being able to visualize brainwaves, like so:

There are more complicated headsets that will soon be available, like this one: http://www.emotiv.com/INDS_3/inds_3.html which not only reads your brainwaves but also electrical impules to your facial muscles, so that you get extra channels of control by winking, clenching your jaw, moving your eyes, etc. I would love to play a 2-person “tug of war” game where the opponents simply will a block to move towards them - whoever concentrates hardest wins

I saw this on Friday after work. I won’t write a full review. I will say it was “acceptable”. Not too good, not too bad. It had everything you expect from a terminator movie “I’ll be back”, “Come with me if you want to live”, red-eyed shiny T600’s and even an Arnold cameo of sorts. Christian Bale did a decent job of acting, although the new terminator, “Marcus” seemed like a better character than Bales’ John Connor.

There was plenty of action to keep you entertained, but it is a far cry from the first or even second terminator movie. I guess the problem is that we take special effects and scary/intense stuff for granted these days, so movies just don’t have much impact anymore, as everything has been done already. I did see previews for a couple of movies that looked like I would want to see, “District 9″ was one of them.

I’m considering moving all of my photos to Flickr. I like hosting stuff on my own server, but if the server were to die, I could lose all my pictures, which would suck. I could do off-server backups, but that is a pain to manage and no gurantee that the backup server couldn’t die as well. Let’s face it, sometime *I* will die as well, and if my pics are hosted on flickr, they will live on (at least if someone keeps paying the Flickr Pro fee)

Pros
* Pictures are “safe” on Flickr/Yahoos redundant servers
* More options of how to display pics via flash and Flickr API
* Lots more exposure for my pics as people do searches etc

Cons
* Time/effort to import all my pictures from Gallery to Flickr (I think I can script it)
* Time/effort to change my scripts (MoBlog) to upload to Flickr using their API
* Time/effort to change my blog to use the Flickr API to display recent uploads (Theres probably a WordPress plugin for this)
* Have to buy a “Flickr Pro” account because I have so many pictures (I think $24/yr)

Every year around this time I get slapped with an annual fee on my “Visa Platinum Plus” card, whose main feature is no annual fees. I have fought Bank Of America many times on this, and failed:

http://www.the-ownage.com/?p=652
http://www.the-ownage.com/?p=481
http://www.the-ownage.com/?p=480

Well, its that time of year again. I called them and gave them the usual quick rundown “Yes I have a Platinum Plus card, the reason that I got this card is that it has no annual fee, but you guys keep charging me an annual fee, and every year I have to call in and spend 2 hours on the phone to get you to give me back my $30″. The guy puts me on hold for about 5 minutes, and then comes back and says “Yes sir, thank you for holding, I’m going to *click* - *dialtone*”. Bastards! I know that trick well, the hangup-in-midsentence ruse.  I call back and get a nice sounding lady. I give her the same intro. She puts me on hold for 5 mins and comes back and says she has to go get her manager because she cannot refund my money. She puts me on hold for another 5 minutes, then comes back and says “I’m sorry but we are short staffed today and there are no managers to help you. We will have to call you back later“. I’m like, “Yeah, right”. She says she doesn’t know when they will call back, but it “should be today”.

Did they ever call back? Of course not. Meanwhile I am still searching for a name/address of BOFA corpororate office or something to write a letter of complaint to some real humans who ARE management or higher.

P.S. In response to all of the “just pull all your accounts from BOFA” suggestions, that is not easily done. I have my House, Home Equity, Credit Card, two Checking accounts, and a Savings account with them. Moving all of that over $29 a year isn’t worth it - YET. But dealing with this madness every year is so ridiculous and infuriating.

I like solving problems with technology. I had an excellent opporutnity when one of the AC units that cools the server room malfunctioned and dumped several gallons of water onto the storage room floor, which also flowed under the wall and into the hallway.

Perhaps even more distressing was that there was no apparent cause of the malfunction, it was exactly that. There is a tank of water that is periodically purged and refilled, and for reasons unknown either the pump that discards the water decided not to come on, or the valve that closes after the purge cycle stayed open. The AC tech manually forced several purge cycles and we were unable to reproduce the problem.

So what worries me is, what if this happens again? I was was only able to notice the problem because I happened to walk by the storage room and simulaneously saw the water in the hallway and heard the pitifully quiet water alert beeping from inside.

What if it happens at night? What if it happens on a weekend? The entire suite could be flooded! Something must be done. We need a way to know when there is water on the floor, and more than just a beep, we need an email or SMS message alert, and we need it to be cost-effective. They do sell water detecting devices of various kinds for a pretty penny, and none that will send you an email. So what to do? Innovate!

Clicking a button is nothing more than shorting or connecting two contacts. Guess what is cheap and has clickable buttons? A mouse! And guess what is an excellent conductor? Water! I took a long piece of cat5 networking cable and soldered it to the contacts of the right mouse button.

By converting or extending the mouse button contacts into a simple wire pair, water can connect them and do the same thing as clicking the mouse button. Now we just need a way to read the mouse click. And guess what can do that and also satisfy our need to be able to connect to the CLI network and send an email message. A laptop! We definitely have some old barely working laptops, that while no longer suitable for normal use, will work just fine for this. I took an old laptop (had a broken display but the mouse and network port work just fine) and installed Linux on it.

Now all I need is some software that can read when a mouse button is pressed down (equivalent to the wires being wet) as well as when the button is released (wires dry). I came up with the following perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# This script will detect the state of mouse button
# blazer0x at gmail.com
my $data;
my $fd;
my $buf;
my $mousedev=”/dev/input/mouse0″;
use POSIX;

$fd = POSIX::open($mousedev, &POSIX::O_RDONLY) || die (”Cannot open $mousedev: $!”);
while($data = POSIX::read($fd, $buf, 1))
{
my $DATA=join(”", map(sprintf(”%x”,ord($_)), split(//, $buf)));
my $DATE=scalar localtime();
if ($DATA =~ /8/) {
`echo “Water event ended (mouse button released) at $DATE\n”| mail -s “WATER ALERT (recovered)” sysalert\@myjob.com`;
}
if ($DATA =~ /a/) {
`echo “Water event started (mouse button pressed) at $DATE\n”| mail -s “WATER ALERT” sysalert\@myjob.com`;
}
}

I wish figuring out how to read the mouse button data was as simple as the length of the program suggests. There is a multitude of programming libraries and built-in functions for reading mouse input while running the GUI, but in this case I cannot run the GUI as it would interfere with my reading of the mouse (the GUI wants control of it). So I had to resort to reading the raw mouse device and parsing the data that comes from it when the buttons are pressed. After trial and error and lots of testing I was able to determine there is a certain byte of data that is only seen when the button is pressed, and another unique byte that is seen when the button is released.

Putting it all together, we have a laptop, with a hacked mouse that has a long network cable soldered to one of the buttons, with some software reading the state of the buttons. When the end of the network cable gets wet, it connects the wires, which the software detects as the button being held down. The software then sends an email alert. Once the water is gone, the software sees this as a button release, and that event is dealt with in a similar manner. The final version will log the water events to a log file and integrate into our main systems monitoring that monitors all of our servers.

I love solving problems with technology. In this case I was able to solve the problem of; “How do you detect the presence of water in an area, and send an email?” My solution was to build a Linux-powered TCP/IP networked remote water sensor. Price: Free. Learning experience and fun doing it: Priceless.

I received my SheevaPlug Dev Kit today from GlobalScale Technologies. I took some pictures of the unboxing. This thing is so small! A 1.2Ghz Ubuntu Linux PC the size of 2 decks of cards - Ownage!

Below are links to the pics. Stay tuned for more posts as I fire it up and put it through some tests.  I have so many ideas and plans for devices like this. I will post some of those soon too.

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01657.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01658.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01659.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01660.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01661.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01662.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01663.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01664.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01665.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01666.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01667.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01668.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01669.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01670.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01671.sized.jpg

http://www.the-ownage.com/gallery/albums/Miscellaneous/DSC01672.sized.jpg

I don’t have a problem with “leet speak” or texting abbreviations when they are called for. But I hate when people use that language when there is no need.  If you are playing an online game and any time spent typing is likely to get you killed, its normal to type something like “srsly hlp me loc8 it”. But I find it annoying when someone sends an email that they had all the time in the world to type, and it reads like something they texted while weaving in and out of traffic.

Now read this: http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/03/sci_fi_channel_aims_to_shed_ge.php

The Sci-Fi channel is changing its name (effective July 7th) to “Syfy“.  Why are they doing this? because it’s “actually this is how you’d text it,” … “It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.”

Why is it cooler to name things the way 12 year old kids would text them? That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard!  It’s bad enough that kids these days cannot even tell time on an analog clock, but once marketing “geniuses” like these tards are done, people won’t bother to use proper english anymore.

I guess everyone else wiill follow suit now, so I might as well make some predictions on future name changes:

• Burger King -> bk “hv it ur way lol”
• McDonalds -> mcds “Im <3 it”
• WalMart -> wmrt “alwys lo $”
• Nike -> nIkE “jst doit, dnt b gay”

I won’t even go into how strange it is that the Sci-Fi channel does not want to be associated with Sci-Fi stuff…because it’s associated with “geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements”….what the hell?

Ah well, I guess I’m done ranting for now, kthnxbai