running with paper

I’m fan enough of computer graphics that I once spent at least half of a first day with a guy talking about it and viewing clips back at his place (the modern equivalent of etchings?).

No, really! On his suggestion, I attended my first SIGGRAPH conference in 1997. FUN! Even the behind the scenes stuff is very cool.

But even before computer graphics I was a fan of visual effects; sleight of hand magic tricks, things that change from one sort to another, old movies pioneered by Harry Hausen himself.

Another fan has put this together; a compendium of visual effects in the movies over the years:

Very nice. While he limits himself to a five minute span, I could see a series of these emphasizing the other pioneering techniques – maybe a series of themes to bring the “cool” and “this is what you can do if you stay in school/work on it as a hobby” to VFX.

I was a little disappointed that the Lord of the Rings series were excluded; that table scene with the Gandalf and Frodo! Ohhh! But again, only five minutes!

But happy to see the effects behind Benjamin Button: I haven’t seen the movie, but will keep my eye out to rent it if a full director’s cut and/or effects track is provided. It gives me faith that they can bring my favorite Bilbo instead of this Doctory fellow or the choice Gandalf hinted at (though I must argue that Tom Baker is my Doctor!).

Between the strides made with Andy/Gollum/Sméagol and what I see of Benjamin Button, I think we can get Ian Holm in for the Hobbit(ses) … please?

I’ve already griped about Facebook’s utter scary of a mobile site. I actually have been planning to review the Facebook iPhone 2.0 software I’m running, but life keeps getting in the way, and every time I sit down with the device and software, it starts “behaving” nicely and I figure the errant behavior was just a quirk of my imagination and everything else I could simply ignore.

However, I’m finally going to review 2.0 very shortly (I’m writing the post now) and put in my wish list for 3.0 (so far I’ve completely neglected to research it avoided the spoilers, yeah, that’s it).

While I was in the process of researching the history of iPhone and Facebook, I found out why it especially sucks to be me and other clueless iPhone-Facebookers.

Facebook has a SPECIAL web page for iPhone users only.

I hardly ever use the word incensed to describe my reaction to software, even when faced with certain nameless OS/hardware configuration difficulties but, yeah, I’m incensed. And I don’t mean that I smell like a house of worship. Continue Reading »

I recently returned from vacation (peeling and cranky, but several delayed flights and Pepsi-only terminals will do that to me) to my lovely home computing devices. I’d been “roughing” it with an iPhone (soon to go away, boo hoo) and a quick dollar spin on a public internet terminal (because I was having a devilish time locating my flight information – date, time, airline, destination …).

I’ve had this theory for a while about Gmail and Facebook, but I didn’t know how to test it, short of how I did: go away for a few days and refuse to upgrade my Firefox. Continue using Gmail and Facebook as usual until they stop. Reboot everything a few times, follow semi-explicit troubleshooting methods, and then give in: Upgrade Firefox.

And tonight, it happened. Gmail and Facebook worked fine in Chrome, Opera, Safari, and even a really old version of AOL’s version of Internet Explorer (yes, I am looking into finally retiring all versions of AOL software from my systems, but I have to negotiate with the Octos to do so).

Firefox? No.

Facebook was fine, but I suspect they don’t have as many brilliant awesome and handsome developers as Google does (or will have had, come a few more weeks – scroll to number five).

But I expect that if I wait long enough, Facebook will stop working, too.

So my theory is thus:

1. Despite the popularity and availability of Chrome, a lot of people use Firefox for their Gmailering.
2. Google, Facebook, and other sites have a vested interest in their users using up-to-date browsers, especially if security patches are involved.
3. While other Google functions probably work during this “code strike”, I haven’t bothered verifying it for a number of reasons ¹.

Therefore, when something really (or somewhat) important is updated in Firefox, Google, Facebook and possibly other sites put up a bit of code that is roughly:

Browser out of date? If yes, block all cool stuff (AJAX, JSON, COMET). If no, let them read their stuff without hindrance or let.

Google doesn’t care if I use their search or any of their other bazillion programs, or maybe they limit those, too. But they know if I care about the cool stuff, like chat, menu bar email counts, and those cute mountainscape backgrounds, I’ll upgrade my darn Firefox to get them working again. Which is fine by them.

That’s my conspiracy theory, and I’m sticking to it. Because honestly? I’d do it, too. Now if only I could turn off certain “pushed” upgrades (I’m looking at you, iPhone!) …

Anyway, I need to go upgrade half a dozen WordPress installs – version 2.8.4 is out …

_{1. Gmail is convenient, Google Docs is not bad, Google Voice has sent me a total of three calls but that’s all I really use. If they blocked their search engine from us slacker updaters, they’d likely have a riot ….}

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ETA: I could not publish this from a non-updated Firefox and non-updated WordPress without some fiddling … I really do need to go through and update all the biddly bits on my bit boxes here. Sigh …

We finally plugged the Wii back in the other night to play our new game – Wii Sports Resort. Pretty fun; I like the improved control given with the game controller add-on.

But one thing that amazed and amused me was the warning we received. The software and possibly hardware configurations and programming were updated when we booted up and started fiddling. The unit informed us an update was about to take place, and politely informed us that if we’d made any modifications to the system, such as making it play DVDs, or other end-user kiss-your-warranty-goodbye changes, those changes would be overwritten and your device might come to some harm.

I loved it. We were late to buy a Wii (weighing the consoles before it won out), so this was the first time we’d seen the warning.

If there’s one thing the game companies have learned, and to some extent, embraced, is that we’re going to hack their stuff. And min max it, and play it, and keep buying it. We might not pay for it if we don’t have to, but we will pay for it in some way, and sometimes the game companies will be the ones getting the money .

But to see that warning was heartening. Too often there are scary details buried in the minutia of End User License Agreements (EULAs) that are written quite badly and can be interpreted quite badly (Google owns all content in your gMail, beta software that can be deleted at any time, the OMG The Government OWNS YOUR COMPUTERS!!!111). This was a simply a friendly warning that hey – we know what you might do, and this might break it, because we don’t necessarily like you modding our stuff …. Or not – mod at your own risk.

Not everyone has this approach, but I do see DirectTV’s point of view* as well. If I’m creating or selling something, I want to be compensated. But virtual (or actual) monopolization of media is steadily eroding as home technology and people who just want to hack continue to do so – the trick is finding something that mostly works for mostly everyone.

We’ll see where that middle muddle is … and in the mean time, happy hacking, do so at your own risks, and so on, and so on!

^{* While this “Game Over” report is dated Dec 08, it refers to events in 2001 and is not annotated as clearly as I’d like. This did lead me to a link to an interview with the creator of the countermeasure that is a great read.}