Threadless announces "Threadless Loves Geeks" design challenge

Indie t-shirt shop Threadless opened up a new contest, Threadless Loves Geeks, sponsored by Microsoft. Being sponsored by Microsoft, you're up for a bunch of 360 swag (console, Xbox Live subscription) plus cash and Threadless credit. Good through October 1st, will be interesting to see what the geek design community comes up with...

Ghost N Goblins, Pacifist Style

Insert credit points the way to a truly excellent video of getting to the first level boss on Ghosts and Goblins without harming a sprite (the boss, however, must die).

It's apparently part of this Something Awful thread about amusingly difficult game challenges.

Why My Wi-Fi Closed

For the record, I completely agree with the sentiment expressed in this Wired article, in fact it is in pretty much lockstep with why when we moved I went ahead and left our Wi-Fi router completely open. Little risk, small benefit to a passer-by or neighbor and a lot easier for setup.

Then a couple weeks ago my connection slowed and started dropping. I went to check the router logs only to find that the D-Link was staving off a middleman spoof attack. It didn't look like any real damage was done, but it was chewing through the logs at a breakneck pace. I put on encryption and a password ... and it's been running perfectly fine ever since.

It's not a big deal, but it reminds of the kind of thing that spoils the net. Like spam has nearly killed e-mail as being the kind of social tool it really could be - malicious attempts like this one spoil what could be an open and free Internet.

Mozilla Kicks Off "Firefox Users Against Boredom"

It's viral marketing, so of course it is supposed to be bizarre, but I wonder how effective the lengthy list of statistics the Fight Against Boredom site lists off as benefits to a Firefox lifestyle will be. I mean, what does less likely to live in Chicago or read the Tribune have to do with being exciting. It continues on to cite Iowa, Kentucky and plenty of other states.

Let me guess - this was a bunch of surveys taken in the Bay Area and New York?

Update: Odd, password protected now.

Rails As A Ghetto

Via /. - I find this hilarious. It's basically a enormous rant by a guy pissed at the Ruby on Rails community. For those who haven't been acquainted, Ruby On Rails (Or ROR is you're hip) is a relatively new framework for writing websites. Personally, I have no opinion on ROR itself because it has never really come up for me professionally.

Why I find the rant so funny is because not so long ago the somewhat major retailer who likes to wrap your things in black in white boxes that I worked for was shopping around for design agencies. At the time, I was told this was because the design staff didn't have the bandwidth to handle the redesign they were wanting. The reality is a different story. Along the way, some small Chicago agency got into the interview process. I really, really don't remember their name.

They loved ROR. Oh, wow did they love rails. And when they found out that we were a .Net shop - boy, we they willing to preach us the gospel of rails. .Net was monolithic and slow. ROR was sleek and fast. .Net was your grandma. ROR was a cheerleader. I don't really exaggerate here - they had that kind of thing in bullet points for meetings.

So, for you little Ruby (or other bleeding edge tech) shops out there, here's some advice:

1) Don't go into a Fortune 500 company and announce that their framework is for crap when you've actually not been asked your opinion their framework. Unless you're another Fortune 500 company - here's a clue ... nobody gives a damn. Nobody. Seriously, I don't even care if you're right - you look like a damn idiot. Maybe if we'd still been using the ASP3 codebase purchased a half decade ago you might be able to make the occasional snide remark to a tech geek and hope to get a chortle - but the moment you start handing out papers on the subject ... you need to back the hell off.

2) If you do decide that for some reason a handout is the best thing for your client and your professional career - check your facts. You can be damned sure that in any sizeable organization, the person you handed it to probably has no idea what you're talking about (this is probably intentional). Your problem is that they, deep down inside, know this, and will get it into the hands of someone that does to cover their own ass (oddly, corporate bureaucracy works well in this regard). When that person does get that handout finally, you better be sure your facts are straight.

3) Companies the size of those of which we speak have lawyers. Some have a few, some have many, many, many more. State Farm, for instance, has one of the highest lawyer to employee ratios on the planet. If you really think they won't litigate you when those facts aren't straight and when your nubile little framework cracks under the weight of an enterprise e-commerce site ... well, maybe you ought to appreciate why tip 1 exists in the first place. And remember that handout will still be in someone's drawer when tip 2 failed them. Guess what? You're still screwed.

Seriously, I have nothing against Ruby, or Rails or well ... hell, nearly any web technology out there. I want them all to succeed like the super little children I'm sure their parents know they are. But for the love of all things holy - learn to behave in the first place. And when I read rants like this ... it reminds me that sometimes agencies forget this.

Brainwaves Make Lousy Demos

I can see why the always excellent MAKE would find this interesting - it's pretty nifty when it comes to just pure gadgetry. I don't see why the gaming industry would care though:



I was like thinking that I had to be thinking about my thoughts and stuff. OK, sure, the kid's like seven and I'm thinking that I should be thinking that maybe he didn't take his ritalin or sometihng. These interfaces keep getting kicked around but keep missing the fact it's hard enough to make controllers with the kind of precision gamers need these days. Last night I died in a small pool of lava because the Wavebird knockoff we use for GameCube games decided to take a quick break. Would it be better to if could have thought about my momentary state of non-calmness to float? I mean, these things just register brainwaves and then report the to the computer. It's actually not that revolutionary nor useful - brainwaves don't actually have that many dimensions of information to them. Basically this is like being in a sleep study, but shoved in front of a monitor.

Until they can show a demo of a game that actually looks like a game ... I'll keep shaking my head at these. Nintendo has done far more with cheap electronics and a pair of IR beams.

30 Years Of LucasFilm Christmas Cards

This year’s card by Lorraine LeBer, photographed above, features three rows of die-cut pop-up Stormtroopers holding candles and songbooks. Click on the image to enlarge. But lets take a look at some of the cards from LucasFilm’s past

-- Cool Stuff: 30 Years of LucasFilm Christmas Cards

When Rockets Go Bad

Not that rockets generally "go good" - but here's a great bit of Japanese news featuring a rocket launcher against bullet proof glass.



Thanks MAKE.

Shop Like It's 1999

Snopes is being geektastic this week. Here's a clip of how 1967 thought shopping in 1999 would be, and it's actually not far off:

1956 5 MB External Hard Drive

The 350 Disk Storage Unit consisted of the magnetic disk memory unit with its access mechanism, the electronic and pneumatic controls for the access mechanism, and a small air compressor. Assembled with covers, the 350 was 60 inches long, 68 inches high and 29 inches deep. It was configured with 50 magnetic disks containing 50,000 sectors, each of which held 100 alphanumeric characters, for a capacity of 5 million characters.

Disks rotated at 1,200 rpm, tracks (20 to the inch) were recorded at up to 100 bits per inch, and typical head-to-disk spacing was 800 microinches. The execution of a "seek" instruction positioned a read-write head to the track that contained the desired sector and selected the sector for a later read or write operation. Seek time averaged about 600 milliseconds.

With storage capacities of 5 million and 10 million digits, and the capability to be installed either singly or in pairs, the 350 provided the 305 system with storage capacities of 5, 10, 15 or 20 million characters.

An IBM RAMAC 305 with a 350 disk storage unit leased for about $3,200 per month back in 1957. Over a thousand of the 305 systems (one of IBM's last vacuum tube units) were manufactured before production ended in 1961, and the 305 was withdrawn in 1969.

-- Snopes - Computer Storage

Weighed over a ton. Maybe I'll stop cursing at my Lenovo Thinkpad now.


(nah, I'll keep cursing at it)

Lucas Aims For Robot Star Wars Television

George Lucas, the Star Wars creator is looking for writers to help pen a live-action series about the lives of robots, according to a story published Wednesday in Los Angeles Times.

Does this mean C-3PO and R2-D2?

-- Report: New Star Wars show about robots

Adult Swim just did the Robot Chicken and Family Guy Star Wars parodies back to back - pure gold. If this comes to light, I just hope Lucas keeps to a benevolent dictator role and not, you know, writing and directing or anything.

Cloaking Device Engaged (sometime)

Certainly to be the quote of the day:

"These materials would comprise a complete -- almost magical -- mastery over light," said David Schurig, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University, who did not participate in the new research. "They would enable not just invisibility cloaking, but arbitrary control over the richest information channel humans employ. One thing I know for sure, it will happen sometime between now and the technological singularity."

-- New 'Metamaterial' Brings Scientists Closer Than Ever to a Cloaking Device

(emphasis mine)

Thanks, doc, for clearing up that time frame for us...

Takei Now A Rock In Space

On Slashdot:

ineedbettername writes "In recent news, the International Astronomic Union
has decided to rename the asteroid "1994 GT9" to 7307 Takei in honor of
George Takei, the actor who played Sulu in Star Trek. He now joins the ranks
of other famous sci-fi ...

Read Full Article, George Takei Now an Asteroid

I think I actually adore George's post-Trek work far more than his days of Sulu.

Adobe MAX Midway Point

I haven't been to a proper conference, workwise, in something near a decade - so being at MAX is a bit of a trip. Adobe just acquired Buzzword, a most interesting online word processor. They also announced more online services like Share, which seems like it would be a cool way to distribute documents online, but the beta doesn't seem to be giving me any love right now.

Most fascinating, however, is Thermo - announced today with no release date, sadly. Thermo allows you to take Photoshop files (properly layered) and convert them into Flex apps by redefining the layers as components. It's seriously one of those apps that once you see it, you wonder if it won't change your workflow in a positive way of the like you'd never want to leave again.

We've had a chance to show our Accelerate4Pharma application, which runs on Adobe's AIR, during a couple of sessions. I got a chance to talk briefly with James Ward and confess that once I was something of a Flash hater, but now am pretty much entranced by Flex.

I'm cobbling together an AIR app which, should I actually finish it, might help find other AIR applications and organize them via RSS feeds. I'm still at this point where any excuse to code something is a good excuse and it will force me to try something new (like using RSS feeds as a datasource or cleaning up SQL handling for offline data).

Right now I'm huddled in a hallway stealing some electricity, though. The actual accomodations here at McCormick can be a mixed bag. Nice rooms, no outlets. In fact the general design theme seems to be to keep chairs away from outlets at all costs. We found a bench next to an outlet, but the outlet was dead.

To boot, wifi and cell access are dodgy at best. Someone is still looking for the DHCP server, I think.

At Adobe MAX This Week

Work has sent me to Adobe's conference, MAX. Sitting in the general session now. I'll poke my head out when I can. Pics to arrive shortly.

UFO On The Moon

Via New Launches:




Observed during routine looks from Italian astronomers. Creepy. I'm sure there is fine scientific explanation for a black blob which changes both course and speed, right?

Spiderbot Video

On MAKE Magazine:

This hexapod robot by animatronic artist Matt Denton is sure to freak your
freak. Truly impressive.

Read Full Article, Stunning Spiderbot



Pretty neat, although you get the point early in the video. Still some pretty hypnotic movement from a robot there.

Happy Birthday Smiley

On New Urban Legends:

About the anniversary of the smiley and the origins of emoticons.

Read Full Article, Glyph Notes

Great article. To think the Reader's Digest was ahead of the emoticon curve.

Real Virtual Trees

On MAKE Magazine:

Some video documentation of German artist Aram Bartholl's custom built
physical versions of the "virtual" trees you usually see in 3D games.
[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Read Full Article, Aram Bartholl's 3D Trees

If anyone has ever level mapped, this is extra funny.

Pretty Nifty "Context Aware" Image Editing

On TechCrunch:

This image resizing and manipulation demonstration is sort of jaw dropping,
particularly as the video goes on. The related paper, written by Dr. Ariel
Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan is available here. Crunch Network: CrunchGear
drool over the sexiest new ...

Read Full Article, I Want This In Photoshop Immediately

If the retargeting stuff doesn't interest, wait till you see how they can erase your ex from old photos.