Dammit Jim!

I think it’s supposed to be some sort of blogging shortcut but I kind of like when a blog I read posts interesting links they’ve found recently. So I thought I would start doing a few posts like that of my own. I’ll gather up links I think are especially interesting and once I get five or so dump them in to a post. Feel free to read or delete as you please.

MESSENGER Images of Mercury

The Messenger space probe passed by Mercury recently. I hadn’t realized that most of Mercury has never been seen. It’s pretty cool that we get to see images of a new world almost as quickly as the scientists working on it.

That Stupid Bigfoot on Mars

This one has been going around the internet. If you missed it, there’s a rock on Mars near one of the rovers that looks like Bigfoot. The “Bigfoot” thing is pretty silly (although Sasquatch was the first thing I thought when I saw the picture) but that post shows the really cool and huge panorama it came from.

Donald Knuth and LaTeX

I like LaTeX so I found this bit of history about Donald Knuth coming up with the software pretty interesting.

Bioluminescence and Squid Video

I just found out about all these TED talks being online. Pretty handy when you don’t have a TV. This one is about five minutes long and has a bunch of videos of squid, octopuses and things that glow in the depths.

Pulgasari: The North Korean Godzilla

This is another one resulting from not having a TV. Definitely a less than B grade monster movie but it does provide a good comparison to Cloverfield. The story of Kim Jong-Il kidnapping the director and his wife and forcing them to make the thing sounds like a better story than the movie itself (not that it’d take much). For the impatient, there’s decent monster bits around 27:30, 47:30 and 1:03:00.

Soldering Tiny Components

This is a great video tutorial on how to solder tiny electronic components. Really nicely filmed and very closeup. You can really see what’s going on and the guy sure makes it look easy.

NerdKits

A nice idea by a couple college students to sell kits for learning how to use microcontrollers. They “guarantee that you’ll get your first program written and running”. Unfortunately they don’t have a USB version yet. Sort of a homegrown alternative to EasyPic4.

That’s it for now. That was pretty quick and fun to put together so I’ll probably do some more of these in the future. I hope something on there is interesting for other people too.

I browsing around the internets this morning and came across a few mentions of the movie Cloverfield. I vaguely remembered seeing the preview and thinking it looked interesting. But when I saw the Bad Astronomer (who seems to have a pretty good taste in movies) say it was (and I quote) AWESOME, that was enough for me. So I woke up Xiaofen and we headed off to the theater ($5 off if you go to the 10:15AM show).

After seeing it I have to agree, I really enjoyed it and I was on the edge of my seat through the whole thing. I definitely recommend Cloverfield (in the theater if possible). Just one caveat, it’s possible the camera work might disturb anyone with motion sickness although Xiaofen didn’t have any trouble and she gets car sick all the time. I had only seen the (cryptic) trailer and didn’t have any expectations going in and I think that helped so I’m going to leave it at that and follow Wil Wheaton’s example and leave my slightly more detailed analysis in the comments.

Oh if you’re like me and worry that the director is going to stick a little extra on after the credits, there is a little something but it’s not really worth waiting for (only a couple seconds of audio and I’ll link to it below).

Possible spoilers in the comments

I just graduated a few months back and I figure it’s about (past) time I start looking for a job. I’ve been meaning to look into microformats and they have a resume microformat so I figured I’d give them a try and get my resume done at the same time. As far as I can gather, microformatting is basically just hiding some machine readable information in text meant for humans (usually in the class attribute of html tags e.g. <p class="someMicroformat" >). This means people can read the page quiet happily one moment and a computer can come along the next and parse the page much better using the microformatting hints. The big microformats seem to be calendar and addressbook entries (also tags, licensing, and external links but these seem to me to be in a different, simpler class). It seems like a smart idea so although I’m not sure there’s any actual benefit (yet), I figured if I’m going to make an html resume I might as well make a microformatted html resume.

Things went pretty smooth after I figured out the basic formatting since it’s just adding the same annotation for calendar events for all the dates and same addressbook format for the employers/universities. It was really helpful to refer to the resume of someone who knew what they were doing for any questions. The only hitch was when I hit things unexpected in the microformat (like a job that started and stopped a couple times or more than one employer for one job). I guess in those cases you either have to sacrifice human readability or the microformat clarity so I just marked it up as best as I could. The only other complaint would be that they give publications the short shrift without any microformatting. Seems like a citation microformat would be really handy on the internet.

So anyway here’s the resume. If you’re actually curious and look at the source, there’s all kinds of microformatting goodness going on behind the scenes with all the employers as hCards and the job times as hCalendars. If you want to be able to see microformats in action without looking at the source of every page you visit there’s the handy Operator plugin for Firefox that automatically puts a little indicator in the title bar (like the little orange RSS indicator) and allows appropriate actions (like adding to a calender or address book). You can start to see how useful microformats could be using that plugin. I think Firefox is planning to push microformats in their next version so here’s hoping they catch on.

Well I wondered how long it would take before I hit a snag with RCN’s internet service after praising it. It turns out it only took a few days before I found out they redirect 404’s (incorrect addresses or webpages that are temporarily down) to their (spammy-looking) “help” page. Now perhaps I’m too picky but I’m quite happy with the way my browser handles things now and if I wanted something different I sure wouldn’t pick crappy search results mixed with ads for my solution. I suppose I could live with the useless page but it also rewrites the address so if I type exmple.com/longstring/ I have retype the whole thing instead of just adding an ‘a’ to exmple (really a pain when developing websites). And mostly it just annoys me to suddenly be on a page that sets off my spam detectors. So I set out to figure out how to fix it.

On the bottom of the RCN page, there is an option to opt out but it actually then sends you to a buggy Internet Explorer error screen (and still rewrites your address). Since there’s no opt out that left working around them. RCN is inserting their page through their DNS servers so using a different server should fix the problem. I had been meaning to try out OpenDNS anyway so I figured I might as well make some lemonade out of lemons. But it turns out OpenDNS do the same redirection thing to their own page. So it was back to a google that turned up this helpful page of alternate DNS servers. I’m a little leary of using unknown servers (since you send them the address for every site you visit and they can send you wherever they want) but the servers 4.2.2.1 through 4.2.2.6 are all from Level 3 Communications Inc which seem pretty widely used and reputable. OpenDNS provides a handy guide to changing your DNS servers (if you don’t want to use theirs you can substitute any other IP address) for anyone with similar problems.

I just moved to Philadelphia and had to find internet. I was having a pretty rough time so I googled around for advice but didn’t find any so I thought I’d put this up to help any other new Philadelphians. Anyway, it looks like there are three possible companies in Philadelphia: Comcast, Verizon, and RCN.

Comcast charges $62/month for basic internet if you don’t get some sort of bundle with phone and cable (which I didn’t really need or want). $62 seemed too much so I didn’t go any further with them although they do at least tell the truth about their prices on the internet (I think).

Verizon says they charge $30/month but once you get through the endless holds on their phone system, it turns out to be $45/month if you don’t get phone service from them. I can’t find any sign of this on their webpage. Did I mention you have to wait on hold more than half an hour to even talk to some one? I waited 45 minutes before their phone service dropped me, then waited another 30 minutes (this is when I still though their service was reasonably priced) before I got to talk to anyone (I had waited more than 10 minutes and given up a few times earlier so this isn’t an isolated event). Even better, once I finally got someone I couldn’t actually start my service because some other customer had their suspended account registered to my line. They would only allow me to use the line if my landlord called them personally (not very likely given the 30 minute holds). So in summary Verizon sucks. Oh also it would have taken at least a week to get my service started.

I was about to bite the bullet and go with Comcast when my girlfriend found RCN. They offer (1.5 mbps) internet for $17/month (or 5 mbps for $35). An actual human operator picked up the phone without any holding when I called. There wasn’t any bundling crap (they did have a $25 installation fee that didn’t appear on the internet but the operator said they were updating the webpage). And they had a cable guy at my house less than 24 hours after I called. After all the crap with Verizon, this was amazing.

So if you’re looking for internet in Philadelphia (or perhaps anywhere these companies operate) RCN seems like a much better company than Verizon (did I mention Verizon sucks?) and offers cheaper services than Comcast. I’ve been using the $17/month internet for a couple days now and it seems fine for normal usage (I don’t do much file sharing so I’m not sure how that would hold up).