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Joshua Brauer

Competition

October 17, 2005

Bloglines gets hotkeys
It's been great to see the new Google RSS Reader the last couple of weeks. It's the closest an online RSS reader has come to being great. I haven't yet tried the NewsGator online tool that I'll be entitled to as a Net News Wire customer but of the free newsreaders Google has a great one. However the competition has been good. As seen here Bloglines which has been around for a while and could have done hotkeys at any point in the past didn't do it until Google forced them to.

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Why ESPN didn't get my $10...

October 15, 2005

I came home early tonight with the intent of watching the Colorado State at BYU football game. Having scouted the game earlier I knew it would be on ESPN's Game Plan. It has been a while since I used one of the pay-per-view services but thought it would be worth dropping $10 to watch the game. Little did I know that I was only half right. For some reason I won't soon understand ESPN doesn't sell individual games anymore. If you want to see one game you have to buy the $20 "weekend" package. I understand it gives me more games that I could have watched earlier in the day but as I often do I was working earlier in the day.

No worries, I thought, because BYU TV had the game scheduled to be shown with a 1-hour delay. "All right," I thought, I can avoid the score for an extra hour and see the game. Of course when the hour passed and the game was due to start its "delayed" showing a college of fine arts music concert was on instead. It seems the schedule was optimistic in advertising the game for an hour after kickoff. Going online it seems the package is $20 to watch it on either the internet or TV. Why not both? Would it really cost that much extra for ESPN to offer a combined package?

Alas it is now most of the way through the third quarter and the Cougars are mauling the Rams 17-0. ESPN GameCast shows the Rams are having an impossible time crossing the Cougar's 35-yard-line, let alone getting into the red zone. Elsewhere in the league today Utah's woes continued with San Diego State coming up with a 28-19 win.

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Frustration with IE 6

October 15, 2005

It has been a frustrating day trying to deal with the CSS bugs in Internet Explorer. This site shows up nicely in Firefox, Safari and other browsers using CSS style sheets to handle the display. However if you're looking at this site in Internet Explorer 6 the sidebar doesn't show up. The bmannconsulting.com site has the same problem (and is another Drupal site). Is there something in the default Drupal .css that causes this or is it some oddity of IE we're left to battle on our own. It might be necessary to re-design the CSS with the advice from webreference.com. Something to do this evening I guess.

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Sandy Internet Superhighway

October 15, 2005

Today was a banner day for me here in Iraq. I just got an internet connection installed in my CHU and I got a mattress to sleep on. I had been waiting hours for 20 minutes on a public connection and had been sleeping on plywood covered with a thin "therma-rest" type camping mattress. Let's here it for progress!

Now that I have a connection in my room I highly recommend that those of you who do not have Yahoo or AOL instant messenger go ahead and get that service. Its free and will be the best way for me to chat with you. My screen name is rotoravi8r on AOL and on Yahoo. I am 7-8 hours ahead of most of you.

The past few days have been relative quiet here for me. I hitched a ride on a recent flight as a passenger just to see what the flying environment is like. We flew all over northern Iraq without incident. Bagdad is really cool looking from the air with night vision goggles. The goggles keep you from really seeing the destruction so the city appears to be quite beautiful. I hope to be in the pilot seat soon. The guys who have started flying are flying a lot and I expect to get a lot of hours as well.

I am getting used to the routine and to my accomodations. I will send pictures in the next few days.

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Reality distortion?

October 13, 2005

Over at Slate Jack Shafer criticizes media that "salute every shiny gadget " Apple produces. In the complaint he goes on to say "At least the techie readers of Engadget, free of the Apple mind-meld, recognize the V-iPod[sic] as a deliberately crippled by copy protection, low-res, underpowered video appliance that is merely Apple's first try in the emerging market of video players."

Funny. It has been at least a few months since the same things were said about an Apple release. Remember all the claims of "ho-hum", "tired", "been there" quotes that the "knowledgeable" people had to say about the iPod Shuffle. All the while the horribly incorrect mainstream media reported what consumers said. At the end of the day, or in this case the fiscal year, it turns out to be Apple that is laughing all the way to the bank as long as they can keep the diminutive blockbusters on the shelf.

It's funny that the "knowledgeable" folks who will be rushing out in a year to buy the product that average consumers have found to be fantastic.

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The editorial eye

October 11, 2005

In commenting on Yahoo News search Dave Winer suggests "Blogs don't belong in the margin, they belong in the main results."

Looking through a search presents some problems with this idea. An average search shows several copies of results of posts from this blog repeated on several other spamertising blogs. This means that to decide which blogs should be included an editorial decision needs to be made on the part of the information provider. An offhand suggestion says perhaps you go to the first copy of the post as authoritative. However this will just cause the illegitimate sites to backdate their posts to appear to be the original.

Rapidly this becomes an area where the authority of the editor becomes important. With the New York Times for example I'm able to judge from many volumes of history what I think of their editorial policies. How do we learn to apply that same judgement to collections of personal publications?

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Robot race

October 9, 2005

"NO DRIVR" reads the ontario license plate. "driven by Mac OS X" reads the fender of one Volkswagen Toureg. In comes another dust-covered Toureg with its play on the familiar Volkswagen line "Drivers not needed," the rear fender proclaims. Indeed it is almost correct. The vehicle has just become the first to traverse the 132-mile course with only a computer at the controls. Though it has logged more than a thousand miles in training its artificial intelligence system, the 132 that it logged on Saturday are historic.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 2005 Grand Challenge filled the parking lot behind Buffalo Bills' in Primm, Nevada this weekend. I snapped a few photos of the first vehicles to complete the 132-mile desert course. In contrast to the 2004 Grand Challenge where the top teams managed only seven miles, 22 of the 23 finalists surpassed the seven-mile mark. Five teams finished the entire 132-mile course this year, although only four finished in the alloted 10-hour timeframe. 43 teams went to the National Qualification Event over the last two weeks. The teams competing had bots ranging in size from Blue Team's diminutive Ghostrider Robot a motorcycle based platform to the 16-ton green machine TerraMax.

Stanford's Stanley, a Volkswagen Toureg, completed the course in 6 hours 53 minutes and 58 seconds to win the challenge's $2 million purse.

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