Wednesday, December 15th, 2004
I came across an interesting web portfolio created with an iPod-like interface. It even plays music and switches songs while you’re viewing it. Check out a screen shot.
Tuesday, December 14th, 2004
DVD Coasters are Really No Fun
Well, they aren’t. Therefore, I link to Steve’s blog entry that says to go to www.nomorecoasters.com. Read it, then buy good DVD-R and CD-R discs in the future. Yes yes.
Tuesday, December 14th, 2004
Map24 is similar to mapquest or yahoo maps in purpose, but it shines in implementation. The interactive map is a Java applet that lets you smoothly zoom, scroll, and navigate the map. It updates very smoothly and nicely without reloading the webpage.
Monday, December 13th, 2004
Google Labs is always coming up with interesting ideas. They’ve got another winner with the newest addition: Google Suggest.
It’s a makeover of google.com with a tweak that auto-completes the search term you are typing. A drop-down list of popular search terms is generated with each character typed. The amazing part is how quickly it works.
As documented in this slashdot comment, it is implemented using an XmlHttpRequest in a Javascript that sends very small amounts of data back and forth to update the list.
Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
Here is a map showing where our condo is. The red square is our place. There is public parking for a good price just north of the dark blue square. Mi casa, su casa.
Saturday, December 4th, 2004
Graphical User Interface (GUI) Design Tips
Benjamin Roe’s “Usable GUI Design: A Quick Guide” nicely summarizes some of the most useful ideas in user interface design. His 5 major points are:
0) The user is not “using” your application, rather getting their work done with the help of your application.
1) Fitt’s law: big stuff close to your mouse is easier to click on.
2) Avoid unnecessary interference with your user.
3) Use the power of the computer to be helpful to the user. Don’t burdon with mundane tasks.
4) Make items easy to distinguish and find.
I also think that saving state is a very great feature that could improve many applications. Ben mentions this under his point 3, but I just wanted to emphasize that saving state is very important. Some of my favorite applications do this well (MATLAB, UltraEdit, Firefox with SessionSaver) once it is setup, but I think it should be the default!
Sunday, November 28th, 2004
MATLAB Distributed Computing Toolbox 1.0
On a related note to my previous post, The MathWorks, makers of MATLAB, have just released thier first toolbox focusing on supporting distributed computing.
The Distributed Computing Toolbox allows one to develop a MATLAB program or Simulink simulation that can be run on a cluster of computers. It’s very platform-savvy: it runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, or Windows.
Sunday, November 28th, 2004
As reported on Mac OS X Hints, it is possible to use MATLAB to Xgrid. It only should work well for those “embarassingly parallel” tasks that you can manually split into chunks of data to process, but it could be interesting!
Thursday, November 25th, 2004
New Wedding Photos of Shayna and Mark Fullarton
Congratulations to Shayna and Mark! They had a really fun wedding at the Palmer House in downtown Chicago on November 7th. Now that they are back from honeymooning in Aruba, thier wedding website has some great pictures. Check it out!
Wednesday, November 17th, 2004
Have you ever wondered why humans have such big butts? We may have been born to run (nytimes.com, registration required). Here’s a bit of the explanation:
Earlier human ancestors, like chimpanzees today, had pelvises that could support only a modest gluteus maximus, nothing like the strong buttocks of Homo.
“Have you ever looked at an ape?” Dr. Bramble said. “They have no buns.”
Dr. Lieberman, a paleontologist, explained: “Your gluteus maximus stabilizes your trunk as you lean forward in a run. A run is like a controlled fall, and the buttocks help to control it.”
Monday, November 15th, 2004
Northwestern’s Associated Student Government has a great restaurant guide for the Evanston area. I added a few ratings for my favority places. Can you tell I’m looking forward to moving back there?
Wednesday, October 27th, 2004
A good collection of software essays is listed on Joel on Software discussion group.
Monday, October 25th, 2004
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers much of the course material from more than 500 of thier courses at the MIT OpenCourseWare website. It’s a great resource when you want to brush up on a subject or learn something new.
Friday, October 15th, 2004
The OQO is a tiny computer that looks pretty cool. It’s only 5in wide by 3.5in tall by 0.9in thick and it includes a 1GHz Transmeta processor, 20 GB hard drive, and 256 MB of RAM. Will this type of thing get cheaper and kill the PDA?
Monday, October 11th, 2004
Are You a Dummy About Fixin Yo Car?
Auto Repair 101 is a good beginner’s guide to car repair. I like to read up a bit before heading to the shop, so that I at least sound like I know what I’m talking about.
Tuesday, October 5th, 2004
My one trusty reader, Steve Hoelzer, may have to geek out and update his cool CSS frame demo once he sees this great CSS box made from a single image. The one-image one is fixed-width, so it’s not quite as flexible as Steve’s.
Tuesday, October 5th, 2004
Roger Johansson has put together a very complete list of web development mistakes that many people make. I sure make a few of them, but hope to fix them soon!
Monday, September 27th, 2004
In more family news, my brother Arik Brooks moved his website from Bradley University (where he went to undergrad) to Washington University (grad school).
Wednesday, September 15th, 2004
Paul Graham gives a great answer to the question, “How do you write a quality essay?”
A sample to wet your appetite:
The most obvious difference between real essays
and the things one has to write in school is that real
essays are not exclusively about English literature.
Certainly schools should teach students how to write.
But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching
of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of
literature. And so all over the country students are
writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget
might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in
fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about
symbolism in Dickens.
With the result that writing is made to seem boring and
pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens
himself would be more interested in an essay about color
or baseball.
Friday, September 10th, 2004
Erik Sink’s Source Control HOWTO is a very good introduction into the basics of a software configuration management system.
Friday, September 10th, 2004
The best TiVo forum for learning how to use and improve a TiVo is definately the TiVo Community Forum.
Friday, September 10th, 2004
Some Possible Free HyperCard Substitutes
I miss the old days of HyperCard stack tinkering, but PythonCard looks like it could be interesting. Also, if HyperSense ever gets its OSX version done, it might be good.
Friday, September 10th, 2004
Westwind computing describes all of Mac OS X’s hidden files and directories very nicely. This is a good reference when using the command line because it tells where to expect all of the command line applications to be stored.
Friday, September 10th, 2004
My old buddy from Decatur, IL is out in California now. He is a graphic designer with a very cool website.
Thursday, September 9th, 2004
SimpleBits has a collection of nice CSS notes that describe some useful questions and answers about Cascading Style Sheets.
Tuesday, September 7th, 2004
Kevin Larson at Microsoft describes the history of research into how we recognize words. We use our gool ol’ built-in neural network, of course, recognizing words by their letter combinations as our fixation point hops along, skipping over the small/common/easily recognized words.
Monday, September 6th, 2004
W3Schools provides a very complete CSS Reference that I find useful. Did you know CSS2 profides Aural style sheets for use by the blind and others with reading problems?
Saturday, September 4th, 2004
J Clark’s blog has a nice blosxom plugin called moreentries that lets you see more than the first few entries in a blosxom category.
Saturday, September 4th, 2004
I’m still intested in building a TiVo-like Linux box. AnandTech explains a setup with MythTV in a good article.
Friday, September 3rd, 2004
Security and Privacy for Regular Folks
Thomas C. Greene writes about improving Linux and Windows security. It’s quite in depth.
Wednesday, September 1st, 2004
I’ve been enjoying some of the articles on www.howstuffworks.com. Now you can enjoy too.
Wednesday, September 1st, 2004
Version 6 of the Internet Protocol supports up to about 3.4 x 10^38 addresses. This is enough for 4.3 x 10^20 unique addresses per square inch of the Earth’s surface. Do you think we’ll run out of those?
See the wikipedia entry for a summary or RFC 2373 and RFC 2374 for details.
Wednesday, September 1st, 2004
Hey Steve, we should try Skype. It’s a voice chat program that supposedly has higher quality than iChat and allows Windows-to-Mac chatting.
Read a good explanation of the P2P telephony technology that powers skype.
Tuesday, August 31st, 2004
Steve’s writeup of Gmail is pretty much how I feel about it too. I’m not too concerned with the “privacy” issues people have raised with Gmail — I think you should consider all unencrypted email to be pretty out-in-the-open anyway.
It’s sure fun having Gmail account! If you want to try contacting me, just email me at the user “alancbrooks”, then an “at” symbol, then “gmail.com”.
Tuesday, August 31st, 2004
Pay It Forward works for Gmail
The Pay It Forward concept, popularized by this movie, works in the context of sharing the Gmail invitations that allow you to get on of Google free email accounts.
Here’s the thread on MacRumors forums that is working proof of the pay it forward idea. Also, Gmail swap is another great place for getting Gmail addresses.
Thursday, August 26th, 2004
Apparantly there is now an anti-spyware program out for macintosh called MacScan. Is there a need? Has anyone used it? Steve, are you there?
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
TLAs decrease the SNR of technical communication. (TLA abbreviates “three letter acronym” and SNR stands for “signal-to-noise ratio”.)
When you examine a technical report or presention about an unfamiliar subject, often the abundant use of acronyms causes a great deal of trouble in understanding. To the uninformed reader, the acronyms increase the “noise” level of the “signal” that the author is trying to convey.
Only when one is familiar with a particular field’s abbreviation jargon do they have the ability to fully understand the information. So, TLAs are kind of “encoded” information. If you don’t know the code, the information is just noise.
(A fun* analogy is in spread spectrum communication: information is encoded and transmitted over such a wide spectrum that is looks like nothing but noise except to the reciever who has to code that pulls the signal out of the noise.)
*fun for dorky engineers at least
That’s the thought of the day. If you love it, eat a burrito.
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Intro
I found a very good CSS introduction here.
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
I agree with this article by J. David Eisenberg on A List Apart. Forgiving browsers should be considered harmful. Bad bad browsers.
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
My parents, Randy and Shirley Brooks, are transitioning their fun little haiku company’s website from family-net to www.brooksbookshaiku.com. Be on the lookout for an awesome re-design!
Saturday, August 21st, 2004
The Sixth Annual Davito BocceFest is today! The city slickers (Me, Dave Stopek, Mark Fullarton, and Mick Montgomery) are sure to have our first victory ever. Look for pictures to come! For more on Bocce ball, look at the Wikipedia coverage.
Friday, August 20th, 2004
The story of an article that was only worth it’s while for about 1.2 hours
Markdown has now gone to version 1.0, so my previous story is obsolete. Enjoy. Also, this site is now rendered using Markdown 1.0 — it is nice. If you’re interested in trying this easy tool that allows one to write HTML with out thinking HTML, check out the dingus.
Friday, August 20th, 2004
Markdown 1.0 final candidate 2 is now available. Steve, start your updating engine.
Monday, August 16th, 2004
Parlay of the iTunes Music Store and the iPod on iTunes
John Gruber, the creator of the wonderfully simple writing syntax Markdown, has written an insightful article explaining his view that Apple’s current “licensing” situation with the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) is not similar to thier Macintosh OS platform licensing decisions two decades ago.
I agree. Licensing is little related to the value of the iPod — ripping all of your CDs to your computer and using iTunes/iPod to organize and listen to them is the most compelling use of the iTunes/Pod combination. iTMS is just icing on the cake.
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004
I heard about these a while ago, but forgot the name. A Captcha is a test used to tell computers and humans apart. See the Wikipedia definition and the Carnegie Mellon project.
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004
The Creator of Wikipedia Gives an Interview
Steve mentioned my interest in Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by its readers. Some interesting news about it has recently surfaced. As reported on Slashdot, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales responds to some questions about Wikipedia.
The idea of creating useful free content other than source code is certainly intriguing.
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004
I’ve posted a slide show with my photos from our vacation to Washington DC and Virginia beach. If you have any pictures to add (Dad?), please send them my way.
Also, Jessica’s pictures are available in a zip-file.
Monday, August 2nd, 2004
Dan Bailey’s Celestial Imaging
Check out Dan’s new astronomical imaging website. I’m hosting it on my server for a while, so that is fun. He takes many interesting photographs with his telescope. One of the best is from his recent trip to the Badlands.
Saturday, July 24th, 2004
Special restaurant ratings brought to you by Jessica (my 9-year-old sister).
Her main requirements for a good restaurant center around the available food options. If they serve plain pasta with a large helping of parmesan cheese on the side, an A or higher is guaranteed. Her other dining favorites include peanut butter and jelly, crab legs, and ice cream.
Washington DC
- Bobby Van’s Steakhouse: D
- Old Ebbitt’s Grill: B
- McCormick & Schmick: A+
Virginia Beach
- Fish Bones: A
- Dairy Queen: A
- Lunch on Beach: A
- Dough Boy: A
Monday, July 19th, 2004
Question - D.C. Resident Voting
How do Washington D.C. residents get to vote? I don’t understand this district thing.
Update: Quickly searching the wikipedia, I found out that Washington DC residents do vote for President but do not have any representation in Congress. For more details, check out the wikipedia entry yourself.
Monday, July 19th, 2004
Monday (guess what lovely lady wrote this and you will be an honorary spy)
I awoke to my beautiful wife ready to see D.C. We had a lovely bagel at COSI and then we were off on our first mission to the SPY Museum!
At the museum, I realized my true calling. I must leave my job as soon as we get home and begin a new life of secrecy as a man of international mystery.
Monday, July 19th, 2004
Today, we took off at 9, grabbed a light breakfast at Cosi, and then headed to the International Spy Museum.
Jessica was very excited about seeing the spy museum and was telling us all types of James Bond facts along the way. We saw all types of recording devices, mini-cams, radio transmitters, and so on.
One of the most memorable artifacts was a fancy round seal that was given as a gift to a US Official from Soviet school children in the 1970s. Many years later, it was revealed that the gift had a listening device cleverly hidden within.
Then we headed on to the Smithsonian History Museum. We saw the insect zoo, gemstones (including the Hope Diamond), and the animal bones.
For dinner we had McCormick and Schmick. Jessica was thrilled — see her rating system.
Later on in the evening, we visited the Lincoln Memorial and captured some great images.
Sunday, July 18th, 2004
Discovering Our Nation’s Capital!
Walking
We woke up excited about our first day out exploring D.C. — a quick start at Starbucks for bagels and coffee and we were on our way.
On foot, we explored around the White House, Decatur House, Washington Monument, the mall, a cool sculpture garden, and then the Space Smithsonian Museum.
Then we headed out to the National Gallery of Art, where Amanda really was into the impressionist drawings. One of her favorites was Children Playing on the Beach by Mary Cassatt. I really liked The Bridge at Argenteuil by Claude Monet.
Finally, we ended our walking tour by checking out the newly opened World War II memorial.
Construction
Much of the capital is currently under construction, probably for a combination of security and beautification purposes.
The White House’s surrounding grounds are being updated and you really can’t get to close to it … although this squirrel could:
The Washington Monument’s grounds were all torn up and the public could only get near it via one path. Also, the reflecting pond was empty and full of stinky gunk — yuck.
Boxers and Dinner
I was a little forgetful with a particular undergarment that is nice to change often, so after getting back from our walking tour, Amanda and I headed over to Filene’s Basement to pick up some boxers for me.
Then, on our way back, we noticied the Old Ebbitts restaurant and got our name on the list. It was a great dinner — I loved the Chicken and Crab Saltisoma.
Saturday, July 17th, 2004
Today, we left for Washington at 4:45 AM — now that’s early! My mom is a good morning driver, so she took the early shift. We started off on I-72 and I-74 from Decatur to Champaign and then to Indianapolis. Then, our route was I-70 all of the way.
It was a 14 hour tour: we arrived at the Sofitel at about 8 PM eastern time. We were excited because our hotel is about a block from the White House. We then went on a mission to ease our hunger, settling on Bobby Van’s Steakhouse after walking around a bit and realizing that this area’s restaurants are mostly open at lunchtime.
The food was tasty (I had a crabcake) and we were satisfied.
We went to sleep and enjoyed our room (Manda was getting decorating ideas).
Wednesday, July 14th, 2004
For some fun today, I created a favicon.ico file (the little icon
displayed next to the web address in most browsers). I started with my
background geek image and did all of the image processing on the command
line using imagemagick and png2ico.
The png2ico developer, Matthias Benkmann, has a simple
description of how to setup a favicon.
I used the following command sequence to reduce the background image to the correct size, convert it into the .ico format, and then put it in the right spot for my Mac OS X webserver. :
$ convert -scale 16x16 -normalize geek.jpg geek16x16.png
$ png2ico --colors 16 favicon.ico geek16x16.png
$ cp favicon.ico /Library/WebServer/Documents/
Then, I added the following 2 lines between <head> and <\head> in
the web pages in which the new icon should be displayed. :
<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">
Hopefully, you can see the result above!
Wednesday, July 14th, 2004
Steve updated his blosxom blog
I had linked to his blog before his computer crashed, but now the young whippersnapper has some new content and a slightly new web address:
Once again, I commend his use of cascading style sheets (CSS). His blog style sheet is here. He helped me improve my site a bit with CSS — note the background image sticks to the middle right part of the screen and doesn’t scroll with the text.
Friday, July 9th, 2004
Welcome, visitors from my email
Hi friends and family! Hope you got the move info. Thanks for coming to check out my weblog (“blog” for short).
I’m running this off of my own computer from home, so if any of you have anything you’d like to post (photos, comments, etc..), I’ve got plenty of web server space, so please feel free to email me about that.
Have fun!
Thursday, July 8th, 2004
I really like the look of Steve’s newer blog. He’s using style sheets very well!
Thursday, July 8th, 2004
Last week, I spent Tuesday and Wednesday serving my first jury duty. I served at the Dailey Center for the Circuit Court of Cook County.
They have a one day, one trial system where your service obligation is fulfilled if you (1) wait in the juror waiting room all day, (2) get called for jury selection but are dismissed, or (3) get selected and serve on one trial.
I was selected as the 12th juror, so I served on a civil case Wednesday. It was interesting, and fortunately easy to come to a consensus when the jury deliberated.
Sunday, July 4th, 2004
It was a fun forth weekend — we saw a Cubs/Sox game at Wrigley, I got a new grill (and made some tasty steaks), and enjoyed some fireworks off of the balcony.
Monday, June 28th, 2004
HDTV Over-the-air Receiver and Antennas
Since moving to Arlinton Heights, I’ve been trying to get HDTV over the air. The experiment didn’t succeed — I could only get 3 channels (WGN, ABC, and PBS). Without FOX and NBC, it wasn’t worth it.
However, when a channel did come in with HD content, it looked awesome! The nature specials on PBS were very clear and in widescreen high-definition (you could really see that bobcat fight the snake).
For the record, I used a Motorola HDT-100 high definition television receever on an open-box deal from Circuit City (for $270). It worked well, but had to be returned in the end because …
… it turns out I live on the wrong side of the apartment to be able to receive signals from the Sears Tower and Handcock building in downtown Chicago. I did have some luck with the Gemini Silver Sensor UHF antenna — it’s very directional and helped with the multipath problems caused by the signals going through my apartment building. A good website on general antenna info (for dummies) is here.
Also, antennaweb.org is a great website. You type in your address and it can tell you what direction all the TV stations are from your address and then recommend an antenna type.
Monday, June 28th, 2004
This weekend, I had my first chance to see US Cellular Field — it was the Cubs vs the Sox. Although the Sox won, it was a beautiful day for a game. After the game, we walked through the Taste of Chicago for some yummy eats — fried okra and a steak taco were my favorites.
Friday, June 18th, 2004
I think we should get in touch with Huggins to find out how to replace the broken link to the windows code from Steve an I’s OFDM project.
Friday, June 18th, 2004
Can you believe it? Arik married Laura Hanson, a wonderful young lady, on June 4, 2004. It was a great time! See my dad’s photo collection.
Thursday, June 17th, 2004
Relocated to Arlington Heights
For those who are interested, Amanda and I are moving to an apartment in Arlington Heights this Sunday. We got our keys and checked it out today — it was quite nice! This is our intermediate place to live while our condo back in Evanston is built.
Our new address: 299 N Dunton Ave Apt 604 Arlington Heights, IL 60004
Phone number (effective Monday): 847-577-8563
Wednesday, June 16th, 2004
Congrats to my friend Kris Classen on putting that law degree to use and getting a new job at the Appelate Court of Illinois in Richmond, IL. He’ll be working for Jack O’Malley.
Tuesday, June 15th, 2004
I was excited to have my simple hint posted at macosxhints today. It’s just a convenient way to quit Mail.app remotely so that I can check email using pine.
Tuesday, June 8th, 2004
To concatenate head.html, tail.html files and auto-open result
Tack on another command (cat) that concatenates the text from the header, stdin, and footer. Then open the result in your default browser. E.g. (should be all on one line):
% perl Markdown.pl foo.text | perl SmartyPants.pl |
cat head.html - tail.html > foo.html; open foo.html
Monday, June 7th, 2004
Since Steve introduced my blog, I posted a response, and then Steve responded to the response, then of couse I had to add the obligitory recursive post in response.
Steve’s use of iBlog & .Mac does seem quite simple for setting up simple useless blogs :)
Monday, May 31st, 2004
How to use Markdown.pl on the Command Line
Use the --htmltags command-line switch to produce HTML output from a Unix-style command line. E.g.:
% perl Markdown.pl --htmltags foo.text > foo.html
Type perldoc Markdown.pl, or read the POD documentation within the
Markdown.pl source code, for more information.
Monday, May 31st, 2004
Steve’s Blog has arrived. Some say he’s crazy, and I concur. Also, check his homepage, where he dabbles in CSS.
Monday, May 31st, 2004
A pre-requistie for face recognition is face detection. The Robotics Institute at CMU has a great demo with my submission.
Sunday, May 30th, 2004
I’ve been working on face recognition for my ECE 432 computer vision class at NWU. Here’s some images I’ve been working with:
They come from some photos I took in class one day and from my dad’s student websites.
Sunday, May 30th, 2004
Just a quick note: dotster.com is good for domain name registration. You can do fun searches for what domain names are available.
Saturday, May 29th, 2004
We had a good time dining and visiting with our friends tonite at Navy Pier tonite.
Some “oil cans” of Fosters were consumed, and that led to discussions concerning the best movie of all time. The candidates included:
- Forrest Gump
- Rain Man (don’t these 2 always come up in similar discussions)
- American History X
- American Beauty
- The Shawshank Redemption
- Office Space
- Old School
- The Jerk (courtesy of Kris)
- 12 Monkeys (the greatest movie ever)
- Bandits & Zoolander (oops, dat’s Manda talkin)
- L.O.T.R. (i can’t believe we forgot to discuss this)
- help me menber de rest cuz I be forgettin now
Over & out.
