polyphase.ca » General

A Brief Announcement – Welcome Eamonn

Alan — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:54:36 +0000

New kind of flying machine

Alan — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:12:55 +0000

The Japanese Ministry of Defense has come up with an amazingly cool looking flying machine. Story available on diginfo.tv.

It’s basically a hovering, flying sphere.

Wild.

Courtesy of YouTube

Wiggly things and strong things.

Alan — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:32:56 +0000

The girls and I worked through a Guided Participatory Lesson for Children around building strong shapes. We built tetrahedrons, wiggly cubes and solid trusses, culminating in the awkward to assemble but rewarding icosahedron.

Later they asked me to come back and help them “stabilize” their creation — it’s too wiggly Unkie.

#win.

Very cute inspirational Lego short.

Alan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:08:50 +0000

For my two blog readers that do not also read Gizmodo, this little short is truly wonderful:

Lego Short Film Makes Me Want to Play With Legos Immediately [Lego]:

“

CL!CK is a short film made by Lego about how Legos can inspire you to come up with great ideas. It’s a fancy ad, to be sure, but a truly lovely one. [YouTube via NotCot]

(Via Gizmodo.)

Web developers outsmarting users (or not). Design assumptions that hurt.

Alan — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:58:19 +0000

Website #FAILs.

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of websites make crazy assumptions about my location. I was thinking it was geolocation gone wrong, but it appears that in general they are doing something completely illogical: they are using my language preference list to guess where I am.

This amounts to assuming that all French speaking people are in France, that all English speaking people are in England and so on.

What does RFC 2616 have to say about this?

14.4 Accept-Language

The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but
restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a
response to the request. Language tags are defined in section 3.10.
…

Nothing there about location? This is a classic assumption / layer violation in a design.

The worst offenders here are, by in large, financial institutions. When I visit ING Direct, they redirect me immediately to the Canadian login screen. Trouble is — I don’t have a Canadian account. Worse — ~~there is no button to override their error~~ the button to fix the problem is buried and two layers deep. Outsmarted by not too clever web developers.

Ouch. That hurts.

Wonder what would happen if I visited with a language preference set to en_DE or en_FR?

WordPress Upgrade

Alan — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 08:29:36 +0000

Wow. With much gnashing of teeth, I’ve upgraded to 2.7.1. I have not managed to upgrade my themes, but one step at a time. I had my shared hosting vendor upgrade the platform a while back and oddly enough this disabled my administrative access and I’ve been largely unable to write new content for almost 3 months. It looks like that problem is fixed and I can post a few entries again.

Update: Apparently I still have some problems, I’m working on it.

PoTW: They’re Back!

Alan — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 04:42:21 +0000

The girls are back in town for an extended visit. We found ourselves in Felton, CA today and took advantage of the local park.

Ham Licenses. Who has one?

Alan — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:47:55 +0000

KC and I have been considering getting a ‘real’ bike-to-bike communication system and with that comes the discovery that almost all GMRS / business radios need to be licensed. With a Technician Ham ticket being a mere weekend course and with that opening the possibility of ‘real radios’, I’m interested in hearing from any of you that have your ticket.

What portable rigs have you tried, anyone have any experience with the Kenwood TH-F6A, what about the Yaesu VX-7R, or newer. Anything from ICOM?

I have an ICOM-A23 for aviation that I’m very pleased with, but this is a new application so they may not be the incumbent that they are in the aero world.

Any comments or thoughts around portables are welcome. Since it is a bike application, I don’t have room for a mobile sized unit.

It occurs to me that I don’t even know which of my friends have a ham ticket, so feel free to educate me.

Britannica, britannica. C. 1910

Alan — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 02:20:43 +0000

From Project Gutenberg

[Which is, of course just a copy of the 11th Ed. of Encyclopaedia Britannica]

CALGARY, the oldest city in the province of Alberta. Pop. (1901) 4091;
(1907) 21,112. It is situated in 114 deg. 15′ W., and 51 deg. 41/2′ N., on the Bow
river, which flows with its crystal waters from the pass in the Rocky
Mountains, by which the main line of the Canadian Pacific railway crosses
the Rocky Mountains. The pass proper–Kananaskis–penetrates the mountains
beginning 40 m. west of Calgary, and the well-known watering-place, Banff,
lies 81 m. west of it, in the Canadian national park. The streets are wide
and laid out on a rectangular system. The buildings are largely of stone,
the building stone used being the brown Laramie sandstone found in the
valley of the Bow river in the neighbourhood of the city. Calgary is an
important point on the Canadian Pacific railway, which has a general
superintendent resident here. It is an important centre of wholesale
dealers, and also of industrial establishments. Calgary is near the site of
Fort La Jonquiere founded by the French in 1752. Old Bow fort was a trading
post for many years though now in ruins. The present city was created by
the building of the Canadian Pacific railway about 1883.

I found that rather enlightening AND amusing. Oh how far Calgary has come….

Nothing like a little pre-Great War perspective to put a spin on your weekend.

Commuter Fun

Alan — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 02:54:57 +0000

commute |kəˈmyoōt|
verb
1 [ intrans. ] travel some distance between one’s home and place of work on a regular basis : she commuted from Westport in to Grand Central Station.

Well tonight tops my commuter fun-list. I know that things can get crazy, and I’ve had one day prior to today where CA-17 was closed (as opposed to slow) due to a major accident, however today tops all previous days in my brief commuter experience for sheer number of incidents.

I really had a hard time believing that I was seeing all the carnage that I was.

Here’s the official 511.org version of my commute (by the time I got home). The site has left out an accident on the brief section of CA-237 that I have to take from the office to CA-85 S.

Route	Time
CA-17 S	7/31/08 7:17 p.m.
CHP : Disabled vehicle on CA-17 S Southbound before San Tomas Expy (Campbell) 2nd lane from the left blocked Expect delays
CA-17 S	7/31/08 7:14 p.m.
CHP : Accident with property damage only on CA-17 S Southbound after S Santa Cruz Ave (Los Gatos) Expect delays
CA-17 S	7/31/08 7:01 p.m.
CHP : Accident with property damage only on CA-17 S Southbound after S Santa Cruz Ave (Los Gatos) Expect delays
CA-17 S	7/31/08 6:41 p.m.
CHP : Accident with property damage only on CA-17 S Southbound at Summit Rd (Los Gatos) Right shoulder blocked Expect delays
CA-85 S	7/31/08 7:05 p.m.
CHP: Accident with property damage only on CA-85 S Southbound at Saratoga Rd (Saratoga). Right lane blocked Expect delays.

That makes for 6 (SIX!) accidents on my way home. Each causing significant traffic backup.
Yikes! I cannot wait for September when all the people on summer vacation are driving too!