polyphase.ca

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.

Source Repository Visualization

Alan — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:09:20 +0000

I rendered a quick animation of the reSIProcate project’s development history using the wonderful ‘gource‘ tool.

You can see it here if you like, in 720p/H.264. I love the flurries of activity that pop up over time.

Props to Adam H for pointing me at this tool.

Quote of the Day: It’s the yaks.

Alan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:56:11 +0000

I know, three posts in one day is really too many; but this quote really tickles my funny bone while being a solid reminder why we need some humility and introspection powers.

While discussing the requirements or principles that might guide the development of a new mail application for Mac OS X; Brent manages to use “Let yaks prowl the grounds unshaven.” in a document. Excellent.

Follow along here for more.

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.)

Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees

Alan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:02:14 +0000

Schneier points out that Facebook is a privacy train wreck waiting to happen; something I have long believed. People need to take heed and be careful about what they reveal to whom. We are only at the very earliest of stages with our automated privacy specification and/or features. Life and personal privacy is going to get a lot worse before it gets better:

Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees:

“I don’t know if this is real, but it seems perfectly reasonable that all of Facebook is stored in a huge database that someone with the proper permissions can access and modify. And it also makes sense that developers and others would need the ability to assume anyone’s identity.

Click through to Schneier’s site for a reference to the original material.

(Via Schneier on Security.)

A compelling replacement for make

Alan — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:42:54 +0000

SCons

Having lived with make for over 20 years; I’ve decided that something has to be better. Turns out, there is something better.
I’ve been enjoying getting to know both Python and scons together for the last few months.

What a wonderful tool for building. There is a ton of information online, so I won’t add to the mélé with my opinions.

Check it out : scons.org.

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?

VMware Fusion linux guest os and host file sharing.

Alan — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:39:48 +0000

I managed to install vmware tools into my guest OS (CentOS 5.2) using the manual install method, mounting the ISO image and then running the perl installer. So far, so good.

However, the files are all mounted with the host OS uid/gid. There is likely a better solution, but given that the guest is a single user (effectively) environment, I just mapped the host fs to my guest OS uid/gid by editing the /etc/fstab file.
# Beginning of the block added by the VMware software .host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5 0 0 # End of the block added by the VMware software

Changes to :
# Beginning of the block added by the VMware software .host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5, uid=500,gid=500 0 0 # End of the block added by the VMware software

The 500/500 comes from my id on the linux guest OS, NOT the host OS.

Good luck!