Tech Obsession

2011-07-03T22:11:00.001-07:00

Yesterday - Moodys Investment Service - basically a global credit rating agency - fired a shot across the bow of the United States.

They basically said if our lawmakers can’t come together to raise the debt ceiling by next month - then they’ll downgrade the credit rating of our nation - signaling to the rest of the world that America can’t pay back its bond holders - likely causing a global financial catastrophe.

So the clock is ticking for the Speaker of the House John Boehner to quit playing games and raise the damn debt ceiling.

But the truth is - Republicans could care less about the debt ceiling - the only clock they care about is the one that's ticking away to the 2012 elections.

Republicans have made a calculated decision that if Democrats don’t agree to privatize Medicare, or other massive cuts - then they're going to go ahead and let our nation default on our debt - because they believe that in the end it will be President Obama who will be blamed in 2012 by the voters for the economic disaster.

As Matt Yglesias reports, one Republican who’s close to John Boehner reportedly said in closed-door Republican budget meetings:

Of course, it’s dangerous… But it’s dangerous for everybody, especially the president. At the end of the day, [Obama] will have to give in.

Another Republican piped up and said:

Who has egg on their face if there is a sovereign debt crisis, House Republicans or the president?

The truth is…the Republicans are right - President Obama IS the guy who will likely take the hit if our nation defaults - he’ll become the next Herbert Hoover - and Democrats might be banished from politics for a generation if that happens.

And that’s the exact endgame that Republicans are trying for with their scorched earth strategy - they'll do anything to win back the White House, even if it means another Great Depression for the rest of us.

That’s why Republicans are playing hardball in this case.

But what the Republicans don’t realize - and I’m not even sure the President realizes this - is that while Republicans may be armed with machetes in this budgetary knife fight - President Obama has a chainsaw.

And that chainsaw is a power that the Office of Management and Budget has given to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Back in 1985 - there was a debate going down - just like today - over raising the debt ceiling.

And one Senator from Oregon - Bob Packwood - had a question.

So he wrote a letter to the Government Accountability Office basically asking how - and in what order - our debt obligations would be paid off if Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling.

And what he received back in response is incredible - here’s the letter.

“TO THE HONORABLE BOB PACKWOOD:

CHAIRMAN, SENATE COMMITTEE ON FINANCE, UNITED STATES SENATE

YOU HAVE REQUESTED OUR VIEWS ON WHETHER THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY HAS AUTHORITY TO DETERMINE THE ORDER IN WHICH OBLIGATIONS ARE TO BE PAID SHOULD THE CONGRESS FAIL TO RAISE THE STATUTORY LIMIT ON THE PUBLIC DEBT OR WHETHER TREASURY WOULD BE FORCED TO OPERATE ON A FIRST IN-FIRST-OUT BASIS.”

And here’s the key part of this letter:

“IT IS OUR CONCLUSION THAT THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY DOES HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO CHOOSE THE ORDER IN WHICH TO PAY OBLIGATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES.”

Now, translating that into English, what that means is that Treasury Secretary Timmy Geithner has the sole authority to determine how our debt obligations are met by deciding which bills to pay and when to pay them, of course, doing it on behalf of the president.

In fact - he’s already doing this - we hit the debt ceiling and passed our debt ceiling back on May 17th and Geithner is now borrowing from federal pension funds to keep our government running.

So…if Republicans REALLY want to play hardball - the President can direct Tim Geithner to play hardball right back at them.

Instead of cannibalizing federal pension funds - he could cut federal assistance to states whose Republican Senators and Congressmen are blocking a debt limit increase.

The president could basically say, “Hey John Boehner - you don’t want to raise the debt ceiling - that’s fine. But kiss all that federal money Ohio gets every day goodbye…we’re using that money to pay off our debt”.

No more highway funds, no more medicaid funds, no more education funds, no more nothing.

Ohio, you're out of business.

Or…“Hey Paul Ryan - I know Wisconsin is struggling financially right now - but it’s about to get a whole lot worse because we’re blocking all federal grants to the state…we need to pay off our debt somehow”.

It’s a pretty simple choice really - do we use existing federal funds to finance John Boehner’s corporate pet project of an alternative F-35 jet engine - or do we use the funds to pay off our debt and avoid a global meltdown?

Do we use our money to help rebuild a road in Paul Ryan’s Congressional district - or do we use it to assure other nations that our debt is still good?

I don't know about you - but I'd rather let a few pot holes deteriorate in Wisconsin than let Republicans bring about the next Great Depression.

So Mr. President...

Ask some of the old-timers around the White House how Lyndon Johnson took Fed Chairman William Martin into his office and literally, physically beat him up, then slammed him up against the wall, and then delivered his ultimatum.

It's time for you to do the same - metaphorically at least - with Eric Cantor and the Tea Party Republicans in Congress who want to destroy your presidency by destroying the credit worthiness of our great nation.

Slam them up against the wall by pulling all federal funding to every state whose member of congress wouldn't vote to raise the debt ceiling.

And then let them try to explain to their voters why their food stamp cards don't work, why their social security checks aren't arriving and their road repairs all stopped and half their schools are closing.

Time for some hardball, sir.

Respectfully, of course.

That's The Big Picture

poor internet explorer

2011-07-03T21:52:00.000-07:00

Google Calendar Gets Prettier

2011-07-03T21:41:00.000-07:00

Posted @ 6/30/2011 6:00 AM

I'm in the waning days of my Gmail/Google Calendar usage, but I woke up this morning to catch up on email and get started on the day, and discovered that Google Calendar had gotten a nice-looking facelift with a flatter UI, a cleaner layout, and some other niceties. Google reports that the changes are just cosmetic, so the underlying Calendar functionality hasn't changed. (Which is too bad: I was hoping this would fix the multiple calendars on Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" issue.)

http://www.winsupersite.com/content/content/139676/googlecal_june2011.jpg;pv53b0f49b13725be4

Here's a rundown of the changes, courtesy of Google:

The Quick add function is now under the down arrow next to the Create button
Calendars selected for viewing in your My calendars and Other calendars lists will no longer display with a colored background; instead, only the arrows next to them will be colored.
The Print and Refresh buttons are now icons rather than text links. The Print button shows a printer, and the Refresh icon is a circular arrow.
Visual indicator icons (alarm clock icon for events with reminders, person icon for events with guests, etc.) will only show when the event is hovered over.
The My calendars and Other calendars lists on the left are now collapsed by default and may be expanded using the small gray arrow. Once expanded, they will remain expanded on refresh or open.
The mini month view calendar under the Create button is collapsible using the small gray arrow.
The Save and Discard buttons and Back to calendar link are only available at the top of the event page, not the bottom.

Google says more changes are coming and that this new visual style is part of a new consistent visual experience that will work across the companies various services on PCs, mobile phones, and tablets. Looks good to me.

Paul McCartney On Drugs

2007-10-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

By RU Sirius
January 3rd, 2007

McCartney On LSD

The Beatles titan recently claimed, allegedly during a talk with friend and self-proclaimed “king of bitter divorces” Alec Baldwin a few days ago, that he has grown physically sick from the latest charges by his estranged wife in their divorce proceedings. (Her latest claim is that he stole paintings by Picasso and Renoir from their once-shared lodge.) But, let us revisit for a moment one of the more interesting charges leveled by Heather against Paul, shall we? Let us return to the drugs.

In college in the late 1970s, I had a girlfriend from The Hamptons who had been the baby sitter for Paul and Linda McCartney. (Paul and Linda and their children lived in that elegant Long Island suburb through most of the 1970s). Lizzie hated babysitting for the McCartneys because they were slobs (messy house) and because there were “drugs all over the place,” right out in the open where theoretically one or all of their four young children could get at them. When I questioned Liz more closely about the drugs, she mentioned white powders, mushrooms and (no surprise) marijuana.

Lizzie detested drugs back then, because she was worshiping a poet named Robert Bly, and Robert Bly hated drugs. But I must admit, for me, this tidbit added substantially to Beatle Paul’s always questionable hipster cred.

In the recent divorce case between Paul and his anti-landmine activist soon-to-be ex-wife Heather Mills McCartney, Heather filed a court statement, according to the British tabloid press, stating that McCartney had attacked her with a broken wine glass, and that he used illegal drugs and drank to excess.

I’m in no position to comment on any propensity Sir Paul may have towards violence, although a biography written by the tabloidesque rock writer Christopher Sandford promises, in a synopsis on Amazon.com, that “McCartney is a tale of self-destruction, violence and epic excess.” (Imagine that. Paul McCartney: the Great Beast.) And McCartney himself has made clear that he drinks heavily when he’s depressed (after the breakup of the Beatles in 1970, after the death of his first wife Linda, and while he toured for his hardest rocking solo album, “Run Devil Run” in 1999).

But when it comes to Macca and drugs, there is quite a bit more to talk about.

Join me then on a magical mystery tour:

Paul McCartney and Drugs: A Timeline

Early 1960s

The Beatles play frequent late night shows in seedy clubs in Hamburg, Germany, popping stimulants — mostly Benzedrine — to stay awake.

August, 1964

Bob Dylan turns The Beatles on to marijuana. He is shocked to discover that they’re pot virgins.

April 1965

John Lennon and George Harrison are slipped LSD at a dinner party thrown for them by their dentist. McCartney is elsewhere.

1966

McCartney becomes the last Beatle to try LSD

1967

McCartney is turned on to cocaine by Robert Fraser, an art dealer and a central figure in the London counterculture, who was art director for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover (the image itself was done by Peter Blake). He uses cocaine a bit during his work on Sgt. Peppers, although he apparently doesn’t share it around with his mates. Cocaine is very obscure in 1967 and doesn’t become second nature to rock stars ’til around 1969.

Spring, 1967

McCartney is the first Beatle and the first major figure in rock to admit that he and the other Beatles had taken LSD. While this would seem to have been obvious to anybody who had been listening to their recent recordings, the great majority of people were way more clueless than they even are now and so the admission stirs up quite a bit of controversy. Lennon is miffed that McCartney came out of the closet as an acid head first.

June, 1967

In Life magazine, McCartney describes himself as “deeply committed to the possibilities of LSD as a universal cure-all.”

July 24, 1967

All four Beatles sign a petition published in The Times of London calling for decriminalization of Marijuana. Sir Francis Crick and Francis Huxley also sign the petition. The Beatles also pay for the ad.

1972

Paul and Linda McCartney are busted for smuggling hashish into Sweden. He pays a $2,000 fine.

1973

McCartney is busted for growing marijuana on his farm in Scotland. He is fined the equivalent of $240.

McCartney visits John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, who are living together in L.A. while Lennon produces Nilsson’s album, “Pussy Cats.” A bleary-eyed Nilsson offers McCartney some PCP. Paul asks, “Is it fun?” “No,” Nilsson replied. So McCartney passes on the PCP.

1974

According to a book written by May Pang called Loving John: The Untold Story about the time she spent as John Lennon’s girlfriend, John Lennon and Paul McCartney drop acid together one day in New York City in 1974 and decide to go visit David Bowie.

Bowie has just received the final mix of his latest album, Young Americans which includes two songs that John Lennon worked on. One was a reworking of The Beatles song, “Across the Universe,” and the other was to become Bowie’s first number one hit, “Fame,” co-written with Lennon. Bowie proudly plays the new album for his two Beatles heroes and they’re impressed. And so he plays it again. And again. And again. Eventually, McCartney excuses himself and bolts out the door, Lennon following quickly behind. Bowie’s drug of choice in the mid-1970s might explain his obsessiveness that day: mountains of cocaine.

An interesting side note: In The Beatles version of “Across The Universe”, the line “nothing’s gonna change my world” comes across as a sort of cosmic meditation on the divine perfection of the eternal now. In Bowie’s version, the same line becomes an expression of terrified desperation. This might be interpreted as the difference between psychedelics and coke, as well as the difference between the 60s and the 70s.

1975

Linda McCartney is busted for possession of marijuana in Los Angeles, but charges are dropped.

Sometime around 1976-77

I can’t find the source so this is from memory, but at some point the McCartneys hosted a party for the original cast of Saturday Night Live. Mescaline was on the menu, according to one of the many SNL histories.

Late 70s

John Lennon, Paul McCartney and wives are sitting around Lennon and Ono’s apartment one Saturday night getting stoned on weed and watching SNL, when Lorne Michaels does one of his occasional routines offering The Beatles a ridiculously small amount of cash ($3,200) to reunite. They briefly consider heading down to the show as a lark to claim half of the money, but they’re too stoned to deal with it.

January 16, 1980

McCartney famously busted in Japan at the start of a planned tour with Wings with approximately half-a-pound of marijuana in his suitcase. He spends ten days in prison in Japan before being released and deported. After his release, he promises to quit but also argues that it is less harmful than Valium or alcohol. He also later comments that he just couldn’t leave the pot behind because “it was such good stuff.”

1984

Paul and Linda McCartney busted in Barbados for possession of marijuana. Several days later, Linda is busted again flying into Heathrow Airport in London with marijuana.

1997

McCartney, now a Knight of the British Empire, tells Musician magazine, “I support decriminalization. People are smoking pot anyway and to make them criminal is wrong.”

September 22, 1999

At an after-party for a celebration/performance for McCartney’s new album, Run Devil Run, held at Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, McCartney is observed smoking vast quantities of weed with Woody Harrelson and Laurence Fishburne. McCartney’s publicist gives a photo of the red-eyed trio to High Times magazine and encourages them to publish it. High Times published the photo under the heading, “The Three Stoners.”

June 22, 2000

McCartney delivers a keynote speech in England on “Drug Awareness Day” about “heightening parental awareness to drug misuse, and to outline Government activity in this area.” Rank hypocrisy? In fairness to Sir Paul, the talk repeatedly uses the term “misuse” and singles out heroin and cocaine as “the drugs that cause the greatest harm.”

2004

In a prime example of the media’s tendency to recycle old news as though it were fresh news, the British press goes wild with headlines like “Sir Paul Admits He Used Drugs!” The articles quote from an interview McCartney gives to “Uncut” magazine. He disclosed that he once smoked heroin, but didn’t get high. He says that “Got to Get You Into My Life,” off of the Revolver album was about pot and that the hit single, “Day Tripper” was about acid. He also admits the obvious, that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was about LSD, something the song’s main author, John Lennon, always denied. While he tells the magazine that he’s grown out of using drugs, he also tells them he “was flattered when he was recently invited by a group of Los Angeles teenagers to share their marijuana.” McCartney was quoted as saying, “To me, it’s a huge compliment that a bunch of kids think I might be up to smoke a bit of dope with them.”

Other McCartney Fun Facts
# McCartney was always uptight that everyone considered Lennon, not to mention Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, a lot hipper than him. Thus, he was known to brag, particularly on the pages of Rolling Stone, about being first to try this and that. It was on the pages of Rolling Stone that he first let it be known that he was the first Beatle to try cocaine, and that he came close to cashing it in on unspecified drugs on a few occasions. “I’ve seen my soul get up and walk across the floor a couple of times.” He also claimed in the mag that he gave Mick Jagger his first taste of marijuana. Sir Jagger vociferously denied the claim, saying that the Stones smoked weed long before The Beatles did (nyah nyah!).
# Continuing on the Paul-is-hipper-than-you-think theme, McCartney was the Beatle who befriended ultra-hipster hero William S. Burroughs when he settled in London during the late 1960s. McCartney supplied Burroughs with tape equipment to experiment with his cutup method.
# McCartney was also a lifelong friend with Beat/counterculture poet Allen Ginsberg. He performed, along with Philip Glass, on Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 CD release, “Ballad of the Skeletons.”
# Paul and Linda McCartney were financial supporters of the 25th and 30th anniversary celebrations of “The Summer of Love.” The celebration of psychedelic counterculture was organized by their long-time friend Chet Helms and took place in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
# In Blackbird: The Life and Times of Paul McCartney by Geoffrey Giuliano and ex-Wings member Denny Laine, Laine claims that, in the mid-1970s Paul and Linda were heavily into the occult and Aleister Crowley. The 1975 album, Venus and Mars seems to have a bit of an occultist vibe.

Drugs In Song

However much McCartney may like his altered states, particularly those derived from cannabis consumption, direct drug references are rare and allusions are subject to debate and interpretation. Nevertheless, aside from the songs mentioned earlier, “Got To Get You Into My Life” and “Day Tripper,” I present a few McCartney lyrics that reference drugs, or seem like they probably reference drugs.

I’m Looking Through You
1965, Rubber Soul
Ripped on weed, McCartney sees deeply into his then girlfriend, model Jane Asher, and decides she’s a phony. This story has been told by McCartney himself.

Yellow Submarine
1966, Revolver
On the surface, a child’s rhyme; but the song was taken as a winking assertion of hippie, psychedelic, drop out escape from the dreary mainstream culture into the upcoming party utopia. It was even adapted by some new left activists as a theme song for those seeking an alternative culture.

With A Little Help From My Friends
1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
He gets high with a little help from his friends. What does he see when he turns out the lights?

Fixing A Hole
1967, Sgt. Peppers
Taken by some to be a heroin song (fixing being a term used for shooting up], but also works as a contemplative pothead song or, for that matter, a plain old contemplative person’s song. Another song lyric with a drop out vibe.

Lovely Rita
1967, Sgt. Peppers
“When are you free to take some tea with me?” George Harrison has commented that The Beatles frequently used tea as a pseudonym for pot. On the other hand, they were Limeys, so maybe tea is just tea.

A Day In The Life
1967, Sgt Peppers
“Found my way upstairs and had a smoke and somebody spoke and I went into a dream.” Probably not a ciggie, but you never know.

Magical Mystery Tour
1968, Magical Mystery Tour
“Roll up!” “A mystery trip.” And the whole album/movie concept was taken from Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters.

Penny Lane
1968, Magical Mystery Tour
“The pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray.” Hey, wouldn’t a florist be selling poppies from a tray? In England, heroin was medicalized and made available to addicts, who were given injections by nurses. Also, “Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes.” George Harrison grew up in a suburb near this street, Penny Lane. I recall a story about how George went back there on acid to grok it in all its weirdness. This may have inspired Paul’s song.

Get Back
1970, Let It Be
“Jo Jo left her home in Tuscon Arizona for some California grass.” Is the grass just grass? What, she couldn’t find any grass in Tucson?

Three Legs
1971, Ram
“When I fly above the clouds, when I fly above the crowds, you could knock me down with a feather.”

Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey
1971, Ram
“Hands across the water. Heads across the sky.” Ahh, peace and drugs in the early seventies. References to heads in the late sixties and early seventies were pretty much understood to mean psychedelic drug heads.

C Moon
1973, Red Rose Speedway
“I’d never get to heaven if I filled my head with glue. What’s it all to you?” A rejection of a bad high, and yet, ain’t nobody’s business but his own.

Hi Hi Hi
1973, Red Rose Speedway
This one is blatant and should have been titled High High High. He’s “gonna get high high high.” Mediocre song, though.

Band On The Run
1973, Band on the Run
Not about drugs, but about being busted for drugs and Macca’s concerns about being “stuck inside these four walls, sent away for ever.’

Rock Show
1975, Venus and Mars
“The tension mounts you score an ounce ole!”

Medicine Jar
1975, Venus and Mars
McCartney’s first anti-hard drug song for Wings. Wings guitarist, Jimmy McCulloch, had an ongoing problem with heavy drugs, and eventually died from a heroin overdose. It’s generally thought that McCartney wrote these lyrics trying to challenge and discourage his behavior. “Dead on your feet, you won’t get far if you keep on putting your hand in the medicine jar.”

Wino Junko
1976, At The Speed Of Sound
Apparently, McCartney continued to preach it to brother McCulloch. “Pill freak spring a leak you can’t say no.”

The Song We Were Singing
1997, Flaming Pie
Apparently a bit of misty nostalgia for old-fashioned psychedelic philosophizing and The Beatles heyday, which also seems to permeate the entire album. “For a while, we could sit, smoke a pipe. And discuss all the vast intricacies of life… Take a sip, see the world through a glass and speculate about the cosmic solution.”

Flaming Pie
1997, Flaming Pie
“I took my brains out and stretched ‘em on a rack. Now I’m not so sure I’m ever gonna get ‘em back… Go ahead, have a vision.”

Final Thoughts from Sir Paul

So there you have it. The world’s most complete roundup of Paul McCartney’s relationship with drugs over the years. Does it matter? What does it mean? Let’s give Sir Paul the last word, from his as-told-to 1997 biography Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, co-written with Barry Miles (Miles has also written bios of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski):

In today’s climate, I hate to talk about drugs because it’s not the same. You have someone jumping on your head the minute you say anything, so I’ve taken to not trying to give my point of view unless someone really very much asks for it. Because I think the “just say no” mentality is so crazed. I saw a thing in a women’s magazine the other day: “He smokes cannabis, what am I to do. He laughs it off when I try to tell him, he says it’s not really harmful…” Of course, you’re half hoping the advice will be, “well, you know it’s not that harmful; if you love him, if you talk to him about it, tell him maybe he should keep it in the garden shed or something,” you know, a reasonable point of view. But of course it was, “No no, all drugs are bad. All drugs are bad. Librium’s good, Valium’s good, ciggies are good, vodka’s good. But cannabis, oooh.” I hate that unreasoned attitude. I really can’t believe it’s thirty years since the sixties. I find it staggering. It’s like the future, the sixties, the sixties to me, it hasn’t happened. I feel like the sixties are about to arrive. And we’re in some sort of time warp and it’s still going to happen.

From Microsoft: Vista Clean Install Still Possible with XP CD

2007-01-31T12:28:00.000-08:00

After reading that I was no longer going to be able to do a clean install of Vista Upgrade without already having XP installed, I decided to call Microsoft to find out what was going on. According to them (or at least their sales support person) so long as you have an XP cd you can still install Vista Upgrade.

*****Now, however, we have this workaround that allows users to perform a “clean install.” The process is a bit tedious, but is not hard at all to complete. Users have to perform these simple steps to perform a clean install of Vista without a previous version of Windows installed with an upgrade DVD:

1) Boot from the Windows Vista Upgrade DVD and start the setup program.

2) When prompted to enter your product key, DO NOT enter it. Click "Next" and proceed with setup. This will install Windows Vista as a 30-day trial.

3) When prompted, select the edition of Vista which you have purchased and continue with setup.

4) Once setup has been completed and you have been brought to the desktop for the first time, run the install program from within Windows Vista.

5) This time, type in your product key when prompted.

6) When asked whether to perform an Upgrade or Custom (advanced) install, choose Custom (advanced) to perform a clean install of Vista. Yes, this means that you will have to install Vista for a second time.

7) Once setup has completed for the second time, you should be able to activate Windows Vista normally. You can also delete the Windows.old directory which contains information from the first Vista install.

read more | digg story

Convert real machines to VMWare images, for Free

2007-01-30T09:45:00.000-08:00

This is so very cool. FTA: "Use the intuitive wizard-driven interface of VMware Converter to convert your physical machines to virtual machines. VMware Converter quickly converts Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines. It also converts virtual machines between VMware platforms."

read more | digg story

All my drugging - a Paul McCartney drugs timeline

2007-01-05T08:34:00.001-08:00

An amazing timeline documents Paul McCartney's first use of each illegal drug, including benzedrine in the early 60s, marijuana with Bob Dylan, LSD, cocaine, mescaline, and hashish. It also documents drug busts for hashish, pot-growing, and possession (and pleas for decriminalization), with stories about David Bowie and Mick Jagger, and lyrics.

read more | digg story

Underwater In Photoshop (Great Video Tutorial)

2006-12-11T15:12:00.000-08:00

This is a sped-up demo of how to create an underwater scene using Photoshop without the aid of any images from the net.

read more | digg story

Add Text Bubbles To Videos (YouTube, MetaCafe, GoogleVideo and others..)

2006-12-11T08:16:00.000-08:00

Brand new Israeli startup BubblePLY has created an easy tool for adding text or link comic-book style bubbles to videos from popular video sharing sites. Tell it the link to a video on YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe and others, and then add your own content. The video is saved and can be shared via a link or embedding on a web page.

read more | digg story

Methods for Downloading Google Video as FLV, AVI, or MP4

2006-12-04T20:32:00.000-08:00

Article showing how you can query Google for RSS, and extract information on FLV, API, and MP4 files to download. Use it to create your own Google Video download site.

read more | digg story

Test drive Beryl on a Live DVD. Works with most video cards

2006-12-04T18:30:00.000-08:00

There have been several post showing off Beryl recently, but a lot of people have been having a hard time getting it to work. Just pop in this DVD, and reboot your system. You will have a fully functional Operating System with accelerated graphics and Beryl running live. Works with ATI,Nvidia, and Intel integrated video cards. Nothing to install

read more | digg story

Good Ubuntu Networking Tutorial for Beginners and advanced users

2006-12-04T18:27:00.000-08:00

This is step by step tutorial how to configure networking in Ubuntu this includes Configure your network card using GUI tool for beginners and from command line for advanced users.this will also explains how to troubleshoot your network related problems

read more | digg story

Photoshop Tutorial: Cool pop art effect!

2006-10-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

A very cool way of making a picture of anyone look like a lichenstein-esque drawing.

read more | digg story

Gallery of stunning digital photography with tutorials

2006-08-07T20:54:00.002-07:00

This guy uses a very scientific approach to photography with wonderful results. The site is packed with technical data and tutorials which provide practical "how to" information for any digital photographer, but a visit to the gallery is worthwhile for anyone.

read more | digg story

How To Crack 128-bit Wireless Networks In 60 Seconds [inc Video]

2006-08-07T20:54:00.001-07:00

128 bit WEP encryption secure? Think again! KisMAC + standard dictionary cracks two keys in under 60 seconds. "I'm not even sure if I want to run a wireless network anymore to be honest..."

read more | digg story

Basic journey of a packet

2006-07-06T19:07:00.000-07:00

" The purpose of this introductory article is to take a basic look at the journey of a packet across the Internet, from packet creation to switches, routers, NAT, and the packet's traverse across the Internet. This topic is recommended for those who are new to the networking and security field."

read more | digg story

2006-07-04T18:00:00.000-07:00

How To: Create your own game company, Part One

Posted Nov 28th 2005 4:40PM by Victor Agreda, Jr.

While it's a little cost prohibitive to start developing Xbox 360 or PS3 games from your bedroom, let's not forget games like Roller Coaster Tycoon and Alien Hominid went from humble beginnings to financially successful franchises. Although you'd have to spend hundreds of hours developing AAA titles, there are some ways to get slick games up and running quickly. I'm going to show you a few ways to do just that.

In this installation we're going to look at the beginnings of your company. Starting with a great idea, creating all the necessary assets, and developing the prototype. Next time, we'll look at further development, building your team, and expanding your empire... And wherever possible, we're going to use free or shareware tools. If you're interested in the business end of things, and a good overall setup to the crazy business of games, read Gregg Man's article here. A little dated, but still topical.

Of course, nothing beats a great idea. Unfortunately, good ideas are everywhere. What you need to do is make sure your amazing idea is developed properly. My suggestion is to read Chris Crawford's classic "The Art of Computer Game Design" (it's a PDF link at the bottom of the page). Honing a great story into amazing gameplay is step one. Crawford's book is only the beginning, and you'd do well to rad some informative articles at Gamasutra for more insider tips. A great story with lousy gameplay will get you nowhere, while a great game with minimal story could be the next Marble Madness. Now let's get to making our fantasy reality by creating our graphics and wiring the game engine together... Big list of apps for developing your game after the jump...

The choices in platforms for a game makes a big difference in the tools you'll need to create everything. Using Flash, for instance, often means never having to touch a 3D modeling application. Something like Java could draw images on-screen in realtime, all through code.

But if you're a hobbyist game creator, I'm assuming you're going to need graphics for your game, and a somewhat simplified game engine. The tools I've selected won't do what months of time in C++ and 3ds max will do for you, but they're perfect for creating a usable game in a decent amount of time.

The general workflow I'm assuming here is 1) create graphics and models, 2) create game code, 3) distribute. This is a gross oversimplification of the process, as you often will be testing small bits of code while creating visual assets, and game-testing constantly. I also take for granted your idea for game story and game play has been developed. Check out the VRML narrative storytelling page for ideas on interactive storytelling if you need more inspiration.

Graphics
You'll need to create two-dimensional graphics for textures on 3D models, and to paint a background world. A quick rundown of image editors usually pits the free Gimp versus the industry-standard Photoshop. I'll agree those are the top of the game (you can make Gimp look like Photoshop using GimpShop). But when working in small teams you sometimes have to just grab pre-made textures for scenery and levels. Check out the collection of links to textures at 3DLinks and the tons of excellent freebies at Mayang's.

I wrapped up a boatload of free 3D apps here earlier, but for my money Blender is still the best. There's a huge online user group with tons of help, and a script for creating humanoids (one of the most laborious parts of the process). Blender has it's own game engine inside, and uses Python for scripting. Technically you could create an entire game in Blender, but with the web plug-in in developer limbo, and no real documentation for the game engine any more, it's a little risky... Still, looks like CrystalBlend, a combo of Crystal Space 3D (an open-source 3d game engine) and Blender could be promising...
gameco

Engines
If you want to get started really quickly, there are tons of options out there. Obviously you want a step up from just modding a game (although some mods almost qualify as totally new games). Some apps are an in-between of a real engine and a mod. Case in point: FPSCreator. It's a pretty simple FPS engine, with scripting support for more customization. Most everything can be done using drag-and-drop, and it comes with an assortment of pre-made models and characters. It's like Poser for games, really.

What I tend to think of for prototyping games are the BASIC-derived engines, like DarkBASIC and BlitzBASIC. Both are geared towards beginning game programmers, and both languages are geared towards rapid game development. Dark comes in regular and Pro versions (Pro adds more developer-friendly tools and better mapping). Blitz comes in a number of varieties, with one geared for 2D games, and another for 3D. Blitz also offers a free app called Maplet, designed to help build game levels quickly.

I know discussions of tools like this can get religious very quickly, so I want to point out I'm pretty neutral when it comes to these things. I have a particular way of programming, as do others. I recommend anyone sit down and look at the documentation and support communities before picking any pony... You're going to have to ride this one decision for a while, so choose carefully.

Some other tools include: GLBasic, and excellent choice for those with programming skills; Unity is Mac-only for development, but will export Windows games; and Cube looks cool, but I haven't had a chance to tinker with it. There's also Adventure Game Studio, Coldstone, and RealBASIC out there.

For those of you way ahead of the game, and willing to tinker with C++ you can check out Crystal Space 3D, Genesis 3D (both are open source), or industry veteran Torque. Project managers like Torque because it's a known quantity. GarageGames provides an indie license for $100 (and a free demo download), which is pretty reasonable for what you're getting... For a thorough list of realtime 3D engines (not necessarily suited to gaming) check out this list.

What tends to distinguish the game engines versus a simple graphics engine is the inclusion of interactivity wiring (like triggers for actions) and a physics system. Unity has an excellent physics engine, as does Torque. As I said, you'll want to test these or read the forums for each product to see if it fits the type of game you're making. Who knows, you might just need Flash. That's not a bad idea, considering you can desploy swf's to a broad audience (PC's, cell phones, PDA's).

And speaking of distribution, next time we'll look at finishing up your game and deploying it to the world. Most often this is online (especially for server-based games), but I'll take a peek at some physical means of distribution too. We'll also examine methods of payment for your hard work. If anyone uses a tool that can't live without, be sure to post in the comments below.

How to delete an undeletable file.

2006-06-11T20:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a tip to get rid of these undeletable files.Lot's of times many files in your pc are undeletable.
Well,here is a tip to delete anything You want!

Open a Command Prompt window and leave it open. Close all open programs

Click Start, Run and enter TASKMGR.EXE

Go to the Processes tab and End Process on Explorer.exe. Leave
Task Manager open

Go back to the Command Prompt window and change to the directory the AVI (or other undeletable file) is located in

At the command prompt type DEL where is the file you wish to delete

Go back to Task Manager, click File, New Task and enter EXPLORER.EXE to restart the GUI shell

Close Task Manager

Ok no problem again with these awful undeletable files

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How to create your own game company

2006-05-20T01:55:00.000-07:00

How To: Create your own game company,

Posted May 19th 2006 8:00AM by Victor Agreda, Jr.
Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Finance, Games, Internet, Utilities, Features, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Productivity, Web services, Shareware
how to create your own game company part twoIn part one I talked about a lot of the production tools: 3d apps, game engines, and so on. This time I want to tie that in to the business end. How do you run the company, and how do you make money?

First of all, I discovered PopCap Games offers their engine to developers for free. The license agreement spells out the details, but primarily all you need to do is acknowledge using the PopCap Games Framework. The practical upshot of using PopCap's engine? They might publish it. The practical upshot of getting an engine and look by a successful publisher? You can make money. You still have to file taxes, and do all the other business stuff you'd normally have to, but you get to skip the part where you worry about marketing, payment, etc.

One other development is the rather old Torque Exporter Plugin for Blender is now up to version .91. Since Torque is $100 puny bucks for an indie license, and Blender is free, that also seems like a reasonable choice for budget game developers. If you're still thinking 2D (or very limited 3D, like an isometric game), another option is the Arcade Engine for Runtime Revolution.

So lesson #1 in business: keep your costs low. I don't want to get into a lot of business advice, but if you want some great tips on what NOT to do, check out Ten Easy Ways to Screw Up Your Game Company, and Part 2 of the same. If you're really looking to make a company, and can get investors, there's a lot of funny and valuable lessons to be learned in those few pages...

And not to be redundant (which I'm good at), but Lesson #2? Pick the right product. I know, the author of Ten Easy Ways says the same thing, but this lesson is too important to miss. You can spend thousands on the Unreal engine if you like, but trying to make another Halo? Good luck. It's not impossible, but unlikely. Shoot for realistic early goals and clean up with original, playable content. Now, on to the software!
Building your team

So you've got an engine, you've got an idea, now what? Unless you're some kind of modern-day Da Vinci, you're going to need people to help out. I'm no HR expert, but I can safely say this might be the worst, most challenging, yet potentially most rewarding part of the process. For one thing, a great staff member can elevate the team to new heights. A bad worker can literally bring a project to its knees.

hiring peopleWhat to do? Be very honest with candidates. And force them to be candid with you. One of the coolest approaches I've seen to hiring involves a test in the form of a game from Procter and Gamble. You can start asking friends if they know anyone with the skills you need, and move outward that way. If you're lucky enough to live in a place with a major university nearby (as I do), another opportunity is offered in the form of student workers. And lastly, there's always online recruiting. Online is tough, even with the breadth of choices. It's just very difficult to gauge someone from a distance (kinda like it's hard to convey sarcasm in an email). The first place I usually look or post is Craigslist, and there's probably one in your area. If you're really desperate, there's always a professional solution like Elance.com. Mine those forums and consider targeted markets like GamesIndustry.biz and GameDev.net for talent with experience.

Personally, I've always been a fan of testing personnel. And since you're looking for people with a passion for games, why not host a LAN party, put them all on the block, and have a quick deathmatch? This won't necessarily tell you how well someone can allocate memory or manage UV texturing, but it'll tell you who the griefers are. Don't hire the griefers!

At the end of the day you need to at least have leads in the major development areas: Programming (or tech lead), Art, and Design. Programmers need to be drilled on their skills pertaining to your particular platform. If you need a Python programmer for Blender, don't quiz them on ActionScript. Artists should have a portfolio, and the ability to whip up some artwork on the spot. As for design, I'm referring to the game design. Chances are the game designer, or "vision keeper" is you. I'd still recommend bringing in someone with game design education or experience, even if they are only an advisor. Make sure to check this person's credentials though. Playing Kingdom Hearts for a week without sleep doesn't make you a game design expert.

Documentation

Game documents, who needs 'em? Everyone. Every TV show has what's called a Show Bible. This is the law and lay of the land. Is the main character a pedophile? That little detail might never be revealed on the show, but the actors and directors need to know it, as it would influence the characters and stories on the show.

The same applies to games, only more so. You'll need a Game Design Document first. The Design Document is essentially the vision, point, and basic rules, setup, and look of your game. It is truly the "bible" for your game. Extending out, you'll need an Art Bible, with examples of the look and feel of the game, the design of characters, basically any art in the game. And you'll want a Technical Design Document. This spells out things like your target platform, tools to use, and the potential problems with programming your game. If you're making a Flash game, how are your programmers going to simulate 3 dimensions?

The reason for these documents? Whenever there's an argument over what to do, consult the bibles. An Art Bible ensures a unified look for all the art assets, and makes your game look more professional. The Tech docs make sure the programmers know what to expect. And the vision absolutely must be spelled out. Listing everything you need for a game is an exhaustive process, but one you're going to have to do if you expect to ever finish the thing.

Project management and communications

Project management, in the simplest sense, is very simple. Take the end result desired (make a playable game), and start breaking this down into actual tasks, then plan those tasks across a realistic timeline. Check every day, week, month at different levels (big picture vs. details) to make sure those "milestones" are getting done as appropriate. Looking for an alternative to Microsoft Project? Personally I use a meatspace tool called a legal pad, but those of you wanting software should check out Open Workbench.

communicationsAs for communication with the team, the usual stuff works wonders. Instant messaging with Meebo allows you to be protocol-agnostic. Jotspot offers a pretty good wiki service. And Google's Calendar and Notebook might be just what you need to push dates and talking points. Although I personally think Basecamp is the bees knees. And then there's that old standby: email. I think Gmail has a pretty good advantage here too, due to Calendar and chat integration, plus a powerful search ability.

Each department is going to have specific needs however. Artists need a place to store and log graphics. Programmers need a CVS for managing code. Let's look at each department to see what they need.

Design: I consider design the actual game design, not art assets. Consider an all-purpose CMS like Drupal (which I'm a big fan of), or Typo3, which is actually used by some Blender nerds. What you're wanting to do is have a central repository for "the vision" of the game. A CMS is a good place to put those design documents.

Programming: these guys need a CVS! Essentially this is a way to check in or out code, without messing other stuff up. Managing code is a tough process, and I'm a hack myself. Besides, coders tend to be religious about ways to do this, so to avoid a holy war, I'll just point you to a great book on the subject-Open Source Development with CVS by Karl Fogel and Moshe Bar. Almost everything else is dependent on your platform of choice. Flash, as an example, has its own IDE for ActionScript inside the app.

Art: ultimately these are the guys with a need for a good filing system. This could be as simple as a file server, set up with a very strict nested folder system. For example, a folder with "Characters" could include subfolders of "NPC's," "Heroes," "Bosses," and so on. Inside those would be the model folders, texture folders, and perhaps backup folders for previous versions. You can also use CMS's like Drupal to set this up, as the nature of the CMS versatile enough to handle art assets.

Finally, there's another good ebook to check out: Producing Open Source Software, also by Karl Fogel. Karl's book is a wonderful introduction to the problems (and rewards) of working with a large group of squirrels, each one with their own agenda. If you're looking for more workflow ideas, check out this post.

Testing and marketing: mutually exclusive?

The QA portion of game development is generally a time when the time grows very large. Bug testing can be really expensive, but I don't think there's a need for all that. At least, not when you're the underdog! Years ago I read the book Guerilla Marketing, and it's had a profound influence on my view of marketing. This might be sacrilege, but I suggest you release the game as a limited public beta, and somehow reward bug finders. That's not a new idea (Google I'm looking in your direction), but might take some of the bug hunt pressure off your programming team. The key is to be very open about the stage your game is at. If it's really, really rough, maybe only test with some friends. Once you can more or less successfully navigate every level, that's a good time to open it to the world. If you're really wanting to spend the cash on QA, and I'm not denouncing that approach, Game Instict offers QA-for-hire services.

The bottom line is QA must be done. There are no shortcuts. During the development of Jak X: Combat Racing, the Naughty Dog team tested the online play every Friday night. They'd go home, dial in to a private server, and play against each other. Not only did this uncover code issues, it allowed them to collaboratively discuss gameplay issues. If you're really passionate, this won't even seem like work.

Making your money

So you chose a reasonable target platform that doesn't cost too much to develop for, you have a great team, and you've managed to test the game until the play is just perfect. The next step is to sell your game.

making moneyYou can find a myriad of advice columns on how to approach a video game publisher to sell your game. Some publishers come from a development background (like PopCap and now Gamelab) and might appreciate you more. Maybe not. The advantage of a publisher is that you get an expert in sales and marketing. That's the theory. As any musician will point out, whether or not that expertise is used is another matter... But the big point is to have a complete, playable game, free from licensing issues (like music). It helps to have an idea of how to sell your game too, especially if it is very unique. Publishers tend to be a little conservative...

So I say strike out on your own. Between guerilla marketing and online payment systems, I don't see why you couldn't at least generate a little cash yourself. This might even be enough to woo a tough publisher. So how do you sell online? I mean, aside from PayPal.

Unfortunately, Regshare.com isn't around any more (they're selling the domain, ugh), as they used to do comparisons of online payment systems. But probably the most recognized name in the business is Kagi. If you've ever bought a 3rd part Palm app, you might recognize them. MacDevCenter has a comparison of Kagi vs. DigiBuy and eSellerate, for those still looking to shop around.

You could also implement your own payment system, but that is as varied as the mechanism and platform you're developing on. My own company just uses Paymentech for processing credit cards, but I've found that's overkill for an indie shop. If you're just moving bits around, Kagi works well. If you're selling physical units, consider just setting up shop on ebay (or wherever you like) and go nuts.

Other resources

I am a regular reader of Gamasutra, and you should be too. Sloperama's advice pages are chock full of great industry info, on everything from game programming to the actual gameplay design. You might want to read and check out the blogroll on Greg's blog on Games, Design, Art, and Culture. If you have some time and want to have a little fun, check out GameGame, a card game about designing and pitching games.

If anyone has any other great sites (I know I've left out a ton), please post 'em in the comments. There's no easy solution to making your own game company, let alone a truly saleable game. But hopefully with enough understanding of the process you'll be a little closer to realizing the Next Big Thing on your own.
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Streaming MythTV to your cell phone

2006-05-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

Streaming MythTV to your cell phone

Electrical tape wearing thin holding together my old cell phone (Samsung i500), I decided it was time to give in and upgrade to a new phone. I drank the kool-aid on a 2 year Sprint contract given the discounts both on the phone and in my monthly service, and in the end settled on the Samsung a920. It's an EVDO enabled phone with Sprint's $15 unlimited monthly data service. Playing around with the mobile TV functionality (that's an extra $10/month but I was enjoying the first month free), I had one of those lightning bolt moments.

Why not stream my own video to the phone? Better yet, why not just automate my MythTV to convert my recorded programs and automatically have them ready to be streamed whenever I care to watch them on the phone?

A bit of research later, I discovered SlingBox can stream your tv to your phone, but it needs to be a Windows mobile phone and then there's the monthly service fees and the box to buy. I also found random mythtv devotees with similar ideas at least as far back as January 2005, but couldn't otherwise find a concise guide or more information. Inspired by ZooVision, I knew it was possible for users to stream their own content to their phone, it was just a matter of putting the pieces all together. A couple hours of tinkering later, and I've got a working solution... my "tivo" on my cell phone wherever there's sprint evdo access. So here are the steps:

1. Get MythTV up and running. I won't go into that, but it's worth the hassle even if I couldn't stream it to my cell phone.

2. Follow these directions which will get you an updated version of ffmpeg (named ffmpeg3gp) and a myth3gp script which, in combination, allow you to take Myth recorded video and convert it to 3gp, a mobile video format standard that most multimedia phones support. However, instead of using the myth3gp script from there, you'll likely want to use this myth3gp script as I've included a couple of necessary changes. Save that txt file as /usr/local/bin/myth3gp on your Myth box.

3. Create a directory to hold your 3gp videos on your Myth system. Open up the myth3gp script from the previous step and change the line that says:

out="/mnt/drive2/myth3gp"

to:

out="/directory/for/saving/your/3gp/videos"

4. Install gpac. Once you've compiled and installed gpac, it will provide you with an executable called MP4Box which is used to convert the 3gp file from step two into a 3gp file that is streaming enabled. The myth3gp script calls MP4Box to take care of this for us.

5. Find an internet connected server which can house your 3gp videos and be available to stream them at will to your phone. On said server you'll need to install Apple's Darwin Streaming Server. Installing it can be a bit of pain, but just be sure to have port 554 open so that it can handle the rtsp streaming protocol. For me, getting Darwin to work took the most effort. If your MythTV box has a static IP and is internet accessible, that should work fine, but in my case I'm uploading the videos to another server.

6. We're in the homestretch. We've got programs to convert Myth recorded video to a phone friendly format, and we've got a server that can stream them to our phone. We just now need an automated process to convert the video and upload it to the server running Darwin and we'll be in phone tv nirvana. Myth can do this automation for us. You'll need to exit out of Myth and run:

mythtv-setup

From there, choose the "General" menu item and hit enter until you get to the "Job Queue" screen. Put a checkmark in "Allow User Job #1 jobs and continue to the next screen until you get the page with label "User Job #1 description". Give it a description like "Myth 3GP" and for the command, use (note the quotes):

/usr/local/bin/myth3gp %DIR%/%FILE%

"%STARTTIME%~~~%TITLE~~~%SUBTITLE%"

Save your changes, exit, restart the mythbackend and restart Myth.

7. With Myth restarted, go into Utilities / Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> General and click through until you get the "General (Jobs)" page. On this page, put a check in the checkbox next "Run User Job #1 On New Recordings". This will ensure that our process gets run after each new recording. Important Note: For all existing recurring recordings that you had prior to setting up Myth3GP, you'll need to manually edit the recording options and in "Post Recording Processing", you'll need to switch its setting so that it says "Run 'Myth3GP'".

8. If your using your local Myth system for Darwin streaming, just be sure that Darwin knows where to find the 3gp files on your system. Otherwise, edit the myth3gp script from step number two and set the darwin_username, darwin_hostname and darwin_dir as appropriate for your external server. At the bottom of the script, it uses scp to transfer the file from your Myth system to your Darwin server. Though, for everything to be automated, you'll need to set up scp to not require a password. Directions for password free ssh/scp are short and sweet. Once you can transfer files between systems sans password, you are good to go.

9. The final step. On your Darwin machine, make sure you have a web server running (apache), php installed and place this php script somewhere in a web accessible folder. It's job is to scan your 3gp movie folder for movies and generate a webpage with rtsp:// links so that you can access your recordings from your phone. Edit the php script and change $directory to the directory path for your 3gp videos and set $hostname to your hostname. With that installed, you're done. You can manually convert your old recordings by starting the "Myth3GP" job on them and any new recording will automatically get the mobile treatment. Fire up the URL for the mythmobile php script and start streaming.

Triumph. Indeed some beautiful uses of fair use. Fair use to record the tv program to my hard drive... Fair use to convert the video format to one viewable by my cell phone... Fair use to stream it to my cell phone for my own personal enjoyment. Now imagine trying to do any of this with the broadcast flag in place.
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Dark Side of the Moon celebrates 1500th anniversary

2006-05-08T15:41:00.000-07:00

1500 weeks on the Billboard Charts that is, making it the longest selling album of all time. Do YOU have your copy?

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The Night Sky on Your Desktop

2006-05-05T20:59:00.000-07:00

What is Stellarium?

Stellarium is an open source desktop planetarium for Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX. It renders the skies in realtime using OpenGL, which means the skies will look exactly like what you see with your eyes, binoculars, or a small telescope. Stellarium is very simple to use, which is one of its biggest advantages: it can easily be used by beginners.

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A parade of stars at Wednesday's 'Prairie Home' premiere

2006-05-02T16:31:00.000-07:00

StarTribune.com

Last update: May 02, 2006 – 3:29 PM

Lindsay Lohan, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin will be on parade in downtown St. Paul Wednesday evening. Those are just three of the actors in "A Prairie Home Companion" who will ride to the movie's premiere at the Fitzgerald Theater in horse-drawn carriages.

In all, 10 carriages will carry cast and crew, including director Robert Altman (of "M*A*S*H" fame) and of course Garrison Keillor, who wrote and co-starred in the film, based on his radio show. Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen and John C. Reilly also are expected to attend, along with "PHC" regulars Tim Russell and Sue Scott.

The carriages will leave from Rice Park at 6:10 p.m. The best star-gazing spots will be on Wabasha Street between 5th and Exchange Sts. The carriages are scheduled to reach the theater at 6:25, at which point the occupants will walk down a 100-foot-long red carpet to the private, invitation-only screening, which is scheduled for 7 p.m. A private party will follow at Landmark Center.

The movie, filmed primarily at the Fitzgerald (with a couple of additional scenes at Mickey's Diner), opens nationwide June 9.

JEFF STRICKLER

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A Prairie Home Companion

2006-05-01T21:16:00.000-07:00

A Prairie Home Companion
Gala Movie Premiere Parade
May 3rd, 2006 6:00 pm

The Highland Park Senior High marching band will lead 10 horse-drawn carriages carrying the stars. (Garrison Keillor, Robert Altman, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C Reilly, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin are expected to attend.)

The public is encouraged to line Wabasha Street between 5th Street and Exchange Street for best viewing and a chance to help welcome the stars back to St. Paul.

6:10 pm: Depart Rice Park

6:15–6:25 pm: Travel on Wabasha Street

6:25 pm: Arrive on Exchange Street in front of the Fitzgerald Theater for red carpet.

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HOW TO - Set Up Your Own Personal Wikipedia

2006-05-01T10:33:00.000-07:00

Gina writes: "The software that runs Wikipedia, called MediaWiki, is freely available for anyone to install. Today weâ��ll set up MediaWiki on your Windows PC and get started with a video demonstration on how to add, edit and compare page revisions in your new, local personalpedia."

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T-Mobile's 20Mbps 3G service to replace home broadband

2006-05-01T07:51:00.000-07:00

By Tony Glover Technology Editor
30 April 2006

GERMAN-owned mobile operator T-Mobile is planning to enter the broadband price war launched by Carphone Warehouse two weeks ago, The Business has learned.

T-Mobile intends to take on the UK operators by using its mobile network to offer internet access over a souped-up 3G system at speeds equivalent to fixed-line broadband. This will dispense with the need for a fixed line in the home.

Although mobile phone customers will pay £8.50 (E12.33, $15.22) for unlimited data use, T-Mobile believes it can still undercut UK operators as customers will not need to pay a fixed phone line rental, although they will still be able to retain the sort of phone number currently used for fixed line.

A T-mobile spokesman told The Business: “A key opportunity for mobile is to displace the fixed line phone. If you have a fixed line phone, you’re typically paying over £300 for line rental and broadband access, before you make a single call. Say, over £400 a year with relatively modest call volumes. Customers have a choice whether to continue paying this or to redeploy the money on to mobile. It has always to be their choice; but providing high-speed mobile broadband clearly removes one big reason for ‘having to have’ a fixed line.”

According to T-Mobile, more than 12% of UK households do not have a fixed line phone. So far the trend is mostly among the young, who have grown up with a mobile and see no reason to have one.

Earlier this year, T-Mobile, which is owned by European telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom launched its T-Mobile@home service enabling contract customers to have a fixed line number that can be reached via a mobile phone while in their home. T-Mobile has plans to launch a similar service in the UK together with a high-speed broadband connection. UK customers will be able to have an extra number which has the same suffix as a fixed-line number on a designated mobile that will be able to transfer calls to mobile phones owned by other household members.

UK fixed line operators such as BT believed they had cornered the broadband internet market when they developed DSL software to turn copper telephone wires into broadband pipes. But T-Mobile believes a new technology, high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), a souped-up version of 3G, will enable it to leapfrog the fixed-line operators. HSDPA can be used with a wireless box to allow PCs to access the internet.

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Add thumbnail pictures to Google searches

2006-04-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

Add thumbnail pictures to Google searches

Use a free add-on for Google that shows miniature web pages alongside Google's summaries
Scott Colvey, Computeract!ve 18 Apr 2006

Google is great for searching the web – that's why nearly everybody uses it – but there's always room for improvement.

In this case it's a neat little add-on for Internet Explorer called Lost Goggles (users of the Firefox web browser need not apply). What it does is change the way Google searches are presented so that in addition to a list of all the pages found, you also see a thumbnail picture of each page.

Near each picture a tiny icon is displayed, and if you click on this the chosen page opens in a new window. Those who like to browse this way are saved the trouble of right-clicking and selecting the Open in New Window command, but for those who prefer to use one window at a time, Lost Goggles is worth installing for the thumbnails feature alone.

So, refer to the workshop in issue 215 of Computeractive and then transfer to the Lost Goggles download page.

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$25 Check + $20 Coupon, If you own a Qualifying Epson Printer

2006-04-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

There is a class action lawsuit against Epson that was settled. If you purchased a qualifying Epson printer from April 8, 1999 to May 8, 2006 , you can register to receive a $45 ecoupon for Epson's estore. There is an alternative to receive a $25 check and $20 estore coupon but you must file the claim form.

http://www.epsonsettlement.com/

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Force windows to load the kernel in memory(Windows XP tweak)

2006-04-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is a very small tutorial, that will help you make your windows XP much faster, by loading the windows kernel in memory. This is a very effective tweak for windows XP.

Here is what you have to do :

1) Open the regedit tool (Start -> Run -> regedit.exe )

2) Use the navigation in the left and go to HKEY LOCAL MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory Management

3) Double click the DisablePagingExecutive attribute, and put 1 in the decimal value field
This will make the drivers and the XP kernel run in memory.

4) Double click the LargeSystemCache attribute, and put 1 in the decimal value field
This will improve performance of the kernel

5) Double click the IOPageLockLimit attribute. On some later versions of windows XP that doesn't exists, so if this is the case you're done Otherwise you have to put to the hex value : 4000 for pcs with 128 mb ram, 10000 for 256 mb ram and if you have more put 40000. This value specifies how many bytes can be used for I/O operations in your system.

That's it, enjoy

read more | digg story

Hacking the Mac OSX Login Window

2006-04-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

Not only does this hack let you change the text of the login screen, but gives you a step-by-step to change the general appearance.

read more | digg story

Last.FM your iPod.

2006-04-01T07:22:00.000-08:00

If you don't listen to music alot on your computer but have an iPod and would like to keep track... well, here you go.

read more | digg story

Last.FM your iPod.

2006-04-01T07:11:00.000-08:00

If you don't listen to music alot on your computer but have an iPod and would like to keep track... well, here you go.

read more | digg story

Last.FM your iPod.

2006-04-01T07:09:00.000-08:00

If you don't listen to music alot on your computer but have an iPod and would like to keep track... well, here you go.

read more | digg story

To download Mozilla Firefox

2006-03-27T15:33:00.000-08:00

Beatles taking Apple to court over theft of trademark

2006-03-27T14:30:00.000-08:00

It is the ultimate battle of the generations.

This week the Apple Corps goes to the High Court seeking multimillion-pound damages against Apple Computer, the creators of the iPod, over their hugely successful iTunes Music Store.

In one corner Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the ultimate stars of vinyl who defined music in the 1960s. In the other, the creators of a small white box that has revolutionised the way we buy and listen to music.

Apple Corps, owned by the former Beatles and their heirs, still owns the licensing rights to Beatles’ products. It is claiming that the introduction of iTunes broke a $26 million settlement under which Apple Computer agreed to steer clear of the music business, for which the Beatles’ company retains the famous trademark. It is the latest clash in one of Britain’s longest-running corporate legal battles.

Any damages for this latest clash could amount to tens of millions of pounds because it concerns Apple Computer’s hugely successful iTunes Music Store and iPod digital music players.

The court will be treated to a demonstation of an iPod, but it is unlikely to play a Beatles song, as they have not been licensed for download and it would therefore be illegal.

The Beatles first used a logo of a Granny Smith in 1968 when they founded the Apple Corps to distribute their records and those of other artists they signed to the Apple record label. The records had a ripe apple on one side and a neatly sliced half on the reverse.

The Apple Records subsidiary is still active as the licensing agent for Beatles products.

Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple Computer, founded his company in 1976 with a logo of a rainbow-coloured apple with a bite taken out of it. Apple Corps sued him five years later, accepting an $80,000 settlement and a promise that the computer company would stay out of the music business.

The companies clashed again in 1989 after Apple Computer introduced a music-making program. The computer company settled in 1991, for $26 million. Apple Corps was awarded rights to the name on “creative works whose principal content is music” while Apple Computer was allowed “goods and services . . . used to reproduce, run, play or otherwise deliver such content”.

Critically, however, the agreement prevented Apple Computer from distributing content on physical media. This was designed to cover CDs and tapes, but it is unclear whether it included later inventions such as digital music files or devices used to play them.

Apple Computer will argue that its music service, which has sold more than a billion songs since 2002, is merely data transmission.

The case is scheduled to begin on Wednesday at the High Court before Mr Justice Mann, a self-professed fan of music and computers. He is no stranger to the iPod, having inquired of both sides some time ago if he should disqualify himself from hearing the case because he owned one.

The owners of Apple Corps — Sir Paul, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison — will not attend the hearing, but witnesses will include Neil Aspinall, the company’s managing director and the former Beatles road manager; and Eddy Cue, head of internet services at Apple Computer.

read more | digg story

AJAX Site Design using Prototype 1

2006-03-26T11:58:00.000-08:00

By now the entire World has heard about AJAX, even those who don’t care about Web-Development have seen the potential of this new technology. Everybody is tired of endless introductions on how cool AJAX is and those endless lists of good examples like Google Suggest, GMail and alike, so I decided to cut a long story short and jump right into the real tutorial.

Is this tutorial any different from the others? Well yes and no, it is different in being a tutorial on how to design and build a complete site and not just some fancy little details like how to turn caching in AJAX off or how to create a fancy widget. To keep the tutorial readable, and to avoid having to implement low level functionality, I’m using the dojo toolkit, I tried prototype too and really enjoyed working with being a really nice and easy to use Library, but dojo provides much more functionality bundled with it. For both frameworks one thing is true: documentation is scarse, and I spent alot time debugging and reading posts on the newsgroups.

For debugging I suggest using Firefox Venkman and the really nice Firebug extension, which make AJAX a lot easier to understand, especially FireBug’s "Log each Request" Feature.

In this tutorial we will try to design a community portal as it has a wide range of different components that give a good overview of what is archievable with AJAX, also it should provide you with the basic tools that will help you in more complex applications.

What we want

As developers we need to know where we want to go, before starting right away. The requirements analysis is not part of this tutorial so I’ll just write down the basic functionality for our Portal:

Pages: Load and show simple HTML Formatted content.
User: we want to be a community so the possibility for users to register themselfs, create a Profile and communicate with others is fundamental.
Messages: some sort of messaging center is nice too, and not too difficult to implement, it allows private communication between the users.
Forum: talking about communications, what could be better than a Forum to let the Users talk about whatever they want?

Many more things will be added later but for now this should be enough for some sleepless nights =D

The Layout

Although the focus should be on the development of the functionality, the layout is still as important as the application itself. It gets even more important because the application can be good but without an interface that is functional it is useless. We’ll use a layout that is easy yet functional:

The content area.
A sidebar for context related options.
The main menu (basically this just selects between modules).
The title, nothing fancy here
A list with the online users.

Modules

Basically with AJAx we step away from the classic one page-at-a-time view of doing things, and we have to start talking about a more Event Driven architecture, or MVC-Model if you prefer.
We’ll define an API that abstracts from the actual page so that we can then create modules that do more complex tasks.

To get back to this tutorial we will have several small modules that represent parts on the site, along with real modules we will have some virtual modules that take care of some functionality, but more on this later. Modules in this tutorial include:

Page: this will be the first module we will be implementing, it allows to simply display the contents of a file in the contents area of the site, it does nothing fancy.
User: this module is used for several different tasks:
- Register: register a new User
- Login
- Profile: show the profile of a User
Online: once we have users we can easily implement a component that allows us to show which users are online, and with AJAX this is possible almost in realtime. It is a nice effect and very easy to implement.
Forum: what would a community site be without a Forum?

The implementation

We will encapsulate all of our functionality in JavaScript variables, this is similar to static classes in Java and makes it possible to have some sort of clean namespace division between the modules. First of all we will have to create the engine. The engine is the part that handles loading of all the other modules and gives them abstract ways to interact with the page. The idea behind this is that the page interface (layout, stylesheet, …) and Engine build an abstraction layer so that it is easier to implement the functionality easier, without having to bother about representational issues. In other words we build an API.
The first and morst important thing the engine has to do is initialize everything.

var Engine = {
  bootstrap: function(){
    this.setStatus(“Loading…”);
    dojo.require(“dojo.io.*”);
    dojo.hostenv.writeIncludes();
    if((“”+document.location).indexOf(‘#’) < 0){

      Engine.loadPage(“#Page/Welcome”);
    }else{
      Engine.loadPage(“” + document.location);
    }
  },

This part is easy to understand it does nothing else than set the status to "Loading…", then include some dojo packages and then display a page using Engine.loadPage() as is shown later on. As you can see everything is bundled into a variable named "Engine" thus making it easy to reference it from outside. The bootstrap function is called by the following code in the page:

<body onload=“Engine.bootstrap()”></body>

The next thing to do is to give the Engine the ability to load modules, this is done by downloading a JavaScript file that contains the Module (again encapsulated in its own namespace) and then calling init() of the Module which will initialize the module:

  loadedModules: new Array(),
  modules: new Array(),
 
  loadModule: function(module){

    if(Engine.loadedModules[module])
      return;
    dojo.io.bind({
      url: “javascript/” + module + “.js”,
      sync: true,
      error: function(type, evaldObj){Engine.showError(“Error while loading module.”);},
      load: function(type, data, evt){

        eval(data);
        Engine.modules[module].execute(uri);
      }
    });
  },

For performance issues we don’t want to download the modules more than once, that’s why we use the two arrays in the first two lines: loadedModules[] is an array of booleans which to every modulename tells us if it was loaded or is yet to be loaded, the second array contains references to the Modules themselfs (being variables they can be referenced like this). loadModules() itself does nothing fancy, it just issues a Synchronous XMLHTTPRequest to download the Module’s source code. It’s synchronous because we don’t want anything to happen at this stage, a call to a function that is not yet loaded for example, this gives us a certain security. Notice that the code is evaluated using eval().
Now we move on to the real magic: loadPage(). It will get a URI as input and it will then load the correct module and pass control to the module, which will then take care of the rest:

  uri: &quot;/&quot;,
 
  loadPage: function(url){
    Engine.setStatus(“Loading…”);
    if(!url)

      url = “” + document.location;
    var hashIndex = url.indexOf(‘#’);
    if(hashIndex < 0 || hashIndex <= url.length-2)

      return Engine.hideStatus;
    uri = url.substring(hashIndex + 1);
    var moduleLength;
    if(uri.indexOf(‘/’) > 0)

      moduleLength = uri.indexOf(‘/’);
    else
      moduleLength = uri.length;
    var module = uri.substring(0,moduleLength);
    uri = uri.substring(uri.indexOf(‘/’));
    if(Engine.loadedModules[module] && ! dojo.lang.isUndefined(Engine.modules[module])){

      Engine.modules[module].execute(uri);
    }else{
      Engine.loadModule(module);
    }
  },

The URI is there so other modules and function get work with it easily without having to parse it over again. As you can see loadPage() mainly interprets the URL. Determining the module to load is fairly easy being the first part of the Query string. Some may ask why we’re using URLs like "http://www.example.com/Page#This/is/a/long/string". This is because we don’t want to break the ability to bookmark the pages. AJAX itself does break the bookmarkability because everythin happens in a single page, whereas without AJAX every URL identified a single resource. We use the part behind the ‘#’ because the browser does not issue another request to the webserver, which would unload the entire AJAX application, yet we assign a resouce to a unique URL. bootstrap() also loads the requested page from the URL using loadPage(). Cutting a long story short: a user can browse through our site then copy&paste the URL somewhere and when he returns to the URL he will see exaclty the page he left.

The URL is interpreted in the following way:

Everything in front of the ‘#’ is discarded as it is only the location of the application.
The part between the ‘#’ and the first ‘/’ is the module name which will be loaded if it isn’t yet.
Everything from the ‘/’ to the end of the URL is the argument that is passed to the Module’s execute() function (see the Page module below as an example).

All that is left now to do is implementing some helper functions that will later be used by the modules:

  setStatus: function(message){
    if($(’status’) != null){
      $(’status’).parentNode.removeChild($(’status’));
    }

    var body = document.getElementsByTagName(“body”)[0];
    var div = document.createElement(“div”);
    div.style.position = “absolute”;
    div.style.top = “50%”;
    div.style.left = “50%”;
    div.style.width = “200px”;
    div.style.margin = “-12px 0 0 -100px”;
    div.style.border = “0px”;
    div.style.padding = “20px”;
    div.style.opacity = “0.85″;
    div.style.backgroundColor = “#353555″;
    div.style.border = “1px solid #CFCFFF”;
    div.style.color = “#CFCFFF”;
    div.style.fontSize = “25px”;
    div.style.textAlign = “center”;
    div.id = ’status’;
    body.appendChild(div);
    div.innerHTML = message;
  },

 
  hideStatus: function(){
    Engine.opacityDown($(’status’));
  },
 
  opacityDown: function(theElement){

    if(theElement == null)
      return;
    var opacity = parseFloat(theElement.style.opacity);
    if (opacity < 0.08){

      theElement.parentNode.removeChild(theElement);
    }else{
      opacity -= 0.07;
      theElement.style.opacity = opacity;
      setTimeout(function(){Engine.opacityDown(theElement);}, 50);
    }

    return true;
  },
  setContent: function(content){
    $(‘content’).innerHTML = content;
  },

 
  showError: function(message){
    Engine.setStatus(message);
    setTimeout(“Engine.hideStatus()”,10000);
  }
}

This completes the engine. You can find the full script here.

The first module

Now we’ll move on to implement our first real module. It’s task is to load an external resource (an HTML page in this specific case) asynchronously and then display it in the content area.

var Page = {
  init: function(){

    Engine.modules[“Page”] = Page;
    Engine.loadedModules[“Page”] = true;
  },
 
  execute: function(uri){

    try{
      dojo.io.bind({
        url: “resources” + uri + “.php”,
        sync: false,
        error: function(type, evaldObj){

          Engine.showError(“Error while loading Content.”);},
        load: function(type, data, evt){
          Engine.setContent(data);
          Engine.hideStatus();
      });
    }catch(e){

      alert(e);
    }
  }
}
Page.init();

When the module is loaded it will register itself to the Engine (see the init() function) and the Engine will then call execute() which does nothing else than to load the page in the background and then display it in the content area. Easy isn’t it?
But you can already see that we can create really complex modules too as will be shown in a later part of this tutorial when we’ll create a Forum as a Module.
The source of the Page module can be found here.

Putting it all together

You can take a look at the running version of this application or download the entire source code and analyse it. I hope this tutorial was usefull and helped you understand how to design your application. See you all in the next part discussing an Online display.

AJAX Site Design using Prototype

2006-03-26T11:51:00.000-08:00

The internet is full of tutorials explaining those little tricks about AJAX, how to handle XHRequests and all that low level stuff, but nobody tells you how to design the entire application, nobody gives you the overview on how all these things should work together. What good is knowing all those fragments if the developer is unable to put them together to a real use? We have libraries to abstract from the Browser dependant things like actually doing XMLHTTPRequests, and we should concentrate on higher level design to give our clients (or visitors) good and usefull applications.

This is why in this tutorial I’ll try to give you an idea on how the actual design works. I’ll be heavily relying on my last tutorial for the layout of the final application, but we’ll go much more into detail about the decisions we take. Some parts may be applicable to non-Web-2.0 Web design and some even come in handy when designing completely non-web related applications
User Requirements

This step is as important as the coding itself, if I’d start right with the code without first clarifying where I want to go, I’d be wasting time! So there are three important questions that I have to answer:

1. What? What do I (or my boss) want the application to be, what functionality is a must, what is an optional, what are “nice to have” features?
2. Why? Does what I have found that I want to implement fit into the context or would it fit better if I’d change it a bit?
3. When? Do I have to implement everything right now, or may I add some new features one after another, possibly by releasing it before everything is implemented? But much more important: In what order will I have to implement the functionality?

There is not really a point that is more important than the others, take your time documenting and analysing the problems that you expect and fix some priorities, it will greatly speed up the implementation later.
What & Why

We plan to make a community site so the obvious things for a community is that it has to be attractive, easy to use and most important “feel alive”, nobody really wants to be part of a dead community where some casual visitor posts a new message to the forum every few days. To archieve the live feeling we use some little tricks like the regular updates of the list of users that are currently online. Remember that a community is not made up by two or three moderators posting some news from time to time, and filling the Forum with Junk messages nobody cares about.
When
It is important to understand that we’re not delivering a half finished product, it is fully functional, we plan to add more features in a second (and maybe third) step

1. Release
1. Main engine: the basic framework which will allow us to load and execute single modules at a later time.
2. Display some static content.
3. News System
4. User Registration and simple profiles.
2. Release
1. Advanced profiles
2. Private messaging
3. more to come…

This list is off course fairly superficial and does not cover the details of the implementation, it is an abstract planning step, that helps us get a general overview
Under the hood

As mentioned before we don’t want to reinvent the wheel for the millionth time again so we’ll use some libraries:

1. Prototype: probably the most flexible and intuitive AJAX Library on the internet, really lightweight and easy to use.
2. Behaviour: helps us to keep our pages downgradable for browser without JavaScript support (important also for indexing by search engine).
3. script.aculo.us: what would a Web-2.0 application be without nice effects?

This is what we’ll use for the client side. For the server side we’ll use PHP which is nice enough for our purpose, and is a reasonable tradeoff between control, speed and abstractness. For client-server communication we’ll use JSON which allows us to directly encapsulate the data into a JavaScript object, thus making the interpretation of the data much easier, in this tutorial we’ll use the JSON-PHP Library.

The Behaviour Library allows us to bind functionality right to the DOM-Elements without having to add onclick, onload, on[whatever] handlers right in the HTML, it allows us to define some CSS Classes, associate them with certain actions and then the library will take care of the rest for us, fully automagically.

Another main problem with AJAX pages are the “one-page-application” (applications that run entirely on one page) that have some problems with Bookmarking and the famous back button, I decided that the community page will be implemented as a one page application because it makes the whole process much easier, everything runs in one context and we don’t have to care aabout the rest. But we also want to make our pages bookmarkable so we use the hash ending of the URL to identify which page we are currently on.
Basic setup

Ok, so it’s time for us to gather all our libraries and put them into our Project Folder. Our project directory structure looks like this:

The Javascript folder will contain our three libraries (prototype, behaviour and script.aculo.us), the lib directory will contain all our PHP libraries (just the JSON-PHP for now) and static will contain our non dynamic content, such as some welcome textes and help pages.
Implementation

Now we’ll finally getting to see the actual code, it is important that we go one step after another, starting from the basic page layout and then building the functionality on top of that, it will keep us motivated throughout the process to implement a little thing and then test it to see if it works as we’d expected. The base Page is just a Page with the basic content, possibly a welcome message that tells where the user landed and what this is all about. We’ll use a pretty standard Layout for our application, the only requirement for AJAX is that we assign some ID’s to the main parts so that we can easily reference them later. Now we can insert links as we would normally have done, browsers without JavaScript will see a classic page that is completely served by our PHP-Scripts on the server side. For example the first thing we’ll do is display some static, non generated content, like the Welcome page normal links would look like this:

About

The PHP page would take the query string Page/About and would then serve the new page. Now we want to add the AJAX Magic, and this is magic indeed: we’ll use behaviour to catch the request before it is being sent and use AJAX methods from there on to download only the updated regions of the page. First we have to add a Class to all our internal links:

About

this allows us to distinguish the links we want to catch from the links to outside resources, for which AJAX is not applicable anyway.

var rules = {
‘a.link’ : function(el){
// We don’t want to have garbled links…
if(el.onclick)
return;
Engine.log(“Applying rule to “ + el.toString());
var target = el.href.substring(el.href.indexOf(‘?’) + 1);
el.href = “#”+target;
el.onclick = function(event){
var targ;
if (!event) var event = window.event;
if (event.target) targ = event.target;
else if (event.srcElement) targ = event.srcElement;
if (targ.nodeType == 3) // defeat Safari bug
targ = targ.parentNode;
Engine.log(“Clicked on internal Link “ + targ.toString());
Engine.loadPage(targ.href);
return false;
}
}
};
Behaviour.register(rules);

By doing this we have defined how the user interacts with the AJAX Engine, every element that fires up a certain event will have a class, and behaviour will then take care of the hooking up. Off course the loadPage example isn’t a really complex one but it’s the most common interaction on our page, and it shows the important parts.
See what’s going on

To test and see if all is going as we designed it we will have some way to get feedback from what we do on our Page. Using the alert() function is trivial, too trivial for us and it is really annoying too. Better would be some sort of textfield where our debugging messages are displayed without disturbing the site interaction (alert() opens a popup and focuses it…). We’ll use a popup that can be closed without interupting the application and it won’t try to get the focus for every message.

debug: true,
console: null,
log: function(message){
if(!Engine.debug)
return;
if(!Engine.console){
// Log window does not exist, try to open it.
consoleWnd = window.open(‘’,‘Debug Information’,‘width=350,height=250,menubar=0,toolbar=1,status=0,scrollbars=1,resizable=1′); consoleWnd.document.writeln(‘Console);
Engine.console = consoleWnd.document.body;
}
Engine.console.innerHTML += (message + "
n");
}

This makes it really easy to print debugging information on the running application: just use Engine.log(”Your message here…”); and Engine will take care of the rest. This is exactly what we need: the debugging information when needed but not always. This way of displaying debugging information is really simple, for more advanced features give Log4JS a try.
Modules design

Most AJAX applications in use right now load everything on startup, images, javascript and content. While this is surely an easy way to do things it’s not the best, because it takes a long time (sometimes too long) for the application to be ready, and much of the stuff that is loaded is never used, or used pretty late during execution. For exactly this reason we’ll divide the application into modules. Modules are independent parts of the application, like in our case these would be:

* Page: a simple module which will be implemented in this part of the tutorial. It will load an HTML file from the server and display it in the content area.
* Gallery: a gallery made of user pictures, the goal would also be to use Flickr as a backend for the pictures (e.g. take a group pool and display it, display pictures of a user, display pictures with a certain tag, …)
* News: simply an extension to the Page module this will allow administrators and moderators to post news. News are passed to the Javascript engine using XML. Its main purpose is to demonstrate how to use XML-Files.
* Messages: A module for sending and receiving private messages.
* Forum: the most complex module we’ll see during this tutorial.

First of all we’ll see how to load modules and register them into a module handler (the Engine) and then we’ll move on to actually design the modules.
Module handling

Basically the Engine does specify an API that the modules then may use to access the various parts of the Page, thus we create an abstraction layer between the actual interface and the application. Besides providing an easy to use interface to the Page, the Engine also takes care of loading and managing modules. First of all we’ll have know which modules have already been loaded and if they are not yet loaded we’ll have to load them upon request:

modules: array(),
registerModule: function(moduleName){
…
},
loadModule: function(moduleName, callback){
…
}

notice that we may provide a callback function so that will be executed as soon as the module is loaded. This is because we cannot use the following:

loadModule(“myModule”);
modules[“myModule”].execute();

because loadModule contains an asynchronous call which will immediately return. If we’re unlucky (and most likely we are) the second line is executed before the module has been downloaded and registered, thus generating some really nasty errors. The callback allows us to specify some actions that are to be executed when the module has been definitely loaded.

Modules can range from really easy ones, as the Page-Module is, to really complex things such as message boards, news system, live activity logs, to fully fledged Instant messaging application, there is absolutely no limit to the complexity. The only thing that we require is that the modules adhere to a certain format:

var moduleName = {
init: function(){
// Initialize the module
// Register the module Engine:
Engine.registerModule(moduleName);
},
// …
};
moduleName.init();

The last line is used to initialize the module. Since the module code will be eval()’d it must take care of registering itself to the module handler, the Engine.
The Page Module

The Page module is our first module. On execute it will get the static page via XHRequest from the Web server and display it in the content area. Being the simplest module it consists only of one function and one anonymous function, which will take care of loading the content into the content area. Don’t forget to re-apply the Bahaviours to the loaded code otherwise you might get some unexpected results.

So here it goes, without further ado the code of the Page-Module, by now you should be able to understand what it does.

var Page = {
init: function(){
Engine.log(“Page module loaded.”);
Engine.modules[‘Page’] = Page;
},
execute: function(url){
Engine.setStatus(“Loading content…”);
var myAjax = new Ajax.Request(“static” + url + “.html”,{
method: ‘get’,
// parameters: "?nocache=" + new Date(),
onFailure: function(){
Engine.showError(“Could not load content.”);
Engine.log(“Could not load page “ + url);
},
onSuccess: function(req){
Engine.log(“Loaded page “ + url);
Engine.setContent(req.responseText);
Engine.hideStatus();
}
});
}
};
Page.init();

The rest of the Engine

The engine still isn’t done by now, some functions from above are still missing but it is easy to guess what they do, we simply need some helper functions such as setContent, setStatus, showError and alike, so here goes the rest of the code:

setStatus: function(message){
if($(’status’) == null){
var body = document.getElementsByTagName(“body”)[0];
var div = document.createElement(“div”);
div.id = ’status’;
body.appendChild(div);
}
var node = $(’status’);
node.innerHTML = message;
new Effect.Appear(node);
},

hideStatus: function(){
new Effect.Fade($(’status’));
},

showError: function(message){
Engine.setStatus(message);
Engine.setTimeout(“Engine.hideStatus();”,15000);
},

setContent: function(content){
$(‘content’).innerHTML = content;
},

What’s next?

In the next part of this tutorial we will finally add some really new code that hasn’t yet been covered by my first tutorial, namely we will implement a signup form and some simple user management. For now take a look at the working copy of the application here, or download a snapshot of the code here.
Other resources

* Sergio Pereira’s really good introduction to Prototype
* My first AJAX tutorial
* Prototype Dissected: some really nice cheatsheets for prototype.js

Tools

* FireFox Venkman: the javascript debugger of FireFox (does not work with 1.5.0.1, but the guys over at GetAhead got a fix).
* FireBug Extension: FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter.
* Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework:AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) provides extensible tools for building IDEs for the many different AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) run-time environments (such as Dojo, Zimbra, etc.). This technology also contains features for developing, debugging, and testing AJAX applications. The framework provides enhanced JavaScript editing features such as edit-time syntax checking; an embedded Mozilla Web browser; an embedded DOM browser; and an embedded JavaScript debugger.

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How to create a torrent

2006-03-24T04:16:00.000-08:00

How to create a torrent?

Posted in All, Clients, How to, Tutorial, Bitcomet, Azureus, µTorrent, Bittorrent on 03.23.06 15:23

Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create torrents when they need to share something. I have “a lot of” friends who know how to download torrents, but when they need to send me their latest 200MB vacation picture collection, they ask me to “get on msn”.

It’s not that I have anything against msn (allthough the file transfer sucks), but why don’t just use bittorrent? Especially if you want to send something to more than one person because then you can share the bandwith.

So how do you do this? Well it’s very simple. Open your favorite bittorrent client and do the magic trick:

file > create torrent

…..

That’s all? Well almost. All you need to do now is put in the tracker info nad tick some boxes. This can differ somewhat from client to client but it all comes down to the same thing.

µTorrent

utorrent bit torrent

1. File > Create new Torrent (or CTRL + N)

2. Select the files and or directories

3. Trackers: This is probably the hard part for most people. But it’s pretty easy, just put in one of the popular public trackers. You can use one or more trackers, but in general one is enough.

Here are some of the most popular trackers at the moment:

http://tracker.prq.to/announce
http://inferno.demonoid.com:3389/announce
http://tracker.bt-chat.com/announce
http://tracker.zerotracker.com:2710/announce

Put one of these in the tracker box

4. Do NOT tick the private torrent box (unless you’re using a private tracker)

5. Save the torrent and send it to your friends

Bitcomet

bitcomet bit torrent

1. File > Create Torrent (or CTRL + M)

2. Select the files and or directories

3. Select “enable public DHT network” from the dropdown box
This way you can be your own tracker if the public tracker goes down.

4. Tracker server and DHT node list
Again, This is probably the hard part for most people. But it’s pretty easy, just put in one of the popular public trackers. You can use one or more trackers, but in general one is enough.

Here are some of the most popular trackers at the moment:

http://tracker.prq.to/announce
http://inferno.demonoid.com:3389/announce
http://tracker.bt-chat.com/announce
http://tracker.zerotracker.com:2710/announce

Put one of these in the tracker box

5. Save the torrent and send it to your friends

Azureus

azureus bit torrent

1. File > New Torrent (or CTRL + N)

2. Tick “use an external tracker”.
And again, This is probably the hard part for most people. But it’s pretty easy, just put in one of the popular public trackers.

Here are some of the most popular trackers at the moment:

http://tracker.prq.to/announce
http://inferno.demonoid.com:3389/announce
http://tracker.bt-chat.com/announce
http://tracker.zerotracker.com:2710/announce

Put one of these in the tracker box

3. Select single file or dicectory, click NEXT and point to the file or directory you want to share, and click NEXT

4. Do NOT tick “private torrent”

5. Do tick “allow decentralized tracking”

6. Save the torrent and send it to your friends.

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How To: Re-Surfacing CDs So They Work Again

2006-03-23T07:25:00.000-08:00

Intro Re-surfacing CDs so they work again.

A simple way to remove scratches from a cd so you can get your data back off the disc again.
Step 1 Gather Required Materials.

First gather the following materials.

- Paper towel (softer is better)
- Polishing cloth (eyeglasses cloth will do fine)
- CD scratched beyond playability (Easy to find)
- Can of Brasso Metal Polish.
Step 2 Add Brasso and Start Polishing!

Take some of the brasso and pour it onto the CD. Please be careful with the Brasso, and only perform this in a well ventilated area. I was making this guide at at the office, and forgot about the fumes. I had to polish the CD in the stairwell as I would have fumed out my co-workers otherwise.

Use the paper towel pieces to polish the CD. Polishing is ideal in straight strokes from the center of the disk to the outside so you polish perpendicular to the tracks on the disc. Because I was short on time, I used small circular motions similar to how I'd polish a car. Take your time with this. Add Brasso when it dries or gets pushed off the CD. Continue this process for about 15 minutes.

You should feel the abrassiveness of the Brasso on the CD as you are doing this. If not, then use a different papertowel. The brasso is removing part of the plastic from the disc not adding to it. You are actually scraping away part of the CD which makes the existing scratches smaller.

After 15 minutes or so, Rince the CD off under water and check the CD. The brasso will have left small scratches on the disc as it wore down the CD. Keep going until the deep scratches are gone, and all that remains are the marks from the brasso. (they will diminish as you continue and get an even surface again).

When done, rince the disc, and wipe it with the soft eyeglass cloth.

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my googlepages

2006-03-23T07:18:00.000-08:00

http://u2beatles.googlepages.com/

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Pretty darn good Basic Windows Tutorials

2006-03-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

I know there are A LOT of diggers out there who are not pros, so this would be the ultimate site for noobie to PC diggers, who wanna get an idea on how to mess with their PC, and pretty much learn to work around Windows flaws. If you're a pro, leave this one alone, it would be like going back to a elementary math textbook if you're an actuary.

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Paul McCartney making mashed potatoes

2006-03-15T08:01:00.000-08:00

Skateboarding Dog

2006-03-13T18:01:00.000-08:00

Someone taught their dog how to skateboard. I think its a pitbull.

I know some of you won't be impressed until the dog does that trick of jumping up on a handrail.

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Pixar RenderMan Open Source Replacement.

2006-03-13T17:08:00.000-08:00

Pixie is a RenderMan like photorealistic renderer. It is being developed in the hope that it will be useful for graphics research and for people who can not afford a commercial renderer. Pixie is an open source project licensed under Gnu Public License

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Twins legend Puckett dead at 44

2006-03-06T17:51:00.000-08:00

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Kirby Puckett died Monday, a day after the Hall of Fame outfielder had a stroke at his Arizona home, a hospital spokeswoman said. He was 44.

Puckett died at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Scottsdale, Ariz., Kimberly Lodge said. He had been in intensive care since having surgery at another hospital following his stroke Sunday morning.
Puckett carried the Twins to World Series titles in 1987 and 1991 before his career was cut short by glaucoma. His family, friends and former teammates gathered at the hospital throughout Monday.

"On behalf of Major League Baseball, I am terribly saddened by the sudden passing of Kirby Puckett," baseball commissioner Bud Selig said. "He was a Hall of Famer in every sense of the term.

"He played his entire career with the Twins and was an icon in Minnesota. But he was revered throughout the country and will be remembered wherever the game is played. Kirby was taken from us much too soon - and too quickly," he said.

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VIDEO : Lots of Japanese tips to save your time.

2006-03-06T12:07:00.000-08:00

Very impressive tips with a scientific base from a Japanese TV program.

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Kids Programming Language by Microsoft

2006-03-03T09:26:00.000-08:00

Jon Schwartz et al have created a really cool programming language for beginners, called Kids Programming Language. Here we dig into what they've come up and why. There are some really fun demos.

Check out the KPL site!

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digg - Submit Item

2006-02-27T11:46:00.000-08:00

Both were 81!

Dennis Weaver, the slow-witted deputy Chester Goode in the TV classic Western "Gunsmoke" and the New Mexico deputy solving New York crime in "McCloud," has died,

LOS ANGELES -- Don Knotts, who won TV immortality and five Emmys for playing the bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show"

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A Prairie Home Companion

2006-02-17T21:55:00.000-08:00

By Kirk Honeycutt

Bottom line: Who says you can't do a terrific radio show in a movie?
Screened at the Berlin International Film Festival

BERLIN -- Not since Woody Allen's "Radio Days" has anyone created such a cinematic Valentine to the wonderfully imaginative medium of radio as "A Prairie Home Companion." Garrison Keillor, impresario, creator and host of one of radio's longest running programs -- 31 years and counting -- and director Robert Altman are a match made in heaven. To these two Midwesterners, the region's dry, whimsical humor, unfailing politeness and straight-shooting sensibility are as natural as their own skins. There is no artifice or slickness here, just a native, keen intelligence that slyly hides behind homespun wit and verbal slapstick.

Keillor's radio show is, of course, beloved by many and Altman's movie, as Altman movies so often do, comes heavily populated with marquee actors. So the domestic theatrical audience for "Prairie" should be wide and varied. Overseas is a tough call: So much of the movie relies on deep-grained American humor along with puns and word play in English that get lost in subtitles. Nevertheless, an audience here at the Berlinale responded favorably to the music-flavored film even if some of verbal gags fell flat.

Filmed at St. Paul's Fitzgerald Theater in Keillor's home state of Minnesota, "Prairie" essentially puts a radio show much like "A Prairie Home Companion" on film. Backstage, onstage and around the aging theater, the movie (written by Keillor from a story by him and Ken LaZebnik) imagines a fateful final broadcast of a show that has been given the axe by a soulless Texas corporation. (Keillor knows how to pick his villain's state, doesn't he?)

The central musical acts belong to Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin), the remaining members of what once was a four-sister country music act, and Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), singing cowboys and rivals in one-upsmanship.

Yolanda's daughter Lola (Lindsay Lohan) distracts herself from her mom's oft-told tales of the theatrical life by penning poems about suicide. Guy Noir, a recurring character on Keillorr's show, is brought aboard here as the program's "security director." As the throwback detective, Kevin Kline mixes Chandler-esque dialogue with more than a touch of Peter Seller's Inspector Clouseau.

The broadcast's harried stage manager (Tim Russell, a regular on Keillor's show) and his assistant ("Saturday Night Live's" Maya Rudolph) are given new ways to break into sweat by the unpredictable cast. And through all the delightful confusion and musical numbers drift two iconic figures: GK (Keillor himself), a benign, unruffled presence who smoothly adapts to all exigencies, and a Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen), an angel in a white trench coat, taking the earthly and shapely form of a woman who died listening to the show's broadcast. It was a penguin joke that done her in.

Minor attempts to introduce plot material -- such as an unlikely past affair between Yolanda and GK, the death of a performer and the arrival of the corporate axeman (Tommy Lee Jones) -- never lead anywhere. Even the filmmakers seem to forget them moments after their introduction.

No, the movie steadfastly sticks to its radio roots. The comic bits from Streep & Tomlin and Harrelson & Reilly are gems of off-the-cuff humor. Keillor's droll lyrics and jingles for fictional sponsors poke good-natured fun. The toe-tapping musical performances are refreshingly captured by Edward Lachman's mobile camera, all smoothly edited by Jacob Craycroft.

As a character remarks, this radio show is the kind of program that died 50 years ago only someone forgot to tell the performers. Thank God for that.

A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION
Picturehouse
GreeneStreet Films and River Road Entertainment present a Sandcastle 5 and Prairie Home production
Credits: Director: Robert Altman; Writer: Garrison Keillor; Story by: Garrison Keilor, Ken LaZebnik; Producers: Robert Altman; Wren Arthur, Joshua Astrachan, Tony Judge, David Levy; Executive producers: William Pohlad, John Penotti, Fisher Stevens, George Sheanshang; Director of photography: Edward Lachman; Production designer: Dina Goldman; Music: Richard Dworsky; Costumes: Catherine Marie Thomas; Editor: Jacob Craycroft.
Cast: Yolanda Johnson: Meryl Streep; Rhonda Johnson: Lily Tomlin; GK: Garrison Keillor; Dusty: Woody Harrelson; Lefty: John C. Reilly; Lola: Lindsay Lohan; Guy Noir: Kevin Kline; Molly: Maya Rudolph; Axeman: Tommy Lee Jones; Dangerous woman: Virginia Madsen.

No MPAA rating, running time 105 minutes.
.

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beatles vs monkees

2006-02-16T05:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/?v=dfAierwqhWM

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How To Troubleshoot Any Networking Problem

2006-02-15T04:36:00.000-08:00

Tech author extraordinaire Mark Minasi shares a bit over two dozen "rules of network troubleshooting."

"Every day of the year, I get a bunch of e-mails from people trying to solve network problems. And while I love to help, I'd like even more to show folks how to solve any problem on their own. So it occurred to me that I've slowly learned that there are a bit over two dozen "rules of network troubleshooting." I then put together a 90 minute talk on it, and I've had the chance to do that talk for audiences of up to a thousand people to good reception but as always, I can't get everywhere, so what follows is some of that talk. My intention here isn't to reveal any hidden Registry entries or point you to some heretofore-secret $40,000 network diagnostic device. No, I just want to offer what's worked for me in solving network troubles. I'm sure some of this will be simply a reminder of what you've already learned, but I find, at least in my case, that it's all too easy to forget a rule and have to re-learn it, painfully!

(By the way, if you'd like to listen to this talk, surf over to http://techmentorevents.com/samples/ -- they recorded me doing this once and put it up on their Web site.)"

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PictureCloud

2006-02-10T18:37:00.000-08:00

A picture cloud is the easiest way to make a photo come to life. By using a picture cloud you can turn still photos into images that spin 360Â° by uploading images you take around an object with your digital camera. Picture clouds are helping give depth to the web, and best of all - picture clouds are free.

Picture clouds can...
•Show objects and items in 360°
•Assist in consumer buying decisions
•Be created in under 5 minutes
•Be placed in your web pages, auctions, blogs, personals, emails, and more...
free

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John Lennon lyric sheet to be auctioned. the two-sided lyric sheet is expected to fetch more than $2 million at auction.

2006-02-10T13:34:00.000-08:00

LENNON, JOHN. 1940-1980.
Autograph Manuscript, [A Day In The Life], n.p., n.d. [London, January 17, 1967], 1 page, recto and verso of a single A4 sheet of unlined paper (265 x 194 mm ), in black felt marker and blue ballpoint pen. A few annotations in red ink, one small 5 mm hole and some soiling to lower margin, folding creases, light foxing to lower margin verso. Matted in double paneled glass frame to 19 x 15 inches.

Two complete drafts of John Lennons lyrics to A Day In The Life, likely composed on the morning and afternoon of January 17, 1967.

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CSS Basics

2006-02-09T13:41:00.000-08:00

This is the best, cleanest, simplest tutorial I have found for getting started with CSS.

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"MacIndows"... Give your Windows XP an OSX Facelift

2006-02-09T10:59:00.001-08:00

This is a guide for transforming your traditional Windows XP (SP1/SP2) into a fresh new-looking environment with a strong MacIntosh OS-X feel to it.

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"MacIndows"... Give your Windows XP an OSX Facelift

2006-02-09T10:59:00.000-08:00

This is a guide for transforming your traditional Windows XP (SP1/SP2) into a fresh new-looking environment with a strong MacIntosh OS-X feel to it.

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uBrowser: Browsing the web in 3D

2006-02-09T08:43:00.000-08:00

Check out this neat 3d web browser.

About uBrowser
Introduction

uBrowser is an simple Web Browser that illustrates one way of embedding the Mozilla® Gecko rendering engine into a standalone application using LibXUL. In this case, the contents of the page is grabbed as it's being rendered and displayed as a texture on some geometry using OpenGL™. You are able to interact with the page (mostly) normally and visit (almost) any site that works correctly with Firefox® 1.5.
What does it looks like?

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Sperm Cells Turned into Eggs

2006-02-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

Scientists have tricked male fish cells that were destined to become sperm into switching sex and becoming eggs instead. Junior Tagline: Nothing is inconceivable.

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Helicopter shots of Mexico City neighborhoods -- stunning and unreal!!

2006-02-08T08:19:00.000-08:00

A former Mexico City helicopter pilot has posted a stunning gallery of his aerial photos of the city and environs. Some of these photo's are amazing!

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VMWare releases VMWare Server for Free

2006-02-06T12:07:00.000-08:00

VMware releases VMware Server Beta.

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5 Tips for Getting the Most Out of digg Traffic

2006-02-05T21:08:00.000-08:00

Five simple steps for getting the Most Out of your front-page digg.

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(Video) Computer Generated Animation of Water by Stanford Professor

2006-02-04T14:48:00.000-08:00

Pretty cool, looks very realistic! By Ron Fedkiw, Assistant Professor at Stanford Computer Science, whose research areas include computational fluid dynamics and computer graphics

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Build Your Own iPod

2006-02-03T10:53:00.000-08:00

create your own flash memory based mp3 player. Sounds pretty fun, the kit without a memory card is about 88 dollars. It can run on either MMC or SD memory cards with sizes up to 1GB - I recommend newegg for good prices on these - around 52 bucks.

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VMware to make server product free

2006-02-03T07:33:00.000-08:00

VMware, an EMC subsidiary whose software lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer, is expected to announce next week that it will begin giving away one of its key products for free, CNET News.com has learned.

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Leukemia cure around the corner?

2006-02-02T03:05:00.000-08:00

The deadly disease of leukemia might now be cureable by a simple vaccination. This has been suggested in a small, experimental vaccine study which has given excellent results on the test cases.

Exposure to the chemical benzene, usually in the work place

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Leukemia cure around the corner?

2006-02-02T03:03:00.000-08:00

The Top Ten Hybrid Myths

2006-02-01T15:08:00.000-08:00

With more of the gas-electric cars on the road, it's time to dispel some of the misinformation surrounding these alternative vehicles.

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The Best Open Source Software for Mac OS X

2006-01-31T19:26:00.000-08:00

This site has taken some of the best opensource software for Mac OS X, and made a convienient list. There's some great stuff here.

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Must-have software for Mac OS X

2006-01-31T14:59:00.000-08:00

Great list of the best Mac OS X software. Almost a CC of my Applications folder!

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Pixar takes over Disney Animation and Imagineering

2006-01-30T21:00:00.000-08:00

We all knew Disney was buying Pixar, but... did you know Pixar will effectively take over the entire Disney animation unit - and that Pixar's John Lasseter will also take the reins of Disney Imagineering, overseeing theme parks? (Disney's purchase of Pixar is smelling a whole lot like Apple's purchase of NeXT!)

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How to Take Great Photos of an Electronics Product with a Digital Camera

2006-01-30T20:53:00.000-08:00

Whether writing a review for web site or selling a used camera or product at an online auction site such as eBay, your photos should look their very best. It's easier than you think to take pictures that stand out from the crowd, even without a fancy digital camera and professional lighting equipment.

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Amazing article on how Steve jobs does business

2006-01-30T19:50:00.000-08:00

The now biggest shareholder at Disney, Steve Jobs, is described by Business Week as redefining the job of being a CEO. -a must read...well if he runs pixar...

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Amazing article on how Steve jobs does business

2006-01-30T19:46:00.000-08:00

The now biggest shareholder at Disney, Steve Jobs, is described by Business Week as redefining the job of being a CEO. -a must read...well if he runs pixar...

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Tribute to James Doohan

2005-10-16T08:47:00.000-07:00

We invite friends and fans around the world to compose a tribute to Mr. Doohan, to honor him on his journey to Earth orbit. Your message will be placed on board the spacecraft for launch in mid December, 2005.
You are also invited to attend a public memorial service...

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MSN TV - 2005 Emmy Awards

2005-09-07T19:44:00.000-07:00

STARS TO SING IN 'EMMY IDOL' CONTEST

By Lynn Elber
The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES -- The Emmy Awards will be singing a different tune at this month's ceremony, and it could be a classic.

In an "American Idol"-style competition, stars and singers ranging from William Shatner to Donald Trump to Frederica von Stade will perform themes from TV series, with viewers able to pick their favorite song via online or text-message voting.

Kristen Bell ("Veronica Mars") will be the only solo performer, with her version of the "Fame" theme, while others will sing duets.

The dynamic duos announced by CBS and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for the contest tagged "Emmy Idol":

— William Shatner ("Boston Legal") and opera's von Stade with the theme from Shatner's 1960s series "Star Trek."

— Megan Mullally ("Will & Grace") and Trump ("The Apprentice") with the "Green Acres" tune.

— Gary Dourdan ("CSI: Crime Scene Investigation") and R&B artist Macy Gray with "Movin' On Up" from "The Jeffersons."

"There are certain television theme songs that are nearly as memorable as the shows connected to them," said Ken Ehrlich, the ceremony's executive producer.

"By jogging memories as well as creating wonderful moments by having them performed on this year's Emmy show, we think we're giving viewers one more reason to tune in and be entertained," Ehrlich said in a statement.

The Sept. 18 ceremony on CBS will open with Earth, Wind & Fire performing its song "September" along with the Black Eyed Peas, the number serving as an accompaniment to clips of memorable moments from the past season.

While music is an integral part of the Academy Awards, which feature nominated movie songs, it's not typically key to the ceremony honoring the best of television.

Musical entertainment in an awards ceremony can be a risky proposition. The best-known example: Rob Lowe and a performer dressed as Snow White dancing in an opening number for the 1995 Oscars was widely panned as dreadful.

Meanwhile, in honor of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Ehrlich said all Emmy presenters and performers will be given magnolias, the state flower of both Louisiana and Mississippi. In addition, he said information will be provided throughout the three-hour telecast on how viewers can support the massive recovery effort.

Emmy host Ellen DeGeneres, who is a Louisiana native, last week spoke emotionally about losses her family suffered from Katrina. She last hosted the Emmys in 2001, when she was praised for striking just the right tone for the ceremony, which had been delayed twice in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

TV's favorite ‘little buddy’ Gilligan’ Bob Denver dies at age 70

2005-09-06T12:11:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES - Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy first mate Gilligan on the 1960s television show “Gilligan’s Island,” made him an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers, has died, his agent confirmed Tuesday. He was 70.

© 2005 The Associated Press. All

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SIR PAUL M - McCARTNEY + MORISSETTE USE ALIASES TO FOOL PIRATES + THIEVES

2005-08-29T06:53:00.000-07:00

SIR PAUL M - McCARTNEY + MORISSETTE USE ALIASES TO FOOL PIRATES + THIEVES: "McCARTNEY + MORISSETTE USE ALIASES TO FOOL PIRATES + THIEVES

SIR PAUL McCARTNEY, FAITH HILL, ALANIS MORISSETTE and DEPECHE MODE are among the huge acts using aliases in a bid to make sure their new albums get to critics at newspapers and magazines.
Music industry bigwigs fear the bigger stars' preview albums are being swiped by interns and pirated weeks before their release dates.
So, McCartney's upcoming album has been credited to PETE MITCHELL, while Hill, Morissette and Depeche Mode are sending out their albums as FERN HOLLOWAY, ARTHUR MOORE and BLACK SWARM respectively, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Publicist MITCH SCHNEIDER, who represents both Morissette and Depeche Mode, says, 'It is really a practical thing for protection when there are people walking by desks wanting to take things.'
But the publicists admit their alias plan is far from flawless - some critics, who are inundated with albums to review, give unknown artists' albums away or discard them.
Geffen Records publicist JIM MERLIS explains, 'You can actually out-clever yourself in these situations.'
29/08/2005 02:46 "

Pixar tells story behind 'Toy Story'

2005-08-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

Pixar tells story behind 'Toy Story': "Pixar tells story behind 'Toy Story'
C.W. Nevius
Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Printable Version
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When Hollywood was churning out movies full of explosions and mindless violence a few years ago, Pixar Animation Studios swam against the stream with 'Finding Nemo,' a G-rated feature that received four Academy Award nominations and grossed more than $355 million.
Today, of course, Pixar's filmmaking wisdom is self-evident. Mention the animation studio and everyone nods wisely.
But Monday, as Pixar celebrated the 10th anniversary of 'Toy Story,'' its debut film, the creative minds behind the studio for the first time told the real story of how they almost lost the picture. Not only did the big-money folks at Disney who bankrolled the film not understand the vision of 'Toy Story,'' they hated it so much they shut down production.
Of course, Pixar made the movie, the movie made millions and Disney watched itself dethroned as the king of animation by a company that Steve Jobs started in a Richmond garage.
It is an instructive story on several levels. Pixar, as you have probably heard, has had a stormy relationship with Disney -- and Disney, at this point, looks like the loser. In the 10 years since we met Woody the cowboy, Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the 'Toy Story' gang, Pixar has won 16 Academy Awards and grossed over $3 billion.
Disney, once the gold standard of animation, is reeling from flops like 'Treasure Planet.''
Is Pixar the new model for corporate filmmaking? Wouldn't that be nice?
Yesterday's press tour was a rare opportunity to cruise the Emeryville campus, where studio guru John Lasseter can be seen strolling by in one of his trademark Ha"

The Virginia Quarterly Review - CHURCH ON SATURDAY NIGHT: GARRISON KEILLOR'S A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION

2005-07-26T22:07:00.000-07:00

The Virginia Quarterly Review - CHURCH ON SATURDAY NIGHT: GARRISON KEILLOR'S A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION: "CHURCH ON SATURDAY NIGHT: GARRISON KEILLOR'S A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION
Wolf
CHURCH ON SATURDAY NIGHT: GARRISON KEILLOR'S A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION
MICHAEL NELSON
The program begins with music at five o'clock Central Time on Saturday evenings, and music makes up nearly half the two-hour show. The first words to come out of Garrison Keillor's mouth at the start of his weekly public radio program, A Prairie Home Companion, are song lyrics: "It's Saturday an'/the band is playin'/Honey, could you ask for more?" Later Keillor and others will sing a few bluegrass and early rock and roll numbers. As part of the comic illusion that he and singer Lynn Peterson are working up a repertoire of duets suitable for baptisms and funerals, they will perform an old gospel song called "Where Could I Go (But to the Lord)?" Keillor will lead the audience in a sing-along of traditional hymns and patriotic songs. Joined by regular members of the cast, he will perform in several comic skits and commercials. He will tell us, for example, that Powdermilk Biscuits have the power to make shy persons bold. Midway through the show, Keillor will read announcements submitted by members of the audience in St. Paul's Fitzgerald Theatre: "Congratulations, Brad, from Jay and Disa: You're an uncle now"; "Tim and Kristen say, "Don't worry, Mom, we'll be there for your birthday""; "Happy fifty-fifth anniversary to Mother and Daddy from your children—all eight of us."

There is, in each week's program, the proverbial moment that everyone has been waiting for. It comes about 90 minutes into the show when Keillor says, "Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town." With no script or prompter before him, Keillor simply talks the 20-minute monologue that follows. The seeming artlessness of his delivery is wonderfully studied: Keillor writes a rough draft of what he wants to say during the week leading up to each show.(Indeed, despite the on-air, tongue-in-cheek credit he gives to writers like Sandy Beach, Sarah Bellum, and Warren Peace, he writes as much as 95 percent of A Prairie Home Companion himself.) Keillor reads through his draft of the week's "News From Lake Wobegon" a couple of times before going on stage, then delivers it as if it were occurring to him on the spot, a perfect blend of spontaneity and careful preparation. The audience wants to believe that "I'm just walking out there and making up stuff for them," Keillor says, "telling them a story that I just thought of." As far as he is concerned, however, "it's not the job of an entertainer to have a moment of revelation on stage, but to create them for other people."

On this show Keillor tells about going to the Minnesota State Fair with his family as a boy, "a loud place with bad food and stink, music and sex blaring—listen, it's gorgeous." One year his Uncle Earl saw an ad for a baking contest at the fair and entered his wife Myrna, who was famous for her chocolate angel food cake.("To call it devil's food would give Satan encouragement, so we didn't.") Earl overcame Myrna's reluctance to cook in front of a lot of people by telling her that the winner would surely be asked to say something, a perfect opportunity "to give that Scripture recipe: "Take four cups of I Corinthians 13 and three cups of Ephesians 4:32...." After the bake-off was over (the judge was drunk and Myrna lost), Keillor rode the ferns wheel. "Every summer I'm a little bigger," he says, "but riding the ferris wheel, I feel the same as ever, I feel eternal.... The wheel carries us up high, high, and stops, and we sit swaying, creaking, in the dark, on the verge of death.... This is my vision: little kids holding on to their daddy's hand, and he is me. He looks down on them with love and buys them another corn dog. They are worried they will lose him, they hang on to his leg with one hand, eat with the other. The vision is unbearably wonderful. We get off and other people get on. Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough."

It's ten minutes until seven now. "News," which sometimes runs long and sometimes runs (a little) short, has hit its 20-minute mark exactly. Some members of the audience, having heard what they came to hear, head for the exits. On stage, there is just enough time left for a mock public service announcement by the American Duct Tape Council, in which a New Age supermodel breathlessly recounts how she hangs long strands of duct tape from her living room ceiling to add "cosmic verticality" and also to catch flies. The program ends with a Keillor-Lynn Peterson duet (this one designed for second marriages) of "When I Dream of You (Maybe Someday You Will Come True)."

II
Sounds like a church service, doesn't it? Protestant, to be sure, and unless one wants to count Powdermilk Biscuits as the bread of communion, noneucharistic as well, but a kind of church service nonetheless. The people assemble weekly both in the hall and around their radios. Musicians on stage take the place of choir and organist, with the audience often invited to join in the singing. The messages and greetings that Keillor reads midway through the program are not unlike church announcements, letting people know how others in the gathered family are doing. All this culminates in good Protestant style with Keillor's sermon, er, monologue, which sounds like it is being born in the pulpit but actually is well prepared and even lasts the prescribed 20 minutes. "All comedy is preaching," Keillor has said, "but it can't show its hand." As for the particular brand of preaching and worship that A Prairie Home Companion represents, "Our show down deep in its heart is a gospel show." Don't even let the late Saturday afternoon starting time throw you: the leading trend in Christian churches today is away from formal, Sunday morning worship and toward loose, contemporary services on Saturday night. And, of course, in churches as in St. Paul's Fitzgerald Theatre, a lot fewer people are there when the final hymn is sung than during the sermon.

The church-like quality of the program that Garrison Keillor has been doing nationally on public radio since 1980 should come as no surprise. Coming to terms with Christianity—what he believes and how to weave those beliefs into the fabric of his being—has been a great theme, perhaps the great theme of Keillor's life.

III
Keillor was born Gary Edward Keillor in 1942 and grew up during the postwar years in two then-rural, now-suburban Minnesota towns, Anoka and Brooklyn Park, just northwest of Minneapolis. He was the third of Grace and John Keillor's six children. John worked as a railway clerk and a freelance carpenter; Grace did everything at home. Two seeds that would grow into prolifically fruit-bearing trees were planted early in Garrison Keillor's life, one of them by him and the other by his family.

The seed Gary planted, entirely under his own steam and with no encouragement from his parents, was writing. From a very young age, Keillor was a loner who intensely valued his own privacy but was fascinated by other people and coveted their admiration. He started newspapers at both of the elementary schools he attended and wrote most of the articles himself. In junior high he published some poems in his school's literary magazine. This was "at a time when boys didn't write poetry," Keillor says, so he published them under the name Garrison, "a name that means strength and "don't give me a hard time about this."" Soon afterward, he found a copy of The New Yorker at the public library. It struck him as "a fabulous sight, an immense glittering ocean liner off the coast of Minnesota." "I can't imagine a kid who loved to read and had thoughts of writing not looking at this [magazine] in wonder and admiration," he recalled many years later in an interview with Roy Blount, Jr. While other boys hid copies of Playboy in their room between the mattress and the box springs, Keillor smuggled home The New Yorker. "My people weren't much for literature," he says, "and they were dead set against conspicuous wealth, so a magazine in which classy paragraphs marched down the aisle between columns of diamond necklaces and French cognacs was not a magazine they welcomed into their homes." He still has the first copy he ever bought, a 1957 issue with a short story by John Cheever and articles by A.J. Leibling, Richard Rovere, and Wolcott Gibbs.

Keillor's people—his parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins—were Plymouth Brethren, members of a loose affiliation of small congregations that had originated in a rebellion against the pomp and worldliness of the established church in early 19th-century England. Dancing, card-playing, drinking, smoking, and, as soon as they came along, movies and television were forbidden. Radio, for some reason, was okay, which meant that the Keillors spent a lot of time in front of the radio. Because a priesthood of believers took the place of ordained clergy in Brethren congregations, their lengthy Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night meetings consisted of songs, spontaneous prayers, words of inspiration and admonition from whichever of the men felt moved to offer them, and celebration of the Lord's Supper. Keillor did not need to show The New Yorker to his parents to know that they would despise the value it placed on wit and worldly success. They had already told him that his decision to publish his schoolboy poems was "a shame on the family."

Coming-of-age stories like Keillor's typically follow a well-mapped trajectory: the small town Midwestern boy throws off the provincial or fundamentalist (in Keillor's case, provincial and fundamentalist) strictures of his upbringing, heads for the big city, and embraces all things secular and cosmopolitan. Certainly, Keillor listed in that direction. At the University of Minnesota in the 1960's, he grew a beard and long hair, wore granny glasses, worked as a DJ at the campus and public radio stations, and spent almost all of his time writing and editing the university's monthly student literary magazine, the Ivory Tower. He turned the front section of the magazine in a "Talk of the Town"-style direction, complete with a sardonic, all-knowing, first-person-plural narrator—Eustace Tilley goes Mid-western. The first article he wrote as editor of the Ivory Tower berated the university's chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ for bringing in "One of America's Leading Illusionists...the Story of How the Man Who's Never Been Fooled By a Magician Found the Reality in Christianity." What would Campus Crusade's next act of "charlatan Christianity" be, Keillor wondered. How about a child evangelist, or "Bob "Big Gunner" Verrell, Former Major League Baseball Star Who Found Christ in the Outfield of Yankee Stadium"?

In 1966, after graduating with a B. A. in English, Keillor hitchhiked east to interview for jobs at The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. Although neither panned out, he continued to barrage the editors with submissions. In short order, he connected with both magazines. The Atlantic ran one of Keillor's poems in a "Young Poets" section in 1968. Two years later he placed the first of what would turn out to be dozens of humor pieces in The New Yorker before leaving the magazine in protest when Vanity Fair's Tina Brown was hired as editor in 1992. "Local Family Keeps Son Happy," which ran in the Sept.18, 1970, issue, was a deadpan parody of small-city newspaper feature writing. It chirpily described how "Mr. and Mrs. Robert Shepard of 1417 Swallow Lane" had hired a live-in prostitute named Dorothy in hopes of keeping their teenage son home at night. "In addition to her other duties, Dorothy also cooks breakfast." The article concluded with her recipe for "fancy eggs."

What Keillor never did, however, was turn his back on the faith of his youth. "I believe the same as when I was young," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. Asked in an interview for the Wittenberg Door whether he was "born again," he answered: "Absolutely." The seed of faith that his parents and the Brethren had planted took root as firmly as the literary seed he had planted himself. To the extent that Keillor rejected their dour attitudes toward smoking, drinking, dancing, literature, and the joys of this world, he did so because such bans were without Biblical foundation and therefore were unworthy of what fundamentalists profess to believe. What was left of fundamentalism, he felt, was lovely as well as true. "People who didn't grow up in a religious background, it's the strictures that interest them the most," says Keillor. "But that's only part of the story: great love within the group of people who are as closely bound together by faith as the fundamentalists were, and other small religious sects; tremendous affection and a kindness and generosity for other members of the group."

Storytelling was another aspect of the fundamentalist family and community in which Keillor grew up. Absent television, books, newspapers, and movies, "our entertainment was talk." Keillor's great uncle, Lew Powell, was an especially good storyteller: appropriately, Keillor dedicated his audiotape collection News from Lake Wobegon to Uncle Lew rather than one of his written works. So was Keillor's father, whose voice Keillor says sometimes seems to be coming out of his own mouth when he tells stories. Not just the family, but the larger Brethren community was aware that Jesus was the ultimate conveyer of truth through stories. At church and at church suppers, "These people were wonderful storytellers, and the purpose of their stories was to imbue us with compassion."

In the 1960's, Keillor found the Brethren to be as counter-cultural as anyone on the left. "They were sort of subversive in a way," he said. "Most of them did not believe in getting on in the world. Most of them were failures out of Christian principle. Most of them felt that this world, the world in which you "make it, " was not the real world." Keillor was—and still is—especially drawn to the evangelists who would come through town or preach on the radio. In 1985 he went out of his way to heap praise on Jimmy Swaggart, at a time when Swaggart was wildly controversial. "They are the rock-and-rollers of the Church," Keillor told The Door. "Evangelists are supposed to get out there and shake it.... [Their] one simple job is to shake people loose from their illusions...to look us straight in the eye and say, "Whatever you are doing doesn't matter. None of your illusions matter. There is only one thing that matters."" What Keillor can't stand is a liberal clergyman giving "well-crafted sermons" instead of saying "something that the Spirit has put in his heart to say.... We don't go to church to hear lectures on ethical behavior, we go to look at the mysteries."

Yet over the years Keillor, without substantially changing his beliefs, has experienced with appreciation other branches of Christianity. In 1990 he joined the Evangelical Lutheran Church, a mainline Protestant denomination.(Most people assume that Keillor grew up Lutheran, since he talks so much about the Lutherans of Lake Wobegon, They also assume his ancestry is Norwegian—it's Scottish.) He attended Holy Apostles Episcopal Church in New York and found that "when we stood for prayers, bringing slowly to mind the goodness and poverty of our lives, it brought tears to your eyes, the simple way Episcopalians pray." Most conspicuously, he has always viewed Roman Catholics with wide-eyed awe. "Everything we [Brethren] did was plain and simple," he wrote in his 1985 book Lake Wobegon Days, "but they were regal and gorgeous, especially on the Feast Day of St. Francis, which they did right out in the open, a feast for the eyes. Cows, horses, some pigs, right out there on the church lawn. The turmoil, animals bellowing and barking and clucking and cats scheming how to escape.... I wasn't allowed inside Our Lady [of Perpetual Responsibility Catholic Church], of course, but if the Blessing of the Animals on the Feast Day of St. Francis was any indication, Lord, I didn't know but what they had elephants in there and acrobats."

Curiously, not going to church at all was Keillor's response to his rising celebrity during the 1970's and 1980's. Although he has always considered himself "a writer who is temporarily a performer," Keillor has gone from triumph to triumph in radio. From 1969 to 1982, he hosted a variety of public radio programs in Minnesota that gained him a large regional following for their blend of live and recorded music, dramatic serials, comedy skits, mock commercials, and greetings and announcements. He had quickly tired of "what passed for art on radio: cueing up Schubert and pronouncing him "Shoebear."" Toward the end of that period, in 1980, Keillor's Saturday evening program went national. He got the name Prairie Home from a cemetery in Moorhead, Minnesota, and chose it for the show because it suggests that "radio is your companion as we head toward our ultimate prairie home." In 1985, the now clean-shaven Keillor was featured on the cover of Time as "Author and Radio Bard." It was at about this time, he says, that "I stopped going [to church]. I felt like a Pharisee. I felt conspicuous. Most of the people in the congregation knew who I was. They would stare at me and say to themselves, "Oh, look! It's so wonderful—a semi-famous man goes to our church every Sunday.""

Keillor felt eyes staring at him all the time after he became a national figure. The Time cover prompted the Minneapolis and St. Paul newspapers to treat him like a celebrity. His salary, his ending of a longtime romance, and his marriage to Ulla Skaerved, a Danish exchange student at Keillor's high school whom he fell in love with after their 25th class reunion in 1985—all became fodder for the media. Keillor said the local newspapers covered him as if he were "a cross between Joan Collins and Watergate." Finally, "when I came home and found a picture of my house in the paper, the address and everything, I thought to myself, I can't really live here." Keillor ended the radio show in June 1987 and moved to Denmark with his new wife. "It seems pretty clear...," he wrote in a letter to the St. Paul newspaper, "that the Pioneer Press is going to take an aggressive interest in my personal life as long as I stay here ...so I choose to leave."

Keillor's self-imposed exile did not last long. After less than two years in Denmark, he divorced Skaerved and returned to the United States to live in New York. He wrote Talk of the Town pieces as a staff writer for The New Yorker and launched a new public radio program called the American. Radio Company of the Air. Keillor designed the program to be A Prairie Home Companion with a New York accent, but within a few months it had become a virtual clone of the earlier show. "I started out the first season assuming that listeners wanted to hear me talk about New York," he said at the end of the second season. "Maybe some of them did, but an awful lot of them wrote in to say, "Thank you, that's enough." They wanted Lake Wobegon, so I changed and went back to that." In 1993 he returned home to Minnesota and restored the show's original name.

IV
Lake Wobegon is not Eden before the Fall, although the tag line Keillor always appends to his weekly monologue can mislead the casual listener into thinking it is. "That's the news from Lake Wobegon," he says, "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average," The abundance of the vegetable gardens, the traffic light "which is almost always green," Adams Hill (which Keillor as a young boy thought was where God created Adam), and even the impossibility, because of surveying errors, of finding Lake Wobegon on the map contribute to this illusion. Adam and Eve did not need a calendar in Eden and neither, it often seems, do Myrtle and Florian Krebsbach or the regulars at Wally's Sidetrack Tap. Keillor's first novel, Lake Wobegon Days, is organized cyclically rather than chronologically, like the Christian liturgical year in which every Advent is pretty much like every other Advent. The novel begins in Summer, then runs through Fall, Winter, Spring, and back again to Summer, with incidents from the distant past and the recent past sprinkled throughout its accounts of life in Lake Wobegon during each season.

Look closely, though, and the comparison between Lake Wobegon and prelapsarian Eden becomes more complicated. Indeed, during the first few years of A Prairie Home Companion, before the show went national, Keillor usually portrayed the town as the opposite of paradise. Lake Wobegon was the butt of his satirical gibes at small-town provincialism; by his own account, Keillor saw himself as a kind of latter-day Sinclair Lewis.(Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, which became Gopher Prairie in Main Street.) Lake Wobegon first appeared on the broadcast in 1974, as the setting for mock commercials advertising an outfit called Jack's Auto Repair. Keillor says he did not know enough about cars to keep the gag going, so he had Jack branch out into Jack's School of Thought, Jack's Dry Goods Emporium, Jack's Scraps for Dogs, Jack's Toast House, and Raul's Warm Car Service from Jack's, among other enterprises. Jack's eventually disappeared from the show, but Keillor has always included segments that play on the humor intrinsic to what Judith Yaross Lee has called "the basic clash between commercial rhetoric and unmarketable products."

In 1976 Keillor began doing ersatz public service announcements about upcoming events in Lake Wobegon. Listeners were invited to "Visitors' Day," for example, but were cautioned to "behave yourselves and not stare at anybody and don't point.'Cause there's a lot of people in Lake Wobegon who don't care for visitors or Visitors' Day—who refer to it as V.D., as a matter of fact." At about the same time he began reading letters to home from Barbara Ann Bunsen, a Lake Wobegonian who had moved to Minneapolis after graduating from high school. The letters mixed weekly reassurances that "Everything is just fine, I am all right, so don't worry, everything is o.k." with disconcerting news about her latest "alternative living experiment." In the course of 70 letters spread over five years, Keillor began to populate Lake Wobegon, starting with Barbara Ann's parents, Clarence and Arlene Bunsen.

During the early 1980's, Keillor made the transition from letters and public service announcements to extended stories about the Bunsens (not just Clarence and Arlene, but brother Clint and his wife Irene), the Tollefsons (including Johnny Tollefson, a sometime stand-in for the young Gary Keillor), the Lutheran church (Pastor Ingqvist) and the Catholic church (Father Emil), the happily antisocial Norwegian bachelor farmers, the Sons of Knute Lodge, the Chatterbox Cafe, Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, and dozens of other characters, places, groups, and rituals in Lake Wobegon. "News" now meant accounts of what was going on in townspeople's lives rather than a schedule of the town's events. At the same time, Keillor's tone shifted from mockery to affection. "I...veered away from satire and started being more interested in sentiment and, to some extent, bathos," he said in 1985. The gentle story of Lake Wobegonians at the state fair—the cake-baking contest and the ferris wheel— exemplifies this turn.

Lovely as Lake Wobegon has become over the course of its quarter-century history on A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor has kept the town dark enough to maintain the tension that comedy requires. The name itself is a mixed message: it has a sort of Native American nobility but is also a homonym of the English word that means "woeful" or "disconsolate." Similar incongruities run through Keillor's description of the town in Lake Wobegon Days. "The sun['s]... shimmering lights across the water" of the lake "would make quite a picture if you had the right lens, which nobody in this town does." Lake Wobegon "has few scenic wonders such as towering pines," but it does have "some fine people of whom some are over six feet tall." The town was founded by pioneers, but they were all peculiar in one way or another: a Unitarian missionary who received a vision to "go west and convert the Indians to Christianity by the means of interpretive dance," a poet whose 648-line epic about Lake Wobegon foundered on desperate rhymes such as "sybilline/ porcupine" and "cereal/immaterial," and a small band of Norwegian fishermen who settled by (and settled for) the lake only after discovering firsthand that their impression of the Dakota Territory as a good place to fish was mistaken. The motto of Lake Wobegon is equally ambiguous: Sumus Quod Sumus, We are what we are.

Nothing conveys the chiaroscuro quality of the town better than the chapter in Lake Wobegon Days called "News." The top half of each page in the 25-page chapter is a light and affectionate account of Lake Wobegon's weekly newspaper, the Herald-Star, which was named by its owner, Harold Starr. The lower half of each page consists of a chapter-long footnote, written by an expatriate who moved to California and consisting of 95 THESES 95 that he had hoped the Herald-Star would publish.(Needless to say, the editor, whose first principle of journalism is "I have to live here, too, you know," chose not to print them.) The theses are a devastating account of Lake Wobegon's boring, trivial, hypocritical, and soul-destroying effect on the lives of at least some of those who grow up there:

3. You have subjected me to endless, boring talk about weather, regularity, back problems, and whether something happened in 1938 or 1939....

4. You have taught me to worship a god who is exactly like you, who shares your thinking exactly, who is going to slap me one if I don't straighten out fast....

16. You have provided me with poor male role models... men who clung to tiny grudges for decades and were devoted to vanity, horsefeathers, small potatoes—not travel but the rites of trunk-loading and map-reading and gas mileage; not faith but the Building Committee; not love but supper....

29. You taught me not to be "unusual" for fear of what the neighbors would say.... We knew they'd talk, because we always talked about them....

75. I wasted years in diametrical opposition, thinking you were completely mistaken, and wound up living a life based more on yours than if I'd stayed home....

V
The stained-glass word for stories is parables. The ones Jesus told were about ordinary people in ordinary situations who lived long ago in a small and remote corner of the world. People have been hearing those stories and seeking meaning in them ever since. Not surprisingly, in view of Keillor's deep knowledge of the Bible and his love of story, some of these parables have found their way into his work. None recurs in more variations than the story of the Prodigal Son.

Keillor is anything but formulaic: in his fiction, he does not tell stories in which a younger son takes his inheritance to the big city, lives dissolutely, returns home begging to be taken back, and is welcomed with open-armed rejoicing by his father but tight-lipped resentment by his elder brother. The closest Keillor comes to transposing Jesus' story directly into modern Lake Wobegon is in the final paragraph of Lake Wobegon Days. An unnamed man, ignoring the pleas of his wife and child, drives into town for cigarettes in a blizzard. On the way back he slides into a ditch, fears that he is doomed, then sees the light of home in the near distance.(The cigarettes, by the way, are on the counter of the bar where he bought them.) "Town was a long way to go in a blizzard for the pleasure of coming back home," he realizes. "But what a lucky man. Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted, but getting what you have... He starts out on the short walk to the house where people love him and will be happy to see his face."

More commonly, Keillor focuses a story on one or two elements of the parable. Earlier in Lake Wobegon Days, Uncle Louie goes to Minneapolis with Aunt Gladys seeking a more lucrative career. On their first night there, a hotel clerk "got snooty" with Louie and offered him a room at the sky-high rate of $15 ("Gladys thought it was the weekly rate"). "I didn't want him to think we were green," says Louie, "so I peeled off a twenty, my only one." Lying awake in the room that night, he realizes that "it was pride talking, worldly pride.... I decided that if Minneapolis could have that effect on me, that I'd rather spend what I didn't have than admit to not having it, then I'd better go back where I belonged, and the next day we did." Not the big city, but the effect that big city values had on Louie threatened to turn him into a prodigal, and home he went.

Other of Keillor's stories render no judgment on either the city or the son, but revel instead in the generosity of the father. In Leaving Home, Corinne Ingqvist finds her vocation as a teacher in Minneapolis. She comes home to Lake Wobegon on a visit hoping to borrow $50,000 for a house from Hjalmer, her father. "[H]e and his daughter have had their differences," Keillor writes. "Some of their arguments have made the glasses rattle in the pantry and the family dog cringe behind the couch," including one about the trip to France she took after cashing some bonds he gave her. ""I guess I could try a bank in the Cities, " she offered. "It's too late to take your business elsewhere, " he said. "I'm your father. It's too late to shop for another one." He gave her the check."

Still other stories are about the elder brother. In the parable, the brother's misery at spending his life on his father's farm is palpable. All he can think about is what he deserves in return for all his years of dutiful suffering. Jesus leaves us wondering at the end: will the elder brother put aside his sense of grievance and entitlement and accept his father's invitation to join his brother's welcome-home party?

Darryl Tollerud is an elder brother in Lake Wobegon. He is 42 years old, is married with six children, and lives in the little house on his father's farm while his parents, just the two of them, still live in the big house. His younger brother Gunnar has run off to the city for good—he's "a drunk." Meanwhile, Darryl works for his dad. "Sometimes he gets so mad at the old man he screams at him," Keillor writes. "But always when he's on the tractor in the middle of the field with the motor running." Nothing dramatic happens in this story: no return of the younger brother, no invitation from the father. But Darryl experiences the sort of epiphany that Jesus would wish for every elder brother. "He'd been worried about inheriting the farm, meanwhile God had given him six beautiful children. What happens if you expect the worst and get the best? Thank you, Lord, he thought."

The prodigal who runs off and never comes back is another of Keillor's themes. Virgil Bunsen has a falling out with his father over some cattle. He moves away and leads an unhappy life. The rupture between the two of them is never healed and his father dies. Virgil himself comes home years later only to be buried. At the graveside service, his nephew Clarence offers these words: "Life is short. The Bible says, don't let the sun go down upon your wrath. Settle these things. It isn't true that time heals all wounds, sometimes they get worse if you don't do something about them."

Keillor's most extended variation on the parable of the prodigal son is the story of John Tollefson, whose story begins in Lake Wobegon Days with his teenage years and resumes during middle age in Wobegon Boy, a 1997 novel that is centered on him. As a boy, Johnny itches to leave home. It seems to him that in Lake Wobegon, and especially in his house, child rearing consists of teaching kids that they're not so hot, that they should do without, and that all their opinions are dumb. "If [Johnny] was to say, "I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, "" Keillor writes, "his dad would say, "A person sure wouldn't know it to look at you." Or he would say, "Don't talk with your mouth full, " or "It's about time, " or maybe he would convert to Unitarianism on the spot ("The trinity? Don't be ridiculous!")." Meanwhile the Flambeaus beckon—Emile, Eileen, and their teenage son Tony, the heroes of a book series that Johnny reads at the town library. The Flambeaus live in a New York City apartment overlooking Central Park. They drink wine, stay up late, have sophisticated conversations in which Tony is treated as a mature person, and solve crimes. Johnny thinks of them as his "secret family."

Getting to New York turns out to be difficult for Johnny. He escapes after high school, but only down the road a few miles to St. Cloud State College, where raucous living entails little more than writing angry poems ("Death Dad" was one) for the college literary magazine under pseudonyms like Ryan Tremaine. To get "experience" so that he will have something to write about when he returns to St. Cloud State for his sophomore year, Johnny gets drunk at the Sidetrack Tap listening to Mr. Berge talk about how much fun the two of them are having. He—John, not Johnny, by now—knocks around in public radio in Minneapolis after college. At age 40, leaving the state to escape a romance gone wrong, he moves to New York—not New York City, but a small college town in upstate New York where he manages a college-owned public radio station. He meets and falls in love with Alida Freeman, a wonderfully appealing woman who is his lawyer's sister and a history professor at Columbia University.

What brings John home to Lake Wobegon is a near-miss encounter with the college librarian while Alida is away on a research trip. The next morning he takes a long shower, sings "Just As I Am" and shouts "Get me out of here" to himself, and books a seat on the first flight to Minnesota. "I committed a sin and I came home to repent," he tells his sister when she asks what he is doing in Lake Wobegon. He and his father are still "skittish around each other, and any conversation was like ice cubes on a hot griddle, full of non sequiturs." But Mom opens her arms wide, and the town does him the great favor of treating him as if his being there "was no big deal. Maybe they hadn't noticed that I left twenty-five years ago. Maybe they thought I was still around but didn't get out of the house so often."

Reconciliation with the town and with his upbringing comes slowly for John, culminating with his father's death. At the wake, Clint Bunsen tells him over the din, "Your dad was so proud of you. He was always talking you up." "I yelled, "I wish he'd told me." "Yes, " says Clint, "so does he."" John proposes marriage to Alida, and she accepts. Wobegon Boy ends with him living happily in New York— the city!—as a house husband.

VI
Jesus leaves us hanging in the parable of the prodigal son. Not only do we not know whether the elder brother will ever come to terms with his father, we also are left to wonder what life will be like for the prodigal the morning after the big party. Keillor's great achievement in the story of John Tollefson is to continue the parable, teaching us in the process that making peace with the home we could not wait to escape is essential to our ever being happy anywhere else.

Perhaps Keillor tells the story so well because it is his story, too, a story of leaving and coming, of rebellion and reconciliation, of restlessness and rootedness. Keillor has quit radio several times, but has always returned. He left Minnesota in anger, but moved back with words of gratitude. "St. Paul is a great city and what makes it so is its power to raise your spirits when you feel discouraged and overworked and misunderstood," he recently wrote in a thank-you letter to the Pioneer Press. Not all the breaches have been healed, at least not yet. Keillor left The New Yorker to protest the hiring of an editor whom he considered unworthy of the magazine's great traditions. One can only hope that he will return now that David Remnick, a serious and excellent journalist, is at the helm.

Reconciliation with church—not an idealized version of Church, but small-c church in all its human frailty—has been one of the greatest dramas of Keillor's life. Remember that brutally satirical article he wrote as a college student when the local chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ brought in a Christian illusionist to attract people to a meeting? Keillor revisited that story decades later in "Gospel Birds," an installment of the "News from Lake Wobegon" that is available on several collections of his recordings. The story tells what happened when Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church decided to solve its Wednesday night attendance problems by booking a series of Christian acts, including the world's tallest evangelist and a former body-builder-gone-wrong named Reverend Duke Peterson. The series concludes with Ernie and Irma Lundeen's Performing Gospel Birds, which at Ernie and Irma's direction play familiar hymns by pecking at bells (fittingly, "His Eye Is on the Sparrow") and enact stories from the Bible in costume.

The church is filled with townspeople who came out of boredom or curiosity or even to scoff, as Keillor had at Campus Crusade's Christian illusionist. Instead, they find themselves awed and moved by both the spectacle and the Lundeens' shining sense of mission. The service ends with Irma asking everyone to close their eyes and "contemplate God's great love for us in our lives. And when one of our birds lands on your shoulder, I want you, if you feel that blessing in your heart, to stand up where you are."

"They were a little nervous," Keillor continues in an intense, hushed voice, "and some people were peeking. But then they got down to the business of meditating, [and] thoughts did come to mind of divine providence in their lives, of a great love that seemed to abide in the world and that upheld them and supported them as if by invisible hands, ...and more than that, a presence of grace that lifts all of us up. And as they sat and meditated, one by one each of them felt a slight weight on the shoulder, as if someone had tapped them, and then they did feel blessed. And one by one they stood up where they were, until everyone was standing. It was a stunning moment. And they all felt very touched by this, and not only touched but filled by this miraculous event: the sound of wings in the room like angels moving amongst them and stirring the air."

Grace and love that lifted him up is what the prodigal found from his father. Keillor's great accomplishment has been not only to find these gifts for himself but to share them through his stories with the rest of us.

The Virginia Quarterly Review - CHURCH ON SATURDAY NIGHT: GARRISON KEILLOR'S A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION

2005-07-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

: "CHURCH ON SATURDAY NIGHT: GARRISON KEILLOR'S A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION
wolf
The program begins with music at five o'clock Central Time on Saturday evenings, and music makes up nearly half the two-hour show. The first words to come out of Garrison Keillor's mouth at the start of his weekly public radio program, A Prairie Home Companion, are song lyrics: 'It's Saturday an'/the band is playin'/Honey, could you ask for more?' Later Keillor and others will sing a few bluegrass and early rock and roll numbers. As part of the comic illusion that he and singer Lynn Peterson are working up a repertoire of duets suitable for baptisms and funerals, they will perform an old gospel song called 'Where Could I Go (But to the Lord)?' Keillor will lead the audience in a sing-along of traditional hymns and patriotic songs. Joined by regular members of the cast, he will perform in several comic skits and commercials. He will tell us, for example, that Powdermilk Biscuits have the power to make shy persons bold. Midway through the show, Keillor will read announcements submitted by members of the audience in St. Paul's Fitzgerald Theatre: 'Congratulations, Brad, from Jay and Disa: You're an uncle now'; 'Tim and Kristen say, 'Don't worry, Mom, we'll be there for your birthday''; 'Happy fifty-fifth anniversary to Mother and Daddy from your children�all eight of us.'
There is, in each week's program, the proverbial moment that everyone has been waiting for. It comes about 90 minutes into the show when Keillor says, 'Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town.' With no script or prompter before him, Keillor simply talks the 20-minute monologue that follows. The seeming ar"

Nvu - The Complete Web Authoring System for Linux, Macintosh and Windows

2005-07-22T22:16:00.000-07:00

Nvu - The Complete Web Authoring System for Linux, Macintosh and Windows

Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.
Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

The Poor Man's Raid Array

2005-06-26T01:05:00.000-07:00

The Poor Man's Raid Array: "

What self-respecting geek doesn't get the warm fuzzies at the mere mention of the RAID. With the rising GB to Dollar ratio, we felt it was a good time to feature a project that takes Pure Geekieness(TM) and mixes in a good helping of do it your self. Where else are you going to store all those MP3s (legally obtained, of course)? On a single 200 GB Drive? Or a RAID 5 Array? Take you pick, I know where I will be storing mine.

cost: 249.82
difficulty: novice
time : 3 hours
coolness : very cool

geek score: 7.5
"

It's a rental, it's disposable, but this camcorder isn't complicated

2005-06-25T03:25:00.000-07:00

Last update: June 24, 2005 at 10:52 PM
It's a rental, it's disposable, but this camcorder isn't complicated
Steve Alexander, Star Tribune
June 25, 2005

Can there be a "disposable" video camera?
A $400 digital camcorder is hardly something you'd throw away, but this week a $29.99 simplified digital camcorder debuts at 10 Twin Cities CVS drugstores and is reportedly being test-marketed by Target Corp. in Philadelphia.
In an attempt to appeal to a mass market of people who already buy disposable film cameras, Rhode Island-based CVS hopes consumers will flock to a "one-time-use video camcorder" that you buy, use to film a 20-minute movie and then return to the store.
CVS charges an additional $12.99 to put your movie on a DVD that can be viewed on a TV, a computer or the Internet. The video quality is said to be similar to VHS videotape.
After the camcorder is returned, CVS sells it to someone else, which makes the camcorder essentially a rental. But if the camcorder can't be returned -- either because you dropped it in the lake or got it full of sand at the beach -- there is no security deposit for you to lose and no penalty to pay. You're out only your $30 purchase cost. That makes it a disposable camera in at least one sense.
To prevent anyone from keeping such an inexpensive camcorder, its manufacturer, Pure Digital Technologies of San Francisco, has severely limited its capabilities. The recorded video is encrypted on a flash memory chip inside the camcorder, and the only way to retrieve the movie is to dock the camcorder with a CVS computer server.
CVS said the camcorder would give consumers "a rich, worry-free home moviemaking experience with an affordable single-use camcorder that easily fits in a pocket or purse."
The new camcorder's four-button controls emphasize simplicity at a time when analysts say digital camera sales are on the verge of a slowdown, perhaps because the units are too difficult to use.
CVS, which will offer the camcorders at 4,500 stores nationwide by June 26, has exclusive marketing rights through the end of the summer, after which the videocameras will be available through other retailers, said Simon Fleming-Wood, marketing vice president at Pure Digital Technologies.
Target has just begun its test-marketing of Pure Digital's new camcorder and its still digital camera that was introduced two years ago, Fleming-Wood said. A Target spokeswoman did not return a phone call about the test-marketing effort.
"We expect to sell 1 million of the disposable video cameras in the first 12 months," Fleming-Wood said. Even if 20 percent of the cameras aren't returned, Pure Digital can still make money from camera sales, picture processing fees and sales of the special computer servers that CVS and other retailers need to process the pictures, he said.
Pure Digital's "disposable" still digital camera has sold nearly 1 million units in the past two years, he said. The still cameras cost $15 to $19 at retailers such as CVS, Wolf Camera, Ritz Camera, Longs Drugs and Rite Aid Corp., another drugstore chain. Processing of 25 digital still pictures costs $7 to $10.
To make the digital camcorder attractive to a broad audience more interested in preserving memories than becoming videocam hobbyists, Pure Digital simplified the camcorder so that it has only four control buttons: record, playback, delete and the on-off switch.
"All our research shows that people love video as a medium but find video products very inconvenient to use," Fleming-Wood said. "'To make a DVD disk with most video cameras, you must hook the camera to a computer. Then you need a strong knowledge of computers, DVD authoring software and video file formats. A very small percentage of people know how to do that."
The Pure Digital camcorder hides that complexity, Fleming-Wood said. Consumers never need to know that their DVDs are recorded in three different video formats so the video will play equally well in a DVD player, on a computer or over the Internet. Nor do they need to understand that software on the DVD will upload the video to a Pure Digital website, where a customer's friends and relatives can view it with their computers.

"We're not trying to dumb down digital camcorders so much as keep them simple to meet the needs of people who already use single-use film cameras but want the benefits of digital," such as the ability to create a family DVD movie, Fleming-Wood said.
The introduction of Pure Digital's easy-to-use digital camcorder follows some gloomy analyst predictions about a near-term slowdown in sales of digital still cameras, as well as a current slowdown in sales of digital camcorders.
Analysts contend that digital still cameras will never completely replace their film counterparts because they are too difficult to use. Digital camcorders are even more complex, analysts said.
Worldwide digital camcorder sales revenue is declining this year, following last year's slowdown in unit sales growth, said Chris Crotty, an analyst at iSuppli Corp., a research firm in El Segundo, Calif. The average digital camcorder will cost $414 this year, nearly twice the average $216 price for a digital still camera, he said.
As a result, Pure Digital's strategy of simplifying digital camcorders to stimulate mass-market sales draws praise from analysts.
"Today's video cameras are absolutely too techie for most people," said Chris Chute, an analyst at research firm IDC in Framingham, Mass. "This novel idea of a one-time-use videocamera, combined with burning your movie on a DVD, might resonate with people. But I think the $43 cost is still a little high."
But, simple or not, a one-time-use digital camcorder isn't likely to be as popular as a disposable film camera, said Ross Rubin, an analyst at the NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, N.Y.
"The disposable film camera is really a mass market product that is embraced by all levels of consumers," Rubin said. "But there are fewer consumers who occasionally want to capture a birthday, a holiday or a vacation on video but haven't already bought their own video camera."

Supload.com File Downloader

2005-06-25T02:23:00.000-07:00

Supload.com File Downloader

Josh called this "cool" and that he like it and he's only three.

Learning Guide: SAN

2005-06-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

Learning Guide: SAN

Amazon.com: Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player: Explore similar items

2005-06-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

Amazon.com: Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player: Explore similar items: "Rebel Without a Crew
by Robert Rodriguez
Average Customer Review:
Usually ships in 24 hours

Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. See details.

Need it today? Available for in-store pickup from $15.00 . Price may vary based on availability. To check availability in your area, enter your ZIP Code

List Price: $15.00
Price: $10.20
You Save: $4.80 (32%"

EO Newsroom: New Images - Sunset on Mars: A Moment Frozen in Time

2005-06-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

EO Newsroom: New Images - Sunset on Mars: A Moment Frozen in Time: "Sunset on Mars: A Moment Frozen in Time Click here to view full image (85 kb)

On May 19th, 2005, NASA�s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view of the Sun sinking below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover�s 489th Martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol�s data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. This small panorama of the western sky was obtained using Pancam�s 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer color filters. This filter combination generates false-color images that are similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated.
In this image, the bluish glow in the sky above the Sun would be visible to us if we were there, but an artifact of the Pancam�s infrared imaging capabilities is that with this filter combination, the redness of the sky farther from the sunset is exaggerated compared to the daytime colors of the Martian sky.
Because Mars is farther from the Sun than the Earth is, the Sun appears only about two-thirds the size that it appears in a sunset seen from the Earth. The terrain in the foreground is the rock outcrop �Jibsheet�, a feature that Spirit has been investigating for several weeks. The floor of Gusev crater is visible in the distance, and the Sun is setting behind the wall of Gusev some 80 kilometers (50 miles) in the distance.
This mosaic is yet another example from the rover of a beautiful Martian scene that also captures some important scientific information. Specifically, sunset and twilight images are occasionally acquired by the science team to determine how high into the atmosphere the Martian dust ext"

How to configure your router to allow fast BitTorrent downloads - The Peer-to-Peer Weblog - p2p.weblogsinc.com _

2005-06-15T18:40:00.000-07:00

How to configure your router to allow fast BitTorrent downloads - The Peer-to-Peer Weblog - p2p.weblogsinc.com _: "How to configure your router to allow fast BitTorrent downloads"

Numa Numa Dance

2005-06-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

Numa Numa Dance

Comments by the Author(s) of Numa Numa Dance
(Rated 3.87/5.00 by our users).
Holy crap!!! 1 million views!!!

You people are crazy! Just to let you all know, yes, this is the original location of the Numa Numa Dance... right here on NG. The internet sent it around like crazy, and it's wound up on over 80 websites that I could find, with an appearance on CNN, and just now on VH1's Best Week Ever. I've recieved tons of e-mail's and hits to my website, and I just want to thank you for all the feedback that you've given me.

For people who still don't know, yes that is me in the video, and the song is entitled "Dragostea Din Tea" by the Romanian pop band "O-Zone".

This is the special version where you can turn the subtitles on and off, and play it without the pictures in-between.

Original Numa Numa Dance

2005-06-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

Original Numa Numa Dance: "Description:

This is the original video of the Numa Numa dance without all the edited cuts. Its amazing how one person and a webcam can reach so many millions of people. If you havent seen this one yet it is a must see. This guy is awesome and this is probably the most popular video to hit the internet ever. This one goes out to Amanda and her friends at Neuqua High School who are as big of fans of Gary as we are.

Poynter Online - Fifty Writing Tools

2005-06-13T18:51:00.000-07:00

Poynter Online - Fifty Writing Tools: "Fifty Writing Tools"

Sysinternals Freeware - RootkitRevealer

2005-06-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

Sysinternals Freeware - RootkitRevealer

RootkitRevealer is an advanced patent-pending root kit detection utility. It runs on Windows NT 4 and higher and its output lists Registry and file system API discrepancies that may indicate the presence of a user-mode or kernel-mode rootkit. RootkitRevealer successfully detects all persistent rootkits published at www.rootkit.com, including AFX, Vanquish and HackerDefender (note: RootkitRevealer is not intended to detect rootkits like Fu that don't attempt to hide their files or registry keys). If you use it to identify the presence of a rootkit please let us know!

The reason that there is no longer a command-line version is that malware authors have started targetting RootkitRevealer's scan by using its executable name. We've therefore updated RootkitRevealer to execute its scan from a randomly named copy of itself that runs as a Windows service. This type of execution is not conducive to a command-line interface. Note that you can use command-line options to execute an automatic scan with results logged to a file, which is the equivalent of the command-line version's behavior.

Restoration - user opinions at SnapFiles

2005-06-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

Restoration - user opinions at SnapFiles: "User opinions for Restoration
Restoration is an easy to use and straight forward tool to undelete files that were removed from the recycle bin or directly deleted from within Windows, and we were also able to recover photos from"

I-Hacked.com Taking Advantage Of Technology - Google Hacking

2005-06-07T13:20:00.000-07:00

I-Hacked.com Taking Advantage Of Technology - Google Hacking

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP

2005-06-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP

OneNote 2003 Trial Software

2005-06-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

OneNote 2003 Trial Software

"Dad, I made $69,000 online by 11 a.m. Why go to college?"

2005-06-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

The golden-haired entrepreneur with a knack for computers was taking in $2 million a month by the time he was 25, enough to buy a string of luxury cars, including a Ferrari, a BMW and four Mercedes-Benzes, and to move into a $1.1 million house......took in $18 million this year.

read more | digg story

A web of trouble

2005-06-04T20:26:00.000-07:00

Last update: June 4, 2005 at 7:16 PM
A web of trouble
Warren Wolfe, Star Tribune

In 1998, a few months after Chris Smith dropped out of Lakeville High School, his concerned father talked to him about the benefits of college -- and was startled by his son's reply.
"Dad, I made $69,000 online by 11 a.m. Why go to college?"
Over the next seven years, Christopher William Smith became known as a notorious Internet spammer nicknamed "Rizler," who, the FBI says, graduated to selling addictive drugs online and over the phone.
The golden-haired entrepreneur with a knack for computers was taking in $2 million a month by the time he was 25, enough to buy a string of luxury cars, including a Ferrari, a BMW and four Mercedes-Benzes, and to move into a $1.1 million house in Burnsville, court papers say.
For him, the Internet bubble of the late 1990s just kept expanding. At first he used the Internet to find leads for insurance companies, then filled e-mail boxes with billions of spam pitches for penis-enhancement products, cable television decoders and other products, the documents say.

Smith also leaped into the lucrative prescription drug market, selling addictive drugs such as Vicodin through his online pharmacy and a staff of 85 telemarketers, court papers say.
The bubble may finally have burst in May when federal agents raided his Burnsville company, Xpress Pharmacy Direct, shutting it down and seizing $4.2 million in assets. Court documents accuse Smith of fraud and money laundering, but no one has been charged with a crime.
From his start at age 10 selling popcorn and cotton candy at church fairs, Chris Smith has done well in business.
"I remember Chris sitting on my lap when he was one year old, trying to feed a floppy disk into my old Apple computer," said his father, Scott Smith, 55, of Lakeville.
He described his son as "brilliant but bored" by school. "Chris was raised knowing he could figure things out, knowing he could accomplish a lot with hard work," his father said.
"Chris is kind of like me, only smarter," said Smith, who has made and lost several million dollars himself.
In the 1970s and '80s, Scott Smith was a part owner of Minneapolis night clubs Scotties on Seventh, Graffitti's and Schiek's Cafe. He lost it all after he was critically injured in a car accident in 1985. Smith was divorced soon after that. He now owns Diaper Deck, a Lakeville company that is mainly responsible for introducing diaper-changing stations in public bathrooms.
Chris grew up splitting his time between his father's house on Lake Minnetonka and his mother's house on Crystal Lake in Burnsville, his father said. Chris Smith attended the Academy of Holy Angels, a Catholic high school in Richfield, but began skipping school, his father said.
Father and son then moved to Lakeville, where Chris switched to public school in January 1998 for his senior year. He didn't graduate.
He soon moved to Cannon Falls, Minn., where his dad had a Diaper Deck plant. Chris started a small business installing radios and other electronic equipment in cars, and soon discovered a new business, using Internet ads to seek out potential customers for insurance companies, his father said.
"He found he could do pretty well ... finding people who were looking for insurance and selling their names to insurance companies," his father said. "I was amazed. [The insurers] paid him $35 for a potential customer."
Chris Smith then turned to other Internet ventures -- and trouble was not far behind.
Web-based enemies
By March 2001, private investigators were staking out Chris' business in Cannon Falls. They worked for Time Warner, the cable television giant, which alleged that Chris Smith's new venture, Blast Marketing, sold cable TV decoders on the Internet to customers in New York City. The devices allow people to receive cable TV channels without paying for them.
Federal marshals seized Blast's business records and decoders in June 2001 under a court order obtained by Time Warner. The company alleged that Smith's decoder sales brought in $385,000 in the first half of 2001. When lawyers questioned Smith about selling decoders, he declined to answer, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, court papers say.

A federal judge in Minneapolis told Smith to stop selling cable decoders and ordered him to pay $60,000 in damages to Time Warner. Smith went on to other Internet ventures.
Anti-spam groups began to allege in 2002 that he was hijacking websites of other companies -- in effect taking control of their Internet addresses -- to send out unauthorized e-mails for a variety of products.
Across the Web, Chris Smith made enemies. An anonymous operator of one anti-spam website posted copies of what supposedly are Smith's passport and other documents. The Web page also describes Smith's online activities and lists his home and business addresses. A headline in large, red letters on the Web page says "BEWARE!!!"
An FBI affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis last month said that Smith "appears to be notorious throughout the Internet world for illegal or questionable conduct since at least 2001... [selling] cable descramblers, fake college degrees, eBay auctions, human growth hormones, male enhancement drugs and hair growth products."
Through his father, Chris Smith declined to be interviewed for this article. His father spoke about his son's life, but said little about allegations in government documents that he helped his son disguise profits from the Internet drug business.
"I love my son. I'm proud of him. I know he didn't do anything illegal," he said. "That spamming stuff they talk about, sometimes Chris may have been a middle man helping other business people, but he never broke the law. I'm sure of it."
Smith's attorney, William Michael, said the FBI affidavit and other court documents distort the work of a legitimate businessman.
Operations offshore
America Online disagrees. In March, the Internet service provider sued Smith, alleging that he violated anti-spamming laws through a company called Advistech SA that he established in Costa Rica.
Like the Web, Smith's operation was not limited by national borders.
Some of Advistech's computer operations were based in New York City in 2003, at times operating under a fictitious name, according to the AOL lawsuit filed against Smith and others. Smith authorized wire transfers from a Costa Rica bank to finance some elements of the operation, the suit says.
Day after day, Advistech's computers spat out e-mails that directed potential customers to the operation's websites, court documents say. The e-mails offered generic Viagra, diplomas from Trinity Southern University based on person's "life experience," X-rated images of "the youngest girls on the net" and the Maximum X10 "all-in-one male sexual enhancement breakthrough," according to the AOL lawsuit.
During seven months in early 2003, Smith and his associates transmitted more than 1 billion spam e-mails to or through AOL's computer system, using Internet addresses that had been hijacked from a Delaware company, the lawsuit alleges.
Smith used several aliases, according to the lawsuit, including Dieter W. Doneit-Schmitz, Eric Smith and Bruce Jonson. The suit also alleged that he submitted false information to obtain a Minnesota driver's license under an alias. On the Internet, he created websites with the Rizler name.
Calling to complain
By 2003, Smith was advertising prescription drugs on the Internet, former employees said. He added a call center in Burnsville in August 2004.
"I worked night and day, 60 or 70 hours a week, and Chris expected people to work hard," said Sara Seikkula of St. Paul, who became customer service manager in January.
Seikkula said Smith's operation had 12 websites, but they all linked to Xpress Pharmacy Direct. Employees were told the businesses operated legally. The operation also used telemarketers who called potential prescription drug customers, she added.
"I don't know where the lists came from," said Seikkula, but business "went through the roof" after Smith obtained the customer names.
Some people got multiple calls, making them so angry that they called back to complain, Seikkula said.
Telemarketers could earn $1,000 or more per week, partly through commissions, she said. Chris Smith also pushed them to make calls, she added.
"Chris was basically a nice guy, but he expected you to work, keep making calls. He'd come up with ideas, and he'd expect you to go with it. You didn't say no," she said.
Complaints by some customers and former employees late last year led to the investigation by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, court documents say.
Xpress Pharmacy Direct allegedly offered a wide range of prescription medications, including addictive drugs, court papers say. Smith had neither a state pharmacist license nor a separate federal license required for narcotic medications.
Customers often paid inflated prices, court papers say. A 90-pill supply of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax cost government investigators $349.99, more than twice the price charged by a well-known Internet pharmacy.
The FBI estimates that Smith took in $18 million this year.
Xpress Pharmacy Direct didn't require customers to have prescriptions. Instead, a New Jersey doctor was paid $7 per prescription to sign at least 22,000 prescriptions, including many for hydrocodone, the narcotic ingredient in Vicodin, an FBI affidavit says. Orders based on these prescriptions were filled by two pharmacies in California and Oregon and sent to Xpress Pharmacy customers, the affidavit said.
Smith's attorney bristles at government descriptions of Smith's firm. Xpress Pharmacy merely "facilitated doctor-patient relationships and doctor-pharmacy situations in order to help patients. It was not a pharmacy," broke no laws and did not need a license, Michael said.
Smith's father said Chris ran a fast-growing, legitimate business. "Are those investigators after Chris just because he's successful, because he's made good money?" he asked. "Chris is too smart to make the kind of mistakes they say he made. He's just too brilliant."
Anita and the FBI
That's essentially what Chris' wife, Anita, told FBI agents when they arrived at the family's home on May 10, the same day his office was shut down, Scott Smith said.
Guns drawn, FBI agents pushed into Smith's posh Burnsville house, searching for evidence that his Internet prescription drug business was violating federal laws.
Scott Smith said that hours after the raid, Anita Smith offered this account of what happened. Chris Smith wasn't there, but Anita sat holding her 3-year-old son as agents searched the house.
An FBI agent asked Anita why she would stay with a man with Smith's history.
"Because I love him, and because he's the smartest man I ever met," Anita Smith said. "He could learn your job in a week."
The agent broke out in laughter.
Warren Wolfe is at wolfe@startribune.com
Star Tribune All rights reserved.
425 Portland Av. S., Minneapolis, MN 55488 612) 673-4000

InstantSOUP - Cover

2005-06-04T16:40:00.000-07:00

InstantSOUP - Cover

Electronics Lab - Home

2005-06-01T18:45:00.000-07:00

Electronics Lab - Home

Tech Obsession

poor internet explorer

Google Calendar Gets Prettier

Paul McCartney On Drugs

From Microsoft: Vista Clean Install Still Possible with XP CD

Convert *real* machines to VMWare images, for Free

All my drugging - a Paul McCartney drugs timeline

Underwater In Photoshop (Great Video Tutorial)

Add Text Bubbles To Videos (YouTube, MetaCafe, GoogleVideo and others..)

Methods for Downloading Google Video as FLV, AVI, or MP4

Test drive Beryl on a Live DVD. Works with most video cards

Good Ubuntu Networking Tutorial for Beginners and advanced users

Photoshop Tutorial: Cool pop art effect!

Gallery of stunning digital photography with tutorials

How To Crack 128-bit Wireless Networks In 60 Seconds [inc Video]

Basic journey of a packet

How to delete an undeletable file.

How to create your own game company

Streaming MythTV to your cell phone

Dark Side of the Moon celebrates 1500th anniversary

The Night Sky on Your Desktop

A parade of stars at Wednesday's 'Prairie Home' premiere

A Prairie Home Companion

HOW TO - Set Up Your Own Personal Wikipedia

T-Mobile's 20Mbps 3G service to replace home broadband

Add thumbnail pictures to Google searches

$25 Check + $20 Coupon, If you own a Qualifying Epson Printer

Force windows to load the kernel in memory(Windows XP tweak)

Hacking the Mac OSX Login Window

Last.FM your iPod.

Last.FM your iPod.

Last.FM your iPod.

To download Mozilla Firefox

Beatles taking Apple to court over theft of trademark

AJAX Site Design using Prototype 1

What we want

The Layout

Modules

The implementation

The first module

Putting it all together

AJAX Site Design using Prototype

How to create a torrent

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