yjblog

Lucasfilm’s licensing unit has officially gone insane. Presenting Darth Tater:

Ridiculous licensing decision or not, though, I have an irresistible urge to rush out and buy one. I did write an entire 10-page final project report for my EE analog design class on Mr Potato Head…

Uh oh. AcidFlask has discovered our (admittedly not well-hidden enough) WHAT?98 archive.

Funny that our evil teapot from once upon a time in china is now a very respectable SAF regular officer — may his men never find these videos and hear him cackling like a maniac for a whole minute.

These were done in JC, and we were rushing to the computer labs between classes to render all that nonsense on 3D Studio MAX. Thinking about it, I really can’t imagine where I could find the drive (or manic energy, or recreational drugs) to make anything like that nowadays.

Setting up those buttons on the top right of this site is, hopefully, a first step in getting myself to draw again, so maybe I won’t feel all dried up and uncreative for another year.

One thing that always annoyed me about Firefox for Mac was how its keyboard shortcuts were non-standard for Mac apps — Ctrl-Pageup/Pagedown or Ctrl-Tab/Ctrl-shift-Tab for moving between tabs especially. This hint from macosxhints, however, points out the Keyconfig extension, which allows one to remap Firefox shortcuts (e.g. previous page as backspace from the less meaningful Cmd-[).

Changing the next/previous tab commands were a bit more difficult. Insert these lines into the profile directory's prefs.js to enable Camino-style tab navigation (Cmd-option-left and right):

user_pref(“keyconfig.main.xxx_key__Next Tab”, “alt meta][][VK_RIGHT][gBrowser.mTabContainer.advanceSelectedTab(1);”);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.xxx_key__Previous Tab”, “alt meta][][VK_LEFT][gBrowser.mTabContainer.advanceSelectedTab(-1);”);

Change meta to shift to emulate Safari shortcuts.

On the subject of said shortcuts, remapping the “focus on search bar” from Cmd-K (“disable/enable pop-up blocking” in Safari) to Cmd-option-F was a bit more difficult. Option-F in the Keyconfig control panel gives some ASCII gibberish which doesn't really save properly in the prefs file. Editing prefs.js does the trick:

user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_search”, “alt meta][F][”);

Speaking of random stupid hacks, also modified the WP-iTunes plugin for WordPress to make this page showing the last 50 songs playing on iTunes, so everyone can laugh at my bad taste in music. Do note that the album art shown is not necessarily accurate, depending on the whims of Amazon.com Web Services — I’ve gotten some very questionable results. For example, AWS gave the cover for Gay Classics 2 for the song “Jan”, by 60/40 breakdown from the album Standing Out. Ummm.

Last night, I stayed up till 3 in the Ops Room enduring the let’s-cache-everything-so-these-dumb-yucks-have-to-hit-refresh-every-five-seconds Starnet proxy to get up-to-date news on the Macworld announcements, and… Aaahhh! I quiver in fear at how much I could end up spending — especially when they’re things I don’t really need but can’t resist (mac mini: low end desktop) or already have equivalents of (iPod shuffle: thumb drive + iPod).

Oh Apple, why do you insist on tormenting me so with your flawless usability, finely-crafted designs and MONEY-SUCKING EVIL?!*

Stacky stacky stack animated gif.

* I definitely almost typed “monkey-sucking” there. Need sleep.

Macworld SF keynote at 9am PST today, which means sometime tonight (midnight or 1 — four years in the Bay Area and I still can’t remember when to add 15 or 16 hours to the time difference. Curse you daylight savings).

Rumour mill summary, courtesy of ThinkSecret (predictions for accuracy / likeliness to make me drop cash sometime soon included):

• Headless iMac — The standalone Mac (no monitor, US$500ish). Likely to appear, and a very likely purchase if the price is right. Always wanted a good wireless media server.
• iPod Shuffle — The flash-based 1GB iPod. Almost definite to materialise, but not for me (depending on how well it mounts as a regular USB drive).
• Powerbook G4 update. Definite, but makes me bitter and cranky that the new line will be 67% faster than my Powerbook (it’s only almost two years old), but I am, after all, earning peanut NSF pay. Sigh.
• Firewire Audio Breakout Box. Likely (see lawsuits). Not interested, thankfully.
• iLife ‘05. Definite, also because ‘04 version was exactly a year ago. Nothing from there I really care about except iPhoto though.
• GarageBand Jam Pack 4. Indifference == no prediction.
• iWork ‘05 — Office productivity suite. Likely; this site mysteriously changed their iWork name to iBiz with rumours of a payout from Apple for doing so. I already have my free Office v.X from school, but this could be interesting (and a gratifying release from MS products).

All in all, quite a potentially upsetting situation for my wallet.

Why haven’t we reached 10GHz processor speeds yet?

The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software [via caustic.soda]

Everybody who learns concurrency thinks they understand it, ends up finding mysterious races they thought weren’t possible, and discovers that they didn’t actually understand it yet after all.

Too true. Just ask my OS project partners back in the day…

Steve Jobs to deliver Stanford’s 2005 Commencement Address

Maybe I should’ve finished my NS before going to school — Toledo was kinda* boring.

There he is

Yay, he’s gone

* By “kinda boring” I mean “horribly horribly boring, would you please stop talking, aaaghhh, my face, it’s burning, aaaaghh”.

I was all ready to whine about all the nonsense at work I’ve been trying so hard (and failing) to handle with some kind of dignity, i.e. not breaking down and sobbing like a little child, but then I came across this piece of news:

Will Eisner, 1917 - 2005

… and I couldn’t write about that any more.

Will Eisner was the creator of The Spirit, and the founder of the graphic novel as a modern literary construct. His biography here, and writer Neil Gaiman has a couple of tribute articles. Quoting…

I interviewed my friend Will Eisner a few year ago, at the Chicago Humanities Festival. At one point I asked him why he kept going, why he kept making comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane — before he did Batman — remember) had long ago retired and stopped making art and telling stories, and are gone.

He told me about a film he had seen once, in which a jazz musician kept playing because he was still in search of The Note. That it was out there somewhere, and he kept going to reach it. And that was why Will kept going: in the hopes that he’d one day do something that satisfied him. He was still looking for The Note…

Will Eisner was better than any of us, and he kept working in the hope that one day he’d get it right.

My Eisner collection, kickstarted by A Contract With God and Comics and Sequential Art. Both were required readings in Scott Bukatman’s Comics Seminar back at Stanford (the only class for which I did all the required readings, but who does that surprise?).

“To the Heart of the Storm (Eisner, Will. Will Eisner Library.)” (Will Eisner)

“The Neighborhood : Dropsie Avenue (Eisner, Will. Will Eisner Library.)” (Will Eisner)

“A Contract with God : And Other Tenement Stories” (Will Eisner)

“Last Day in Vietnam” (Will Eisner)

“Life on Another Planet (Eisner, Will. Will Eisner Library.)” (Will Eisner)

“Comics & Sequential Art” (Will Eisner)

“Graphic Storytelling” (Will Eisner)

A pioneer of the medium, and one of its very best.