CakeQuest

Evan's 12th Birthday party is today. No suprise that he's selected LaserQuest for the event (again....). After the major effort last year creating the "LaserQuest Maze Cake" - something a little less ambitious was deemed appropriate for this year. Hence, the LaserGun Cake. Trust me, it looks better in real life. Much more like a gun than a hideous pile of brown frosting...

Damocles Still Hanging Around

Spent the weekend on the construction of a new server. Objective was to build a system with large RAID 1 space for archiving, that would also double as a fast render engine for Truespace. System was speced out to inlcude:

• Thermaktake Tsunami VA3000BWA
• ASUS A8N5X w/ nForce4 Mobo
• AMD Athlon 64 processor 3200
• Thermaltake CL-P0200 Silent 939 K8 CPU Cooler
  
• Radion X1600 Pr PCIe 512M Graphics Card
• Corsair XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
  
• SilverStone Strider ST60F 600watt PSU w/ modular cables
  
• Seagate ST3200822A-RK 200 GB ATA Internal Hard Drive (IDE Master)
  
• 2 x Seagate 500 GB Barracuda 7200.9 SATA Internal Hard Drive (500Gb Raid 1)
  
• Pioneer DVD R/W (Reclaimed from another system)

The 200Gb IDE drive is the boot drive. The two 500Gb Barracuda's are built into a single RAID 1 array. I went overkill on the Strider PSU. 600w is way more than I need right now. I do, however, expect to add two more 500Gb SATA drives to take total capacity to 1Tb RAID 1. I will also take the PATA drive space up to 500Gb. The lights on the the Corsair RAM are cool + I really like the ASUS mobo - it's temperature monitoring and fan management is nifty. Oh yeah - I also went overboard on the CPU cooler -- it's just that there is no way I can trust the crap cooler that AMD ships with the processor + I plan to do a little overclocking....

Oh the name of the new system is Damocles - hence the title of this post. Move along now.

29 October 2006 Update: Added 2 x 320Gb SATA drives last week. Configured as RAID 1. System is now 720Gb RAID 1 (give or take a Gb). Total disk space in the cabinet is 1.84Tb. And to think, the first PC I had with a hard disk was an IBM PC XT with a whopping 10Mb drive.

Must be seen to be believed....

An aircraft carrier made out of Lego to minifig scale i.e. rather big.
File under the categories of (1) Wow! and (2) Too much time on one's hands.

Lovelab Farewell

Found in the Seattle Stranger newspaper and online:

Laugh? I nearly bought a round!

From the pages of Amazon.com, this review:

Twenty-Nine! TWENTY-NINE!!!!!, June 11, 2006
A Kid's Review
I told my mother, Mrs. Fran Stalinofskavichdavitovichsky, to go to the store and get me 30 Tagger Micro Darts for my Nerf the Smurf Rocket Launcher. She came home, and I opened the bag, and it only had 29! It was supposed to come with 30! Upon seeing this my mother tried to flee for cover, but I easily caught up with her fat pig legs. I bit her! Bit her deep!

(and yes - the url does reference Obidos - which be gone...., don't worry - redirects save all)

Gin and Vimto

There are some things that pair well: fish n' chips, assault n' battery, stuff like that. But Gin and Vimto fills me me with such wonderus dread that I have to try it. One of my cousins (who will not be identified to protect the guilty....) IM'd me about this amazing concoction. Couple of problems prevent me from trying it: (1) you can't buy Vimto in Seattle and (2) you can't buy Vimto in Seattle. Now, that's strictly only one problem, but it's such a massive one I thought I'd mention it twice.

Mom, Dad - next trip to the US, please bring a large bottle of Vimto (and Iron Bru while you're at it). And a stomach pump. Thanks.

FON up and Running

Router configuration was completed last night. I now have a "Bill" access point serving those around the junction of 4th Ave and University in downtown Seattle. Buy me a beer and I'll give you free access.

Toonfest 2006 Update

News from Disney's Toonfest 2006 held this past Saturday August 26:

• Support for Safari and Firefox browsers is underway ("the new guy from Pixar wants us to support his browser...."). The Disney management team confirmed that other browsers apart from IE will be supported. Work is actively underway;
• Confirmation of "gardening" as the new, large upcoming addition to Toontown. Plant Jellybeans to grow flowers, pick them and sell them in the market. Plant gags to grow gag trees (with a whole range of bigger and better gags). Trees and plants need watering (at the time of the demo the watering can animation was not complete)
• Wedding Cake gag - attacks *all* cogs you are fighting at the same time.
• Daisy Duck will be coming back to Toontown (after all, the Garden is named after her. Goofy was just looking after it while she was away).
• Disney ToonTown runs on "about 40" servers in Seattle. Linux is the OS of choice (couple of distro's)
• Cog HQ is under construction. No details from the Disney team regarding release date.
• Disney is lookig into how to allow users with single accounts to play multiple toons at the same time (their stated largest fear was "additional characters being sold")
• Trolly games in development
• Account packages that will combine accounts for Toontown and the upcoming "Pirates of the Caribbean" online game.
• ToonTown pins were given out at Toonfest: Three Cogs and five characters (the blue monkey being my favorite). I've asked Evan to scan them for me + will post a picture. (Some are already for sale by others at ebay)
• If you collected six out of seven stickers around the evnet you received a set of magnets with each of the ToonTown land names + a special "ToonFest" magnet. I've seen two sets of these for sale on ebay.

"Snacks on a Plane"

My new concept for airports: "Snacks on a Plane", serving tasty morsels to to famished passenger.
Movie tie-in possibilities are almost endless.

Linksys WRT54G Upgrade to DD-WRT

Spent this afternoon upgrading my Linksys WRG54G to DD-WRT in order to run a FON access point. Since I had the V6 version I had to jump through a few additional hoops, removing vxworks and installing a micro Linux binary on the router. Very useful pages at bitsum. I plan to complete the FON installation and configuration next weekend. Will update then.

So Sue Me......

Expand the image below to see an e-mail message that was sent to a web site admin. This really happened!

August 19: Open Source & Amazon Video

Just found a CM Journal article that was published last year entitled Open Source Development Community Drives Processes Benefiting Enterprise Applications. Length-wise it's little more than an abstract. I'll dig out the full paper on which this was based and post it.

Friday morning Arstechnica ran a story about screenshots of Amazon's new video web store.
Story was picked up by Slashdot, Digg and others:

• Downloadable Movies from Amazon - posted on Slashdot on Saturday
• Screenshots of Amazon's new video web store hit the web - posted on Digg Friday

News is getting kinda 'same-y' these days...

Oh, and read the reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk on Amazon. But don't be drinking said milk at the time unless you want it to be ejected from your nose at high velocity. You have been warned.

More Numbers.....

Seems like the "paint a number - make a sale" business model is being pursued by more than one artist. Anthony White also has a number series. I'm not overly excited by Anthony's artwork - looks like the daubings of a chimpanzee on crack, however you can buy it in varying currencies and it is multi-colored. The fact that he's created his own "secondary market" is quite impressive - even though it appears that he's buying back his own artwork for more than for which he sold it. Smart move there Anthony.

Update: 17 August. Seems like Anthony White is a little tetchy. At least I didn't liken his artwork to that which is created by elephants in Thailand - but wait, maybe I should look again? I'm working on my own wonderful business opportunity to sell plastic and metal scuptures of numbers based on some wacko bit of 2nd grade math. Get those credit cards ready..!

Update: 18 August. I had a call this morning from the legal representatives of the Elephant Sri-Siam, currently in residence at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center. They cautioned me about comparing the primitive splotchings of Anthony White to the elegantly executed paintings of their clients, especially Sri-Siam. Below is an original elephant painting created by Sri-Siam on elephant dung paper. It's entitled "Daawk Sunng" ("Tall Flowers") (actually 'Daawk Sunng' translates on Babel fish as "bean sprouts, pad thai and rice", so I'm not really sure). I'll leave the decision regarding which artist is the better, elephant or Anthony, to the reader....

Boomzilla as a Graph

Created this image of Boomzilla using a cool applet that lets you see the HTML structure of your blog or website as graph. People who have created them for their websites are posting them on Flickr and tagging them websitesasgraphs. Here are a few examples, including CNN, Apple and Yahoo.

The Beast of a Number

http://www.onethousandpaintings.com/home/


....So what you get is a painting, which is a canvas, 30 cm * 30 cm, 4 cm, thick. It's white and it has this blue number number on it. That's it. It's signed, of course, and it has an "up to 19 digits" number on the back, which is sort of a password for that specific number.

...the "value" of a painting, i.e. the full price of a painting, is simply 1000 USD minus the number...the lower the number the more expensive it is...

Number 1 - if it was still available - would go for $999... initally, you just had to pay 10% of this amount. And then, after a 100 paintings are sold, you have to pay 20%, and after another hundred, it's 30%, and so on. And the last hundred numbers that are sold will go for the full price. So, it's a bit like the stock market: The more people buy, the more expensive it gets.

Criss Angel reveals his levitation trick

Check out the video at http://media.putfile.com/Criss-Angel-reveal-his-levitation-trick - Awsome video of Criss demonstrating how he levitates several feet into the air.

Amazon "R" Us

Amazon.com and Toys R Us have finally parted ways. Toys R Us has chosen GSI Commerce to provide a new e-commerce platform, and Exel to supply supporting logistics solutions for its new online strategy. On 1 July Amazon.com launched its new Toys & Games and Baby stores which it is running itself, along with selections from Target and eToys. Given the significant problems that Toys R Us has had in the past with fulfilling orders, it’ll be interesting to see how each company fares.

The Survivors

Survivors of the query Log clickstream era will gather at Craig Woods house later today to mark the evolution to Event Driven Clickstream. In celebration I've made a pinata in the shape of a pager -- somthing that we expect to be using less of in the coming months. It will be beaten to a pulp and small children will be showered with treats for no good reason. (And yes - I know it's "All your base are belong to us"......)

Thoughts for Evan's Graduation

Well, I have three years to prepare for Evan's graduation. Thoughts thus far (based on what I learned during the building of the cable car):

• Drive-in movie - Large screen on which is projected old 50's movies, concession stand (popcorn, hot dogs, soda etc), car's (real cars cut just behind the front seats, engine removed + other junk necessary to reduce weight).
• Space Theme - Tall (30 foot+) rocket ship. PCV pipe, white, flexible card (requires no painting), gantry made from PVC pipe.
• Midway Roller Coaster - Old wooden style coaster on which a small (12inch x 4inch x 3inch) car runs backwards and forwards. Lights, sounds etc.

I think the rocket ship would be straightforwad to build. Gantry is easy, just PVC pipe, fittings and orange paint. Ship framework is PVC pipe and flexible "hoops" around which the white card can be attached. Three stage rocket that is topped off with an escape rocket to remove the crew capsule in case of problems. Fins and engine bells would also be needed.

Time to start lobbying the PTA for one of these themes....

eBay this!

I have the cable car listed for sale on ebay. Will be interesting to see who bids and for how much (if indeed at all). Please feel free to bid without fear of winning as I will be taking the auction down before it is scheduled to end :-)