Category: Uncategorized

Hats off to How To Blog for tipping me off to Haloscan’s trackback sending feature:

According to their tutorial on sending a trackback ping, each time you want to send a trackback from Blogger (or similar tool), you have to

• login to HaloScan
• click ‘Manage Trackback”
• click “Send a trackback ping”
• Paste the TrackBack ping URL into the edit box for ‘URLs to Ping’
• Fill in your blog name
• Paste YOUR permalink URL
• Paste a copy of your Post Title
• Paste (or write) an excerpt from your post
• Click the ‘Ping Now’ button.

Yikes – that’s more work/typing/copying & pasting than I want to bother with.

Worth trying out, I’d say.

I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I saw this come across my blogline:

Texas Instruments Incorporated (NYSE: TXN) (TI) today announced that its digital signal processors (DSP) that helped spawn the wireless communications revolution were named the “Greatest Innovation of the Past 15 Years.” Honored by EDN magazine, TI’s TMS320C55x DSPs were heralded as the most significant design innovation in the last decade and a half, beating out the likes of Intel’s Pentium processor and products from HP, ADI and others.

The reason I laughed so hard doesn’t come until the end of the press release:

A panel of EDN technical editors meticulously worked to identify the list of finalists in each category before EDN readers crowned TI DSP products winners in an online ballot [emphasis added].

When I was an employee at TI I would occasionally receive an email from some unknown marketing droid in Texas informing me of an online “reader’s choice award” survey, encouraging me to vote early and often for all the TI products listed. If I wasn’t terribly busy, I’d go to the website and fill it out. If I remember correctly, rumour at the time was that some of the marketeers had written a script to continuously submit ballots until the polls closed, but I could never bring myself to believe they could ever be that smart. Anyways, it seems that whatever they did paid off for them this time. They produced the greatest innovation of the last 15 years, even if it is by virtue of having the largest number of bored employees.

Alright, alright… To be fair, TI DSPs have had a huge impact on the world we live in. When I left TI in 2001, they dominated the cell phone market. I’m just having trouble imagining that any magazine readership would ever recognize it.

Family Circus cartoons put to the words of H.P Lovecraft at The Nameless Dread (via jwz).

Update:The blog has apparently been shut down. Too bad.

Update:And now it’s back.

Update:And gone again. This time, I think for good.

Anybody following my progress with the exercises in SICP will have noticed that it’s been a while since I last posted a solution. I’m at problem 1.13, which turns out to be a mathematical proof. A mathematical proof requires a mathematical notation, so I’m taking a small diversion into the land of MathML to learn how I might present the equations on this blog. Fortunately, the W3C has an article on how to embed MathML in a website.

I’ve been using OpenOffice to generate MathML, but I’m not entirely happy with the output, which contains several mysterious unprintable ASCII characters; parentheses, I think. Any suggestions on a better MathML editor? The W3C maintains a list of MathML editors, none of which seem particularly remarkable to me. Basic requirements: free of charge, for Windows.

Update: After wrestling with MathML for most of the morning, I’ve completely given up on it. In order to work (on Firefox, at least), the page containing MathML must be named with an .xml extension. Compare this XML MathML test page from the W3C MathML site versus the HTML equivalent. Same contents, different renderings.

Note: Do not attempt running either one through the W3C HTML Validator.

So why don’t I just rename my files to have the .xml extension? Besides the fact that there are gobs of files to rename and as many redirection pages to create, if I were to rename all my files to xml, I could no longer use PHP, because my webserver uses the .php extension to identify PHP files. Even though I don’t use PHP for anything right now, it is the only server-side scripting language available from my hosting service and I’m not ready to throw it way so I can display a few equations.

I’ve started looking into image-based solutions. Eric Raymond’s eqn2graph seemed very promising until I ran it under Cygwin and discovered that ImageMagick’s convert tool was inexplicably generating blank images.

I’d consider using MathType if it cost a little less. The $129 they are asking is too steep for the amount of use I plan to get out of it.

There is some almost helpful information in Math Typesetting for the Internet, which has me almost considering manually manipulating screenshots of OpenOffice, though the very thought sickens me.

When Mandy and I were married in June 2003, we received some gift certificates for Bhima’s Warung as wedding gifts. We finally got around to using them on Thursday night. The food was remarkable; quite possibly the best meal I have ever eaten in Waterloo. For an appetizer I had what turned out to be a gargantuan spring roll stuffed with smoked chicken and other vegetables served on a spicy chutney. For an entree, I had some monkeyfish tail with a cashew curry sauce with pineapples. Dessert was some dark chocolate ice cream. Excellent food! It was quite reasonably priced, too… if you happen to have a $100 gift certificate. If not, it is a little pricey, but you get what you pay for.

Somebody from Crytal Clear Water dropped by for a courtesy call on Thursday to take a look at our broken water softener. He looked at it, told me that its make is Autotrol and that it looked serviceable. If I want it serviced, I have to set up a service call for $60. Thanks a lot! But really, what should I expect for nothing?

The lumber was delivered on Thursday, as I expected. I haven’t done anything with it, yet, except move it from the driveway to the basement, which turned out to be a rather draining job in itself.

When I logged on this morning, I was happily surprised to see that Vonage Canada has finally added 911 Dialing. Mandy and I have been using the Vonage VoIP service as our primary phone service since we moved in October. At $19.95, we pay much less than we would for a traditional line with Bell, but I was always a little uneasy about not having 911 service. Now that we have it, I can rest easier, though I realize their service isn’t perfect: if I dial 911, my location will not be automatically transmitted to the operator so I’ll have to tell him my address in the call.

A woman bit into a severed finger while digging into her bowl of chili at Wendy’s yesterday:

The restaurant at 1405 Monterey Highway was temporarily closed Tuesday night to allow health officials to impound the remaining chili, which was prepared on site, using a variety of ingredients. Health officials also seized all of the restaurant’s remaining stock of ingredients, which will be inspected, and traced back to their manufacturer.

Since all of the workers at the restaurant were in possession “of all 10 of their fingers,” health inspectors assume the finger likely entered the food chain as a result of the manufacturing process, according to county Environmental Resources Director Ben Gale.

How does a severed finger slip through the QA process at food processing plant? If the finger belongs to one of the workers at the plant, somebody must have known about it. Presumably the person who lost the finger knew about it. If there was reason to believe that the finger made it into the food, why didn’t they scrap the entire batch? Did they think nobody would notice?

Of all the fast food chains, Wendy’s is the only one that I like. I still plan to visit there occasionally, but I’m going to avoid the chili from now on.

I’m not sure how long it has been out, but our water softener is not working. I noticed on Tuesday that our water no longer had the slimy feeling of softened water that it did when we moved into the house. I took a sample into Crystal Clear after work yesterday to have it tested. The softener is having no affect on the hardness of the water. The consultant from Crystal Clear offered to drop by our place for a courtesy call. I’m expecting him this afternoon.