Garment Interlocking Standards

November 24, 2004 by Steven Garrity

I wrote last year about a simple marvel of real-world standards when a paint-roller handle broke and we were able to screw in a broom handle into the same socket (fantastic!).

I was amused and amazed at lunch the other day by my colleague Peter Rukavina with another simple display of standards. He was layered up in two coats. The first coat (green) was purchased at the REI corporate store in Denver, CO in April of 2004. It was assembled in Mexico of US material. The second coat (grey) is a Ralph Lauren Chaps-brand coat purchased at the Eatons store in Toronto in 2000. It was made in China.

Both coats sport the ubiquitous YKK zipper brand and as Peter demonstrated with flair, despite their distinct origins, the coats can zip together because they share a common zipper type/size.

Also dining with us during this marvel of overcoat synergy, Dan James informed us that sleeping bags can be easily zipped together. This seems like the thing of nightmares for the parents of teenagers on co-ed camping trips.

November 23, 2004 by Steven Garrity

Is it just me, or was the San Francisco Airport transit system designed by the Star Trek set designer?

November 22, 2004 by Steven Garrity

Photos from my recent trip to San Francisco including some photos from a 49ers game

November 22, 2004 by Steven Garrity

The next version Mac OS X (10.4) will have Jabber support in iChat

New Sounds for Gaim, thanks to Brad Sucks

November 20, 2004 by Steven Garrity

When looking for help in creating an improved set of sounds for the open-source instant messaging application, Gaim, I turned to a virtual rock star. The ironically named Brad Sucks was a great help and came back with a great set of sounds.

Here, for contrast, are the previous set of Gaim sounds (still included in current releases of Gaim) and the BradSucks-engineered new set (to be included in the upcoming 2.0 release of Gaim).

Gaim Instant Messenger sounds: Before and After (all files in WAV format)
Gaim 1.x	Gaim 2.x (by BradSucks)
Message Sent	Message Sent
Message Received	Message Received
Arrive/Online	Arrive/Online
Leave/Offline	Leave/Offline
Alert	Alert

Thanks Brad! Ok, what’s next…

Weblogs on The West Wing

November 20, 2004 by Steven Garrity

The latest episode of The West Wing features weblogs breaking a news story before the mainstream press. It’s a cute episode in which weblogs pick up a story of a White House staffer test driving a huge SUV right into a brand new Toyota Prius hybrid.

Mystery Door Repair

November 20, 2004 by Steven Garrity

A few weeks ago in a large windstorm, the outside screen/glass door on my house blew open and caught the wind, bending some of the spring mechanism, pulling some of the hinges out of the wall, and most noticeably, smashing the large glass pane. I wasn’t home at the time, so when I got home, I was greeted with a large pile of broken glass on my door step and front lawn.

The door was old, so I wasn’t too disappointed about the prospect of replacing it with something newer. I intended to go get a replacement door, but didn’t get around to it. Then, I went to California for a few days, and when I came back, the glass pane was replaced in the old door with new glass.

At first I figured my parents had done it, since they often help me out with things around my house (thanks mom & dad), but they were as confused as I was – especially wondering why I would replace the glass when I wanted to replace the whole door. My girlfriend knew nothing of it, nor did any of my friends and co-workers.

So, I don’t know who did it! I have two witnesses that saw a glass company truck at my house doing the work, so it was professional, but they don’t remember which company.

I’ll call around the to glass companies in town next week and I’ll post an update here if I solve the mystery.

Anyone here have any clues?

Today in (My) History

November 19, 2004 by Steven Garrity

Inspired by Peter Rukavina’s post in which he looks through the history of his weblog on November 19th, I would like to do the same:

November 19, 2003: Like Peter, I was celebrating the launch my friend and co-work, Daniel Burka’s weblog Delta Tango Bravo. My witty post title: “DeltaTangoBravo.com? Roger that.” It’s been a great site since – especially when Daniel talks about me.
November 18, 2002: I didn’t post anything on Nov 19th in 2002, but on the 18th I posted a reply to Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions. My clever post title: “Abstract Abstractions”
November 19, 2001: I posted about a Windows XP billboard that had been hacked to read “Suddenly Everything Sucks”, which also made for a great post title. The site I linked to no longer has the image, but they were kind and wise enough to link to a new location for the photo.
November 19, 2000: In 2000, when this weblog was only a few months old, I posted about CBC Newsworld’s Alternative Election Debate. This alternative TV debate included many of the fringe parties not included in the primary televised debate, including the Community Party, The Marijuana Party, and The Natural Law Party. Boring post title, with lame all-lowercase capitalization: “tonight: the real debate”.

It’s fun to look back. Thanks Peter.

November 17, 2004 by Steven Garrity

Work is being done to measure and improve the boot time for Linux, resulting in some cool Tufte-esque graphs

The Photoshopping of Firefox

November 10, 2004 by Steven Garrity

Yesterday’s Firefox launch garnered a lot of press. I noticed a peculiar pattern emerging on some of the news sites. There seems to be a whole weird underworld of hastily-photoshopped graphics for news sites.

Here is a collection of some images from some Firefox 1.0 launch news articles I found across the website with color commentary. It’s too bad Salon.com hasn’t done a story on Firefox, because their article graphics are like works of art.

	Enterprise Linux IT (day 1) I call this one “Firefox Christ”. If I’m interpreting it correctly, it depicts the ascension of Firefox back to heaven after having spent three days in hell.
	Enterprise Linux IT (day 2) Apparently not content with their apocalyptic graphic from day 1, the Enterprise Linux IT site went tech on day 2. We can assume that the ones and zeros are some kind of “data”.
	Linux Insider One of several sites that surrounded the logo in a blurry halo. This is somewhat understandable, as it was probably a way to mask the edges of the logo since they probably had to just crop a low-res version from the Mozilla website. That doesn’t excuse the Times New Roman text title here.
	News.com I get the “1.0” road sign, but I’m really confused about the little Firefox rolling in the background. Maybe it symbolizes the “roll to 1.0”?
	VNUnet I like what they did with the close-cropping, but they went a little crazy with the JPEG compression.
	CNN A simple image of the logo seems like something that would be hard to get wrong. CNN.com decided it needed a peach/orange background gradient. Maybe that was a screenshot from somewhere I don’t know about?
	BBC News The best of the bunch, but I think that mostly because this is a screenshot of a graphic I made for the Mozilla.org home page. Still, it is simple, straightforward, and doesn’t include any wacky photoshopping.

Enterprise Linux IT (day 1)

Enterprise Linux IT (day 2)

VNUnet