News from Great Castle Wilson

  • SplashBlog and GCW

    I know this isn’t new, but now that I have a Treo 680, I have been playing around with SplashBlog. SplashBlog is basically a photo sharing site (a la Flickr), but with the added twist that it supports PDA/smartphone synchronization. Here’s what Six Apart says:

    SplashBlog lets you instantly publish photos from your smartphone to an online photo album (photoblog) to share with others. SplashBlog includes everything you need to share your photos, including software for your smartphone and a free online photoblog account at splashblog.com. Just install the FREE software on your smartphone, create your free splashblog.com account and start photoblogging!

    At some level, this is the killer app for a smartphone. Wherever you are, whenever something cool happens, you can snap a picture and push it to the web in about 30 seconds. You don’t even have to describe the picture before posting it, because you can go back afterwards (either on the phone or via their web client) and fill in the details. Of course, it eats data charges faster than Lucky can eat his supper, but it’s still very cool.

    Once I could upload pictures effortlessly, I wanted to make it equally easy to share them with my friends, so I started looking around for a way to display them at NfGCW. I figured I was on the right track when I found “district 30″‘s Photo Sidebar widget but, unfortunately, this doesn’t support SplashBlog out of the box. It was trivial to add the support, however, by including…

    elseif (strpos($item["link"], "http://www.splashblog.com/") >= 0) {
	//SplashBlog
	$item_url = $item["description"];
	$start_pos = strpos($item_url , "<img src=")+10;
    	$end_pos = strpos($item_url , """, $start_pos);
	$item_url = substr($item_url, $start_pos, $end_pos-$start_pos);
}

    … in the code that decides how to pull out the picture URL (i.e. $item_url) based on the different feed types. I also bashed the code to remove the randomization of the order that the pictures are returned. Given the way SplashBlog works, it seems like showing the most recent photos is more interesting.

    All in all, a fun bit of hacking for a Saturday morning. If you haven’t noticed already, you can check the side bar of the main page to see my latest images. Apologies for the portrait shots being displayed sideways. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to fix them at SplashBlog, so I’ll just have to remember not to hold the Treo sideways when I take them.

    Btw, if you do want to check out all the pictures on my SplashBlog site, you can go to:

    McQ’s Treo Shots

    SplashBlog is gone now, of course, so my Treo Shots site is too.

  • Sunshine moves on

    I’m not going to try to be eloquent about this, but I thought I should write something here, just so everyone is on the same page…

    Last night, my family went out for supper. When we got home, we found Sunshine, one of our dogs, in severe distress in our front hallway. We rushed her to the emergency veterinary clinic, where we found out that she had had a grand mal seizure. The vet told us that sometimes this can happen only once, sometimes it will happen every few weeks or months, and sometimes it will happen effectively continuously unless it can be managed. They did blood tests, and kept her there. We went home.

    This morning the vet called us at 7am and told us that Sunshine had had 2 more seizures during the night. We rapidly dressed and went to see her. When we got there, she was quite doped up, but we did get to pet her and talk to her. The vet told us that the blood tests had all come back negative, and that given her age, it was likely not epilepsy. The doctor felt that whatever was causing the seizures was probably something intrusive, like a brain tumor, and that although it might be possible to control the seizures, her life expectancy was low.

    As a family, we decided that we wanted to save Sunshine from the pain and confusion that she would have to go through, just so that we could keep her with us for a few more weeks/months, so we had her put down.

    She will be sorely missed by all of us, but we take comfort in knowing that her legacy lives on in the many sons and daughters that she had, and that we gave her a good life despite the very rough times she had before we got her from the humane society. She was a very good dog.

    The rest of us in the family (Deb, Dennis, Lucky and I) will be sad for quite a while, but we know that the love we feel for each other will pull us through. If you would like to commemorate Sunshine’s passing, please donate something to the Humane Society; they gave us a good friend for eight good years. Thanks.

  • The Assault on Reason

    Here’s a link-of-the-day worth considering… I found this excerpt from Al Gore’s new book The Assault on Reason at the Time Magazine site. As a non-US citizen, my perception of the situation in the States matches Mr. Gore’s quite closely. Turning a critical eye on Canada, I can see we’re on the same path. This is ++ungood, people. What are we going to do about it?

    The Assault on Reason

    The excerpt was no longer available at the Time Magazine site, but I did find it at Penguin Random House, so I updated the link.

  • Mothers’ Day

    A couple of quick pics from our traditional family Mothers’ Day outing: A trip to the Quilt Show (on the Saturday before) so mom can pick out gifts that we all know she’ll like. As an added bonus this year, Stacey came along to celebrate her birthday.

    But here’s the good picture: Proof that Dennis will do whatever it takes for his mom (even if he doesn’t enjoy it).

  • Upgrading the BIOS on a T30

    So, I finally got Deb to give me her old T30 to play with [Thanks, Love], and the first thing I did was to wipe Windows XP off of it, and replace it with Ubuntu.

    I have to say, as desktop OSes go, Ubuntu is pretty nice. I honestly don’t know why the average user would need anything else — web, mail, IM, office suite, you name it. And it performs well on the T30, unlike XP. I could even turn on XGL and get the amazing wobbly windows! 🙂

    Of course, with any linux install the issue is whether or not it will find/configure all of your hardware properly. In this case, because of the ubiquitousness of ThinkPads I would guess, the support for Ubuntu on them has been well tuned, and I had no problems getting everything installed… or so I thought.

    It turns out there were two issues, one a minor annoyance, and one quite serious:

    1. If you put it to sleep, when it wakes up the sound is disabled
    2. As far as I can tell, attempting to connect to a wireless network, “hangs” the machine. That is, if I try to connect to my home network, it silently does nothing, and leaves me in a state where I can no longer start any gui processes.

    According to Google, the solution to the former problem is to upgrade your BIOS, and given that the BIOS on this machine is still the original 1.0 version, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that upgrading would fix the wireless problem too.

    The link to download the bios (and many other T30 updates) is here:

    Lenovo Support & downloads – Drivers and software – ThinkPad T30

    Well, no it’s not, of course, and I don’t think it’s worth looking for an updated link at this point.

    According to that page, I actually need to upgrade two different things: the BIOS and the “Embedded Controller Program”. This is where things start to get scary. Apparently, if you need to update both, then you have to update the BIOS first, but if you read the description of the BIOS, it claims that it won’t run without the updated ECP. Um…

    What I hope is true, is that you can update the BIOS and it will still run well enough to let you update the ECP, even though it’s running on the wrong version. Of course, it seems like the best way to do that would be to use the minimal set of hardware/software capabilities to do the updates [can you imagine attempting this from within Ubuntu?], so time to build some boot floppies.

    Erk! No floppy drive.

    So now what do I do? Has anyone gone through this process? Anybody in Ottawa with a spare TP floppy drive? Anybody want to hold my hand while I do the lobotomy?

  • Holy SPAM, Batman.

    Ok, so I’m not the most popular site on the web (although googling for “Great Castle Wilson” does find me first :-)). So why, when I checked my spam logs for this morning, did I find that my anti-spam software has killed >30,000 spam comments?

    Words fail me. If I’m getting this much attention, imagine how much real websites get!

  • Genetic hardware design

    It’s been a while since we’ve had a link of the day, but this is a good one. Check it out:

    creatures from primordial silicon

    Warning: there’s a problem with the certificate for that site, but it does still seem to be up if you click through the warnings to get to it.

    It’s not clear that this generalizes in the way the researcher hopes, but it’s still pretty amazing. What do you think?

  • OLPC as e-book reader.

    So why would I buy a Sony reader when I could get this:

    I’m not too happy about the position of the forward and back buttons, but for $175 I could live with it. Compare the functionality of that versus the Sony Reader.

  • The Treo keyboard works, but…

    …but I wouldn’t want to write a novel with it.

    How do people type with two fingers on these things? When I try it, the thing flops around in my hands to the point where I can actually go faster by holding it with one hand and typing with the index finger of the other hand.

  • What’s on my phone.

    I have added a new page that describes the apps I use on my Treo 680:

    What’s on my phone.

    Well, I guess I took that page down at some point. I don’t think the content is particularly relevant any more anyway, but it might have been nice to have it for historical reasons.