Web link

Spaceport America on OpenStreetMap

Samat Jain — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:29:08 +0000

Spaceport America is “the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport”. Wonder what it looks like? You can now find it on OpenStreetMap, one of the many things I’ve been mapping in New Mexico’s barren & isolated Jornada del Muerto. I’ve indicated various Spaceport America structures, like the state-of-the-art Terminal Hangar Building and Spaceport Operations Center. I’ve yet to accurately locate Spaceport America’s vertical launch pad, which has been in use since 2007.

No, it’s on Bing Maps, Google Maps, or any of the other Web mapping competitors—just in case you needed a reason why crowd-sourced geodata (or VGI) can’t be beat.

Want an aerial photo of Spaceport America? Over on Flickr I’ve a screencap from the USDA’s public-domain NAIP 2011 release, pretty much the only source for high-resolution imagery of the middle of nowhere.

See Spaceport America on OpenStreetMap

Topic:

New Mexico

OpenStreetMap

A street without rules, a safer street?

Samat Jain — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 04:48:31 +0000

A few weeks ago, I started listening to another podcast: WHY? Philosophical Discussions About Everyday Life, hosted by philosopher Jack Russell Weinstein.

Listening through the backlog, I found an excellent show, Episode 28: “On Liberty and Libertarianism” with guest James Otteson. In it, Jack and James philosophize about so-called “Libertarianism”, talking about how government should relate (or not relate) to both social and moral issues.

One of James’ fantastic talking points was on traffic. In short, all the rules and regulations that both drivers and pedestrians must follow are dehumanizing. Destroying the human connection between driver and pedestrian takes the social issue of road sharing and turns it into… well, something else, where drivers and pedestrians no longer need to think—it becomes a matter of just reading signs, staying within lines, and blindly following the guidance of blinking lights.

In the show, they discuss a Finnish town with a high number of traffic accidents. The town removed traffic lights, stops signs, and other regulatory sundries and traffic accidents went down.

They’re beginning to do the same on London’s Exhibition Road in the UK:

The idea is that when driving zones are heavily delineated, drivers tend to be on autopilot, focusing on other cars rather than pedestrians or cyclists. That’s why London has so many guard rails on either side of pedestrian crossings, preventing pedestrians from straying into the road where they’re not supposed to. But 10 years ago, Kensington and Chelsea experimented with removing the railings from Kensington High Street and found that the number of pedestrian accidents dropped by 60%. It seems that when drivers are forced to be more aware and pedestrians are forced to take more responsibility for themselves, everyone is safer. Rules, it seems, were counterproductive.

Interestingly enough, The Guardian publishes this in the Arts & Design section and describes the movement as liberal. In my opinion, it’s anything but. Leave it to the Europeans to re-pioneer freedom & common sense.

Topic:

Philosophy

Libertarianism

Politics

Play WebM in Internet Explorer 9

Samat Jain — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 01:51:39 +0000

Update: Google now offers a WebM plugin for Internet Explorer 9, much easier than what I’ve detailed below.

Google’s recent announcement deprecating H.264 for Chrome (see my thoughts on it) means it’s likely that WebM will become the defacto standard for the HTML5 video tag, supported by Internet Explorer 9. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 9 does not (yet) ship with WebM, despite a lot of misleading PR indicating some kind of “compatibility”.

So, how do you play WebM with Internet Explorer 9?

The easiest way is to use the DirectShow filter pack from Xiph.org. Download and install the installer, available for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and not only will you be able to play WebM/VP8, but also Ogg/Theora, Vorbis, Speex, and FLAC. It’s an royalty-free, open-source standards smörgåsbord!

What do you do next? Of course, submit feedback! Click Send Feedback under Internet Explorer’s Tools menu, and simply ask Microsoft: please support WebM!

Clarification: Don’t install the Support for HTML <video> tag option. It installs an ActiveX control, which requires some extra markup (see the release notes).

Note: Internet Explorer 9 is a beta, as well as Xiph’s DirectShow filters. IE9 doesn’t support a lot of <video> tag features, so many demos out there on the Internet don’t work.

Topic:

Microsoft

Web 2.0

Web Video

Monospaced font for the Firefox AwesomeBar

Samat Jain — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:41:06 +0000

In the shadow of my Flickr userstyle that adds black borders around photos, is another more simple one. Now on userstyles.org, Use a monospaced font for the AwesomeBar (aka the URL bar, URL field, etc).

This isn’t that original or clever, as it’s actually included in userChrome-example.css contained in most older Firefox user profiles. However, this file is no longer included with new profiles as of Firefox 3.5, so it’s a bit more difficult to discover.

Topic:

Web 2.0

Add black border around photos on Flickr

Samat Jain — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:31:19 +0000

Add black borders around photos on Flickr. It’s a userstyle for use in Stylish, a Firefox extension that lets you apply custom CSS to webpages.

In the past, I generally not made weblog entries about creations like this, but it’s never too late to start.

Topic:

Web 2.0

Adobe releases pre-release Flash 10 for 64-bit Linux

Samat Jain — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:23:44 +0000

Today, Adobe released 64-bit Flash for Linux. Finally, I can waste time watching ugly, pixelated Internet video on my 64-bit Linux desktop and laptop, just like all of my 32-bit-confined brothers and sisters on the Internet! (Yes, I know about npviewer—let’s not go there.)

What’s really interesting is that this is Adobe’s first 64-bit release of Flash. That is, Linux users got it first, before users of Windows Vista x64 and and MacOS X. It probably does not mean anything, especially since Adobe has mentioned 64-bit flash will be released at the same time across platforms, but you can’t help but feel good inside.

Go download it now and remember to report good bugs.

Update: Some quick notes…

The tarball provided on the labs website is not the conventional Adobe Flash installer–it just contains the plugin. To use the plugin, drop the .so file into your ~/.mozilla/plugins/ directory.
Make sure to uninstall your npviewer-powered 32-bit Flash completely (disabling the plugin within Firefox is not enough). I personally uninstalled it from my system to prevent any conflict.

Topic:

Linux

Corporations

The number one thing Dell customers want... Linux

Samat Jain — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 02:59:54 +0000

Dell Ideastorm is a Dell-run website where users can post and vote (anonymously) for ideas for Dell products. What’s the number one thing people want…?

People want Linux on their Dell machines. Remember to click the “promote” icon and make your vote count.

Topic:

Linux

Corporations

Microsoft Windows Vista and the end of the computer hardware industry

Samat Jain — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 04:35:35 +0000

Peter Gutmann, a cryptography expert at the University of Auckland, has written a Cost Analysis of Windows Vista, where he discusses how the “content protection” and trusted platform features described in the Microsoft Windows Vista “security” specification will destroy reliability and innovation in the computer hardware industry, as well as make life miserable for us, the users.

Doomsday scenarios like this were brought up when Microsoft Windows XP was about to be released, and though it was enough to make me switch away from Windows to Linux, most of the concerns did not materialize. I don’t know if Vista will be any different of a situation, but if the notion that they definitely want this kind of control (irrespective of whether they can actually do it, or whether the market will let them) doesn’t make anyone who enjoys using their computer want to switch, I don’t know what will.

Topic:

Microsoft

American McGee switches to Ubuntu

Samat Jain — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 04:17:35 +0000

Former id games mapper, and creator of the classic 3rd person game Alice, American McGee has switched to Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu Linux only gets more and more popular…

Topic:

Linux

Ubuntu

A take on Drupal's taxonomy system from the Plone/Python camp

Samat Jain — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 10:23:13 +0000

Over at the Plone Blog is the article Death and Taxonomies; it reviews Drupal’s taxonomy (aka category) system.

The author basically comes to the conclusion I have, a conclusion that is shared by many in the Drupal community but not so much outside of it: Drupal’s taxonomy system is amazing.

For most people and their uses, it is completely overengineered and complicated to use. This fits into Drupal’s marketing stance that it is a content management framework rather than just a CMS. It is very generic, and with some custom programming can be adapted to anything–the possibilities are limitless. With many web development projects (that I don’t want to write in PHP) I think about, I wish I had the facility of Drupal’s taxonomy system.

Of course, there are problems, which the review goes into: there are too many hierarchal relationships in Drupal, all competing with each other. There is the menu system, the book module, and hierarchal taxonomies. The key to being a Drupal master is know when to use which and how to use them, something I’ve definitely not mastered. And that is part of the problem–why should you need to?

Topic:

Python

Drupal

Percentage-relative vs em-relative layouts and Sands

Samat Jain — Wed, 31 May 2006 02:25:53 +0000

I’ve outlined some of the design decisions I made when designing Sands, including why some links are black, the use of a em-relative layout, and why I think they are more usable, in a post on Drupal’s forums: Any theme with high usability?

Topic:

Drupal

Unreal Tournament 2007 screenshots from E3 2006

Samat Jain — Fri, 12 May 2006 05:39:53 +0000

Beyond Unreal has some ridiculously high-resolution Unreal Tournament 2007 screenshots from E3 2006. Well, they’re not that high resolution–the images are just large.

The vehicles look cool. I was excited about Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 before, and right now it’s safe to say I’m excited by the Unreal Tournament 2007 title too. Yes, graphics is not everything… but if Unreal Tournament 1999 and Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 are any indication, Epic certainly understands how to deliver gameplay.

Topic:

Unreal

Games

Gentium, my new Times New Roman replacement

Samat Jain — Thu, 04 May 2006 04:02:55 +0000

Gentium, called the “typeface for the nations,” is a nice serif font. It does not look particularly great on-screen, but on paper, it is absolutely beautiful.

The Gentium samples page includes some pictures, as well as a a PDF containing a history of Gentium. Again, they don’t do the font justice on-screen: print the PDF and just stare at how beautiful it is.

One of it’s nice properties is that it’s approximately the same size as Times New Roman, point for point. That is, a document typeset in Times New Roman and one typeset in Gentium will be the same length when printed. Because of this, Gentium is a great alternative to Times New Roman, because even with similar sizing, Gentium’s glyphs appear bigger, and are much easier to read.

Did I mention it is Unicode? No, it doesn’t have the entire Unicode character set… but no doubt it one day will.

Topic:

Academia

President G.W. Bush, a friend of India

Samat Jain — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 23:30:20 +0000

I was watching CNN today, and they displayed some interesting poll numbers. 66% of Indians consider President Bush a friend of India. This statistic is higher than all numbers of President Bush’s approval rating in the US, which is around 45%.

Topic:

Politics

Debian-based x86-64 Live CDs

Samat Jain — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 02:53:00 +0000

At the moment, there are only two semi up-to-date x86-64 (that is, for Athlon-64, Intel EMT64, and Opteron) Debian-based live CDs.

Knoppix-64, based on Knoppix 3.4 (somewhat out of date as Knoppix 4.0 is out)
Ubuntu, which is kept up to date and is available tucked away on their FTP site

I’m getting Ubuntu now to try out on my new workstation.

Topic:

Linux

Debian