Wednesday, November 14, 2007When Good Apps Go Bad I had a half hour in Kansas City International Airport. Like many airports nowadays, they had free wireless internet. I haven't installed Warcraft on the Powerbook yet so I had to settle with surfing the web. I have installed Leopard so I was trying to download TinkerTool, an essential Mac OS X customization utility, so I can change the hideous new 3D drawer dock. I found it easily enough, but when I went to download it, I was shown this webpage:
 Apparently TinkerTool has some features I'm not aware of! Wait.. Tinker... Tool... oh I get it. Eww. Labels: internet, macs, perversion link : 10:34 PM
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Sunday, September 30, 2007 DC comics is having a comics contest through their new Zuda Comics label: the prizes are various amounts of cash. Sign me up!
There are rules to follow: the comic for the contest is to be 8 pages of 800x600 pixels. The comic can't be shown anyplace other than their site during the contest. Beyond that, anything goes. I thought a bit about what story to tell with what characters. I decided that making something totally new would lower my chances of making a good comic: good stories take lots of time to work out the details. I settled on my favorite character at the moment: Keeley Walker and her superheroic storyline. The setting is a few issues beyond where I'm at right now. It's kind of like fast forwarding the action a little to get to some cooler stuff I've had in mind. I had to think a lot about what specifically will occur in the comic. 8 pages isn't a lot for introducing the character, having something interesting happen, and providing some type of closure. I wrote out the first draft of the script, and now it's time to work on that some more and sketch out the thumbnails. Progress updates later, I hope. Wish me luck! link : 7:47 PM
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Sunday, September 23, 2007Oh, the Places You'll Go! In lieu of actual updates, I added a few more links to the sidebar. I'll tell you a little about each of them to entice you to go... elsewhere (?).
Wasii.com: This site's sister site, which is kind of creepy because it belongs to my ex-girlfriend. She hasn't updated since May, but if you leave taunting comments in her last post, she may do something about it. Newsarama: It's actually just comics news, which is a little odd considering the name. They seem to update often, and aren't as appalling to look at as other comic news sites. I wish they had an RSS feed though. Going to a site is so 2002. Comics 101: This used to be part of Kevin Smith's moviepoopshoot.com (now Quick Stop Entertainment) but it broke away. The feature is a large series of articles written by Scott Tipton about the history of comics and comic characters. If I have to catch up on Iron Man before the comic comes out, without reading all of the comics, here is where I'd go. Kotaku: A gaming blog which doubles as a news source. Their headlines and pictures are usually funnily appropriate. Hardcore Gaming 101: I mentioned this site earlier here. Kind of a Comics 101 but for games, they also have articles on the lengthy history of franchises and characters. Anthropology.net: A news blog about all matters anthropology. They seem to cover the four fields fairly evenly, with a slight lean towards human evolution. Anthropology in the News: More of a news list than a blog. They show links to other sites with current anthropology news. The last three sites are highly recommended for readers of all backgrounds. They aim to set straight common misconceptions about important scientific matters. Race: This site is run by the American Anthropological Association and gives evidence that what a lot of people see as set, permanent races is actually one fleeting glimpse at variation that is always changing. Even scholars who should know better (say for example, a geneticst student who is a huge jerk and attacked a very minor point I made about the non-existence of race in a presentation I gave... oh my what a tangent, sorry!) get race wrong. Understanding Evolution: This site is made by UC Berkeley (yay!) and teaches evolution. Many people, whether they subscribe to evolution via natural selection or not, don't really understand the hows of it all. This is a great resource for learning it from the basics. Bad Science: When I started this blog one of my goals was to talk about how the media almost inevitably misconstrues articles about science. That kind of fell by the wayside but I was very happy to find that someone already does it: Ben Goldacre, writing for the Guardian. For example he rightfully points out that the recent story on how all men are attracted to a certain hip/waist ratio and Jessica Alba's mastery of it is based on no research at all. Read his updates as the group that started that a story defends themselves pretty much by acting like jerks. There are a lot of jerks in science and pseudoscience apparently. I hope you have fun reading some of those sites. I have a few posts of my own coming up, including a tempting contest (not of the Seinfeldian kind). link : 3:51 PM
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Thursday, May 3, 2007 As I predicted, now you can display population density data in Google Earth, thanks to the work of Imran Haque, a grad student at Stanford (boo!) though he was an undergrad at Cal (yay!). His program, gCensus, allows the drawing of polygons over Google Maps, which the Google Map API doesn't do well on its own. Combine that with freely available US Census data and genius happens. Do I get any credit for predicting its development? No? Ok.
 {This Google Map with gCensus enhancement shows the population density of Asians living in Poway recorded by the 2000 census. My parents' house is marked for reference.} Labels: internet, tech:computers link : 3:02 PM
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Wednesday, January 24, 2007Space Battle I somehow missed the birth of networking sites like Friendster and Myspace but all of a sudden it seems like this type of site is almost ubiquitous with casual internet use. Specialty sites have come up to cater to specific audiences. There isn't one for anthropology yet so I'll write about two that cater to the other two-thirds of this site's theme.
1up.com is a networking site for gamers. I usually go there for the news, though I've visited it less as less since it is so complex. I just want my gaming news! The news sits in a little block of text surrounded by links to blogs. I don't want to see what Joe D. Gamer says on his gaming blog. I have my own! Why read the World of Warcraft Blog when I can just play it with the other eight million people who have it? Anyway, I wanted to see how the networking part of the site was going so I went profile hopping. I even found someone I know! So I set up my own little profile and tried to invite him to be a friend. And... nothing. I have no idea how to do it! The site is just so cluttered. The obvious "Invite Friends" button is actually for spamming my friends who don't have a profile so they will join. But how do I send and invite to someone who is already here? I still haven't figured it out. The help link, buried in the lower right of the page, leads to a single page that only shows me how to sign up for this monstrosity (using outdated screenshots no less). I give up. My reunion with my friend will have to wait until I get some more patience. On to other things, like writing this post. I've dumped on 1up.com a bit now so it must mean I have a solution for all of their flaws. Well, to show an example of a networking site that works in its simplicity, I present Comicspace. Yes, it's a blatant name-ripoff of Myspace, but it is so much better in execution. Just compare the two home screens. Comicspace has a tasteful row of ads at the top, and the rest of the page are large blocks of information. there is a lot of information here but it is given room to breathe. And once you start clicking links and filling out text boxes, it works flawlessly. Comicspace is run by one person with volunteer programmer helpers and it just plain works. Myspace has all kinds of money backing it and it fails. There are errors that show up for the most mundane tasks like sending a message or seeing someone's profile. It's shoddy while Comicspace is expertly designed. Just look at it! It's, dare I say, a beautiful site. link : 7:44 PM
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