Brian Yoder's Stump-o-Matic : A tasty treat for fans of technology, great art, rants, and news.
Updated: 9/1/2002; 5:20:01 AM.

 

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Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Spirited Away Info: Some have asked for more information about the upcoming Hayao Miyazaki film Spirited Away, so here are some links to explore:

Spirited Away Page

Article About the US Release from March

A Review of the Film with a Few Stills

A Short Japanese Trailer

A longer (and better) trailer with subtitles

Japanese Language Documentary about Miyazaki's Work with English Commentary on Website

The Nausicaa.net page about the film


11:52:52 PM    

Excellent Article on Rebuilding the WTC: I had heard about this article by Sherri Tracinski from other rebuilding advocates, but I didn't get around to reading it until today.  It's a must read!
11:13:16 PM    

New Rebuilding Site: Richard Krasney's "Soaring Towers Coalition" has started a website at http://www.soaringtowers.org/ that has an ikonboard message board... they have invited other Online-LTTC members to join.I appreciate their enthusiasm even if they don't realize the extent to which they have "reinvented the wheel"...pushing goals that others of us have been campaigning for for months,including people prevented from participating in Online-LTTC after registering in good faith.I have linked their site from http://www.put.com/wtc/ and hope the link will be reciprocated. [Louis Epstein]
10:50:57 PM    

El Capitan Tickets (Miyazaki in Person) On Sale: I just this minute heard that there's apparently an in-person appearance by Hayao Miyazaki coming up at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood.  I would imagine that this is in conjunction with his upcoming Disney release of the movie "Spirited Away" (which I have seen some clips of and it looks like it will be great just like everything else Miyazaki does).  Anyway, whatever the actual event will be, here's where you can sign up for the 1000 available seats...
Online via the El Capitan Tickets page OR By Phone at: 1-800-347-6396 8am-6pm pacific time.


10:45:37 PM    

Hooked on Gotch: My cousin Renee liked the Thomas Cooper Cotch painting I posted yesterday so much I thought I would put up some more typical works of his for your viewing pleasure.


The Exile (1930)


Monsigneur Love (1880)


Destiny (1886)


Heir to All the Ages


Sharing Fish (1891)


Death The Bride (1895)


The Child Enthroned (1894)


6:31:52 PM    


EchoStar/Dish Network PVR Gripes:  About 6 months ago I called up Dish Network and asked about getting a new receiver with a built-in PVR (Personal Video Recorder).  Specifically I asked if the PVR inside was from TiVo and the sales guy assured me that it was, so I ordered a DishPVR 501.  I immediately discovered that it was not a TiVo PVR (I have had a TiVo since they first came out and have hacked it to make it a little better since then too), but I figured it would be pretty much the same thing.  I was disappointed to discover a huge number of problems.  Most of them are minor and most of them don't completely prevent me from using it at all, but they make me not bother using most of the features of the device because it's just too much hassle and frustration for the benefit. I have compiled a list of some of these problems and have for some time been trying to find SOMEWHERE that EchoStar could accept them, but I have come up dry.  Their website doesn't seem interested in hearing any feedback from the customers (red flag!) and they seem to make the addresses of their employees some kind of national secret.  So, if they won't listen, I will just post my comments here for all to see.  If any of you know how to contact someone who matters at EchoStar please do pass this along or let me know how to contact them. 
 
1. Program Guide Updates: Why does the unit wait until I want to do something before it notices that the program guide isn't updated yet (and then force me to sit there anxiously as I wait for the guide to update)?  Solution: It ought to wait until the middle of the night and do it when nobody is watching, or better yet (if there's a way to do it), get the update in the background on some regular basis.  Of course determining when someone is or isn't watching is not easy, but you could determine that if nobody has touched the remote for 3 hours and if after a minute or two of an onscreen warning of hte same kind that pops up when the recorder is about to change the channel that should be fine.
2. Show Title and Description: As I go through the program guide there's nowhere I can see the program description.  There's a bunch of room in the upper left quadrant of the screen where the channel number is displayed (but it's already visible in the grid at the bottom, and could also be overlayed on the video window too if need be), the Dish logo takes up a lot of room, the time and date aren't especially interesting most of the time and could be displayed in much less room than they take now, and the favorite list has its own problems...see below.  I know it is possible to press the "Info" button to get it, but that takes work and requires multiple button presses.  Automatically displaying the description in that upper left quadrant would be much nicer.
3. Program Guide History: I have on occasion wanted to ask the question "What was the name of the show that just got finished?" but I can't see what the last show was on the program guide.  Solution: Put some kind of divider at the current time or color past programs differently and allow the left arrow button to bring these into view.
4. Software Update Only On Shutdown/Startup: Apparently the only time software upgrades can happen is when the unit is turned off, but I never turn it off.  In fact, my software was so out of date that it coudln't even read the program guide data anymore recently so I had to call technical support.  Solution: Check for the availability or necessity of software upgrades at the same time program guide information is downloaded.  If there is a concern about too many people upgrading at once (and perhaps allowing an unforseen bug from getting out of control too quickly) you could put a random factor in the program guide data indicating that "If you need to upgrade, pick a random number between 0 and 1 and if it's larger than X then do the update now."  You could also do the same thing by some unique device ID (in other words, "If your device ID is greater than X then do the auto update, otherwise wait till next time." which would allow you more control over which people get the upgrades how fast and in case something terrible happened, you could determine who each recipient of the bad stuff was.
5. Program Guide Feedback: When I press the "Guide" button (and other buttons too, though the guide button is the one that gets on my nerves most often) there's no immediate feedback indicating that the PVR has received my command.  The couple of seconds before the guide comes up are always a little annoying because I never know if I actually hit the button or if something intervened between the remote and the receiver.  Solution: A little beep, or some visual indicator that something is working would be nice.  Making the guide load faster would be even nicer.  Best of all, try both.
6. Favorites: This is a cool feature, but I have several problems as it is implemented currently.  One is a "discoverability" problem.  Just looking at the interface there's no indication that the feature even exists, how to set it up, or how to use it.  Solution: There are a lot of ways to address that.  One that others have used in the past is to give the favorites selection mechanism a very prominent position (in essence, forcing the user to log in and out), which I think is far too intrusive.  You could also put some kind of selector on the remote.  I have seen some people do this with buttons (one for each favorites set), which I think is cool, though it clutters the remote even more than it already is and using buttons doesn't map well to such a selection task (the same problem exists in the Sat/TV/VCR/Aux buttons).  Some kind of lever or clicky wheel would model the choice much better, and eliminate the need for the little LED illuminators under the clear buttons too.  Putting some kind of selector on the remote would solve the discoverability problem as well.  As a related issue, using the "Guide" button to select which set of favorites is currently active means that multiple presses can't be used for a more obvious purpose which is to turn the guide off again.  Popping it on and then off should just be a matter of pressing the guide button twice, but instead I have to find and press the cancel button.  This might seem trivial, but if my eyes are locked onto the TV, I don't want to take them off the TV to read the button labels to do the most frequent features.
7. Extra buttons: The remote seems to have far too many buttons on it, several of which have no use at all, or which are hard to figure out and inconvenient to use.  There is nowhere I have found that the * and # buttons are used, and the same is true for the little alphabetic labels above the number buttons, or the Search button.  The little "Dish" button doesn't seem to do anything either (which doesn't exactly make a great brand statement does it?).  I'm not sure what the "View" button is for, but it can't be that important if I have had the thing for all these months but never found a need for it.  I gather that the "recall" button takes me back to the channel I was most recently on, though I never really tried it until today.  I guess it would be handy if you were flipping back and forth between two channels, but I didn't really understand that until now.  What's odd is that the buttons which anyone would understand (e.g. pause, play, fwd, back, etc.) are labeled to help explain them, while others (like the 30 second forward and whatever that curved back button is) aren't labeled.  What's with that?  The "Theme" and "Browse" labels are a mystery to me.  I have no idea what they mean and doubt that whatever functionality they enable matters much if I have not found a use for them yet..  Solution: This is complex because each of these has a number of issues associated with it and related business issues (like how many are in the warehouse, how users have been trained, and so on) but it would be smart to review each of these issues to see what could be done about it.
8. Unsubscribed Content: There are numerous places in the interfaces where programs and channels which I didn't subscribe to show up in lists (which of course I have to pass over).  I imagine that's there to remind me that I could have bought more features that I don't have, but come on...it's really annoying to have to skip over it all the time.  It's also odd that I can still select unsubscribed programs into my favorites list even though the unit already knows I can't see them.  At least make me skip those if they are unavailable.  Solution: Don't let unsubscribed channels show up or at least don't let me select them by accident.
9. Ongoing Recording: One of the things I like best about my TiVo is that I can tell it that I like to see some program that comes on at some regular schedule, but which I don't have to go through and point at each episode and time for.  If that is possible I couldn't find out where to specify that's what I want.  Of course one problem inherent in this is a scheduling problem (since shows overlap and some appear at multiple times) but the problem can be solved.  TiVo's "season pass" feature seems to do pretty well.  If the problem is that the feature is in there but I can't find it, I don't know what to say...it needs to bubble up to the surface, it's one of the top couple of features for the device.
10. Impending Channel Switching Notification: I often have the TV on while I am doing other things and not necessarily looking at the screen, so when the notification that the channel is about to change because of a scheduled recording pops up it is easy to miss.  Solution: If there were some kind of audio alert sayinbg "Hey, look at the screen before something happens that you don't want." that would make it a little nicer.
11. Recovering Disk Space: When the disk gets full it's a real chore to go through and delete the programs I don't want to see anymore.  Solution: An automatic expiration scheme should get rid of the oldest stored material as new stuff arrives (unless it has been marked to be spared the reaper).
 
Overall, the product seems to have been built according to a laundry list of features from some Marketing guy who has no comprehension of technology or UI design.  The problem is much like the "blinking 12:00" problem with VCRs.  It's not that it's impossible to set the clock, it's that it's not obvious and a rotten design.

6:14:00 PM    

Smoking Gun for Saddam: Not that we need to prove a direct link between 9/11 and Iraq to justify kicking Sadam out of power, but has everyone forgotten the Al Queda training camp in Salmon Pak, Iraq with the Boeing 707 that was used to train terrorists in just this kind of thing?  That said, I think we need to dispense with this idea that we need to prove in court (or in a mob of anti-American European intellectuals or arab dictators) that Saddam explicitly ordered the attack himself.  It should be clear in retrospect that we should have taken him out back at the end of the Gulf War, and that his regime constitutes a clear and present danger to the rest of the world, as would any radical islamic regime that might some day overthrow him.


6:00:33 PM    

Sony Makes Big Bucks on MMPORGS: According to a Business 2.0 Article, Sony is making big bucks from EverQuest, to the tune of $5M per month.  At a 40% profit margin that's not bad at all! [Business 2.0]


5:14:56 PM    

Information About Honeypots and HoneyNets: The Honeynet Project is pretty cool!  It's a non-profit group of security heads sharing information about how to snoop on the badguys to see where they are and how they work.
5:01:32 PM    

Fire up the Pie Canon!  Microsoft is at LinuxWorld: I dodn't quite know what they are up to, but Microsoft has a nice big booth at LinuxWorld.Are they spying?  Are they pretending to be nice guys?  Are the preparing to embrace and extinguish?  Time will tell.  [Wired News]
4:31:07 PM    

Microsoft to begin selling WiFi Gear:  C|NET news reports that Microsoft is building 802.11b wireless home networking products within the same hardware division that creates keyboards and mice (hmmm, some of their best products, btw). This probably denotes a shift in Microsoft's rumored policy to only certify 802.11a/b combo cards with their OS; if they're going to be selling 802.11b access points, they're going to have to certify drivers for those devices as well.  Combining this with their plans to use PEAP, this looks like another stab at closing out every device that doesn't run a Microsoft OS and use Microsoft identity infrastructure.  Beware!
4:22:13 PM    

Severe IE flaw undermines SSL security, expert says. Signed certificates can easily be used for a different domain. Why?  Because nobody was paying attention in Redmond...again.   [InfoWorld: Top News]
4:20:36 PM    

500 Foot Dust Devil Caught on Tape: It's like a tornado but without the death.  A local TV station nabbed this kinda cool footage.
4:19:53 PM    

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Yawning: Ever wonder why we yawn?  Why they are contagious?  Why just reading about yawning makes you do it right now?  If so, check out this Scientific American Article.
4:30:44 AM    

Don't roll the credits just yet 
  Lisa Rein points to this piece on college radio stations being forced off the Web by the new CARP regime.
  She also urges listeners to support the stations that are sticking it out.
To dim with faint praise 
  The significant news in this Times piece about blogs is that Cameron Marlow, creator of Blogdex, says their number "has probably passed the half million mark."
  It's clear the author isn't on top of her material here. Otherwise she wouldn't write "And while most online harangues presumably lack the public profile and scathing eloquence of history's most redoubtable pamphleteers..."
  Presumably? Well, I guess 500,000 looks like a pretty big haystack.
[Doc Searls Weblog]
3:26:10 AM    

Looking for More Gotch: One artist I have been doing some research on lately has been Thomas Cooper Gotch.  I have managed to find a number of quite excellent Romantic style paintings by him (though would love to see more!) but I found one of a rather different style, much more reminiscient of later art nouveau designs below called The Messenger.  Does anyone have any other examples of Gotch work in this style?


3:11:17 AM    

My Latest Home Networking Travails:  It looks like my fancy home network is having some trouble.  It seems that when I try to FTP files from one local machine to another the performance is ultra-crappy!  My theory is that the PPPoE AC is doing some kind of highly inefficient routing far away or perhaps there's even something further up the line than that causing the trouble.  My friend Dave Ely is not so sure though and here's our little exchange...

> Your little picture says:
>
>     "All computers on this network are running their own PPPoE drivers.
>     We don't do NAT here."
>
> That'll do it.
>
> When running PPPoE, the logical end point for each machine is nowhere on
> your network (it's somewhere out past the ATM cloud in most cases). That
> means that every packet from machine A to machine B has to go out and
> come back. Instead of being limited by your normal downstream pipe (384k
> or so), you get limited by your upstream pipe (in the ball park of 128k,
> could be worse).

The problem is that it isn't anywhere even CLOSE to that fast.  It's more like 12-14K with nasty long latencies.

> Yucko. NAT may not be ideal, but it's better than this arrangement.
> Worst case, I get limited by the stupid AirPort (11,000k).

Well, I have considered adding a NAT/802.11 AP to my little constellation here so I can use my iPaq wireless stuff and perhaps at some point rig up some kind of car audio hard disk MP3 refreshing system so I could keep my car system loaded up with tasty tunes and perhaps someday even audio captured from my PVR (since a lot of what I record is talking heads stuff where the video is superfluous) without any wires or hassles.  There's not a PPPoE driver available for an iPaq that I am aware of though...have you ever heard of such a thing?

> You do realize that using ftp under these circumstances is an invitation
> to get hacked, since I assume you've left it open to anyone with the
> right username and password.

Yeah, I know but I have it locked down pretty tight and I only run the daemon when I have something to do.  That said, the hackers sure do find open FTP ports fast!  Within 15 minutes I had bad guys trying to log in.  To no avail though from what I could see.  The GuildFTPd guys seem to care at least a bit about security and I shut every door and window I could see.

I was a little surprised though that there aren't a ton of freebie file transfer utilities out there at Download.com or whatever.  I suppose I could use something like PC Anywhere or something, but I imagine that would be even worse since it's a lot heavier protocol under there.

> If I'm way off base here, hopefully Mark will slap some sense into me.

Well, you are certainly right that an all-PPPoE setup like I have is far from ideal for talking from one local machine to another (something I rarely want to do anyway), but it shouldn't be as bad as this is.

--Brian


2:24:02 AM    

And Now, Direct from Cuba:  Fans of Goodart.org may know that for a while I was searching for a good image of William Bouguereau's Dawn, and not I have found one! Previously, I only had a black and white image of it, and the original was in the hands of Fidel Castro. I don't know who got this scan or how they got it, but I'm glad they did.


1:12:24 AM    

Here's Another Design Possibility: A more realistic rendering like this might be cool looking, but has two drawbacks.  One, that it is becoming "erily real" and therefore perhasp a little distracting.  The other is that rendering everyone to look like this will take a lot of time that we don't have.  Remember, we aren't Disney!


1:07:43 AM    

So Do Stranded Astronauts:


12:33:31 AM    

Afghans Can Think Different Now:


12:27:04 AM    

In our previous episode...

In the past I have posted photos of my biking adventures at my website.  In the future I'll pop them in here instead/too.


12:21:17 AM    

Oh, and these too: Here are some other sketches..


12:18:06 AM    

New 3D Character Designs Under Way:  It seems like almost everyone who sees the great 3D artwork always asks why we don't at least consider using 3D characters instead of 2D ones, so we have started working a little bit on coming up with some re-designed characters that would look good and be economical to produce.  It wouldn't make sense to just make 2D versions of the 2D designs since those were created in order to look good and be cheap to produce with traditional drawings, not because they were somehow platonically ideal.  So here are a few examples that seem to be headed in the right direction...


12:05:24 AM    


© Copyright 2002 Brian Yoder.



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