Writings

Things that I spent too much time figuring out again today with OpenOffice

• Tools -> AutoCorrect .... - to turn off all those replacement tables which make your Unix commands in a presentation all go funny

• OpenOffice "automatic colors" are anything but, as they don't realize you have a black background, and choose horrible defaults

• To fix this do the following:

• Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Appearance

• Modify link color to something like yellow

• Modify document background to black (so you can see when you edit)

• Save as some other profile, as this will affect all documents, including text ones

Now my life with open office is a bit better. :)

You can see Susan and I caught in the light on the top left of the picture at the Jonathon Coulton show in New York. Thanks to snipeyhead for posting a whole set of images to flickr. This was during one of the songs where Kristen Shirts Ukulele Army was partaking, which means probably Creepy Doll.

It was truly an amazing show. The fact that we got Curl during the second encore was awesome. I'm definitely going to catch more of JoCo's shows in the future.

Update: A complete set list, plus lots of videos of the show are on the JoCopedia.

Here's what my delicious links look like via wordle:

I'm amused, and love visualizations like this.

Through dave hansen's blog I found the CHDK project, which creates custom Canon camera firmware that adds a lot of features to existing cameras. While I've only had this loaded for a day, I'm really psyched with the results so far.

It immediately meant that I got RAW support, an OSD battery sensor showing % left, exposure settings, and this zebra mode thing that let's you know when you've maxed out the CCD, and where specifically is the issue. The procedure to add it is pretty simple, and it's breathed new life into my SD500, which has seen a lot of good days with me.

I get really excited when devices evolve and improve after you have them. My Logitech Harmony Remote, XBMC on my old xbox, and now my Canon camera all fall under that heading. This also guaruntees that I'll only buy Canon cameras that support this in the future. This kind of freedom is hard to give up. :)

Mo Hax and I have started a weekly effort to gather up some of the IBM internally created OpenSim / Second Life content and contribute it to OpenSim as stock content. As OpenSim approaches the 0.6 release, it would be good to have some more reasonable stock content included for those people that aren't Second Life Heads, and have huge inventories of their own stuff sitting on their disks. The results of week one was a single handshake animation, and a lot of understanding on how our stock content system works, and how it should be changed to make it easier to contribute to it.

Yesterday, in between builds and meetings, I decided to refactor a few LSL scripts I had that used unique OSL functions that let you dynamically create textures on objects, both from text drawing commands, and from images of the internet. Those are all now in the OpenSim Library, and accessible for anyone in world. They are under the same license as OpenSim, so do what you will with them. :) (Note: I've found the client caches the inventory trees, so you'll need to clear cache before they show up.)

The scripts contributed yesterday are as follows:

• osTextBoard - a text board I wrote to do agendas or note taking in world. Modify the script, hit save, and you get the content in your text board texture. Multiple font sizes, colors, and names are used.
• osWeatherMap - a 3 panel cycling weather map for US weather. This is inspired by the work nebadon did on osgrid.
• GrafittiBoard - Justin Casey's GrafittiBoard (as seen on osgrid), which is similar to text board, but has an llListen hook so that if you talk on channel 43 it displays it on the board.

Consider all of these as launch points to more complex things. But, they'll at least give people a flavor of what is possible. And you'll get it with every opensim build.

A friend of mine pointed me at Live Maps last night, which is basically microsoft's google maps. It looks basically exactly like google maps, so I wasn't sure why he sent me there.

Then he said "Find your house, and click Bird's Eye view."

Ok. The results are impressive. It's a lot higher res than the aerial, and more current. I wish they told you the date o nthis things, as I'd find it facinating. I have some ideas by what's laying around in our yard that this is late March / Early April last year.

I'm still sorting out how I'm going to do photos in the future, as the old photo album is pretty much under decay, and my interest in the old workflow for publishing has waned. On the viable options from, Smugmug looks like an early leader here, largely because their albums don't look like poo, and they have a web services API that I can write some ruby code against (at least once they open their API key for signup again.)

I just uploaded the bulk of my pictures from our India trip as a test case. Feedback is appreciated from readers here, especially those that actually tended to show up mostly to see pictures. :)

So, it's now been confirmed. We had a lightning strike on the dish at the house. That piece of cable was found by the tech while fixing our dish. He took the original home with him for an office souvenir, as I don't think he really believed me that the house got hit by lightning when I first told him.

When I got home tonight, things seemed a bit off, and I couldn't figure it out to begin with. Pretty soon I realized that a lot of electronics were acting up. While a hard power reset fixed some of them, others (like our satellite receiver) didn't recover so well. Given the storm we'd had, I decided to have a look around for a tree that had been struck. While I was out there, I noticed that one of our satellite dishes seemed to have bits hanging off of it. I know there was hail around here today so it could have been that instead.

After some resets, and digging, the comprehensive list of broken items in the house is listed below:

• Dish Network Receiver - HDMI is toast, and even over the RF to the TV downstairs it appears that it's getting no satellite signals
• 5 port gigE switch - plug it in and no lights come on and it just gets hot
• 2 ports in the other 5 port gigE switch - 1 port that is now dead was the Dish Receiver port
• the WAN port on my FIOS router
• the gigE port on my desktop

I had another 10/100 card to throw in the desktop, and it's back up now. Playing port plugging got enough bits working downstairs. My openwrt router came up like a champ and got me back on the internet. So the damage amounts to about $100 worth of stuff I need to replace, plus whatever the story turns out to be with Dish (who is coming out of Thursday to do the service call). I'll try to get some pictures up on the damage, and I really should get up on the roof to see if there is any other damage up there, but that's going to require a day of not rain.

I've been listening to The World is Flat on audio book, as part of my summer run through of popular non fiction of the last couple of years. One phrase really struck me on the way home, which was the assessment by Brian Behlendorf that

"software is lettuce, not gold"

Software is both a commodity and perishable if not consumed in a timely manner. For the doubters out there, check out the ranks of abandoned software on sourceforge.net some time. My proud collection of shirts from software companies that don't exist any more is a less compelling, though more close to home, reminder of that fact.