Secret Force

April Showers

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Thanks to BraveNewCode, the site is now smartphone-ready, and you can easily browse and read when visiting from your iPhone, Blackberry or other smartphone.

I was just doing some stumbling around today and found a few nifty sites. Here’s some random examples of coolness from Cyberspace:

Fractal Lab: Here, you can play around with fractal art without having to download a program onto your computer. Just create the fractal right in the web browser. Of course, since fractals are fairly complicated digital images rendered using algorithms, push the settings too high and your browser and/or computer might freeze, depending on the badassery (or not) of your particular system. I created this image while playing around:

Fractal Lab

B-Rhymes: This is a handy tool for poets or song writers. Plug a word into the search, and the site returns words that rhyme but those that might not be so obvious. Unless a person is trying to write a terrible poem or song, for instance, one probably should not rhyme “fun” with “sun.” This search returns more uniquely crafted rhymes. For instance, I entered “stereotactic” and got such gems as “peripatetic” (Consequently, this is my screen name in Counter Strike: Source with one letter variation), “extragalactic” and “bacteriostatic.”

Flickr Related Tag Browser: This is a different kind of browser that works within a more spatial context, grabbing images based on whatever word a person enters into the search field. I put in the word, “poo,” and here is a screenshot of the result:

Flickr Related Tag Browser

Each of the words in the white rectangles can be clicked to get their respective search results.

And my favorite of the day …

Conflict History: This site offers an interactive map that traces all the battles and conflicts on the planet dating back to B.C. The timeline at the bottom is scrollable, and when loaded, the battles for the particular time periods are highlighted in red and more information is available for each of them. The first war that I could find was the Kurkshetra War, dating back to 2993 B.C.

Conflict History

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a couple weeks, but the Google Chrome browser comes with a slew of add-ons, called “extensions,” to enhance and make users’ browsing experience more productive. One of the more unique and aesthetic extensions is called Cooliris, which is sort of a visually pleasing way to browse the Internet. Once installed in Chrome (which takes only seconds), users see a large menu to the left with items ranging from “Photos of the Day” to “News” to “Sports” to “Movies and Trailers” to “Games” and more. Once a menu item is clicked, the user is then able to scroll through items of interest in sort of a visual vortex or a tunnel-esque collage. To see what I mean, here is a screenshot:

Screenshot

Items scroll from left to right or vice versa and users can use the mouse to cycle through the selections. Clicking on a picture or news item of interest takes a person to the actual website. For the record, I highly recommend Google Chrome for general Web viewing. It has proven, at least to me, to be quite fast (faster and less glitchy than Explorer), although, since the code for many websites is written with the assumption that most people use Explorer, certain features within websites may not work in Chrome. I’ve found such cases to be rare.

Whereas Bill O’Reilly has his “The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day,” I present the first installment of “El artículo más loco del día” (titled in Spanish for no reason whatsoever, other than for my own amusement: the craziest item of the day), in which I will attempt on a daily basis, as much as possible, to bring to light a piece of news that is, in my mind and in some way, nuttier than a fruit cake on Christmas.

And here’s the primer elemento.

Facebook, at it happens, is attempting to become more ubicuo than it already is (I will also, occasionally slip into Spanish occasionally, at my leisure and for my pleasure, so keep the English-Spanish dictionary handy). According to this article, the social networking hub is attempting to — sit down for this one — trademark the word, “face.”

Aaron Greenspan, who is opposing the move, said that he had a hand in developing Facebook. 

“If you search the patent database, there are thousands of marks that contain the word ‘face,’” Greenspan said. “I understand where Facebook is coming from, but this move has big implications for my company and for others.”⁽⁽¹⁾⁾

Henry Sneath, a patent and trademark lawyer in Pittsburgh, Penn., doesn’t seem confident in Facebook’s chances of success in trademarking the word.

I’d bet against “face” being awarded to Facebook. You cannot overtake the use of a generic word people use in everyday speech.

The same, I can only imagine, would apply to “book,” lest we are, in the future, relegated to referring to constructs that resemble former books as “written works of significant length, bounded and packaged as a cohesive whole.” “Book” seems like a more workable modelo.

1. http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/27/technology/facebook_trademark_face/ [↩]

My first foray into the Internet was at some point around 1997-98, when I gained access at Lander University and obtained my first e-mail address from Hotmail, which is still my main address, consequently.

As it turns out, at the time, less than 5 percent were using the Internet in South America, most of Europe and Asia. Today, with the exception of parts of Africa and Asia, 31 percent or more are online.

The BBC recently released the interesting, interactive maps detailing the spread of the Internet across the world from the late 1990s to the present. Today, an astounding 298,000,000 folks are currently on the Internet  in China, as opposed to 230,630,000 in the U.S. Here’s a screenshot from the 2008 data:

Credit: BBC

And here’s another graphic on the workings of the Internet and some data on Internet users worldwide:

Credit: BBC

Yesterday, Steven Jobs introduced Apple’s next big thing, the iPad, which is basically and iPhone without the phone (and if it actually was a phone, that would be hilarious) and a laptop without the horsepower or the keyboard. And here’s the bizarre-looking device that Jobs and Co. will try to convince us we can’t live without:

The New York Times

Of course, at this point, Apple’s propensity to introduce new gadgets has gotten ridiculous, and I’m sure Jobs has someone staying up late figuring out how to create this device:

As The Onion also reports, Jobs already lost a bunch of sleep on the iPad. He must have had a tough time presenting the iPad to reporters and tech geeks in San Francisco with all that work from the night before.

CUPERTINO, CA—Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last minute, a frantic Steve Jobs reportedly stayed up all night Tuesday in a desperate effort to design Apple’s new tablet computer. “Come on, Steve, just think—think, dammit—you’re running out of time,” the exhausted CEO said as he glued nine separate iPhones to the back of a plastic cafeteria tray. — The Onion, Jan. 27, 2010

Ok, so Tuesday night, my computer seemingly went the way of the dodo. In short, the lesson learned is this: though I highly recommend the program, Ad-Aware, be careful when “cleaning” problems found on your computer. It will, apparently, assume you know what you are doing when you click “remove all” problems and allow you to toast your hard drive’s boot sector. I like to pretend I know what I’m doing some of the time when it comes to computers, but I made the mistake of lackadaisically clicking through to remove a certain number of files with issues. But on restart, the operating system did not come back up. The fans were running and the motherboard kicked on, but no boot.

Thus, begins my 2-3-hour-per-night journey inside the case, removing hardware, replugging, swiping the CMOS, replacing the power supply with another … all such annoying, tedious stuff. As frustration mounted, I finally posted the problem to fixya.com, and within a few minutes, I had a couple ideas of what could be the problem. One person suggested that Ad-Aware had (without warning me) deleted files in the boot partition, thus rendering the hard drive a nice, shiny rectangular object, but otherwise useless. For some reason, the BIOS, or anything for that matter, wouldn’t load using the current MOBO and set up, so I found an old computer I had laying around and stuck the hard drive in question in there.

I remembered I had an old EZ Install Boot Disk, and this other computer just so happened to be ancient enough to have a 3.5 floppy drive. So, after a couple ill-fated attempts, I finally managed to format the hard drive, insert the Windows XP CD (Yeah, from 2002) and start over. Once Windows was on the computer, I wanted to test the hard drive out in the newer machine.

Here is my ill-fallen machine on the right. The old one is pictured on the left.

Once sick computer, right, side-by-side the old, grizzled savior with entrails falling out

So I plugged the HD back in and nothing. I then guess that, while it could be a video card or MOBO problem, I really didn’t think so at this point (or at least hoped not). So, I tried changing out the power supplies in the two machines, and lo and behold, it started up like a charm. I then proceeded to insert my other hard drive, and that didn’t go as well. The computer recognizes the drive, but it currently says “access is denied” when I try to access the folder with all my stuff in it. This was the important drive with the mp3s and other documents that I don’t want to lose. So, I’m still working on that. Worse comes to worse, I’ll get a recovery application and break into the drive Cell Block C-style, but hopefully that won’t be necessary. Now, I have to download iTunes and try to get all my music back in listenable form. Luckily, before this happened, I had backed up my music library to an external drive, and it, hopefully, sits peacefully in waiting.

As a frequent browser of The Atlantic magazine’s Web site, today I happened across James Fallows’ blog. Fallows is a well-known, heralded writer and reporter for the print edition, and like most everyone else who takes up the pen, he’s hit the blogosphere.

In a recent post, he highlighted a tool for assessing which words were used more frequently in presidential inaugural addresses. The site does most of the work for us, and lists each president’s speech straight from Washington to Obama, but it would be an interesting study for someone to perform an indepth analysis of the 44 addresses and the word choice down through the generations. Perhaps someone already has. Anyway, the tool behind this idea is something called Wordle, which gives us a visual representation of the most oft-uttered words of any text. The words used the most are bigger, while the least-used words appear smallest in the computer-generated model. To have some fun, go here and enter or cut and paste some text. You can hit the “Randomize” button for different appearances or use the “Layout” and “Color” options to change them yourself. Going back to the previous idea about inaugural addresses, here is Washington’s quite brief address visualized,

and here is Obama’s, rendered in the same font and style for comparison:

Also, here are a few of my own posts, rendered in different styles. The following creations are rather “tame” versions, all on a white background, but some other designs are more intriguing. Here are three of mine. They link to the original post:

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As you will see, I have a made some minor to changes to the blog. I attempted to make a rather significant change, by adding a plugin called “IntenseDebate” to the server, but when I did, most the sidebar that you see to the right vanished. As I was unable, on a couple attempts, to rectify the situation, I simply deactivated the new plugin and carried on. In its defense, had the plugin not affected other aspects of the site, I would very much had advocated it, as it allowed for comment threading and feedback on particular posts. It would have given me and users more control, but alas, it screwed things up pretty severely, so it’s disabled for now.

I did, however, add a quotes collection widget to the sidebar, and will be adding to it as I see fit. There are quite a few — OK, probably hundreds — of quotes in books that I own that I will have to hunt for and dig out, but for now, I’ve supplied 70 or so that will randomly rotate on each visit to the site. Also, the footer, all the way at the bottom, is no longer brown (an aesthetic I always detested, but never addressed until now) and is black, which matches the rest of the site. Also, the nonsensical thing at the bottom has been replaced by a copyright statement by me, which should have been there all along, saying that all of this mind-blowing writing (I trust you can very well hear the sarcasm in that statement) is, indeed, my own and protected by law.

Oh, yes! My Twitter tweets (For real, I really hate saying or writing the word “tweet” to mean anything other than what birds do) but my daily, maniacal musings are archived there on the sidebar, fed from Twitter. And that’s it! I appreciate any and all who have been reading and commenting. Please continue if you see fit. Suffice it to say: more rabble-rousing to come!

Peace.