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MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

Satelite Imagery

There appear to be two non-government-owned companies providing satelite imagery: Space Imaging and upstart DigitalGlobe (yeah, like they’re not both upstarts). DigitalGlobe is working hard to make friends with the media and regularly offers timely images of events, disasters, and wars to them. For the public, they offer some more scenic shots, like this one […] » about 200 words

Casey Bisson

Jeffrey Veen Gives Presentation Advice

In Seven Steps to Better Presentations, Jeffrey Veen acknowledges the complaints against PowerPoint, but explains that the real problem is “bad content delivered poorly.”

His seven points have a lot more detail that what I’m quoting here:

  • Tell stories.
  • Show pictures.
  • Don’t apologize. Ever.
  • Start strong.
  • End strong too.
  • Stand. Away from the podium.
  • Pause.

My own opinion is that Veen and Tufte would agree more than they disagree. Tufte too, for example, suggests using PowerPoint to show pictures. Tufte goes on to suggest presenters should offer their audience hand-outs with detailed information that can’t be represented on a PowerPoint slide, and I wonder what Veen’s thoughts on that are.

Casey Bisson

Tips To Flag Designers (Vexillographers?)

The folks at the North American Vexillological Association get excited about flags. Yeah, I had to look up Vexillology too. Anyway, they’ve got a 16 page how-to about designing a flag, for “your organization, city, tribe, company, family, neighborhood, or even country!” Their advice centers around these five rules of flag design: Keep it simple […] » about 300 words

Casey Bisson

Cat and Girl Makes Me Laugh

I can’t get enough of Cat and Girl and this one just hit my funny bone. Thinking of comics, Comic Life makes it easy to lay out your digital photos and add comic-style speech balloons. Looks interesting, though I’m not sure it’s worth $40 bucks. » about 100 words

Casey Bisson

Geolocating Everything

I just added Jonathan Crowe’s The Map Room to my daily read. It was there that I learned that GeoURL is back, and that’s got me thinking about geocoding things again. I spoke of geolocating photos in a previous post, but my interest has broadened. I now want to geolocate my blog posts, I want […] » about 600 words

Casey Bisson

See, When The President Does It, It’s Different, Somehow

It’s a reasonable story: guy gets iPod, buddy puts a few favorite tracks on it, everybody jams happily because they can share their little bits of culture. In a way it’s an extension of the mixed tape so romanticized in High Fidelity, but in another way — the RIAA’s way — it’s probably a copyright […] » about 300 words

Casey Bisson

Modern Day Opium Craze

In a story in the Sacramento News and Review, Peter Thompson writes about his drug use. At 16 he tried making mead, but when that failed he continued to look elsewhere: I began to see the supermarket and drugstore as potential drug dealers. I drank bottles of cough syrup before I knew what dextromethorphan (DXM) […] » about 600 words

Casey Bisson

Apple Finally Unleashes Tiger

Apple announced the availability of Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger Tuesday and is now accepting pre-orders. The product is to be in stores on Friday, April 29 (beginning at 6PM?) and will sell for $129, or $199 for the Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger Family Pack, a five seat household license. Amazon is offering Tiger for $95, after rebate, though the rebate doesn’t appear to […] » about 300 words

Casey Bisson

Our Underequipped Military Forces

A story over at DefenseTech is reporting that four years after the September 11th attacks and during a time when US personnel are involved in armed action on the ground in Arabic speaking states, the military still doesn’t have a plan to train their soldiers in the language. It seems the Pentagon can spend bazilions […] » about 300 words

Casey Bisson

Most CMSs Suck

I’ve been slowly struggling with the question of how to replace pMachine, my CMS engine here. I haven’t really liked any of the alternatives that others I know are using (link link link link), though I’ve been hard pressed to identify exactly what my complaints are. Among the points in Making A Better Open Source […] » about 300 words

Who Doesn’t Want a Caboose?

Perhaps it’s the lasting effects of watching The Station Agent too many times, but I went looking for a place to buy a caboose. They’re big; as much as 50′ long, 16′ tall, and 11′ feet wide. And they’re heavy, perhaps 30 tons. But they can be moved on roads via big trucks and cranes, […] » about 300 words

Casey Bisson

Molecular Visualization in Mac OS X

A while ago I went looking for alternatives to MDL Chime on Mac OS X, as MDL is still choosing not to support OS X. Sure, you can run it in Netscape 4.x in Classic mode, but that’s getting increasingly frustrating. What’s great about the Mac, however, is how many great solutions there are from small developers who take on the “big guys” and do it better. Evidence: Piotr Rotkiewicz’s iMol.

iMol is a free molecular visualization application for Mac OS X operating system. The program is an indispensable tool for chemists and molecular biologists. iMol allows loading molecules using several file formats: PDB, XYZ, MOL2, HIN, CAR, ALC, BIO. The molecules can be saved as PDB, XYZ or BIO files. The BIO file stores all view and rendering settings (e.g. colors, lighting, orientation of molecules). iMol can easily handle both small and large molecules, it can load multiple molecules, move and rotate them independently.

There are more solutions for a bunch of platforms listed at YeastGenome.org. Nine of the listed apps are stand-alone, six can be used as plug-ins, and most (all?) will read PDB files.

Casey Bisson

Declaring Bankruptcy On Old Stories

I often use the MaisonBisson blog as a sort of annotated bookmark list, keeping track of the things that catch my interest for one reason or another, things that I’d like to return to or share. But I often get ahead of myself in identifying the things I’d like to look at further and never […] » about 800 words

Casey Bisson

Does Size Matter?

A while ago I asked a friend why short sentences were so pleasing to read and write. He had no answers, but agreed that brevity is its own reward. Some (though I can find no reference to it) suggest that technological developments have changed and simplified sentence structure by allowing writers to write and revise […] » about 300 words

Casey Bisson

Verizon Wireless’ Wardriving Rig (Can You Hear Me Now?)

It turns out that Verizon (and all the other carriers, presumably) really do go around asking “can you hear me now?” The actual test conversation sounds different (possible source?) and the testing is automated, but there really are people out in the world doing real coverage testing. I guess I naively assumed that it was […] » about 300 words

Casey Bisson

Of Bricks And Progress…

This post is about a couple of things. First, it seems Cory Doctorow has issued DMCA takedown notice to the folks at BoringBoring.org for their parody of Doctorow’s BoingBoing. What nobody knew at the time is that Gakker has also been on the scene, Doing Doctorow parodies, and all. Which is where thing 2™ comes […] » about 400 words

Casey Bisson

The RIAA’s Logic And ‘Declining’ Music Sales

Blogger Mark Cuban listened politely to RIAA chief Mitch Bainwol stumble into the logically fallacious argument that: it was obvious that illegal downloads were hurting music sales. It was obvious because the advent of file sharing coincided with a decrease in music sales. Therefore A lead to B. (I’m quoting Cuban, who’s parapharsing from » about 400 words

Casey Bisson

Archiving RealAudio Streams on Mac OS X

Standard players for RTSP streams like those for RealAudio don’t cache the files they download, meaning they require a net connection to operate. I found an EZBoard forum message that identified HiDownload, Net Transport, OEP-OEE and StreamDown — Windows-only applications that can download RTSP streams and save them to a playable file. But those trick ponies do nothing to help Mac users.

AudioHijack has been around for years now, but it only captures the audio stream as it leaves RealPlayer and heads off to your Mac’s audio output. This works, but it has its own problems. Googling turned up a discussion of what I was looking for, this list QuickTime utilities, and this discussion of how AirTunes and AirPort Express interact. But I found no real answers. Darn.

Casey Bisson

Gas Prices (Finally) Affecting Car Sales?

A Mainichi Daily Times story announced today sales of energy-efficient Japanese cars soar in U.S. Toyota and Nissan both saw 12% sales growth, with Toyota’s Prius sales jumping to 260% their numbers from a year ago. Honda, which usually wears the energy efficiency leader’s hat, saw a nearly 7% increase in sales. Ever prideful, MDN […] » about 300 words

Casey Bisson

Tator-Tot Pizza

So my challenge is to prove that I can be both trite and serious in the same day. Here, Tom chows on tator-tot pizza with ranch dressing and chipotle chile Tabasco sauce. It’s part of the Tator-Tot Pizza set at Flickr. There’s no good reason to make tator-tot pizza, but we had both, plus all […] » about 100 words

Casey Bisson

Serious Saturday

I’ve lost my way a bit and been posting a bunch of trite stories here lately about my kitchen and in my photoblog.

I’m sorry.

I have made a few attempts at serious discourse. If you look carefully you’ll see stories on Grokster, RFID passports, a library conference, a chilling look at the death penalty in Texas. Looking a little further back, you’ll find new stories in the very serious copyrights & intellectual property and politics & controversy categories.

Yes, this Saturday mea culpa might sound a bit familiar. With luck, however, we won’t be seeing another.

Casey Bisson

Can You Eat It?

Food bets seem harmless, but they look funny.

Everybody likes the old “can’t eat four saltines in 60 seconds” bet, and it’s likely that many of these foods would never get eaten except on a bet. Then there’s the story of two guys who took a bet they could eat Ramen noodles — only Ramen noodles — for a month. It’s probably apocryphal, but they story ends with them getting scurvy and giving up.

For all the trouble they can cause, I think bets are one of the great engines of change in society — and they’ve certainly had a positive effect on the advancement of technology. Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, for instance, showed America what the future of cars might be when he set off on the first successful tans-continental road trip on a $50 bet. Sure, he had no experience, but bullheaded foolishness is all part of the game when a bet is on the table.

Update: Some say six or seven is possible, and there’s a strategy….

Casey Bisson