Random Brain Dump

Here’s a video clip of a DUI stop between a demanding officer and a very talented drunk. It’s hilarious!

Update 9/13: A co-worker informed me that this is from Comedy Central’s Reno 911.

Wikipedia is one of the most successful social experiment on the web. It is a wiki-based encyclopedia that is totally open. Any visitors can contribute by posting or editing articles. This collaborative effort results in a collective brain dump of the web community. It’s free, dynamic, and supports many languages. And it thrived. It is surprising to many including yours truly, how successful it has became since it is recently launched several years ago. It goes to show the spirit of the community.

I personally find the site extremely useful. With unceasing edits from the community, the promise is that not only content is free but it’s also more up-to-date than traditional encyclopedias. I certainly find this to be true when looking up technical stuffs. Type in AJAX and it spews out a list of all the entries including Ajax the cleanser and Ajax the new way for web development.

I had wondered how expansive is Wikipedia. I don’t use it enough to get a good feel for that. I suppose folks who do research for a living can attest to whether it’s comprehensive. Personally though I am impressed with it.
The first time I really use Wikipedia for real research was when I was reading Vietnamese history. I wanted to know more about several Vietnamese generals and a poet that I came across in my reading. I wasn’t surprised that Google fails to turn up much links to these obscure names. I tried Wikipedia and voila, there were several write-ups on these ancient Vietnamese military figures. Information not available anywhere else. It blew me away…

As with any open project, one wonders about its quality. Since anyone can edit, one has to be concern about the accuracy of the posts. Without traditional editors, it’s all too easy to post inaccurate information.

In the case of John Seigenthaler (pictured), the issue becomes false information. Seigenthaler is a journalist and served in JFK’s presidential cabinet in the ‘60s. The 78 year old man wrote an article expressing his outrage when he discovered an article about him on Wikipedia suggesting that he was involved with the assasination of JFK. 

It’s “internet character assasination”, according to Seigenthaler. When he tried to track down the anonymous author, he was told by Wikipedia’s founder that it’s virtually an impossible feat thanks to federal laws that protect online companies. The article since removed and Wikipedia now requires registration for posting new articles (no registration required for edits of existing articles however).

Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as flawed and irresponsible. The incident represents more than just vandalism. It illustrates the problem with online information. The take-away lesson is that one needs take care when evaluating information posted online regardless of the source. I am sure that there’re other mi-sinformation incidents like this on Wikipedia. Hopefully, they’re exceptional.

That may not mean much to victims like Seigenthaler, but it illustrates that dynamism of Wikipedia; it is self-correcting, however belated. Evil deeds like this one will be corrected by the good deeds of the community. In the end, netizens have to bank on the goodness of the community, that the good will triumph over the vicious.

I been using my camera for about a year now and now I shopping for new lenses. There are just so many lens on the market, each is designed with compromises based on laws of optical physics. It’s not an easy task shopping for the best buy. I discovered the forums on dpreview.com make me even less decisive; these opinionated folks just go back and forth endlessly.

I found this a Canon EOS FAQ to be extremely helpful. It’s just non-nonsense, comprehensive and up-to-date. It’s a beginer’s FAQ so it’s easy read too.

This site details the timeline of vaious graphical user interfaces, starting with Xerox’s Alto in 1973. The first GUI desktop I started to play around with is GEM, pictured here, for the Commodore 64. The major problem with these early environments was speed– GEM was darn slow, to the point that it was not usable on a daily basis. Too taxing for the hardware of the day, I guess…

The NeXTStep operating system really caught my eyes when I first saw it. I probably stopped by the UCLA computer store at least once a week just to play with it. Unfortunately, NeXT systems were way too expensive for most people. Like most, it wasn’t until Windows 3.0 that I began to use a graphical O/S. Bill Gates’s gotten us line & sinker since 1990 didn’t he?

Recently, I’ve been eyeing the Mac OS, considering getting a Mac mini for Katelyn ever since Apple announced them. Might just get one this xmas…

This site showcases photos taken by tossing your cameras into the air. A novel way to take photographs, that’s for sure. One would expect randomness, but the motion generated some pretty intricate patterns. I wonder how many photos you get on average though before that inevitable day when the camera gets splattered on the ground. 🙂

So after gorging all the Thanksgiving food moms slaving hours over, what are some nice things we can do for all the sweet moms out there holiday? How about these 10 things to do for mom’s PC this Thanksgiving? Easy stuffs and sounds like a good idea to me.

Well, the Lams are heading down to sunny L.A. for Thanksgiving. The kids will get to visit their aunties, cousins & grandmas. My mom doesn’t use a computer so I guess I’ll do them for my sister’s PC instead…

Have a safe & happy Thanksgiving everyone.

There’s a lot of talk about web 2.0 these days. The term means different things depends on the context, but most often it means the “new” way of developing web applications. The buzz word these days in web development is AJAX, and no it’s not a toilet cleaner. 🙂

The acronym was coined by Jesse James Garrett’s classic article, but it was Google that helped made it popular with their implementation of Google Maps & Google Suggest . The biggest promise AJAX brings is added interactivity. For example, AJAX enables fetching data behind the scenes to minimize server requests. It also suppose to enable things like drag & drop. The funny thing is that it’s not anything new. It’s just a new application of existing technologies. Goes to prove that you don’t always have to re-invent the wheel.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out this nice collection of 10 AJAX links.

I’ve installed a rich WYSIWYG HTML editor on the system this morning. No more entering HTML tags when posting comments. The editor is an open source implementation called TinyMCE and it’s 100% Javascript. It enables you to visually format text, specify colors, create lists, insert images/flash and creating tables. It even includes a dialog for inserting emoticons!

I did some quick testing on IE & Firefox and everything seems to check out ok. I expect Opera and event Safari on Mac OS to work okay as well.Your browser needs to enable Javascript to get the rich editor. If disabled, you just get the normal simple text editor.

Please let me know if you’re running into problems posting comments (let me know the OS & browser you’re running too).

If you’re like several people I know who are currently considering running your own blog, check out this smackdown of 3 blogging systems: WordPress, MovableType & TextPattern.

I’ve only use 2 of the three. After a few years running rexlam.com on MovableType I stopped using it for two reasons. First, I don’t like the new complex licensing. The free version is restrictive. Second, I was inundated with comment spams which requires hours of maintenance a month, despite various anti-spam plugins I tried. I switched over to WordPress this summer and so far am happy with it. WordPress is easier to use but is also easy to hack around. One thing I also like is WordPress generates its pages dynamically, as opposed to MovableType which I was required to rebuild the site from time to time.

Even Fox Trot is getting on Sony for their DRM debacle: