Greta

Greta
Originally uploaded by --Mike--

At Noran's request, I took some photos of Greta, or newest cat. I like this one the best. I used a flash off to the side.

How not to market - Apple flubs it again

I find it amazing that a company with as much marketing savvy as Apple doesn't have common sense enough to actually provide a video feed of their new iPad announcement.

This is 2010, Apples products make it possible for anyone to stream, and yet they can't do it themselves?

FAIL

Big Blue Button

I've been trying out Big Blue Button which is a very nice open source conferencing system. It seems to do everything we need. The virtual machine download makes it dead simple to get going, as we already have VMware ESXi to run it against. The tutorial videos make it easy too.

I love open source stuff. 8)

Comments and trust

I occasionally vent in this blog (as the 10 or so regular readers know well)... recently after venting about the deceptive nature of DimDim conferencing software, I was left a comment suggesting I try our something called RHub.

RHub doesn't specify much about what it really does on their web site. It gives lots of features, but no technical details about how it actually works. This does not sit well with me, so I

The post had no actual links in it, so that was a plus.

The author of the comment had her address pointed towards The Social Robot, which has a lot of ads on it, but I gave the benefit of the doubt.

Kelsey appears to be a real person.... http://thesocialrobot.com/author/kelsey/

As near as I can tell, she's not trying to push the product in question.

But... you really can't tell these days... can you?

http://searchengineland.com/author/kelsey-childress/

Oh the angst of it all.

If she had just said what the non-profit she works for is... it might be easier...

Memepedia - organizing the worlds memes

While Google aims to organize the world's information... I've got a smaller goal... to organize the world's ideas... it's memes.

I set up Memepedia as an experiment to see what can be build to index ideas. Just as wikipedia attempts to set up an authoritative encyclopedia, I thought it should at least be possible to set up the same type of thing, but for ideas.

Wikipedia limits the discussion to facts... there are often many aspects of things related to an idea. There are proponents, opponents, criticism, and many other valuable things to be added, all of which are pretty much absent from Wikipedia.

I value the community editing aspect of Wikipedia, and I thought this might be a very good way to do things.

I've had a bit of a learning curve to get it up and running, but even so, the investment is fairly trivial. I don't expect to make any money off of this, but I would like to see the idea take off.

Excel - Show empty text boxes

I've recently had some trouble with Excel sheets containing empty, but spurious text boxes. They would show up as unwanted random lines disrupting output. Copy and paste the code below into the VBA editor, it will make each of the text boxes 20x20 pixels which should make them big enough to spot and remove.

Sub ShowEmptyTextBoxes()
  Dim shp As Shape
  Dim sLoc As String
  For Each shp In ActiveSheet.Shapes
    With shp
      If (.Type = msoTextBox) Then
        If .Width < 2 Then
          .Width = 20   
          .Height = 20
          ' .Delete     
        End If
      End If
    End With
  Next
End Sub

If you want, you could also just delete them... uncomment out the .Delete statement by removing the leading ' mark.

EmDrive as velocity measurement device?

If I read the theory page correctly at the EMdrive site, you might be able to use a properly constructed tapered EMdrive cavity to sense absolute velocity simply by measuring the Q of the cavity and working backwards.

A balanced pair would probably be easier to get going.

I'm going to investigate the amount of work involved in doing this.