iPhone Gestures

My wife and I have an iPhone. My biggest, and really only, complaint is about how it works as an iPod.

When she is driving and I'm in charge of the music, she says "Next" a lot. You have to press the Home button, then slide to unlock, then press the small Next button all to go to the next song.
(EDIT: As comments noted; also doing double-click the Home button and look to see the Next on the screen too. But still, you've got to look at the screen.)


Hopefully somebody at Apple is listening...add Locked iPhone Gestures.

Let me press the Home button, then "draw" commands with my finger on the "locked" screen. Simple shapes to tell it go to the next song or other commands. If it was me, I'd do a > shape like the button in the UI for next. Two fingers sliding down to do II that would pause. < to go back. I'm sure you could think of more...and it would be awesome.


And while you're at it, when playing an audiobook, the little slider to move back and forth in the book is way too sensative. For a 5 minute song it's OK, but a 2 hour book jumps minutes at a time. Again, you add Gestures. The good old "circling finger" as if I was using an old style iPod would be perfect to scroll forward and backward in the track.

Not what I expected

After spending a lifetime watching cartoons and movies, this is not what I expected to see happen after a fire hydrant was hit by a car.

Cool thing for my Resume

About 2 years ago now, when I was first adding the BitTorrent support to GetRight, I wrote a proposal for how others could do the same combining of HTTP/FTP downloads into a BitTorrent download that I was adding into GetRight.


It's been edited and updated a few times, the original is here:
http://getright.com/seedtorrent.html



As I've been working on other things and not paying attention, it's become a quite accepted standard for BitTorrent clients. All the main ones, including the BitTorrent.com client itself, now do it. Pretty awesome!


I've just written it up in the format for the new "BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals".



I get to add to my resume: "Invented the WebSeed mechanism that has become part of the BitTorrent protocol standards." (Draft in the proposals right now...but a lot of clients have done it.)
http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html

Thoughts on Tech News...MS vs Yahoo

So when Microsoft made its huge bid for Yahoo, was it thinking:

If they take it, great.

If they don't, it will so mess Yahoo up, they'll be sidetracked for months or years and we can overtake them that way. People are starting to sue Yahoo for not accepting. It's created a huge amount of uncertainty for all Yahoo's employees. Hmm.

Creating "AntiImages"

I've no idea if there's an official name for this technique; I called it "AntiImage" when doing it.

The basic idea is overlaying a white/black transparent image file (usually a PNG) over a solid color background. That way a single graphic can change color to match the layout of a website by only using CSS.

My brother had the basic idea first and talked about it here. But his Photoshop skills are far better than mine, so I needed a way to do the same thing with an existing graphic.

I found a couple plugins for paint.net that let me do it in just a few steps. The first is Color Difference to Alpha and the second was Curves+. Install those first. (This would be really hard without something like that color-to-alpha converter!)


Step 1) Open the image in Paint.net, then pick the Adjustments--"Black and White" menu. I started with an image from a set purchased from icons-icons.com
Orginal: to black-and-white version:


Step 2) Set White to be the active drawing color, then choose the Effects--Color--"Primary Color Difference to Alpha" menu. This gives a sort of shadow of the image. I used just the paint bucket tool to fill the area outside the circle with the background color of the web page (white in my case--your web page will need to have solid color background too.)



Step 3) Pick the Adjustments--Curves+ menu. Select Alpha from the drop down at the top, then you can drag around the curve to see how it looks. How you want to change will depend on the original image. For this one, I made it a little less transparent.


Step 4) Use CSS to set the background-color for the IMG tag, then just use the graphic as the image! All these graphics below use the same overlay image. For the website I'm working on, where clients can pick a color scheme to customize it, this lets us use one image that looks good no matter what sort of color scheme they choose.


The graphics are all more subdued than the original and than the background color (which shows around the edges since I'm not an expert with this blog tools CSS/HTML editor)...but the colors match pretty well. (And you could use the CSS :hover to just change the background color to do a mouse-over effect as well!)

More water

Seattle had a huge, record setting storm. Several inches of rain at our house--some of which found its way into the basement.

How does Jacuzzi stay in business?

About 3 years ago, we finished a big remodel on our house, including a nice big tub for two in our bathroom.


Soon after it was finished, I came down after a bath with my wife to find a puddle in the kitchen with water dripping out of the ceiling (right below the tub.)

After several visits from the contractor, the plumber, the special Jacuzzi plumber, and holes in both the ceiling of the kitchen and around the tub, they fixed the leak. Great.

Forward about 9 months. I came down again, to find another puddle. The Jacuzzi plumber returned, another hole in the wall by the tub, but he though he had it fixed. We got in for a bath the next day, but heard a noise. I checked the kitchen and it was like a waterfall. By the time we drained the tub, over 2 gallons had come down into the kitchen. We ran around naked, finding pans to catch the water and every towel to mop up the mess.

After another attempt to fix, the Jacuzzi plumber decided to just have them send us a new tub. That arrived, and they set it up to test in the garage...and none of the electric things worked. I think they made 2 more trips up (they're about an hour drive from our house), with every part they could replace, and still couldn't fix it. So they had Jacuzzi send ANOTHER tub. So at this point, Jacuzzi has shipped 2 giant tubs--they're big, something like 7 feet by 3x3 crates, so must cost a ton. Thankfully it's all been covered by warranties.

The plumber had it shipped to his house, so he could test everything before making the drive to replace it.

Finally, over six months after that drip in the kitchen, we had a working tub. Yeah!


Until last night. We both heard a noise. Fortunately, we'd procrastinated, so the hole in the wall hadn't really been fixed--just the board covering the hole. So I could quickly see it was leaking AGAIN!


How does Jacuzzi stay in business? Their plumbers have visited our house 6+ times; at an hour drive each way. For the initial leak, I know the contractor charged them a lot to fix all the holes in the newly finished house. They've sent 2 extra tubs (at no charge to us, thankfully). The plumber is about to visit again.