sent2null space

Turns out my development box had a deeper affliction than the feared power supply fault. I received the new PS and installed it and the computer whimpered in the same way mentioned in the previous post *sigh*. After a longer session of investigation trying to trouble shoot the actual source I've come to the conclusion that it is the worst possible component failure next to the crash of an un backed up hard drive, namely a mobo meltdown. This is second to a hdd failure because at least it can be recovered from, but it requires lots of hardware replacement (essentially a rebuild of the computer).....argh! I am now investigating the parts needed from newegg.com to rebuild the box. Amazing how this happens NOW just when I am days away from deploying my code (now silent on the hdd of this box) to the production servers! Murphy's Law is supreme! The bright side is that I will get to build the more modern box that I was hoping to after the site launch early, this current machine is b

About 5 years ago, I recall noticing the difference in quality between the signals that I received on non cable based tv from say 10 years ago and today's digital cable signals. The main difference lay in the fact that digital tv replaces ghost and snow artifacts for digital pixelization. In the early days I noticed a marked difference in quality as when both signals were at their best , the local cable provider applied enough compression to a signal that various scenes would clearly show the artifacts. The compression used on the digital signals is mostly mpeg format compression which uses a discrete cosine based method to compress luminance but mostly chrominance information to reduce the bandwidth requirements of the signal for transmission. However, cosine based compression is subject to quantization errors and artifacts having to do with the selection of a specific sized quantization kernel for the compression algorithm, for scene data that moves faster than the algorithm can

Intent on finishing the implementation of the new permission token feature into the framework code I was fully engaged yesterday in getting it done hopefully by the middle of this week. That is until a strange occurrence yesterday. As I was at the computer the mouse became unresponsive, I have a periodically flaky KVM switch that some times does this so I switched to one of my other development pc's to see if the KVM was frozen, it was not. I switched back to the main development server and after a few silent expletives , hit the power button as I had no choice. The computer immediaetly began a reboot but at the point of reaching the BIOS screen simply went dead. I was curious but already had a feeling that my computers power supply was in trouble. I rebooted again after first unplugging the power cable from the pc for a few seconds, the machine indicated it was getting power by blinking the power and hdd light, but the hdd light was solid and the screen didn't receive a signal

In the previous post I detailed the roller coaster ride of implementing e commerce enablement to the consumer site that I'll be launching in a few weeks. The service plan options that I provide allow users to manage their own private conference room in the basic "free" configuration, additional plans that require payments allow a user to manage or create multiple rooms. The problem I ran into revolved around how to provide the users the ability to create new rooms in a limited fashion. Originally I thought that the uniqueness of the problem constrained the generality of the solution so that all I needed to do was upgrade the User class to add a new "create room token" which was simply an integer indicating the number of available requests to create a room that the associated user could invoke. This solution however broke the symmetry of the permissions system in that it granted a right that the permissions granted outside of the ken of the permissions system st

Launching a start up is an amazing experience, in the last few months I've written code in many different areas to facilitate the successful and smooth launch to come. As mentioned in previous posts the last step of getting my commercial site up and running involved coding the consumer web site and providing users the ability to browse and select or upgrade to any of the service plan options that my site makes available. In this post , I discussed some of the ways that I was able to efficiently handle problems that consumer sites enabling e commerce run into. Basically, a trade off must be made does the site manage every aspect of the service plans that users purchase by keeping subscriptions? If so where is the subscription information managed? In a proprietary method on the consumer site or is that function off loaded (at cost) to a third party payment processor? In the ideal I would design and build my own payment processing API, get a merchant account for handling credit card

In a recent article at Silicon Alley Insider , a wall street analyst came to the conclusion that Verizon building out a fiber network is a bad idea. I wrote a fast post listing several reasons why the analysis is at best way off the mark. I extract it here but link to the post below. The original article at SAI. The short term (what i call idiot analysis) of a stock always makes me chuckle. If a 15 year wait for return on investment is too long for you Moffet that is you but some investors actually b u y on those horizons. I had to blink at the screen when I read the ending of the article indicating that Moffet thinks the best thing to do now is nothing??? huh??? Like the horse cart manufacturers did as the car came on the scene eh? Where are they now? No, only someone on LSD would do nothing, by acting NOW Verizon does several things. a) They get first mover in marketing the converged service that will be cheaper for them and us, more powerful in terms of bandwidth provisioning, more

As a self trained illustrator and lover of art and art history, I still keep a tab on the works of animators, designers and artists immersed in the digital media that are available to us these days. Recently on a recent surfscapade of the net I discovered the following animation. DAD at work Needless to say the crude art work work perfectly with the animations frenetic style and makes a hilarious little clip. I was so impressed by the title character (which just happens to match an acronym of a very important program in my framework) that I created an illustration of DAD that I plan to put on a T-shirt. I also created versions of DAD with the suit case and hat. Of course only those that have seen this video will recognize the character , sort of an inside joke then to the people that enjoy this type of work. If you are interested in getting a copy of the graphic file (.psd format) to print your own shirt I can send it to you, just send me an email and I'll send it over. I am using

It has been a while since I posted anything, have had a few personal problems that are getting in the way of my normal output and I am very deep into implementing the payment solutions for the site launch (still) I switched to use Amazon payment services instead of Paypal which turned out to be a nightmare, as it stands Amazon integration was only a fraction as formidable and I am almost done with the testing. I'll have more to say about the differences between Paypal and Amazon in a subsequent post. Until then, enjoy the following: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/viewer.php?id=386773&key=BdVqZyXzBtOzdxbStiN2YyNzMxOGY4QjE4MTIrNV9xMGI5ODE7QjE0QlYxOzJWNTJiMDI0ZjArVnFfOTYxbTk5NjUyMDg4OQ%3D%3D A modern classic.