dennis yang dot com

Sweet. Tonight was the lunar eclipse. So frikkin’ cool. It was a little foggy, and it took me a little while to figure out how to really take pics of the moon properly… But, about 5 minutes before it hit total, the entire sky cleared up.. and I was able to get a few decent shots of the moon as it got eclipsed by the earth.. I started out with a large aperture, but then figured out that it was a lot better at f/8.0, and a pretty fast shutter, like around 1/30..

I put together a little montage of my best shots, but it’s not at good as this one.. But, for my first lunar eclipse shoot, I think it’s pretty decent…

All the pics are here.

Ok, I guess I should get to sleep now.

For the past few weeks, my computer had been acting more and more sluggish with each day… and I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. I mean, yes, I usually have a ton of windows open, but I kind of need to with the amount of multi-tasking that I do…

I figured that the digital detritus was just building up from over two years of use and my laptop was just in need of a wipe and rebuild.. But, I don’t really have time to do that (nor do we have an IS dept to handle that kind of task)..

So, last night, after a night of sitting around, I awoke to find my laptop in a frozen catatonic state. Ugh. I did a hard reboot, and was horrified to find that it wouldn’t even start up anymore. I turned it off, booted into the IBM restore function, looked around a bit, and then restarted again, and then thankfully it started up again. But, sensing that whatever caused my laptop to zombie was still lurking around, I did a little digging around. My hard disk sure was frag’d crazy, but come on, that couldn’t be the cause of the problems…

I found that whenever I started up Firefox, it used like 208mb of memory… even with just one window open. Hmm.. that’s not quite right. Talking to Mike, his FF only uses like 80mb even when he has like 8 tabs open, so something is definitely not right.. Some googling came up with some fixes that just seemed too drastic to be the right fix, so I dug around my settings for a bit.. And then I found the culprit…

I had set the “Remember visited pages” setting to 999 days. Hmmmm.. could that be it? I mean.. Firefox couldn’t possibly be storing 999 days of my browsing history in memory, could it? Sure, I’ll give it a try… I remember that I changed that cuz it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I set it to 30 days.. and.. VOILA!! Memory usage is now down to 50mb.. Woooohoooo…

Seriously, that setting should come with some sort of warning or something… Anyway, hopefully this post will serve as a warning to others so that I’m not the only one that is shooting myself in the foot.

This should teach me a lesson not to be such a packrat… Speaking of which, I really need to clean out my closet.

This is rad. And by “rad” I mean omg what a super nerd I am.

The Konami Code works on Digg.

And by “works” I don’t mean it gives you 20 lives, but it expands all of the comments, which isn’t the cool thing — but the fact that it doesn’t anything at all is really rad.

Hmmm.. I wonder if the Konami Code works on like ATMs, now that would be super duper rad, for reals.

Woohoo!! I’m now the #6 dennis on google. Is it really, really nerdy to be excited about this?

Don’t answer that.

Woohoo. Tales from my nerdy past. This is my 1993 appearance on the local quiz show, Academic Challenge. I tried to upload this to YouTube, but they have a 10 minute limit, and the other day I decided to try google video, and it worked there..

I remember our strategy for the “Hodgepodge” category was to always pick “Math” because our rationale was that no matter what, we would be able to figure out the answer. But, honestly, that was actually the most stressful cuz I don’t really like math that much, and I’m a little too impatient to sit there and calculate things out… I’m much more of a “don’t think about it too much” trivia answerer..

Anyway… good stuff. Wow. the 90s.. Yay.

Ok.. so I’ve been saying for years now to invest in corn futures.. My reasoning was that as global consumption of beef increases, global consumption of corn will increase (since cows eat a lot of corn) — so, corn prices will continue to rise.

So, we just hit a 10-year high for corn prices. And, I think it’ll continue to rise, because of the beef thing, and now — ethanol is taking off, so that’ll exert even more pressure on corn prices..

Damn, if only I had followed my own advice and actually put my money where my mouth is.

The future isn’t plastics, my boy, it’s in CORN.

Ali and I headed down to the Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight yesterday — along with 1,000 other pillow-wielding people.. It was pretty fun, kind of silly, and very, very feathery. On the Muni ride over, I looked around, and like half of the people heading down to the Embarcadero were holding pillows. C’mon people, you’re supposed to at least try and hide it a little, no? I got there a few minutes before 6, and people were milling about.. At 6pm precisely, the entire plaza erupted into a huge pillow fight, and after about 5 minutes of pillow pummeling, feathers started flying. Feathers were everywhere, it was insane.

So, anyway… my PR folks must be working overtime, cuz I’m in the news again. And, they say that I’m “incredibly attractive.” Well, they said that everyone that went was “incredibly attractive,” but I’ll take it anyway.

Psst. This Wednesday, Justin Hermann Plaza, 6pm.

Pillow Fight.

Yes, it’s Valentine’s Day. Extra points for anyone dressed up as Cupid.

The drive down from SF to our Sunnyvale office today took almost 2 hours (thank god I only have to drive down once in awhile).. Ugh.

So, inspired by the insipid traffic this morning, Masnick and I started discussing the viability of personal air transport.. I don’t think that it’s practically feasible to have personal air transport, in the way that we currently use cars. I just don’t see it. Sure, it’s been in plenty of movies and tv shows, but.. hmm.. just seems too impractical for me. Masnick disagrees.. Yes, I know about the Moller SkyCar, but it’s juuust a little expensive for me right now.

So, we decided to make a long bet (well, not an “official” one, like on the site — our bet is for 1 can of Coke.)..

The bet I initially proposed:
“Personal flying vehicles will be a standard way of transportation within our lifetime.”

But.. then I realized, that in order for this bet to be settled, we would have to be dead — at which point, neither of us would be able to pay the 1 can of Coke. So, that’s kind of silly, so, I revised it to a 50 year bet.

The bet, revised:
“Personal flying vehicles will be a standard way of transportation by February 9, 2057″

Masnick is taking the YES side, and I’m taking the NO.

There. It’s now part of official record.

And yes, this is really, really, really geeky.

Really geeky.

And I wonder why I’m still single.

The latest meme going around is this Blog-Tag thing (you basically list five things that people don’t really know about you, and then “tag” five people to continue the chain). So, I guess it finally made it around to me — Thanks John.

Anyway, here are five things that you may not know about me.

1. Although most people that know me know about my Who Wants to be a Millionaire appearance a few years back, it wasn’t my first appearance on a television game show. In high school, I was on our local television quiz show, Academic Challenge. We came in third place (out of three teams). Ouch.
2. My senior year of college, I worked as a snowboard instructor at the local hill, Greek Peak. Lessons at the time were “free” (included with your lift ticket), and I was only tipped once during the whole season. But, I didn’t really care since I got a free season pass.
3. I got started in networked computing in 1986, when I signed up for an account at the Cleveland Freenet. My friend Ryan and I used to send email to each other and then call each other hours (or sometimes days) later to report when the email arrived. Good times.
4. I dj’ed one radio show with my friend Audris. Mike usually hosted “Ithaska” on WVBR Saturday nights, but he had to study for a prelim or something, so we hosted it instead. I had no idea what I was doing, and when someone called in requesting a “shout-out for Mark”, we obliged by literally shouting out.. “MARK!” on the air. I was never asked to host another show.
5. On February 18, 2000, my friend Korby and I circumnavigated the Bay Area on public transit. It was a non-trivial task to accomplish at the time — the trip took over 12 hours and spanned 10 different public transit systems. Kept abreast of our progress via Blackberry, Pius documented the day online. Six years later, I finally posted the pictures. Korby is also known for instigating the “hey, it looks like we can drive to Alaska” trip.

And.. that’s it.. Now it’s my turn to tag people.. Hmm… Mike, Cherry, Penelope, Jason, and Dana. You’re it!

It’s my favorite time of the year.. hooray for the holidays. “Dennis’ Xmas Mix 2006″ is done and ready to distribute (ask me if you want one), and I’m even almost all done with my holiday shopping..

This Saturday was Santarchy aka Santacon here in San Francisco.. Approximately 500 Santas descended upon Fisherman’s Wharf around noon, and then proceeded to wreak good cheer and mayhem upon the unsuspecting tourists and residents of San Francisco..

After starting off at Hooters, the group wandered up Hyde, and then to the top of Lombard, blocking traffic, of course, as we all meandered down the crooked street. After Lombard, we headed for Washington Square Park, where free beer and hot dogs were distributed (Santas are hungry and thirsty) and a wicked game of Twister was played.. But then.. when a wedding come out of the church on the park, we all mobbed like some sort of wicked swarm of red bees..

After leaving the wedding, we continued to North Beach, where we frequented several NoBe bars, ultimately ending up at good ol’ Larry Flynt’s place… Oh.. good times, good times. It was quite a scene.

Most of my pics are here. (Yah, ahem.. some aren’t posted.)

Wow… so tonight the subject of Geocities came up in conversation, so I decided to see if my old Geocities page was still up… Amazingly, it’s still there… but, the coolest thing that I found was this…

Some sites that Dennis found.

Back in 1995, I worked for a summer at a pharmaceutical company, but my job was to investigate new technologies that could be useful to them. So, I basically spent the entire summer surfing around what was a very young web. And, whenever I found a cool site, I would add it to my list here.. My little list of sites actually got a good amount of visitors (for back then), and I was even named the “Beverly Hills Internet Site of the Day”..

But, the summer ended, and I went back to school, and neglected this list, and went on to spend most of my time at school building cars instead of internets. Ooopsie.

It’s quite amusing to look through this list of stuff… A ton of URLs on here are at .edu domains and live in people’s user directories… Neato. Funny to see the original urls for stuff like Lycos (http://fuzine.mt.cs.cmu.edu/mlm/lycos-all.html), SavvySearch (http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~dreiling/smartform.html), and IMDB (http://www.msstate.edu/Movies/)..

So yah, this list is a little over 11 years old, so most of the links don’t even work anymore…

Well, that was a fun little trip down memory lane…

So.. the fantastic folks over at Shine have this neat-o photobooth in the back that takes your pic and automagically posts it onto flickr.. Yah, it’s kind of geeky.. but what would you expect from a place that is at 1337 Mission… (and if you get THAT reference, then you are truly geeky).

Anyway.. Brian made a kickass timelapse video of the photobooth.

I’m in there somewhere.

So that last post about my crazy sleep schedule got me to thinking… why are we constrained to this whole 24 hours per day, 7 days per week schedule anyway? I mean, our biological clocks run on more of a 25-hour schedule, so the 24-hour day isn’t even what our bodies are dictating..

So, I remember a few years ago, I stumbled upon this proposal of the 28 hour day.. It’s an interesting concept:

Basically, instead of the 24/7 week, you have a 28/6 week (no more mondays!!).. And, the idea is that this schedule maximizes your daylight, non-working hours… It’s a pretty cool idea.. it’s kind of a waste to spend most of the daylight hours (for those of us with day-desk jobs) behind a desk… so, this way, you’re working when it’s dark out 10 hours a day for 4 days, and then you get a 36 hour weekend in the daylight… woohoo!

Anyway.. thanks to Thomas Edison, we no longer have to structure our day around the rise and set of the sun… hooray technology!

I’ve been using the Y! Mail beta since like last September now.. it’s super ajax-y, and they’ve done a lot of great stuff with it.. It’s got a 3-pane (msft outlook-ish) reading UI, and sometimes you forget that you’re in a web application. They’ve even put in a right-click menu! The only thing that I really disconcerting is that the “undo” function with ctrl-z doesn’t work, and since I’ve forgotten that I’m in a web application, I try and “undo” things with the ctrl-z.. Not a huge, huge deal, but still something..

Anyway, Yahoo! has done a fine job with the application, although admittedly, I still somehow prefer the bare-bones utilitarian UI of gmail… and feature-wise, I find the threading view *very* useful (especially since my friends are prone to replying-all). Finally, I find that emails are easier to organize via tags rather than folders.. Ie, many times, an email doesn’t just fit into one folder, and with gmail that’s not a problem.. with Yahoo! (and Outlook, actually), that’s an issue.. you have to pigeonhole.

But, I really like the little bouncy dude that appears when Yahoo! mail is loading slowly.. Granted, performance hasn’t been too much of an issue for me with Yahoo! so it’s been kind of hard to trap Liam, but.. finally I managed to catch him today… And there he is bouncing away on the right.

So.. I was reading Valleywag today, and found this link to MyHeritage, where they have some facial recognition software (supposedly to find people who are related to you, I assume).. Anwyay, the demo they have compares your face with their celebrity database, and has provided me with at least 7 minutes of fun this morning. So, I thought I’d share the results with you…

I uploaded a picture of my brother Andy and me…

Turns out.. we’re none other than Gerard Depardieu and Takeshi Kaneshiro (the dude from House of Flying Daggers)..

Woo.. this is fun.. so I dug around, and just for kicks.. I uploaded an old baby picture of mine…

And… who did I resemble when I was a bouncing, little 1 year old?

David Hasselhoff.

Uh.. yah. Facial recognition software stuff is cool and all, but I guess this one only has about 3,500 celebrities in it — I would imagine for a better match that you’d need a lot more people in it. That said, I’ve been dying to try out Riya — I’m fairly fanatical about tagging all of my flickr photos, so I’m sure I’d be a great test subject for them… C’mon Riya folk, send me a beta login please.

So Andy thinks that radio buttons should turn off when you click on the selected one again… and after playing with this a bit, it’s kind of intuitive…

Pretty cool, eh? To get radio buttons to kind of work like checkboxes, here’s what I had to do..

First, since the onClick event always evaluates a radio button to “checked” when the radio button was unchecked or checked before you clicked (which is a little weird, but I guess it makes sense since any function you call with onClick happens *after* the click, and therefore .checked would evaluate to true) — anyway, I put an onFocus to set the “ischecked” variable, and then used that to determine whether or not to turn the radio button back off…

so, add:
onFocus="javascript:woop(this);" onClick="javascript:woot(this);"
to all the radio buttons… and then add the javascript functions:


function woop(radiobutton) {
ischecked = radiobutton.checked;
}

function woot(radiobutton) {
if (ischecked) {
radiobutton.checked = false;
ischecked = false;
} else {
ischecked = true;
}
}


W00t! Maybe there’s a simpler way to do this, and if there is, lemme know. Happy Geeky Friday.