Saturday, December 31, 2005

Making Flock connect to your Blogger/Blogspot web log

Click the feather-pen icon in Flock, and do this when the dialog box appears:

Choose "ATOM API" from the API menu.

Flock will have filled in your blog number already.

For the URL to your blog, enter this:

https://www.blogger.com/atom/5810332

Use your own blog number in place of 5810332 above (that's my number).

Note, the "s" in "https", above! Important! Also, you may be able to use "plant" in place of "www" in the URL above.

Then, flock will ask for the weblog's username and password, so that submitting new weblog entries will work from Flock.

Addendum

Sometimes Flock will lose the URL immediately after this, so it still doesn't work. To check this, go to the main browser window and select "Options" from the "Tools" menu. Click the "Blogging" settings icon. Double click your weblog's name. This brings up the settings about your web log. Notice the URL! You probably have to re-enter the correct https URL as shown above. Don't forget to use your weblog number, not mine. Click "Save".

You probably don't have to, but anytime I make major settings changes like this, I quit out of the browser and re-run it. Flock and Firefox probably don't need this, but it can't hurt. (I learned that from painful experiences with Internet Explorer - forgive me. :) )

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Signal Strength to control Unmanned Craft

There is a need more and more for automated delivery via robotic craft. For example:

The Progress supply ship, which blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, arrived about eight minutes ahead of schedule and hooked up to the research outpost at 2:46 p.m. EST (1946 GMT), NASA's mission control in Houston said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews


Think about that for a moment. When lifting off, ground control needs full control over the spacecraft. But when docking to the space station, the space station personnel need full control over it! So, at what point does one control switch to the other?

I say it should change with distance: the closer it is to a control point, the more strongly the controls at that point can control the unit. For example, as the craft is nearing the space station and a human operator in the spacestation sees it coming, his controls take over control of the ship long before it tries docking. This way the right speed, angle, position, and so forth can be guaranteed. Also, the most responsiveness - time lag with distance can be very harmful in time-dependent precise controlling of things, such as when docking one ship to another, far above earth. A half-second radio delay could yield horrible results, in a place where there's no room for error. Errors in this situation cost millions, if not billions, of dollars.

This would also work for remote-controlled cars on the road, which we definitely will have some day. The metal bumpers on the sides of mountain roads could have radio controls in them, with very close proximity priority; if a remote controlled car got too close to the side wall, the instructions from that side wall being transmitted by radio would temporarily take over control of the vehicle (or influence it), with the instruction "stay away from this point," or "go away from this line or plane". When the car is in the normal driving area, it's too far away from the side of the road for there to be any influence from that signal. But the closer it gets to the edge, the "stronger" that signal is perceived, so the more certain it is to have an affect in the car's decision of where to drive.

The worst-case would be that the vehicle becomes a bumper-car bouncing between one side wall and another, never hitting either; steering powerfully each time it nears one side, plunging it over towards the opposite side.

So - if you see that behavior in the first buggy models of robot taxis that come out, or whatever vehicle is first tested on our roads - you'll know where the idea came from. :)
(A good movie with this kind of robot taxi is one of my all-time favorite movies, Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.




King Kong movie 2005

I just arrived home after seeing the King Kong movie that is in the theatres right now. This is the most amazing movie, in the sense that I could not tell where the computer graphics began and ended. It's so well created, the blending and post-production is just amazing, in every scene. The physics of the giant monkey was really realistic and correct; far better than, say, Jar Jar Binks in the newish Star Wars movies.

I am so glad they chose to reproduce the time era of the original movie, circa 1920's. It would probably have been so much easier to do a "what if King Kong existed today!" movie, with lots of clips of today's Times Square in New York, cars driving, buildings, people in modern clothes, etc. But they didn't. They made a 1920's New York, down to every detail I could think of. They did such a good job.

I would say this movie is worth seeing, even if you aren't a great fan of these kinds of movies, just to admire how it was done.

King Kong, as a story, is one of the greatest stories ever told, I'm realizing now. You take something over-the-top (a giant monkey), place him in something familiar to us but foreign to him (New York City), and let him loose. What would he do? Where would he go? What would he learn? How would he react? It's fascinating, from a writing point of view, to think like that - take a character and put him in a situation or a place totally foreign to him, and think up what he would do. Good writers say "the story writes itself," but it takes a lot of practice to get to that point. It's very good exercise for your creative imagination.

Anyway - I liked the movie, and I didn't think I would.

It's one of those edge-of-your-seat, almost a thriller, style of movie. Very well acted, and well done all around. It should win an oscar or something.


Thursday, December 22, 2005

Flock-to-Gmail inline image trick

Here's how you can embed an inline JPEG image into an email message in Gmail.
Gmail supports inline images, but they just don't give you any way of inserting one! You have to get some other application to do it, then drag-n-drop into a Gmail message body. Flock is just the app to set it up.


First, get and install Flock. It's free. It's not version 1.0 yet, it has many bugs, but it is usable.

Second, set up a Flickr account. It's free. Post your image on Flickr, and enable it for public viewing.

Third, open a web browser window and go to your Gmail account. Click "Compose Mail" to start a new message. Type a few words on a few lines to start with.

Fourth, bring up Flock and click the feather-pen icon, as if you're entering a web log entry. If you don't have any weblog system set up yet, don't worry, you don't need one for this (click "cancel" if a dialog box asks you to log in to one). click the "topbar" icon, and choose "Flickr topbar". Enter your username in there, so it finds your image.

Now drag and drop that image into the body of your Flock web log entry area.

Lastly, select that image in the flock web log entry area, and drag-n-drop it into your Gmail window's message body! The image magically appears there!

This doesn't seem to work very well for large images, because Flickr has a file size limit (not to mention a bandwidth limit).


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