Oh my, it looks like the Layout Fairy's been here and made everything earth-toned and easy(er) on the eyes. Hooray for the Layout Fairy!

Well, I wish there'd been a magical fairy involved. Most of you will probably agree that it's harder to design something for yourself than for anybody else. You're your own worst critic. So, here's a crazy idea. Why not have something like Trading Spaces for blogs? If you want a new design, first volunteer to create one for somebody else. In turn, somebody else will volunteer to design a new design for you, based on your general ideas and/or the impressions they get from browsing your existing blog. You'll get to exercise your creativity and you'll also get a brand new design without all the hemming and hawing over colors, sizes, and logos.

Or is that not crazy enough to work? Maybe it could also involve rabid badgers somehow!

Anyway, on to the real subject of this post: the Wii. For me, the Wii has been something of a miracle mixed with disappointment. I suspect this feeling may have something to do with the games I've been playing, which I'll briefly review.

Wii Sports

A good introduction to the potential of the Wii's motion-sensitive controllers. Like the Queen Herself, I enjoyed (read: did well in) the bowling game. I did less well in, yet still enjoyed, golf and tennis. This probably had something to do with the fact that I was playing the game with/against another player in the same room. I doubt I'd play any of these games on my own.

MarioKart Wii

Obviously, this is a racing game in which you play various characters from the Marioverse. Special powerups scattered around the tracks allow you to get the advantage over other racers (and vice-versa.) Some extremely tricky tracks will challenge even the most non-computer racers. The game comes with a gimmick steering wheel that the Wii controller snaps into (not necessary.) This is yet another game that I doubt I'd play on my own, but it would be one of the first that I'd bring out at a party.

Super Mario Galaxy

Now we're getting somewhere. I really enjoy how this game plays with space. You can walk around on the outside of a planet, then climb down a green tube and walk around on the inside. Some of the earlier levels led me to believe that the rest of the game would be done in the signature cutesy style one would expect from a Mario title. However, two later levels, Battle Rock and the Space Junk Field, were fairly impressive and had me wondering whether Mega Man would ever make a Wii appearance. Unfortunately, I seem to have reached the point in the game where the fun has run out and been replaced with frustration.

Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law

So, I thought, let's try a game that should require neither aim, nor sense of timing, nor pattern recognition skills. I'd hoped this would be a point-and-click adventure in the spirit of Sam And Max Hit The Road and Day of the Tentacle. Well... hmm... no. The best I can describe this is as an elaborate guessing game. Since it's based on a cartoon, the only successful choices may be ones made on spurious logic. For instance, which piece of evidence proves that Birdman's sidekick Peanut is lying? The keys to the safe, the death ray machine, or the lobster? In fact, the answer is apparently none of the above. It's also not the mask balm, the pile of money, a business card, or any other item in my inventory.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King

Next, I thought I'd try some of the downloadable content. This title jumped out at me, since I thought it would be something like Sim City meets Final Fantasy. In fact, it is, but what I find more interesting than that is how this game puts the player into the role of king, i.e., assigner of quests to adventurers. It turns out that the land surrounding your castle is filled with dungeons and monsters, most of which are sitting on top of resources you need in order to continue building your city. Since you're the super-important king, you can recruit adventurers from your population and send them into harm's way on your behalf. And unlike Sim City, there is in fact a story arc that unfolds during the course of a game.

Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess

Now for some real adventure! But first, let's run errands and do chores for two hours and thirty three minutes. Then your beloved peasant village can suffer its awful fate as portals to an evil dimension open across the land and... say, this sounds really similar to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, doesn't it? Well, I can tell you the reason I stopped playing that game was mainly because after a while it seemed to be nothing but going into and out of portals, being eaten by wildlife, and being thrashed by bandits for the sake of ungrateful peasants. So let's hope that Twilight Princess stays close to its overland-and-level-based roots as a Zelda game and doesn't stray too far into free-form adventure territory.

Greetings, Readers!

Looks like I'm back. Even though it was really only an extended weekend getaway, and in the end, I didn't really get away, I still had a wonderful time, thank you.

On Friday, we arrived in San Francisco. I usually fly to Oakland, but this time, we went to San Francisco International. An interesting thing about this airport is that it has a computerized tram that passengers can ride from one terminal to the next, to the BART station, and to the car rental building. We were given a giant SUV, since the midsized cars were apparently all checked out and the rental desk was understaffed.

We then began the long drive to wine country, which remained much as I remembered it. After checking in at the dumpy motel, we met up with some friends. The gathering soon became a Rock Band party.

I learned that playing the drums is "freaking impossible" while playing the bass is "indeed quite challenging." I also learned that there is no song that I cannot murder, although by the end of the night, I was able to get a 91% rating on a Radiohead song.

On Saturday, I discovered that I was in the presence of a fellow Flickr member, and so we engaged in the sacred ritual of the photowalk. Fortunately, there was a small street fair of some kind up the street. While we snapped photos of scooters and musicians, the non-photography-geeks sat, listened to music, and discussed MMORPGs.

After a while, we all piled into the SUV and drove to Oakland for the Dream Theater show. I'd never been to the Paramount Theater in Oakland before, but it was quite a treat. Delightful Art Deco decoration was everywhere, although I was unsure as to how much of it was actually original. The show itself was, well, mostly it was loud. Which was to be expected, of course. What I did not expect was that the opening acts were mostly all death metal. The musicianship of the groups was great, but lyrics delivered in a drawn-out belching sound just doesn't do it for me. I suppose that's an odd thing for me to say, since I usually manage not to understand traditionally delivered lyrics. Or maybe it's not an odd thing to say, since because of that, I tend to consider the vocals as just another instrument. So maybe it's the same as preferring fiddles to bagpipes.

Anyway, by the time the main act (which was all I had expected) had finished, we were all quite restless, as it had been a long concert. We finished the evening at a Lyon's restaurant, where we discovered that if one has no better excuse, telling someone the time in an incredulous tone often works just as well.

On Sunday, we drove out to Cafe Citti in Kenwood, which is worth a try, if you're in the neighborhood. I usually order the special and have rarely been disappointed. However, the ravioli is also very good, and friends swear by the fusilli and AOP (garlic, olive oil, and pancetta.) Afterward, we saw Iron Man. I was thoroughly entertained and felt that it was a decent adaptation of the comic book. Now, when I saw X-Men, I left the theater feeling as though I'd really seen the real X-Men. I didn't quite have that feeling leaving the theater after Iron Man, but I did leave with satisfaction and excitement, especially after waiting through the credits for the easter egg.

I believe that the rest of the evening was spent playing Mario Kart Wii and watching Superbad. Although this wasn't the sort of movie I'd choose on my own, it did have some amusing moments.

On Monday, we took a scenic drive through Sebastopol, Bodega, Jenner and Guerneville. The Northern California coast is beautiful and dramatic, though the waters are cold and often full of dangerous currents and jagged rocks. And although the weather is often (as it was Monday) what most people would classify as "gloomy," it brings fond memories to mind of the town further up the coast where I lived as a boy. As did the redwood grove we visited later that day. Not so much the burger stand we visited after that, fortunately. The evening was filled with more Mario Kart and a showing of Planet Terror.

On Tuesday, we bid farewell to the dumpy motel and drove back to San Francisco. There, we took a cruise out to Alcatraz Island, which was surprisingly beautiful. Much of the island was closed off due to nesting sea birds (the parade ground) or to the danger posed by the age of the crumbling structures (the factory buildings). So we went on the audio tour of the prison, walked around the lighthouse and exercise yard, and then bid farewell to Alcatraz.

Then, we did a very touristy move and ate dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe at Fisherman's Wharf, before returning the rental car and flying home. And that was that. I was a little bummed that I didn't get to go to Maker Faire or back to the Computer History Museum... but there's always next time.

Dear Readers,

I'm at last packing my bags and taking off for a few days. To relax and sip mai-tais on a tropical shore fine wines at exclusive wineries cold beer on a fishing boat in the company of friends.

The guest author I was going to treat you to sort of exploded— bad capacitors, I assume— so instead you'll have to amuse yourselves with Twitter updates, should you find such things amusing:

Electronic Love,

The Electronic Replicant

Has it really been three (or more) days since I posted something (that was meaningful?) My dear blog, please accept my apologies for this act of gross negligence. I'll make it up to you. You'll see! I'll tell you funny stories, and draw you funny pictures. I know you're tired of memes and token Link-o-Rama posts. You'll see no more than one of each per week, unless I'm really out of ideas. Will I take a big black marker and draw a big black moustache on my boss and then tell you why I'd be happy to vote for Obama? Yes, and soon. Will I tell you how I ate a piece of toast and then brushed my teeth?

No, but I will definitely tell you if someone throws an octopus at my window.

Since I apparently believe that beating my head against a brick wall is a perfect evening's entertainment, I continued yesterday's experiments with OpenID. Today, I decided to start out by installing my own OpenID server.

Enter phpMyID, two PHP scripts that, once uploaded, provide identity service for one. "It can't possibly be that easy!" you may protest. True, you do have to run some text through a commandline utility and then edit a file. The enire procedure took all of about ten minutes, and that included the reading of the entire README file.

Unfortunately, I had a problem. phpMyID worked as advertised until it actually came time for it to do something useful. Then all it would say was, "Missing expected authorization header." Apparently, this was a problem with the Web server itself. The scripts came with an .htaccess file that had three suggestions to solve this problem, but needless to say, none of them worked. While I'd like to experiment with this program a bit more on a Web server that I actually control, until then, it's time for plan B C D.

I signed up with another OpenID provider, myOpenID. While lacking some of the features that made ClaimID interesting, this service does allow users to create multiple "personas," which allow the user to present a different face to different online services. For example, I can choose to show the "Cosmic Flurk" persona to Blogger, and voila, my comments are signed as Cosmic Flurk, and point back here. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work with LiveJournal, which still insists on printing the OpenID URL as entered.

Just for information's sake, then, I delegated the LiveJournal OpenID to a page on my site and tried using that as an ID. Perhaps not surprisingly, even that showed up as the full URL on LiveJournal, and as the filename of the page on Blogger. And of course when delegated to the main page, the domain was again used instead of a friendly name by both services. Tsk.

This all seems like an awful lot of work to have gone through to remain just this side of anonymous, but without coming off as some sort of impersonal self-promoter when commenting. On the other hand, it's always early adopters that get bitten. But then again, it's hardly early any more.

As previously mentioned, in an attempt to avoid opening an account at Blogger* I instead took the OpenID fork in the road. I chose an OpenID provider and then delegated the ID to my domain. That was all relatively easy. Unfortunately, something doesn't seem to be working as it should. When I do post a comment as an OpenID claimant, it appears that my domain name is shown as the author of the comment, not my username at the OpenID provider, and not the allegedly real name that I provided to them.

I'm not sure where the actual problem lay. Is the OpenID provider that I chose simply not responding in the desired fashion? Are the OpenID clients misinterpreting the returned data? Is this humble user completely misinterpreting the OpenID standard, and thus expecting an unlikely result?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I opened accounts at Blogger and LiveJournal so that I could post a number of test comments without disturbing anybody else. It appears that when placing comments at Blogger using OpenID, when my delegated URL is entered into the OpenID field, my domain name is displayed as the comment author. This is consistent with what the Blogger developers showed in their own blog. However, when I used the OpenID URL that was provided to me by ClaimID, the author of the comment was shown as the ClaimID username. While not exactly ideal, since anyone clicking the link would be taken to ClaimID rather than directly to here, this result was a bit more like what I'd been led to expect.

As for the LiveJournal experiment, using either of the OpenID URLs resulted in the URL entered being shown as the comment author, rather than any sort of friendly name. That just Doesn't Work for me.

Take a look at the blog post linked to by the Blogger blog, OpenID For Non Superusers. Many, if not all, of the OpenID commenters have friendly names showing, not URLs. Admittedly, it appears that the majority of them appear to be using MyOpenID, AOL's OpenID, or their own PHP OpenID servers. It also seems unlikely to me that interwiningly.net is a Blogger site. (BTW, I think I'd go crazy if I had to use Blogger. Even though it's a little quirky sometimes, I heart Thingamablog.)

The next step in this experiment, then, is to repeat the above tests with a different OpenID provider and compare the results. I should also, perhaps, locate another OpenID client and test that with my existing provider to see if a friendly name is shown.

Whee! :-P

I'm a do-it-yourself kind of guy, except when I'm feeling just lazy enough to want something done, but not so lazy as to not bother. This here blog is a good example. I didn't want to be bound to a particular blogging service or even to a particular hosting provider, for various boring reasons. That's why I'm using a client-side application to generate and upload my posts. Just a bit 1990's, to be sure, but I could pack up my site and move it elsewhere in a handclap. I only bring this up because of Blogger. In the past, they've let me post comments (when a blog author allows it) under my name and URL. Now, this option has been removed in favor of OpenID:

We apologize for removing the URL field from the comments form prematurely two weeks ago. That was a mistake on our part that came from launching OpenID support on Blogger in draft. Ironically, our testing of OpenID, a feature that lets you use accounts from all over the web to comment on Blogger, made it appear that we were trying to force you into getting a Google Account. [Source]

Now that NaBloPoMo is over, what does someone who's successfully completed the thirty posts in thirty days challenge do next? No, not Disneyland, although that's not out of the question. One might turn around and sign up for another post-every-day challenge, the Holidailies. The rules of this challenge are slightly different. One must "try really hard" to post once per day from December 1st through January 1st, although with "holiday obligations, this realistically means you might post a minimum of 20 entries for the month." Each post must be at least fifty words in length, and there may be no one-liners and no memes.

Why do this? Well, a number of reasons. I think if I were to take a break from daily posting now, I'd almost instantly end up back at the lazy once-a-week schedule. If I were to restrict myself to writing quality posts, then I'd probably write more about robots and science projects, and less about favorite colors and what sorts of beverages I may have had that day. If I were to write more about robots and science projects, then I'd have to work more on these projects so that I'd have more to post about. And that would be a very good thing.

So without further ado, I'd like to list some of the projects I'm currently working on, or planning to work on.

• Three-axis fabricator.
• Converting Mobile Armatron into an autonomous (or at least wireless) mobile robot.
• Cataloging all scavengeable parts in all devices flagged for cannibalization.
• Reverse engineering the Markov chain generator used in the Megahal chat program and reimplementing it in PHP and MySQL.
• An automatic pantoum generator.
• A new template for The Electronic Replicant.

With midnight coming in just over thirty minutes, time is running out for today's post. Not even enough time to replicate another meme. Why didn't I just save the emotive lamps for today's post? Why? Why?

I think I'll just take the opportunity to point out that I published version 2.0 of the Random Star Trek Episode Generator yesterday. This version has a much larger cast, handles "dead" characters in a more believable fashion than the previous version, has expanded choices for introduction, rising action, complication, climax, and B-plot. Check it out here.

I've spent the day assembling a Random Blog Compliment Generator. If you're like me, you've discovered a lot of interesting blogs lately, and you'd like to let others know about them. You'd also like to be able to say more than, "Here's another new one." That's why I've created the Random Blog Compliment Generator. The RBCG will take all the work out of creating a shout-out.

As I may have mentioned, a long time ago, I wrote a random Star Trek plot generator in Pascal. As I said, this was a long time ago. Anyway, I thought it would be fun, and a good programming exercise, to port it into PHP and post it up here for you all to enjoy. In the process, I made a few minor improvements to the plotting algorithm (which was, and still is, essentially to choose one from columns A, B, and C) which eliminated the most irritating nonsensical things like "The Klingon High Council accidentally creates Starfleet Command," "A wormhole falls into a wormhole," and "Spock is possessed by Odo." It still outputs nonsense, of course, but now most of it's amusingly plausible. And before you ask, yes, it's supposed to mix and match characters from different series.

So, if you'd like to check out my Random Star Trek Plot Generator, it's right over here.

I'd have had it up a lot sooner, but the viewscreen looked a little boring in pure black. Then I found this amazing tutorial on making star fields in Photoshop, which was exactly what I wanted, and quite fun once I figured out how to translate the steps to the GIMP. If you try it, I highly suggest you also try the dust cloud effect he mentions toward the end of the article.

While I'm on the subject of graphics, I can't believe how difficult it was to find an animated gif of the main viewer light bar. You'd think that some fan would have made one long ago, but heck if I could find one. It was a real blast from the past, though, looking through those animated GIF websites, especially some of the more seizure-inducing pages.

Here's some exciting news. Next month is National Blog Posting Month, or NABLOPOMO for short. The idea behind NABLOPOMO is to encourage all bloggers to post to their blogs at least once per day throughout the month of November.

There's an official site at nablopomo.ning.com for those of you who'd like to make a true challenge of it, and possibly win some fabulous prizes and new readers. I played along last year, and try as I might, I missed at least two days and thus wasn't eligible to enter the drawing for the fabulous prizes. But I did gain, literally, a couple of readers, and I certainly expanded my personal blogroll through use of the randomizer. And, of course, I had a good time doing it. That's why I'll be doing it again this year, and you should too!

Where have I been, indeed. As a rule, I don't discuss work here. However, I will say that I've spent the last... oh, however many day's it's been... picking up the pieces of a poorly-managed project and Krazy Gluing them into something vaguely resembling the desired product. Yes, it was a difficult birth, and the baby (so to speak) doesn't look much as the parents imagined she would.

Lessons learned? Yes. Basic project management: it works-- use it!

• Ensure that all team members have a clear understanding of
  • the big picture,
  • terminology specific to the business,
  • the business model of the business,
  • their responsibilities and relationships,
  • what's to be accomplished.
• Set goals, intermediate goals, and milestones with specific deliverables.
• Prioritize (into Must-do, Should-do, and Could-do.)
• Devise a reasonable work distribution, not necessarily an even one.
• Communicate, but don't reverse-delegate.

The readers have spoken. The Electronic Replicant's newest feature will be a weekly webcomic!

There's also a new poll up for your entertainment.

The first of many, I hope, new things to come to this site is a poll widget. It should be found somewhere in the sidebar. The purpose of this poll is to find out what new feature my dear readers might like to see most. And feel free to leave a comment if you think of an option I've overlooked.

Happy May First! Some of you may recall that I had been planning a surprise. Well, here it is. I call it Robot-a-day. Every day for the month of May, conditions permitting, I will draw and post a different original robot illustration by yours truly. If I'm feeling truly inspired, I may include a bit of flavor text. Should I skip a day, for whatever reason, you'll see two robots the next day. Or three the following day. Or possibly thirty at the end of the month. This is something of an experiment, after all, so even I don't know what's going to happen. As long as we all have fun, I'll consider it a success.

So, let's begin with the one that gave me the big idea, the Robutler.

Dear Blog,

Has it really been over a week since we last talked? How could I have let this happen? I hope you can find it in your bloggy heart to forgive me. I promise to try harder to keep in touch with you, Blog. In fact, I have a little surprise planned for you, something I think you'll like. I won't be telling you what it is just yet, dear Blog, so you'll need to be patient just a little bit longer.

Best Wishes,

E.R.I.K.

Yes, indeedy, the Electronic Replicant is moving to its own domain, www.electronic-replicant.com. See you there!