Just what do the characters in cheesy user-created Flash movies think of this blog? Opinions differ. PS: No, I didn't make the movie. Bob did.

PC Magazine has written a quick review of Kubi. They like it. I think you might as well. If you want to join our latest Beta, drop me a line.

I'm so proud of my boys. I've always tried to encourage their creative sides, and they haven't let me down. My five-year-old is an obsessive sketcher (as I have mentioned before). My eleven-year-old is fascinated by media of all sorts, and has a knack for working computers. Recently they teamed up to produce a Flash movie from an original drawing. Read more about it, and see the result.

I've been pretty quiet here as far as new entries go. Partly it's because I spend more time away from home in the summer, and partly it's because work has been pretty intense lately, but mostly it's because my blog energy has been going into behind-the-scenes changes. I'll be back, I promise.

Speaking of behind-the-scenes, Holovaty.com makes me want to do the Wayne-and-Garth "We're not worthy!" gesture. Adrian's blog is (as he puts it) "focused on design, usability and other technical aspects of news Web sites." The content can sometimes be a little too narrowly focused on these topics (he spent what seemed like all of June detailing his search for webmaster email addresses on news sites), but you can do a lot worse that to study how he has put his site together. From the clean design to the easily-overlooked but masterful "This Page" boxes, to the downright genius coding (take a look at how his comments are brought onto the page), the whole site is a paragon of blog best practices.

The little town of Tamworth, New Hampshire started a trend by publishing calendars featuring townspeople in the all-together (tastefully done, of course), and selling them for charity. The first round of calendars raised $125,000, so they've made a new set for the coming year.

My father and step-mother live in Tamworth, and they are Mr. and Ms. July in the new calendar. Dad is the guy day-dreaming in the hammock:

Darwin in a Box is an article about the work of Torsten Reil, who created a convincingly natural walking animation by constructing a virtual joint system with a neural network to control the muscles, and let a genetic algorithm find the "best" neural network parameters. In 20 generations, he went from random flailing to a smoothly striding figure.

Genetic algorithms have long fascinated me as a practical application of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. That they can work so well is delightful, as is their subversive creativity (just as in nature): Reil had to modify the fitness function from "distance from the origin" to "distance from the origin while keeping the center of mass above a certain height", because the algorithm discovered weird crawling techniques that were doing pretty well otherwise.

Reil's company naturalmotion has a cool video of the evolution.

Matthew Thomas has a detailed rant called When good interfaces go crufty, about the historical artifacts we ask users to live with in user interfaces. I'm probably too much of a geek to fully appreciate his viewpoint. I remember reading Alan Cooper's About Face, which also argued that File - Save was an unnecessary and confusing detail, and questioned the wisdom of removing it from UI's.

But, some of his point clearly hit their mark, and he is absolutely right: interfaces gather cruft and it's the poor user who suffers with it. I have my own real-life example of this sort of crufty interface stuff, and it's crufty enough to have confused even an old and well-credentialed geek like me.

» read more of: When good interfaces go crufty... (7 paragraphs)

Abe Fettig points to good news: two development efforts to get Python support for Eclipse, the open-source uber-IDE. Xored TruStudio seems to be further ahead, but PyDev is the creation of Alex Totic, one of the OSAF people. (these days, OSAF is overtaking Zope as the best thing to happen to Python).

I've always been impressed by Eclipse, and have not been impressed by the Python IDE's out there. I'll be trying at least one of these new offerings.

(This is not about deli after-effects: it's about Python). The pickle module is great: any Python data, simply serialized for storage, transmission, whatever. Nevertheless, Jarno writes about his difficulty with pickle. I don't have the same problem (I always go find my last use of it to copy from anyway), but I had two deeper problems with pickle recently:

Problem one: You can't pickle instances of classes that are not declared at the top level of their module. This is clearly stated in the docs, but I had to discover it the hard way. I like to use private classes where the class is only needed within another class, and pickle can't handle it:

# Bad: can't pickle Outer
class Outer:
    class Inner:
        # ....

    def __init__(self):
        self.inner = self.Inner()

# Good: can pickle Outer
class _Inner:
    # ....

class Outer:
    def __init__(self):
        self.inner = _Inner()

Problem two: I had created an overly-tricky class that never returned an AttributeError: missing attributes simply returned None. This messed with pickle's head, because it tries to get the __getstate__ method on instances, and None is not callable. This wasn't really pickle's fault, more of an object lesson in how to override the deep magic methods like __getattr__.

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean recently, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Johnny Depp was campy bordering on genius. Keira Knightly was physically flawless bordering on physically bland. It would have been more fun if it had an R rating, but it is a Walt Disney Picture (the first to have even a PG-13 rating). The humor was abundant and good-natured (favorite joke: "You spent three days lying on a beach drinking rum?" "Welcome to the Caribbean!"). And it was fun to see the old gags from the theme park ride used in the movie (like the jailed pirates trying to entice the dog with the keys).

In the continuing descent of this blog into a "nifty Matrix link every week" junkyard, here's ZMatrix, a Windows animated desktop background that puts that drizzling green code effect onto your very own screen. It's well-implemented, with lots of options (including a cool image matrixifier effect), and runs at idle process priority, so it won't interfere with actual work.

When writing software these days, there are tons of tools the developer can use to help get his code done. These range from clever editors to samples to wizards. There are also many types of infrastructure that can be deployed as middleware to help while the code is running. These range from libraries to classic middleware to callable network services. Many of these tools and middleware are very helpful. Many really do speed up development by creating abstractions and raising the developer's focus from the trivial to the insightful.

But you have to be careful: if the abstractions don't match your needs, or there are flaws in the implementation, or something important is hidden from you, then they can be hindrances rather than helps.

Remember what you learned in kindergarten: never accept candy from strangers.

» read more of: Candy from strangers... (6 paragraphs)

Any Star Wars fan knows about the standard ships like the X-wing, the Y-wing, and the B-wing. Some even know about the esoteric E-wing. But what of the rest of the alphabet? Is there a J-wing? A Q-wing? Jon Palmer answers the question with his Star Wars Alphabet Project. He's imagined what the rest of the alphabet ships would look like, and constructed them in Lego. The results are complex, well-thought-out, and believable.

Here's a short interview with Ethan Diamond, co-founder of Oddpost. He talks about Oddpost's choice of browser, interestingly timed given the recent news about Netscape.

I'm pleased to claim credit for his "monument to justice" quip, which I wrote in my comment about Oddpost of over a year ago. By the way: things have changed since I wrote that comment. First, Oddpost is still here, despite the odds I may have implied for them. And I now use Mozilla Firebird exclusively as my browser.

The best thing about the summer for me is the ocean, or its milder cousin, the bay. Vacationing at the shore means attending to the tide, since what you can do at the water depends on the tides.

We've all learned that the moon's gravitational pull causes high tides, but I've never adequately understood why it is that there are two high tides in a day, one nearest to the moon (I get that one), and one farthest from the moon (huh?).

» read more of: Tides... (5 paragraphs)

On a walk with my son a while back, we went to look at an abandoned house near Jamaica Pond. It looks like it had been quite a nice house once, but is now in complete disrepair, missing all of its window, plus some, covered in grafitti, parts burnt out, and surrounded by cyclone fence.

It must have been a mansion at some point, not only because of its size and style, but because it is the only house in a 300-yard radius. I was curious about its history. At the bottom of a run of stone steps down to the pond, the last step is engraved with an inscription about the steps coming from John Hancock's Beacon Hill mansion. Searching the web for the text of the inscription led me to a page from the Jamaica Plain Historical Society: Pinebank, a Former Homestead in Jamaica Plain.

The whole history of the house is there, including the fact that it was the home of the Perkins family, explaining why the nearby street is called Perkins Street. Poking around the site some more, I found a photo of the house from early in the 20th century.

On a second trip, I tried to get a shot of the house from the same angle as the 1915 photo (made a little difficult by not having it in front of me, and by having to shoot through the fence). Here's the then and now:

It's amazing to see the decay, how something that was once beautiful can be left to rot. It's hard to imagine that this house could have ever been so undervalued that it would be allowed to degenerate as it has.

Another fun Matrix-inspired short: This one is a live performance of a ping-pong game as it would be played in the Matrix. The technique is very low-tech, but very well done, complete with bullet time, gravity-defying action, and dramatic camera angles, all performed live on Japanese TV.

I used to work at a startup called Blue Ripple. When I mention it, I like to put in a link to the Blue Ripple website. Because it is a failed startup, the website is no more. So I would link to its archived version at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. If you've never used it, it is an amazing thing, storing old copies of websites for posterity (for example, they have the Lotus homepage from November 1996).

Recently, though, the Wayback Machine stopped showing me the Blue Ripple website, instead claiming that access to http://blueripple.com has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt. Huh? Blocked? By the site owner? Sure enough, a domain squatter has slurped up blueripple.com, and has excluded the Internet Archive from visiting with a robots.txt file.

Doesn't it kind of defeat the whole purpose of the Internet Archive if some crappy-ass domain squatter can prevent access out-of-hand? And why should a robots.txt today prevent the archive from displaying previously crawlable content?

In any case, I've put up my own archive of the Blue Ripple site, in case anyone is interested.

This is so cool in a Lego, scale-model, self-referential way: Mega Lego are giant Lego pieces made out of Lego. I want plans (and tons of same-color pieces, and lots of time) to make some of these.

I've been away on vacation. It was fun, relaxing, energizing. To try to spread the joy, here are two diversions for you:

¶   Samorost, a quirky and haunting flash game from the Czech Republic.

¶   The Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products, for all of us who enjoyed the Road Runner cartoons.