(Almost) a Wing Commander!

Posted on July 15, 2009 | 1 comment

Ever since we devised the rank system on Atomic Avenue (a mishmash of US and British Air Force titles for the most part, with no small hat tip to the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), there’s never been anyone who reached the 2500 rating points required to make the top rank: “Wing Commander”

Checking my feedback this morning, however, I noticed I’m getting awfully close…

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In theory, this means ten more Five-Star ratings would put me over the top. I’ll admit, for a system that I helped concoct (and which I suppose I could rig by editing the database), I’m irrationally excited by the prospect of hitting the top rank.

(Maybe then I’ll finally get the key to the Wing Commander’s Executive Washroom! šŸ˜‰

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Posted in Atomic Avenue

Kindle Hacking: Changing the Screen Saver Pictures on the Kindle 2 and DX

Posted on July 11, 2009 | 12 comments

Article_HeaderThis may or may not have anything to do with the soon-to-be-announced ComicBase 14, but for my fellow Kindle fans out there,Ā  I wanted to share some tips Iā€™ve learned in the last month or two to help you make the most of your Kindle 2 or Kindle DX (Iā€™m afraid I don’t have access to an original Kindle, so I canā€™t vouch for hacks which are meant for that platform).

First up: I love the screen savers on the Kindle, but I wantedĀ  like to swap up the pictures for ones of my own choosing. But the pictures in question live on a hidden partition which isn’t user-accessible. Hereā€™s how you do it:

1. Get your Pictures Ready

For the Kindle 2

Get your favorite images, and save them in 600 (width) x 800 (height) format, in .jpg (or .gif orĀ  .png) file format. Make sure you leave a bit of a margin in your image as the viewable area of the image will be slightly smaller than the physical dimensions would indicate. Color is fine, but keep in mind that youā€™ll be viewing them in 16 shades of gray on the Kindle. Also, smaller images load faster than large ones, so try to keep the image sizes under 300K or so.

The Kindle will cycle through your images in order of their file names, so if you have a particular order in mind, you might want to save the files with a number in front of their name, e.g. ā€œ01_My First Image.jpgā€)

For the Kindle DX

The same advice applies as with the Kindle 2, except that you will want to save your images at 824 (width) x 1200 (height)

2. Plug In Your Kindle via USB.

It will appear as a removable drive under My Computer

3. Set Your Computer to Show Hidden System Files

Go to Start > Settings > Control Panels > Folder Options and click the View tab. Scroll down and uncheck the ā€œHide protected operating system filesā€ box, then click OK. This will let you see the hidden ā€œSystemā€ folder on your Kindle.

4. Copy the appropriate ā€œhackā€ to the top level of your Kindle

The following hacks come from MobileRead Forums user ClarkNova. Iā€™ve tested them myself and can verify they work great on my Kindles, but theyā€™re not official releases from Amazon, so caveat hacker (use at your own risk). They both basically work by showing the invisible partition on your Kindle which holds the built-in screen savers, allowing you to modify that folder. Theyā€™re also reversible using a second hack (at the end of this article).

For the Kindle 2

http://www.comicbase.com/Kindle/Kindle_2_Screen_Saver_Hack.zip

Download and unzip the above folder. Copy the enclosed file,Ā  ā€œUpdate_kindle2_user_screen_savers.binā€ to the top level of your Kindle.

For the Kindle DX

http://www.comicbase.com/Kindle/DX_Screen_Saver_Hack.zip

Download and unzip the above folder. Copy the enclosed file,Ā  ā€œupdate_DX_screensaverhack-install.binā€ to the top level of your Kindle.

5. Update your Kindle

Unplug your Kindle from your USB connection and restart it by pressing its Home button, Menu button, choosing Settings, pressing Menu again, then clicking Update Your Kindle. When the itā€™s done, it will restart.

6. Copy Your New Pictures to the Kindle

Plug in your Kindle Again via USB and youā€™ll see a new folder in your Kindleā€™s System folder called ā€œscreen_saverā€. Inside are all the original Kindle screen saver pictures which you can add to or replace with your own pictures that you prepared in Step 1. Because weā€™re good like that, weā€™ve thoughtfully provided you Eight Fantabulous Glen Orbik Original Paintings from ComicBase, in Kindle 2 and Kindle DX format which you can download as well.

7. Restart your Kindle

Unplug your Kindle from your USB connection and restart it by pressing its Home button, Menu button, choosing Settings, pressing Menu again, then clicking Restart. Your new screen saver images will now appear in rotation. 
 

 

Undoing the Hack

If you ever want to go back to the original screen savers, just plug in your Kindle, and copy the the ā€œUpdate_kindle2_restore_default_screen_savers.binā€ file (for the Kindle 2) or the ā€œupdate_DX_screensaverhack-uninstall.binā€ (for the Kindle DX) to the top level of your Kindle. Update your Kindle by doing the Home, Menu > Settings, Menu > Update Your Kindle routine, and itā€™ll undo the hack and restart your Kindle.

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Posted in ComicBase, Geek Stuff

Coming Soon: ComicBase 14

Posted on July 3, 2009 | 1 comment

It’s a big one…a really big one… and it’s coming up soon.

We’re just now putting the final touches on the amazingly cool ComicBase 14, and I, for one am tremendously excited.

For one, I’ll finally be able to open my big mouth soon about the amazing things we’ve been cooking up for the past year. My Facebook friends may have caught a couple of clues as to what we’ve been up to, but for the most part, we’ve been pretty good about keeping the new version’s feature set under wraps so we can have a proper “reveal” at launch time. And that date is coming up very, very soon indeed!

Watch this space: lots more to come!

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Posted in Atomic Avenue, ComicBase

The Government owns How Much of California?

Posted on June 19, 2009 | 1 comment

This came up in a conversation yesterday, and I tried to use Wolfram Alpha to find the answer (unsuccessfully, sadly). Google provided the following, however:

http://www.calinst.org/bulletins/b1115h.htm

Short answer: 46.9% (!). And check out how much of Nevada is owned by the government for a real shocker.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Upgrading to a New iPhone, Transferring your old Data and Number

Posted on June 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

When Apple announced the new 3G S iPhone, I jumped at the chance to upgrade my still-shiny 3G to something even shinier. Unfortunately, since I had bought my 3G last year at this time, I didnā€™t qualify for the ā€œupgradeā€ price until December. My much-less-gadget-crazed wife Carolyn, however, had an aging Samsung phone which did qualify for an upgrade.Ā  So, after chatting it over, we hit upon the idea of upgrading her phone instead, then somehow switching the numbers so that Iā€™d get the new 3G S, sheā€™d get my old 3G iPhone.

Jumping to the end, it all worked out fine. Hereā€™s what was involved to make the switch happen:

Step 1:Ā  Back up your old phone

Just sync it to iTunes and make sure it completely backs up. It’s a really good idea to check your iTunes preferences for the phone to make sure your apps are getting backed up as well (for some reason, I had that option unchecked on mine, which caused me to have to reinstall a few things later).

Step 2: Activate the new phone

Basically, when the new phone came in, you need to hook it up to a computer, let it be recognized by iTunes, at which time, it’ll get its Sim card recognized by the AT&T network. Do this before anything else.

Step 3:Ā  Swap the Sim Cards

Grab a paperclip and poke it through the tiny hole at the top of the iPhone next to the headphone jack. The Sim carrier will pop out. Do the same thing on the other phone, swap the Sim cards, then plug them back in. Within a minute or so, each phone will be recognized on the AT&T network as the other.

Step 4:Ā  Sync the new phone to iTunes and let it restore your old data

Plug it in, and youā€™ll be greeted by an advertisement for Appleā€™s Mobile Me service. once you click past that, youā€™ll be asked if you want to treat the phone as a new phone, or restore its contents from your old phone (which you backed up in Step 1). Do the latter. After several minutes of restoring, youā€™ll be good to go!

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Posted in Geek Stuff

Secret Stuff Afoot

Posted on May 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

I sort of have an informal goal of blogging about once a week, and I have to apologize because I find lately that Iā€™ve got nothing to talk about–or more accurately, nothing I can talk about.

Weā€™re hard at work on the next version of ComicBase (in a way, weā€™re always hard at work on the next version), but this time, weā€™ve decided to save the big surprises for the actual release date…and thatā€™s a secret too. All I can say at this point is that it looks really, really cool!

As for other things, well since this is a blog loosely connected to my business, Iā€™m never going to be talking about politics, religion, or anything thatā€™s likely to personally offend anyone I do, or am likely to do business with. Since we ship on six continents, that pretty much leaves penguins as topics of open and freewheeling conversation (Oooh! Could I tell you a few things there! [actually, not really]). I also have to respect the privacy of family, friends, and customers, so even if thereā€™s a Really Colorful Story I could share involving any of the above, I can only do so if I change all the names…

…but let’s be honest, Iā€™m such a geek that the work I canā€™t tell you about is already pretty much crowding out the personal life stuff I canā€™t tell you about. Sigh.

So welcome to Peteā€™s unintentionally muzzled, very quiet lately blog. Product announcement (and much retroactive blabbing) to follow…at a time which has not yet been publicly announced, and which I thus canā€™t comment on at this point.

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Posted in Atomic Avenue, ComicBase, Family and Friends

Internet Explorer 8 Ships, Fixes Dropdown List Problem

Posted on May 5, 2009 | 1 comment

Microsoft finally made Internet Explorer 8 a “recommended download” with the latest set of patches on Microsoft Update. At first glance, there’s not a ton new with IE 8, but it does fix one incredibly annoying problem with all previous versions, including IE 7: Dropdowns containing many items no longer take a huge amount of time to be built, freezing the page (and computer!) during the process. Firefox and other browsers haven’t had this problem, but it’s nice to see IE finally getting this one fixed.

Why is this one important? My big point of pain was the “List of Titles” under the seller inventories on Atomic Avenue. After complaints from users, we tracked down what appeared for all the world to be a hard crash in IE 6 and 7 to the user’s going to my personal titles on Atomic Avenue, where my list of over 10,000 titles in stock resulted in a drop-down list which could take several minutes to fill on a fast computer.

Cutting down the number of titles resulted in an exponential decline in the time required, leading me to guess it was a case of the programmer equivalent of the blonde joke about painting lines on the highway–basically, the programmer was adding onto the end of the list in a way which involved constantly going back to the start, counting to the end, then tacking on the item there, rather than setting an index point at the end and tacking new data on from there directly.

On modern machines, the lazy, brute force way of adding to lists by counting from the beginning is normally not a problem, but when thousands of items are involved, you can quickly set up conditions so that the computer must walk up a number of items in the list equivalent toĀ  [the number of items in the list] raised to second or thirdĀ  powerā€”each and every time they want to add a new item. Repeat that ten thousand times, and you can see how little programming inefficiencies, repeated with very large numbers, can become killers.

Once we discovered the original problem in Internet Explorer, we’d been forced to cap IE clients to seeing the first 2000 titles worth of content from a given seller when viewing individual inventories. This only affected a couple of sellers on the system, and was largely a temporary measure until we could address the matter in a more satisfactory way.

Unfortunately, one of those sellers with wide-ranging titles for sale was me! (By nature, we tend to grab one copy of everything in order to throw it in ComicBase).Ā  Happily with IE 8 now available, we’re safely able to remove that limit (and warn users of older versions that they could do better if they upgrade to the latest version, or use another browser like Firefox which never had that particular problem). We’ll track browse usage in the months ahead and see whether we still need to engineer a workaround for older IE user.

(I’m hoping not, frankly, since any fix would not only be reasonably complicated, but would also involve a fair amount of overhead to load up the list, realize that there’s too many to be safely be shown by old versions of IE, then display smaller batches in a safer way. Having Microsoft simply fix IE seems much preferable, although if nobody ever updates their browser, we may have to rig up the workaround anyway, I guess…). In any case, kudos (and thanks!) to whichever person on the IE 8 team fixed this one!

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Posted in Atomic Avenue, Geek Stuff, Programming

Saboteurs Take Out San Jose Internet

Posted on April 10, 2009 | 1 comment

If you’re wondering why the ComicBase.com and AtomicAvenue.com sites were down yesterday, it wasn’t the normal server crashes, equipment moves, or other normal stuff. No, saboteurs actually cut the cables, disabling phone, cable, and internet service to a big chunk of San Jose, Morgan Hill, and Santa Clara.

The cuts were actually done in four different locations, and AT&T is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the culprits.Ā  The FBI is also on the case.

Weird, weird times we live in…

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/09/MNP816VTE6.DTL

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Posted in Atomic Avenue, ComicBase, Geek Stuff

The Stock Market Game Update

Posted on April 7, 2009 | Leave a comment

After the first day of play, mattress-stuffing Kelly is in the lead with $10,000.23 cents, courtesy of 1 day’s worth of interest on her Wamu money market fund at 0.0083% interest.

I similarly chickened out (but didn’t give myself the benefit of any interest, as my “cash” is presumably stuck in a brokerage holding account). I just didn’t see any stocks which looked like winners to me right now.

Neil went with BQI, a petroleum sands exploration company out of Canada. Had he been able to get in yesterday, he’d have made a nice profit, but for today, the stock treaded water and he’s still out the commission fee of $49.99

Lastly, Carolyn went with her “economic apocalypse” smattering of stocks which included gun makers Smith & Wesson and Ruger, defense company Textron, as well as the Gold spider fund. Textron was up significantly on a rumored buyout by Lockheed, but the others were slightly down, leading to a net loss of $26.15 for the day.

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Posted in Uncategorized

The Stock Market Game

Posted on April 3, 2009 | 2 comments

In an effort to help teach my son Neil the fundamentals of the stock market, we Bickfords are kicking off a family contest on Monday which will run until May 1st. It’s called “The Stock Market Game” and it goes like this:

1. Each player starts with 10,000 in (pretend) cash with which they can invest in any publicly traded security or fund.

2. The person with the most money in their virtual account at the end of the game wins $50 in real money, so long as that person showed a profit over the starting capital.

3. Of any players left with less than $10,000 at the end of the game, the person with the greatest losses pays $10 of real money (or a comparable amount of chores) to the contest sponsor (Dad).

4. Kelly, our five year-old, is required to follow the “stick in in a Money Market Fund” strategy, which guarantees at least one winner (and a minimum of $10,004.15 required to beat her at the end of a month).

5. All sales are executed at the market closing prices, and all purchases are at the market opening prices.

6. Cancellations must be made with an email to pbickford@human-computing.com, date-stamped at least 5 minutes before the point of execution (i.e., sales can be cancelled if notice is given before 12:55 pm PST; buys can be cancelled if I get notice by 6:25 am PST)

7. All stock trades have a 1% sales commission. Any normal fund entrance requirements, loads,Ā  and early exit fees apply.

8. Both Put and Call options can be bought at the end-of-day closing price for 5% of the day’s closing value. Options expire at the end of the game (become valueless), but can be exercised with no further fees at any time.Ā  Naked puts are forbidden (you must actually own the stock you are buying a put on).

I’ll be posting the standings at http://www.stoopidmoney.com/stocks. I’ll post my own stock picks by Sunday night, and if anyone else wants to play along “fantasy stockmarket”-style, drop me a note along with your stock picks and I’ll post your standings as well on the site. I’m afraid that only the family members are eligible for the csh prize (or loss), but you’ll definitely get bragging rights, and the whole thing should be a lot of fun!

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Posted in Life