beer planet

Today Google announced the release of 29 translating robots that you can just add to your friends list in Google Talk. Then you can talk to them, getting instant translation in return. You can also enter a group chat and use the bots as translators between other people and yourself.

The only downside is that the Google Talk client doesn't seem to support group chats just yet, so you have to use the Gmail in-page one.

I think it's a brilliant idea if you ever deal with foreign languages. How many times have I forgotten a word while translating a paper or trying to talk to my mom back in Ukraine? A quick IM to the en2ru Google bot and…

I was looking through some old papers while cleaning out the closet and found this list that Milla made for my mom when she was visiting. I quickly jotted it down for future reference. Here it is in no particular order:

In San Francisco

• Golden Gate Bridge
• Golden Gate Park
• Twin Peaks
• Legion of Honor (beautiful place!)
• Embarcadero
• Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf
• Ghirardelli Square
• Palace Of Fine Arts
• Lombard Street (the curvy one)
• Alcatraz
• Treasure Island
• Chinatown
• MOMA (Museum Of Modern Art)
• Broadway
• North Beach
• Coit Tower
• City Hall
• The Marina
• Union Square, Downtown

Outside San…

Updated: December 19th, 2007

If you haven't heard yet, there's a cool useful little device that you can buy for about $20, called the Kill-A-Watt. You plug it into the power outlet, then plug something into it and observe various fun facts about the plugged in device, such as the power consumption, voltage, amperage, etc. I started plugging things in and recording power consumption that you can see below. Here are the results I got so far (updated often):

• Vizio P50 HDTV 50" plasma
  • standby: 0-1W
  • on – perfect white screen: 450W (OUCH!)
  • on – bright screen: 350-430W
  • on – medium brightness: 250-350W
  • on – dark scenes: 200-250W
  • on – perfect black screen: 185W

…

Found this on digg today, which caused me to literally laugh out loud. Is this guy just too happy to report the weather or just looking to score a promotion?

Don't forget to read some of the digg comments. For example:

• "Maybe he's hoping it'll just blow over."
• "With a wang the size of Ohio you would think he would have a better job than local weather."
• "Who would want a wang the shape of E.T.'s finger? Unless it's to "probe" people for all their memories like in American Dead"
• "Well that was a hard one to look at."

Updated: December 17th, 2007

An adorable group of orphaned baby owls have been adopted by a silly-looking stuffed toy owl, after they were found on the brink of death in the wild. You have to see the photo to believe it – you will die of cuteness!

read more | digg story

Are you dead yet?

Help me pick something from my shelf. What should I drink tonight? (Yeah, yeah, work is tomorrow but who are you to judge me?)

Welcome. You've got mail.

Tonight, we dine, in de_dust!

Updated: March 19th, 2008

I don't know about you but I've had a lot of problems making screen work nicely with YaST. Both putty and SecureCRT had major problems displaying YaST's ncurses interface. The screenshots below depict the problem quite clearly. If at this point you don't see anything like this, you are most likely not affected and can go get a beer.

If you are seeing similar problems, here's the fix. After digging around a bit, I have discovered that the problem was incorrect data encoding. My character set was set to KOI8-R while ncurses expected UTF-8. Here is how to change the corresponding setting in putty:

… and SecureCRT:

…

Updated: November 5th, 2007

This space is reserved for sucking up to Mozilla.

Firefox rocks, yeah!!

http://www.getfirefox.com

Updated: April 29th, 2008

For all the Intel folks out there (shout out to the Folsom Intel, Prairie City Road, woo woo). It is especially funny because it's so true. Dedicated to Nathan Foster and Thaya.

Updated: November 11th, 2007

The aww factor is through the roof.

Updated: May 23rd, 2009

Removes all ftprush queue items that don't download to localhost. It is useful to run if you FXP a lot of files back and forth and want to clean up the queues from time to time, but don't want to delete anything that is downloading. Feel free to make a shortcut to this script and run it any time you want.

Note that this script is only compatible with the ANSI FTPRush version. The Unicode version is not supported.

You need to have Activestate Perl installed in order to run this script. http://www.google.com/search?q=activestate+perl+download

Script source is available from SVN here.

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Updated: December 16th, 2007

The next Terminator is coming. Who's excited?

Here's the plot: After the drastic effects of Terminator 3, the story continues as John Connor and soon to be wife Kate Brewster realize they must create a resistance organization with Earth's remaining survivors against the army of robots slowly being built up by Skynet. As they are building this resistance, one survivor happens to be a traitor in disguise, and has a secret that nobody would ever come to suspect.

The good news is that the movie is now in pre-production, the script is done, and shooting should begin in 2008. Terminator 4 will come out in June 2009 if everything goes as planned.

The bad news is that Arnold will not…