http://redcarton.com/ The RSS feed for the site comments. Dominique Bischof http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=48 I have long been annoyed by the Triangle Expressway's PDF by which you have to carefully piece together the toll charges, so I made a map-based calculator. 2014-08-03T10:44:42-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=47 View Photo Slideshow NCSU's Centennial campus is growing quickly. Now that all search engines have their own satellite image powered maps you can watch the growth unfold. On the same day I got screenshots of the campus at various stages of construction over the past three years from Microsoft Terraserver, Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps, Microsoft Live, and Ask Maps and stitched them together with Slideroll. On a side note, Slideroll does not seem that impressive in its curr... 2007-08-18T17:55:21-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=45 I once saw a similar and much larger community canvas whose location I have since forgotten. Several months later I got to thinking how it was made. I had and idea of using AJAX, so I whipped this up using just that to see if it could be done. That, in a jiffy, explains why I made this. So what is it? Community Canvas allows you to draw by colouring in squares. As you draw your changes are saved for all to see. Also, as others make changes the changes will propagate to your canvas, e... 2006-01-10T21:09:54-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=44 Good thing this is not a blog or that would be a seriously sorry state of affairs. One post every two months, course for par I guess. Anyway, some actual news this time: two Java applications were released. Both of these were written to fulfill a need I had and have been released in case anyone has the same needs. 2005-04-30: Photo Notes Photo Notes is an image caption program. Basically all it does is allow you to save captions/notes for photos you take. Its main strength is that ... 2005-04-30T16:06:25-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=43 Some olds (not exactly new anymore): News & Observer got another letter to the editor on January 19th after they ran a story on the new Airbus A380 with this diagram. "Airbus bets big on 747 knockoff Or so it seems from the comparison visual aid on the front page of today's business section. It is quite clear that the Airbus A380 visual is just a modified version of the Boeing 747 one, yet in reality the two look nothing alike. The A380 does not share the 747's pronounced nose, op... 2005-03-14T21:37:09-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=42 T'is the season again. No doubt Rudolph will be on TV soon, if he hasn't already been. It's going to be another green Christmas. There were green ones in Canada too, but at least there there was a possibility of snow. Not here and I'm always reminded of that when the radio plays the White Christmas song: I'm dreaming of a White Christmas Just like the ones I used to know Where the treetops glisten and children listen ... May your days be merry and bright And may all your Ch... 2004-12-07T21:37:01-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=41 According to Merriam-Webster: " Main Entry: fun·gi·ble Pronunciation: 'f&n-j&-b&l Function: noun : something that is fungible -- usually used in plural " Fungible = something that is fungible, no kidding. Oh, and I skinned the site for my new domain I purchased a few weeks ago, redcarton.com. 2004-10-03T22:36:05-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=40 I read a News & Observer article yesterday during breakfast about how a police officer (who was subsequently fired) groped two women after pulling them over. Something in the article struck a nerve though: they actually published the street names where the women lived! What? Deeply troubled by this I sent off this email to the editor and cc'ed the author: "Dear Editor, Is it North Carolina law that you must publish the addresses of victims (such as in today's cover story &ldquo... 2004-08-04T13:13:30-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=39 A bit late with the news I know, I know, but I won an iPod mini two weeks ago. On Saturday the 18th a package containing the iPod was magically delivered from the Computer Science Department at NC State. Seems I was one of four alumni to win an iPod's in a random drawing of June's survey participants. Cool stuff. I never understood everyone's infatuation with this MP3 player but now that I have one I'm a believer too. I must admit it's quite sleek in it's neon green brushed aluminum ca... 2004-08-01T13:00:56-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=38 I was looking over the logs for my cold war website and it turns out that it has quite an international appeal. This is nothing new but it is the first time I actually took the time to count. From August 2003 through yesterday (prior logs are lost in ether) my site welcomed visitors from at least 59 countries: Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Benin, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican ... 2004-07-11T17:34:42-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=37 I did some summer cleaning and found this list. Back in 1999 when my high school friends found out that I would likely move to a "suhthern" state they wrote up a list of Joe America's children: Bubba Shirley Wesley Sherry Dale Taylor Molly Chuck Dolly Tyler Kelly Kyle Sally Kevin Katie JohnJohn Carrie Mickey Jenny Pete Mary Buddy Emily Liddy Davie Nate Sue Ann Billy Ray Louanne Nadine A... 2004-07-10T14:55:48-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=36 I wrote this back in January but never put it online. There are still a few bugs in it but they seem mostly related to AOL's TOC servers and the Jaimlib library on which JaimBuddy is written. I wrote JaimBuddy mainly to familiarize myself with a number of Java structures and components that I had limited exposure to. Among those are Properties, JSplitPane, JEditorPane, JOptionPane, Action, as well as translucency, key remapping and custom list cell renderers. JaimBuddy is pretty limit... 2004-06-16T16:15:47-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=35 To say that LEGOs were my favourite toy would be an understatement. I spent hours playing with them, but could you really blame me? What toy or game is possibly better than LEGOs? Not only could you create your own stories with them, but you could also create the environment in which they took place. If you can imagine it you can create it; much better than linear video games and G.I. Joe dolls (oops, action figures). Can it get any better? I built a huge space city complete with a ... 2004-06-02T13:17:25-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=34 I graduated yesterday with my Master of Computer Science degree from North Carolina State University. Thus ends my stint in academia. Now on to life... 2004-05-16T17:04:48-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=33 "Drivers beware:more cameras Running a light in Raleigh is getting downright risky. Seven more red light cameras are going up, doubling the number around the city. - Dan Holly, The News & Observer, 2004-05-07 (Emphasis mine)" Funny, I always thought that running a red light was by its very nature risky. 2004-05-07T09:32:08-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=32 A great quote from a Slashdot conversation: "Automobiles are like dogs. They let us down sometimes, they misbehave at inconvenient moments, and we're sometimes angry at them for being a nuisance. But for the most part they're loyal to us. And we love them more than the neighbor's even if the neighbor's is prettier. Computers are like cats. They're cute when they're brand new and purring along. After six months you realize they're useless and plotting to kill you. You want to kick the st... 2004-04-25T20:21:08-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=31 It's 04-04-04. That's only the fourth time that has happened since December 12th, 1912. Finally, a day where the YY/MM/DD, DD/MM/YY and MM/DD/YY people can agree on. For the record: YY/MM/DD is the right way to do it, DD/MM/YY is acceptable and MM/DD/YY is just dumb. Well, ideally it should be YYYY/MM/DD. I made the switch to Mozilla Thunderbird from Outlook Express last week. I tried Thunderbird out quite some time ago but I wasn't all that satisfied with it. Nonetheless I made the ... 2004-04-04T13:48:12-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=30 I have been to heaven, and believe you me it is in Colorado. I went on a spring break ski trip to Aspen-Snowmass last week and it was absolutely fabulous! We had clear blue skies, 10-20C weather and amazing snow. Check out some of the photos. We skiied two days in Snowmass, one in Aspen Highlands and the final day on Aspen Mountain. Buttermilk looked a little small, so we stayed away from it. Getting back home was an experience though. The original plan was to fly to Aspen through ... 2004-03-14T21:38:11-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=29 Way cool! These mini 8cm rovers are so cool! It looks like you can drive over all kinds of stuff with them, and even play laser tag. Some of these action shots are great, people have too much time on their hands. Then again, I could easily see myself building one of these. You can even get a video camera for it. $50 for a rover seems alright, I don't know about the $115 camera though. If you have money to blow, get one! And get me one too. 2004-02-24T13:06:37-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=28 I found a cool website that lets you mark all the US counties you've been to and then maps them. I've collected the travels of me. I've covered most of the North East (except for Rhode Island), but when you look at just counties it looks sad. :) I neutered my :CuteCat yesterday. I got the :Cue barcode reader back in 2000 when Radio Shack was giving them away. Digital:Convergence, the cat's manufacturer, has since gone bust (after spyware claims and whatnot), so I found a new keyboard drive... 2004-02-08T22:41:30-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=27 I was at Best Buy the other day and I walked by an iPod display. It seems that Apple boasts that their 40GB mp3 player can hold 10,000 songs. Their website goes on to claim that "that's four weeks of music — played continuously, 24/7 — or one new song a day for the next 27 years." Pretty cool. Well, sort of. Assuming that the only legal way to acquire mp3s is either to purchase them online or to rip your CDs, that leaves you with $1 a song (99 cents at iTunes or roughly $15... 2004-01-04T17:32:06-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=26 Well Montréal and Sutton were a blast. With waist deep snow, snow fights, Taboo under the influence, Risk till dawn, and even some cross-country skiing, could it get any better? Christmas was great too. The green NC climat gives new meaning to the "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas" song. Nonetheless it was nice. It's New Year's Eve, tomorrow is the start of a new year and the Vienna Philharmonic's annual New Year's Day concert is on PBS tomorrow night, excellent! Ah, it's a b... 2003-12-31T21:10:30-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=25 There are only 2 days and 38 minutes left till takeoff at RDU (coincidentally exactly 100 years after the Wright Brothers first flight in NC)! And best of all the Montréal area got a nice dumping of snow yesterday. This montrealcam.com webcam picture shows the corner of Ste. Catherine and Peel this morning. Snow! Snow! Snow! If the snow stays I may even be able to do some x-country skiing this time. Sweet! 2003-12-15T09:56:24-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=24 My senior design project (a CAD document digital rights management system devised last spring) has matured into a product. Our sponsor, Integrated Industrial Information (aka I-Cubed), has taken our design and expanded it to create FileLine, previously codenamed Themis. I think it's cool that our project is being used (the project itself, not just the ideas). In fact one of the employees working on FileLine mentionned on the WolfWeb: "We are using the same architecture and probably a ... 2003-12-10T23:17:22-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=23 From a canada.com article: "Still, Chrétien is proud of how far he's come with his English. A unilingual Chrétien told his Shawinigan riding association in his first campaign 40 years ago that he would become bilingual within four years. He recalled years later of telling Pierre Trudeau of the promise. Trudeau said to me, 'You never kept your promise.'" Hahahaha, that's great! 2003-12-06T22:22:33-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=22 Two articles caught my attention in yesterday's Connect section of the N&O. Neither addresses anything new or surprising, but they both discuss interesting inter-personal communication quirks that have arisen out of the constant access to computers and information. The first talks about how Wi-Fi is changing corporate presentations, pointing out that the attendees can easily double check everything the presenter says with Google searches and IMs to co-workers. The columnist goes on to say... 2003-11-27T12:59:00-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=21 I reached the two year mark on my United Devices Cancer Research Project distributed computing agents. Since March 1st, 2002, I have donated just about 2 years and 2 days of total CPU time on my main home computer and work desktop (the work computer accounts for about 2/3 of the returned results as it's on 24/7). SETI@home is cool and all, but it feels good to put the computer to work for a good cause. 2003-11-25T19:29:09-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=20 1) Road Runner was out for most of yesterday and again for most of today, POS! It's been acting real bad the last couple of weeks, which I find highly unacceptable. This is the third time it's down, and on a few occasions it has been so slow that it might as well have been down. And what's dummer is their network status website always has the same meaningless message: "Road Runner is currently experiencing issues with the cable network. Subscribers in the affected area(s) may experience a ... 2003-11-23T18:52:08-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=19 Mark your calendars, Sutton is back from December 18 to the 21st! The countdown is on! United, the airline that showed the least promise (especially since half the links on its site are dead!), ended up having the most. AirCanada never had anything and I waited too long for Delta. However I get to fly to Chicago on my way back, that's kind of cool. And the Raleigh/Dulles-Chicago/Raleigh flights are in a British Aerospace 146, I've never flown on one of those; for that matter, I've never f... 2003-11-22T10:58:30-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=18 I took a bunch of pics of campus this week in case I may want to look back in a few years. I may end up taking some more on a sunnier day, if I get around to it; maybe in the spring. I also want to map the pictures to put them in context. And it's a lunar eclipse tonight. 2003-11-08T21:30:15-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=17 Haha, someone finally drew up a comic of this classic joke. I still remember when I first heard it, I didn't even get it. "The error lies between the keyboard and the chair." What??? Oh... Hehehehehehe. Classic. 2003-11-04T08:33:04-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=16 I started drawing these images because I wanted to play around with vector graphics and gradients in Paint Shop Pro 7. The last time I had worked with such imaging techniques was back in the late '90s with Corel Draw 12 (with a brief Flash 4 stint in 2001). I was somewhat disappointed thought. Gradient handling is sufficient, but the vector handling could have been done better. It's nowhere near the power and ease that Corel Draw had, but then again PSP is not really a vector graphics suit. ... 2003-10-18T18:49:20-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=15 Read this story a few days ago (sorry, I couldn't get a legible PDF to have a reasonable file size). Good story; ID theft sucks. 2003-10-16T20:03:25-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=14 I haven't had much time to work on the site lately and likely won't for quite some time. Nonetheless over the past few weeks I did manage to "XML-ize" these comments by creating an RSS feed. Cool stuff, just click on the XML icon: . Figuring out what RSS stands for was harder than actually implementing it. It would seem that people can't agree whether it's Real Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary (which in turn is Resource Description Framework Site Summary). Oh well, it works, that's all ... 2003-10-06T16:41:16-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=13 My first hurricane! Apart from the excitement of experiencing a hurricane first hand, I must say Isabel was a dud in the Triangle. Stronger than usual winds is about all it had, it didn't even have strong downpours, just your average rain. All in all it was just stuff I had already seen on plenty of 'non-hurricane' days. Even the birds didn't think it was a big deal; they just kept eating as if nothing was up. Admittedly it was still fun to watch. I did keep track of it online and even made s... 2003-09-18T21:21:12-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=12 I got these two in the mail today. The first is interesting, the second is just so silly I can't help but laugh. "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. Initsereg!!" Ah, the beauty of sill... 2003-09-17T09:16:37-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=11 Alright, I've finally finished moving everything that I wanted and added the bulk of the new features that I felt were most pressing. Some things are still missing, but they can wait. While I moved the site I also decided to give it a new facelift and figured why not make it valid table-free XHTML. That's right, everything you see if CSS driven! There are no tables except for the picKLE photo gallery which I only customized the looks and not the structure. If I'm bored someday I might XHTM... 2003-09-09T13:17:50-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=9 I finally decided to go out and buy a battery backup for my computers on Saturday after the power choked for a split second during a thunderstorm and all the computers reset. By total coincidence the APC model that I wanted turned out to be $40 off that day. I tested it out on Sunday and it worked. Pretty cool. With all my core equipment on the battery it has about 20-27 minutes of power, not bad, especially since I want it mainly for the split second power outages. I also hooked it up t... 2003-08-18T16:53:57-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=8 So I've been staring at these clocks since last Christmas' shopping season and finally bought one from Sam's Club yesterday. The clock adjusts itself; it just doesn't get any better than that. It has now joined the all time cool ranks with my VCR. With so many clocks and watches in my house it's nice to know that at least two of them will set themselves, and accurately too. It even has indoor and outdoor temperature indicators, with a remote thermometer for outside (with vital Centigrade su... 2003-08-11T12:12:57-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=7 I'm in the process of moving the site to this blazing fast Pentium 166 MHz. Actually, I'm quite surprised that the pages don't load slower than they do. We'll see how it is once everything is up. This main page is up (with a new look), but not much else is up yet. However I have added some photos from my summer road trip to the image gallery. 2003-08-03T11:57:00-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=6 There's a Time Warner Cable commercial by French FX company la maison on TV right now that has pigs flying through a city. The slogan is "What if everything you thought was impossible, wasn't?", I guess it's Time Warner's wave of the future pitch. Who cares, right? Well, the city the pigs are flying over is Montréal. The commercial has some nice skyline shots. 2003-01-24T01:55:49-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=5 "We had a woman who called about a psychotic squirrel that had been holding her hostage for 4½ days. Every time she tried to get out of the house, the squirrel would rush the door or her windows. - Laura Simon, Urban Wildlife Director for the Fund for Animals The News & Observer, Sunday, October 27th, page 4D" I think that says it all... 2002-10-28T01:56:53-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=4 I read The Last Flower by James Thurber (1894-1961) in my Econ class recently. The art is primitive, but the story has an important point to it. Something to reflect upon. 2002-09-16T21:28:39-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=3 Indeed he is! This is some guy I met at the air show in Hampton Roads. Turns out his grand parents (or something like that) are Canadian. So suffice it to say, Uncle Sam is CANADIAN! Besides, the flag proves it, doesn't it? 2002-07-21T16:12:20-05:00 http://redcarton.com/archives.php?id=1 The site is now live! 2002-07-21T16:00:15-05:00