Comments for OddThinking

Comment on The Sum of… One Million Frickin’ Laser Beams by Don Davis

Don Davis — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:53:51 +0000

I have given this matter some thought. The recent proliferation of green lasers of high wattage may invite reconsideration of the possibility of a mass attempt to illuminate the night side of the Moon. I have seen 5 watt green lasers at Burning Man, and many hand held units are now of a power to invite contributing to such an effort. Each laser would have to be aimed precisely enough to hit the dark portion of a crescent Moon, including from daylight locations with the Moon in the sky. The presence of extra lighting on the Moon would best be shown by the beams doing a 10 second off/10 second on pattern with the on and off times coordinated as closely as possible, within a second. All participants would have to be listening to time signals in order to coordinate the timing of ‘pulses’. The nature of the Lunar surface is an unexpected aid to such efforts as glass spheroids are a major part of the surface materials, reflecting light back at the source as does a scotchlite painted road sign. ‘Painting the moon’ may be an uphill battle but the problem is worth reconsidering based on the back scattering property of the Moon and the proliferation of commercially available large green lasers.

Don

Comment on Python Imaging Library (PIL) and Animated GIFs by Almar

Almar — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:37:45 +0000

Hi,

I wanted to make a gif movie given a list of images and like
the way you tried to figure it out. I dug a little deeper and
(with the help of the file format description on wikipedia)
managed to make it possible to produce 89a animated gif files.
I put the result on http://sites.google.com/site/almarklein/files-1/images2gif.py.

Still, I was not happy with the result: only 256 colours and
the dithering doesn’t make it pretty either… So I also looked
into alternatives and ended up checking out the swf file format,
which is very well described in a pdf on adobe’s website. After
a days work or so I can now produce swf files too. The script
for that can be found in the same place:
http://sites.google.com/site/almarklein/files-1/images2Swf.py

Hope this helpes,
Almar

Comment on Efficiency of Banner Pages by Josh

Josh — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:59:11 +0000

Interesting, I too am plagued with this question. I contend that in offices where printers are shared by 10 -25 users, banner pages serve a purpose and ultimately save paper. We actually did a survey last year and 51% wanted banners and gave specific reasons why they benefited from them. The other 49% who did not want a banner only stated they wanted to save the planet. There are three main benefits to having a banner; Time, Reprints, and Support. Time is saved by users not having to sort and search jobs. This leads to higher productivity. Reprints should go down or not happen if users are able to identify their jobs and will result in less paper consumed. Support goes down with fewer calls to the support center asking where their output went. You might even add there is a slight level a confidentiality in that a person would not have to search the content of a job to find the owner when the banner page clearly states who the owner is. I am about to do a pilot in an office where we are going to disable banner pages for a time period. I will compare historical data with the new data and look for job reprints. Hopefully the results will give a clear answer.

My position is, if there is no need for a banner page then there are too many printers in the area. This is assuming no job pulling software is in place. With that type of software banners are not needed. However you will need to weigh the cost of the paper savings to implementing a new print server technology in your company.

Comment on 20Q by Chantal

Chantal — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:33:51 +0000

20Q is not an american game. It’s based in Ottawa, Canada….

Comment on Samsung PC Studio 3 versus Microsoft Outlook by Klaus

Klaus — Sun, 24 May 2009 11:36:51 +0000

Dear all, on june 27 2008, “Brian” commented that the PIM sychronisation program “Synccell” might well solve many of the above problems. Has anybody tried it?

Comment on Beating the Clock Solitaire by chloe

chloe — Sun, 24 May 2009 09:41:07 +0000

[For the record, there was a crude troll comment posted, which I have removed because it lowered the tone too much. However, lest I am accused of suppressing criticism, suffice to say someone calling themselves Chloe doesn't like me much because I was rude about Clockwork patience. - Julian]

Comment on Samsung PC Studio 3 versus Microsoft Outlook by mdc088

mdc088 — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:41:35 +0000

Hey Kit: where did you get that version? 2.1.3 HA4 of PC Studio 3?

Comment on Advanced Settings by Julian

Julian — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:47:45 +0000

William, nothing springs to mind. Can you post/email me a link to your broken site so I can take a look?

Comment on Advanced Settings by William

William — Wed, 13 May 2009 05:27:39 +0000

I have installed this plugin on two different wordpress sites. There is a simple site that it works flawlessly in. Then there is a more complicated site. On the second site it seems to think that js is disabled and will not encode the emails. Do you know of anything done in a them that may directly interfere with this plugin? Or any plugins that may interfere with it?

Comment on EmailMeNot by Aristotle Pagaltzis

Aristotle Pagaltzis — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:37:11 +0000

I wouldn’t want to run a service that automatically requests URLs in mails it receives… I’m getting a headache just trying to imagine all the ways in which it could be abused, eg. as a DoS vector. (Sure, you can solve each one of them… the question is whether you can think of every possible scenario.)