Urinal Games
March 31, 2006 | Leave a Comment
From Yanko Design comes the On Target urinal. Basically this urinal has a built in game that helps to keep men aiming where they should and makes a generally mundane task entertaining. Well, at least that’s the theory….
I grabbed the rest of the images from the designer, Marcel Neundörfer, site. I think the images speak for themselves.
From their site:
Recessed into a urinal is a pressure-sensitive display screen. When the guest uses it, he triggers an interactive game, producing images and sound. The reduced size of the “targetâ€? improves restroom hygiene and saves on cleanings costs (like the “fly in the urinalâ€? at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport). It also makes a trip to the urinal “fun and gamesâ€? – more than just a necessary nuisance. By projecting the game experience into the public space, viewers are treated to a new way of visualizing the abstract, and the entertainment value is boosted. The projection of the project into a museum space was conceived of as a critical-ironic measure, questioning the concept of art, but extending it at the same time. “On targetâ€? is an interactive installation with the functional purpose of improving hygiene.
Tags: art, game, innovation, urinal, video game
World’s Tallest Woman
March 30, 2006 | 75 Comments
In 1976 Sandy Allen was declared the “world’s tallest woman - living” by Guinness Book of World Records. Allen is a towering lady at 7′ 7 1/4″. Amazingly this is not far beyond the recognized world’s tallest living man - Xi Shun (7′ 8.95″). Allen has since spent her life traveling around the world encouraging people that it is OK to be different. Allen was born in 1955, at age 22 she underwent surgery to stop her growth. Without this she would have continued to grow and suffer further medical problems associated with gigantism. In 2001 John Kleiman wrote Cast a Giant Shadow: The Inspirational Life Story of Sandy Allen the World’s Tallest Living Woman.
There is some debate on the internet about if Allen is still in fact tallest. De-Fen Yao has been measured at 7′ 8 1/2″. This has not been confirmed by Guinness Book though. (What do these people do?) However, TallWomen.org makes the point that if she is “only” 7′ 7″ which some sources claim, she is still taller than Sandy Allen who can no longer stand up straight and is sadly confined to a wheel-chair now. If Sandy could still stand her bodyweight seems to have caused her back to arch so she can no longer be considered to be 7′ 7 1/4″. I agree that either way Gunness Book needs an update.
Another very tall woman is Heather Greene who has some pictures that circle the net making her look extremely tall, yet she “only” measures in at 6′ 6 1/2″.
Tags: de-fen yao, gigantism, guinness, guinness book of world records, Heather Greene, sandy allen, tall, tallest woman, world record, world's tallest, xi shun
Lawsuit Defends World of Warcraft Strategy Guide from DMCA
March 29, 2006 | 7 Comments
Brian Kopp of Bronson Florida is selling The Ultimate World of Warcraft Leveling & Gold Guide and Blizzard isn’t happy about it. Blizzard forced Ebay to shut down his auctions claiming violation of DMCA.
Public Citizen is defending Kopp:
“Copyright laws are designed to promote creativity and innovation, not squelch it,” said Greg Beck, the Public Citizen attorney representing Kopp. “A video game is copyrightable just like a book, and just like a book you should be able to comment on it, create new works inspired by it, teach about it in classes, write newspaper articles about it and so on. It is this kind of innovation and open discussion that the copyright laws are supposed to foster. By claiming that mere publication of a how-to book about its game infringes its copyright, Blizzard has interpreted its intellectual property rights in a way that would prohibit legitimate commentary that is protected by the First Amendment.”
Tags: blizzard, brian kopp, copyright, dmca, first amendment, game, gold farming, guide, public citizen, strategy guide, video game, warcraft, world of warcraft, wow
Leveraging CAS with Luminis
March 28, 2006 | 4 Comments
In SunGard Higher Education's Luminis product one of the many add-on packages you can install is CAS support. CAS is an acronym for Central Authentication Service. This WebISO solution is one of the most common in higher education. CAS was created originally by Yale, but ongoing support has been taken over by JA-SIG. When the CAS package is installed in Luminis, it makes Luminis act as a CAS authentication provider. Coupled with this built-in Luminis support, we use a CAS library called phpCAS that adds to the simplicity of deploying this within our environment.
Time and again, CAS has been proven an effective and simple way for us to quickly drop authentication ability into our homegrown PHP applications. Once a function was developed, this was easily reused across dozens of applications within a few short months. The ease of deployment made it easy to convince various developers to switch from custom authentication schemes.
In a PHP application on any of the servers in your environment you can do something like the following:
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<?php
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function casify()
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{
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// import phpCAS lib (http://esup-phpcas.sourceforge.net/)
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include_once($GLOBALS['INCLUDES'].'/cas/CAS.php');
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// initialize phpCAS
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phpCAS::client(CAS_VERSION_2_0,'luminis.institution.edu',443,'cas/');
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// check CAS authentication
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phpCAS::forceAuthentication();
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// at this step, the user has been authenticated by the CAS server
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// and the user's login name can be read with phpCAS::getUser().
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return phpCAS::getUser();
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}
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$username = casify();
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// nothing past the execution of casify() would occur without acquiring a valid CAS ticket
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?>
Note: the preceding code is an example. There is more sophisticated functionality that can be accomplished using CAS, this is merely a starting point for people interested in this WebISO technology.
Tags: cas, development, education, higher education, identity management, jasig, luminis, php, phpcas, security, sungard, sungard higher education, web development, yale, yalecas
A Couple MySQL Administrative Queries
March 27, 2006 | 1 Comment
There are a few tasks in MySQL which I do rarely and usually graphically. This in turn leads to sifting through lots of documentation to refresh my memory. Not anymore... here are those commands so I'll always know exactly where to find them.
First is a basic command for granting privileges to a user, the example shows all privs from a specific host to a user from a specific host including the ability to grant further privs to others:
GRANT ALL ON * TO 'username'@'hostname' IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
The above is not a good thing to do willy nilly. The command creates a superuser, though sometimes you need these...
The next thing i do more regularly these days is slip tuning configuration parameters in during runtime. This is useful if you've experienced some significant growth and want to tune you db without a restart. Keep in mind these settings will be lost if the database is restarted:
SET GLOBAL wait_timeout=60;
Tags: code, grant, mysql, set global, sql
Religious Right Against RFID
March 26, 2006 | 4 Comments
In a recent Wired article titled, RFID: Sign of the (End) Times?, Katherine Albrecht's stance against RFID is discussed. In short, she is a Christian who believes that RFID is the biblically foretold "mark of the beast" and in turn can be interpreted as the sign of the coming end of days.
I hate to find myself on the same side as someone I look at as a bit nutty, but who am I kidding, I'm just a few conspiracy theories away from wearing a tinfoil hat. Regardless of my distaste for her particular argument against RFID, hopefully it does ring true with the particularly political group of evangelical Christians who seem to have a stranglehold on the country at this point.
So if the leftist paranoid liberals hate RFID and the evangelical conservative right hate RFID, who's out there pushing it on all of us? Oh yeah, big business...
Tags: business, conservative, evangelical, liberal, privacy, religion, religious, RFID, wired
The Bison - Then and Now
March 24, 2006 | 2 Comments
The above image is of Casey around the time I first met the dude. Below is from last summer. A lot has changed...
Tags: barbeque, casey bisson, corn, photo, photos