I just received this voice mail transcription from Google Voice from my wife. I have no idea what she’s talking about.

Thanks Steven, x use at pop singer or burger. Thank you. Bye. Anyways, but driving. If I thought I’d say hi. I have a very good work it work out. Eric A. You have a good balance, and I’ll talk to you later. I love you bye.

I just discovered the extremely useful (and free) Paparazzi. Paparazzi let you take a single snapshot of a web page, even if it extends of the screen. Far, far superior to pasting togeher pages generated by the “Print->Save as PDF” method.

If you do web development and need to study page design or give a presentation, Paparazzi is sure to come in handy.

I just discovered FileChute a great little app that makes file transfers super simple. No more explaining to people how to use FTP/SFTP/SCP!

FileChute handles file uploads to DAV or FTP servers, generating short URLs for sending to recipients. Also includes a nice feature to automatically delete an uploaded file after a specified period of time.

Here’s a cool little toy for viewing websites as networks.

Here’s ToddBlog:

Recreate this graph.

I’ve already sent over 3000 emails in 2006 (3012 to be exact). That’s over 30 a day…

The insanity continunes – I’ve *received* over 30,000 (spam excluded).

Here’s a fun quiz that lets you know what file extension you are…

Which File Extension are You?

Just come across this great idea on creating “this date last year” smart albums in iPhoto.

Several years ago, WormBase began collecting detailed intellectual pedigrees for members of the community. To display the large degree of collaboration within the community, I created a directed acyclic graph that depicts the following relationships:

• PI <-> Post doc
• PI <-> Grad student
• PI <-> Masters
• PI <-> Undergraduate
• Worked with
• Collaborated with

About the image

The Y-axis displays years, with the apex of the graph positioned at 1970. Only individuals that have bibliographic or lineage data contained in WormBase as of 5/2005 are displayed on the graph. Individuals are placed on the Y-axis according to the year the first entered the community. This is determined as the earliest year of either the first paper or meeting abstract published or drawn from
lineage data, if it exists. The position on the X-axis is arbitrary, calculated using an energy minimization algorithm to restrict the number of intersecting lines.

Key

Viewing the image

Your browser may try to load either the EPS or SVG links directly. Few browsers, however, can correctly render the entire image. Due to its size and complexity, it is recommended to download the image and view it offline in a vector-based editing program such as Adobe Illustrator.

Downloads

EPS (encapsulated postscript)
SVG (scalable vector graphics)

Technology Vaporware, Part 1: FMD is here!

Today: a special sneak peek at high capacity Fluorescent Multilayer Discs.

If you are a geek like me, you actively pursue the bleeding edge of new technology, salivating over technological breakthroughs, anxiously awaiting for them to hit market. Of course, most of these technologies never make it to market, or if they do, they fail to live up to their promise.

Fluorescent Multilayer Disc (or FMD for short) is one of the most exciting new technologies that I have heard about in the past few years, brought to us by the good folks at C-3D. C-3D claims that FMDs will eventually store up to a terabyte on a single CD sized disc. I’ve included an image here (directly linked to C-3D’s site, so the image link may be broken).

This image is displayed directly from C-3D.

The initial product rollout was supposed to include a write once, read many (WORM) type drive (like a CD burner) capable of storing 10-20 GBs of data, and smaller form factor modules for use in personal digital devices. Furthermore, C3D claimed that only small modifications would be required in the exisintg CD manufacturing process to make FMDs. Finally, the sweetest thing about all the promises of FMD was that the technology wasn’t so radical as to be unbelievable. It was the Next Logical Step. It must be right around the bend, right?

Well, ah, no.

The once-steady stream of FMD press releases and news blurbs has dried up. I no longer recieve announcements from the C3D mailing list (but those were corporate in nature and spotty at best). And of course, I STILL DON’T HAVE AN FMD RECORDER IN MY HOUSE!

This leads me to believe one of two things. Either that 1) FMD is dead in the water, or 2) that it was a hoax all along (I mean, C-3D’s website is a dot net – how suspicious is that?

I’m happy to report today that both of those assessments are wrong. FMD is very much alive, and thanks to inside sources, I’ve gotten my hands on some! I don’t have time right now to conduct a complete review, but I’d like to leave you with some brief observations and a few photos to whet your appetite.

First, the FMD form factor is *extremely* cool. It almost looks like a CD. As the photos clearly show, FMDs are transparent, enabling the multilayering pf data, in turn enabling their enormous capacity.

A brand new FMD.

Writing to an FMD is a breeze in the MacOS. I just popped it in the drive, DiscBurner displayed the standard dialogue asking if I wanted to prepare the disc for burning. After preparation, the FMD mounted on the desktop. I dragged a 10GB Volume onto the FMD. After ejecting, burning commenced. One of the more staggering things about the FMD is its burn rate. It took a little over 10 minutes to burn 9.5 GB of data!

Much like CDs after burning (where you can see where the dye has been altered), so too do FMDs change. The change is more subtle, and I’ve tried to take a few pictures of a burned FMD to show you. Burned FMDs become ever-so-slightly more opaque…

That’s about all the information I have for now. Stay tuned for more. FMDs should be hitting your local Best Buy soon!