11.24.07
Posted in personal, travel at 5:25 pm by danvk
I flew Virgin America recently and, since they’re getting a lot of buzz, I figured I’d write up my experience.
First off, you have to be flying amongst San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York JFK and Washington Dulles. Those are the only cities Virgin flies to. The good news, though, is that they’ll almost certainly be the cheapest option if you can use them. A cross-country ticket cost me $130 each way, though I see that their rates have recently gone up to $170.
When I got on the plane, there was mood lighting and really energetic music. Virgin really advertises the mood lighting, but I think it’s just silly. It’s not as though the lighting turns it into a party plane (now that would be cool). Seriously, when was the last time you were bothered by the lighting on a plane?
Another difference is that, instead of having a “beverage cart” go through the plane once or twice per flight, you order drinks and snacks through your in-seat computer. Non-alcoholic drinks are free, and snacks cost some small amount ($1 for cookies). You can also order a meal if you’re so inclined. This lets you get drinks when you want them (good for someone who likes to sleep on flights) and frees up the aisles.
The in-seat computer is the main difference between a Virgin flight and one on any other airline. Their very-trendy interface is called “Red (BETA)” and lets you listen to music, watch TV or movies, chat, play games, and order food, as I mentioned earlier. It must really be a beta, since it crashed on me at least once. The pilot made a friendly announcement at the start of the flight that it would “crash and need to be restarted, just like your computer at home!” I find it incredibly amusing how folksy this sounded when he said it. For what it’s worth, these things run Linux and X11. You can tell by cursor and background, but it’s most obvious when you restart and see a command line. =)
The music selection was fairly random. They picked a few popular artists from several different genres (pop, rock, hip-hop, classical) and had between maybe 7 and 15 songs from each. This led to some unusual picks. While 15 songs probably isn’t enough for the Beatles, seven is too much for a current artist like Justin Timberlake. Another oddity: songs were listed in reverse chronological order. That’s fine for JT, but it led to a really weird playlist for Bob Dylan. I was surprised to see “Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee” as his top song.
The full movies were $8/view, and I just don’t care that much about Shrek the Third. There were also free shorts available, but these looked thrown together at the last minute. They seemed like some sort of “best of YouTube” collection.
The games were pretty cool. I played Doom for about half an hour on my flight home. I assume it was under emulation, since it was pretty sluggish. But it was playable, and reminded me why I never got into first-person shooters as a kid. I’m terrible at them! With some more games and a larger controller, this could be a good way to pass a flight.
There was also seat-to-seat and group chat, but I didn’t see the point of this. Do I really want to chat with a random person on the plane using an undersized keyboard on the back of my remote? The person sitting next to me sure did. She was pretty into it. To each his own.
All in all, Virgin was pretty cool. It’s not worth going out of your way to get the “Virgin American experience”, but if they’re the cheapest option, the by all means, go for it!
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11.20.07
Posted in personal, travel at 11:46 pm by danvk
I had a busy week of travel last week. First there was D.C. Gras, where I met up with many college friends and some high school friends too:
They’d get links, but they have no web presence. Come on, guys!
After a great weekend in D.C., I flew back to San Francisco and then to beautiful Maui for a work-related off-site morale event:
Here’s one of my favorites, from the Haleakala National Park:
I’m staring up at a 400 foot waterfall from a nearby hill. Ryan (who has a web presence) has all his wonderful photos from the trip here.
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10.30.07
Posted in astronomy, personal, science, wikipedia at 11:22 pm by danvk
Ars Technica has the write up of an experiment performed by two University professors. Instead of assigning an ordinary term paper, they had their students create a new Wikipedia article on some topic pertaining to the course. To summarize the summary, it was a rewarding experience for the students but had some issues. In particular, several of the articles were immediately deleted or merged into other articles. The original PowerPoint is worth skimming if you’re interested.
My take: this should absolutely be encouraged. How many term papers ever see the light of day after they’re graded? The paper benefits the student, maybe the professor, but rarely anyone else. Can you imagine how many papers college students have written about Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat? Wikipedia needs you!
I’ve thought about the merits of Wikipedia assignments ever since I started editing back in college. The issue of public exposure wasn’t so important. I’ve had that since I was little. It was mostly the idea of not letting all the research I’d done for a course go to waste. I was so enamored with the idea that I gave it a trial run myself. After writing a term paper on two ancient Greek astronomers in the Fall of 2005, I created articles about their works. It was a good but surprisingly time-consuming experience for me. Putting my work on display for all the world to see forced me to double-check everything I’d written, clarify my reasoning, and introduce explanatory figures and tables. But the finished product was great. Those two articles I wrote are undoubtedly the best online source for their two topics. And they’re unexpectedly deep content for Wikipedia, which is not necessarily known for its coverage of original materials or ancient history.
The main problem with this approach is that Wikipedia may not accept these changes with open arms. The professors made some good points about this in their slides. The Wikipedia way is to start small and rough, and edit your way to a finished product. I did this for my two articles. This is the way papers are written as well, it’s just that the process is less visible. What’s more, it helps to be familiar with Wikipedia culture before making major edits. For the students whose articles were deleted or merged, I’m sure they could have asked whether there articles were appropriate on some talk page or another. For contributors not familiar with Wikipedia’s style, their contributions will be a heaping mass of words in need of copyediting. This would be even more important if the students had been assigned to edit an article, rather than write one from scratch.
All in all, if done well, this use of Wikipedia can be great for both the students and the community. Here’s the money quote from one of the students:
This assignment felt so Real! I had not thought that anything I wrote was worth others reading before, but now I think what I contributed was useful, and I’m glad other people can gain from my research.
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10.26.07
Posted in programming, web at 2:49 pm by danvk
I recently noticed that Rice has unceremoniously purged my Owlnet site, so I’ll be moving some of its content over here. First up: my JavaScript implementation of Nagi-P Software’s NS-Tower.
This is one of the few games I’ve ever seen with only one control: jump. Your character bounces off the walls and you have to power him up for jumps. My record is 282 floors on Hard. Can you beat it? No fair using the JavaScript version, though. More details below (warning: it takes a hard right turn for the nerdy)…
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10.22.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:24 pm by danvk
A conversation at lunch today reminded me of one of my favorite trivia questions: what’s the most isolated any man has been in history? By “most isolated”, I mean that his/her instantaneous distance from the nearest other person is maximized.
Think about it for a minute or two, the answer’s below the fold.
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