deep darc

Sophia's cat likes to sleep in the comfy confines of her clothes drawer.

This should put a stop to that.

Sophia and I knew that we were going to get married long before I asked her to marry me. One side-effect of this arrangement is the ability to shop for a ring together to make sure that it is exactly what she wanted.

For me, I always imagined offering a custom-designed one-of-a-kind ring to my love. A unique artifact which no other woman would have on her finger.

Sophia was quite fond of Tacori's elegant and sophisticated designs. However, by buying one of the existing Tacori designs we would be certain that the ring would not be of a unique design.

So... What do we do? Have Tacori make us a custom-made, uniquely designed engagement ring?

Yep.

Over the past two years and three months, I have gotten to know and fallen in love with Sophia Liu. She has become the love of my life, and I cannot imagine living without her. Yesterday, I asked Sophia if she would marry me. And she said yes.

More details to follow.

Last month, Sophia and I went to Steamboat, CO. While there, we found this quaint old-fashoned drug-store with a soda fountain, a jukebox, and... a photo booth. I'm not talking about one of those modern photo booths that are digital and just print out the pictures, no siree. This box was totally old-school, taking around two minutes to develop the sepia-toned pictures on a textured photo paper. There is just something imminently comforting about knowing that things like this still exist and are still working. In an age where it is hard to imagine how to make anything without microcontrollers, one needs to be occasionally reminded that people built amazing things long ago without them.

Of course, there are plenty of other pictures from my steamboat trip. Read on to take a peek.

From the Android SDK M5 API Changes Overview, Dave Cridland pointed out the following:

The com.google.android.xmppService package has been replaced by the com.google.android.gtalkservice package. This is driven by the fact that the GTalk API is not XMPP compliant, and will be less so going forward. The reason is that XMPP is too verbose and inefficient for mobile network connection, and the GTalk API will be moving to a binary encoding for the protocol between the client and the server.

I'll enumerate the implications and conclusions:

1. XMPP is verbose.
2. XMPP is inefficient for mobile networking.
3. A proprietary binary protocol would be more efficient for mobile devices.
4. The former Android xmppService API will diverge away from XMPP.

I think that this direction is unfortunate, and the reasons misguided. Read on, and I'll elaborate...

I participated in the Give-1 Get-1 program last month, and a few weeks ago I got my shiny new OLPC XO-1 laptop. I took a picture of myself using the built-in camera. As you can see, my cat Zahki never misses a photo-op.

After playing around with it for a few days, I have come to a few conclusions about the device. And, for my own amusement, I'm making this post entirely from my XO-1.

When I first started messing around with Teredo tunneling, I was really impressed with how it allowed me to get access to the IPv6 internet from just about anywhere. In fact, it excited me so much that I wrote a teredo client for MacOS X based on Miredo.

But lately teredo hasn't been all it's cracked up to be, and I think I know why: BGP routes to broken teredo relays. Whichever teredo relay which happens to be covering most of North America is really busted. I can connect to Japan (kame.net) just fine. I've been having problems like this for months but it only recently got really bad, because I no longer have a teredo relay set up at my home. Even though most of the IPv6 internet has been unavailable thru teredo for months, I didn't really notice—because at least I could access my home network. Now I can't even do that.

This is a damn shame. What was once a very promising transition path from IPv4 to IPv6 has fallen into such a state of disrepair that it has become useless.

The BBC ran an article on Monday about the effects of sensory deprivation. Several individuals consented to be locked individually in a fall-out bunker, without light or sound, for 48 hours. The results were both insightful and terrifying.