smalldeath.net/blog

I have to say, I’m really tired of all the 3-D being pushed everywhere.  Where is the market for this stuff?  No one I know cares, and many are utterly annoyed and/or unable to use it at all.

I have no desire for 3D TV or games.  I love video games, and I love pretty graphics, but making it “3-Dimensional” doesn’t seem to add anything to me.  At least not in its current form.  I love new technology and change, but this doesn’t seem to be a step in the right direction.  Now I have to wear glasses (which I purposefully take off every time I get near a computer, I wear glasses for distance viewing) just to watch a sporting event?

Some might argue that it’s no different than going from standard definition television to HD, but I disagree.  HD made things easier to see and watch, it made larger screens more enjoyable for more people, since sitting a bit closer to a large HDTV is OK, whereas with SD it was horrendous.  It made eye strain less of an issue – no more squinting to figure out what the scores are at the bottom of the screen.  3D does none of that.  It makes it harder to see, less viewing angle, and it’s uncomfortable with the glasses.

Not to say 3D will never be useful.  I can’t wait for the day things are interactive in 3D with no glasses (like Ironman movies or not, those computer interfaces were pretty damned cool).  Or better yet, Star Trek Holodeck style 3D, where your actually inside the action.

Most of this rant brought to you by news of 3D cameras, TVs, and other stuff I see pushed down our throats every day.  Send help!  Preferably of the two-dimensional, no glasses, viewed from any angle variety!

I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to do this, and after finally figuring it out I thought I would share.  I had a couple things that I wanted to know when they would arrive, but I had to add each of them the “track shipments” box every time I wanted to see where they were at.  So I searched around Google and the UPS page for a way to have multiple tracking numbers in a single URL without much luck.

Making a single URL is pretty simple, its just http://wwwapps.ups.com/etracking/tracking.cgi?tracknum=xxx (where, obviously, xx is the tracking number).  This only allows for a single tracking number, so it didn’t really help much.

I finally found out how to do multiples after putting a tracking number directly into Google.  If you didn’t already know, you can put your tracking number in, and Google will return a direct link to the UPS track page.  Useful stuff, but most of all it was interesting for the URL it links to:

http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?sort_by=status&tracknums_displayed=1&TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&loc=en_US&InquiryNumber1=xxx&track.x=0&track.y=0

You can simply add more to “tracknums_displayed” and put each tracking number in “InquiryNumberX” to have multiples on a single bookmark.  For example:

http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?sort_by=status&tracknums_displayed=3&TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&loc=en_US&InquiryNumber1=xxx&track.x=0&track.y=0&InquiryNumber2=yyy&InquiryNumber3=zzz

Hope someone else finds it useful!

Finally get to do some programming/development work again, this time with Google Maps and creating a map for the Trimarc traffic cameras.  It’s not overly difficult, but the biggest issue is that I started doing this way-back-when and was designing it in Maps v2 and when I started back up, without realizing it, I was trying to do things with Maps v3.

It seems as if they have nothing in common.  At first everything was just errors until I realized what was going on.  Then the infowindow wasn’t acting right.  Buried somewhere in the documentation I’m sure it tells you that the infowindow should be a single object that you “move around” as opposed to just creating a new one, but I didn’t see it.

http://smalldeath.net/tests/gentest03.php

I obviously don’t post much, but I think this is my new favorite spam mail.  I’m sure people fall for it, but the amount of terrible grammar and such in this email is just astounding.  (Note that I don’t really play anymore, and have a real authenticator anyhow).

Greetings!

Recently, the problem of account invasion is getting worse and worse which cause enormous players’equipments and virtual currency stolen. This severely damages the benefits of mass players, also causes our company lose a lot of customers.

Our company has to adopt some measures to safeguard our common benefits in order to strengthen the safety of mass players’accounts, and firmly resist the account to be stolen again.Through our company’s research and investigation to xxx customers,we will make the following decisions: we launch a package of updated code strengthen system and dynamic code protection card which can effectively prevent the accounts invaded. We will send this package of code protection system to players free of charge.

Please open this connection:  http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/secure

If your account passes the check successfully, we will send this package of dynamic code protection card to you in the form of e-mail.

In 3 days after you receiving the e-mail, if you don’t submit your information, we have right to freeze your account, every player is obligated to protect the safety of the account. You must work together with us to be determined to crack down all the behaviors of destroying games.

If you had already authenticator your account, please disregard this automatic notification.

Regards,

The World of Warcraft Support Team
Blizzard Entertainment

http://www.blizzard.com/support/wowindex/

Mmmm… Spam…

Blogging… Ahhh the wonderful world of things people read for no reason. Well I saw it as a chance to see if someone actually cares, and a good way to keep track of what I’ve done to the site.

If your reading this post, it either means you’ve read all the rest, or there’s probably only 5 or so posts and it took you about 30 seconds to read all of them. In either case, waste more time and look around… I got 60gb of bandwidth to waste, and right now I’ve used about 100mb, and most of that is Dale’s images on ebay, woopee!