Category: looky

Oooh shiny… very corporate. I wonder what the environmentalist groups think of these guys?

The Green Power Market Development Group is a collaboration of 12 leading corporations and the World Resources Institute dedicated to building corporate markets for green power. Our goal is to develop corporate markets for 1000 MW of new, cost competitive green power by 2010.

Web link of note: Green Power Group
(At http://www.thegreenpowergroup.org/)

Welcome to the World’s largest stock market listings of environmentally active companies.

Web link of note: Invest Green
(At http://www.investgreen.ab.ca/)

If I had more warning I was buying a car (i.e. my junker car hadn’t exploded) I totally would have gone to the auction for it!
Web link of note: Alameda County Auction
(At http://www.acauction.com/)

I made buttons on my DVD that set the subtitle language and the commentary audio track… but I wanted the menu to also show which track was active, independent of which button the cursor was selecting.

For example, suppose the Vietnamese subtitles are active-

• when on the subtitles menu, the user can move the cursor over any of the items representing different languages’ subtitles.
• But there will be a graphic conveying that the active subtitles are in Vietnamese. Possibly just a sign saying SUBTITLES: VIETNAMESE
• When the user selects Vietnamese, nothing happens, because those subtitles are already active.
• When the user selects Spanish, the graphic changes to SPANISH

Well, I did it. How?
Basically there are two tricks here:

1. there is a different menu for every choice of data stream for a given single track. For Subtitles, there is:
   1. No subtitles
   2. English subtitles
   3. Spanish subtitles
   4. Japanese subtitles
   5. Vietnamese subtitles

   The state of the active subtitle is reflected in which version of the Subtitles menu being displayed;
   selecting one of the buttons for another language will link to that particular menu.

2. there is a central Subtitles page which forwards to the appropriate Subtitles page. The page runs a script and queries a register to see the current subtitle setting. All other menus forward to this central page and not to the individual subtitle pages

The feature track should run a script at its termination to see which menu it should be returning to! I have renamed all my variables so I don’t get confused. Their values are occaisionally bitwise ANDed with the SPRM values:

• SPRM 0 is the current menu language (e.g. “en”=0x656E for English)
• SPRM 1 is the current audio stream number… starting with 0 (add one to get stream number)
• SPRM 16 is the initial audio language code for this DVD player
• SPRM 2 is the current subtitle stream number-
  • range is 0 through 31… (add one to get stream number)
  • “on” flag is decimal 64 = binary 01000000 = 0x40
• SPRM 18 is the initial subtitle language code for this DVD player

Links:

• DVD Subtitles (Ken Stone)
• forum posting on DMN Forums
• DVD Scripting by Alistair Jackson

Since the news stories seem to be fading away, I thought I’d preserve the names of the SFPD officers busted for making porno movies here for posterity

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

San Francisco Officer Darryl Watts and Kelly Francisco, who works for the Sheriff’s Department at San Francisco General Hospital, were the protagonists of “Bus Stop Whores.”

Police believe Francisco made at least four videos, attended adult film conventions and had her own adult Web site under the name Reina Leone.

I remember this game for the Atari 2600 which was basically impossible, Swordquest. Maybe I was just too young to understand its appeal… It had two cartridges, Earthworld and Fireworld. And I found out about 20 years later there was a contest associated with them, with the winners taking home a $25k prize…

This is an interview with Michael Rideout, the winner of the Fireworld contest.
Web link of note: Swordquest interview
(At http://www.atarihq.com/2678/swordqst.html)

The story of Momotaro, the peach boy.

This weekend we will be making kibidango in our mochi machine.
Web link of note: Momotaro
(At http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/nanjo/nanjo14.htm)

Make kibi-dango – this one does a blender (we will be using an actual mochi machine)
Web link of note: Kibidango
(At http://www.kevinryan.com/student/projects/jdish/kibidango.htm)

The parents of my brother’s friend gave us the “Save the whales” game back in the mid 1980s. It is basically Monopoly with whales… except much much less competitive.

The beaver one is pretty good too. It comes with little matchstick “logs” to build the dams with. I haven’t played the honey bee game but it looks good and friends liked it.

Now, I’m not a psycho Ayn Rand fanatic, but a completely cooperative board game seems a little boring to me. Making a board game that is inclusive is a real challenge… which I would say these guys have met.
Web link of note: Cooperative Games
(At http://www.cooperativegames.com/)

Brief recipe for kibi mochi, which I am assuming is the same as for kibi dango, the thing Momotaro uses to recruit allies in his journey to fight oni.

Now I have to figure out the difference between millet and “sweet millet”
Web link of note: Home Japanese recipes year round
(At http://ww4.enjoy.ne.jp/~shokujin/english/foodca.html)