Want to download someone's flickr photos easily? Try FlickrDown.

I got a chuckle out of Matt Damon's comments on Sarah Palin: "Does she really think that dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago? Because she's gonna have the nuclear codes..." (time offset 1:20)

Portland Food and Drink reviewed our favorite Thai restaurant, Kinara Thai Bistro. Luckily for us, it also happens to be the closest restaurant to our condo.

I used to link to an excellent article from GetRichSlowly.org on Renting vs. Buying: The Realities of Home-Ownership. But they asked me to remove the link. It's too bad because it was a good article! I have never heard of anybody asking somebody to remove a link in this situation, but it isn't worth the hassle so I just removed it.

Twilight *** : In the world of books-for-teenagers-that-adults-read-too, first there was Harry Potter, then the Golden Compass, now there's Twilight. To be sure, Twilight is not forged from the same rich lode as its predecessors, but it's a decent enough modern vampire novel.

Electoral-vote.com: I loved this site in 2004. Now it's back to track the 2008 elections!

Good video from my friend Pete on the housing market collapse... Stop the Bailouts.

Pnin ***** : Wonderfully rich, sensuous, and complicated prose. Not the kind of book that can be read quickly, but the enjoyment is as much in the journey through the words as it is in unraveling the plot. My first Nabokov and definitely not my last.

The corn industry must be feeling the pressure from PBS's King Corn, Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, and such articles as High-Fructose Corn Syrup: Not So Sweet for the Planet from the Washington Post. Check out these hilarious commercials on why high-fructose corn syrup isn't bad for you: video 1, video 2.

Polar has some sweet new heart rate monitor watches out, specifically the FT80 (for crosstraining) and the CS600 (for cycling). I just might have to treat myself to a CS600 with the power module...

Google Chrome was released yesterday. This puts to rest any debate in my mind as to whether Google was slowing down!

I love every aspect of their approach to this project. They've published a great comic book that explains everything you'd want to know about Google Chrome in a very entertaining and easy-to-read way. The comic provides details on all of the cool technological innovations (one process per tab, optimized Javascript engine, etc.) along with an explanation for what led Google's engineers to do this work in the first place.

As for the browser, I've been using it for a day now. I love the fresh UI. Putting the tabs on top makes great sense. The "incognito" privacy mode is a simple and awesome idea. Highlighting the "http" in green and the main domain name in dark black in the address bar is really nice. And the performance is lightning quick.

But I won't be ditching Firefox for it any time soon. First, I depend daily on so many useful Firefox add-ons that I can't possibly imagine leaving them behind. Second, Chrome is only available on Windows. One thing I love about Firefox is that it is pretty much the same on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Hopefully Google will get its wish and Firefox will copy some of their ideas into a future release of Firefox!

4-Hour Work Week *** : I have a fundamental issue with this book's premise that you can simply farm out all of your labor, sit back, and profit. If everybody in the world had this approach, there wouldn't be anybody producing real work! Nevertheless, there are numerous productivity-enhancing recommendations offered that make this a worthwhile speed-read.

Cool article from IEEE Spectrum on Kiva, a company that manufactures robotic warehousing solutions: Three Engineers, Hundreds of Robots, One Warehouse.

While developing Presto's Sidebar Clock and other Windows Vista sidebar gadgets, I've struggled with debugging. Numerous web sites say that you can use Visual Studio to debug errors, but, up until now, I've never been able to get it to work. And writing any non-trivial gadget really requires the use of a debugger.

I finally figured out that only the professional versions of Visual Studio will allow debugging. I installed a fresh copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional from MSDN and I'm up and running. It was so easy to set up that I'm mad I didn't get it going sooner. Unfortunately, the documentation out there is pretty abysmal regarding this topic.

On a related note, DebugView is pretty handy for sidebar gadget development as well.

The Fountain **** : Awesomely inventive work with exquisite imagery. A bit hard to follow because of its three intertwined plot lines, but worth the hassle.

I rode the Portland Century last weekend. I hadn't done much training in the last month, so I knew it would be tough. But it ended up being a lot toughter than I was expecting...

It was very hilly with almost 5,000 feet of elevation gain. And I haven't done much hill training this year on account of my Seattle-to-Portland training. Luckily the weather was extremely pleasant - a hot day would have made this ride a killer! I started out with Par and Kurt, but got dropped somewhere before the first rest area. No problem, I'm used to riding alone on long rides. I caught up with another friend, Lindsey, after the third rest stop and we rode the rest of the way together.

I didn't have any physical problems but did lose mental motivation on Marine Drive (around the 70 mile mark). It also rained on us for the last hour of the ride, although it was a warm summer rain and not really that unpleasant.

Overall, the course was great, traffic pretty minimal, fun crowd, decent rest stops (although way too few bathrooms), and great food, especially the huge buffet at the finish line. At a little under eight hours, I wasn't a speed demon, but I felt like I finished at least in the top 50%. I'm going to have to come back next year and try to crush this thing!

Warlock in Spite of Himself *** : More of the same from Escape Velocity author. Part of the Warlock series.

Earth Abides ***** : Another classic sci-fi novel that I somehow never read until now. A disease kills almost everybody on Earth and the survivors live off the remains of civilization. Epic and thought-provoking!

I was digging through some old links just now and one of them resulted in this 404 haiku.

Amber Spyglass ***** : Outstanding conclusion to the Golden Compass series.

Carolyn sent me this: BigDog, "a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads."

It's awesome. Be sure to check out the guy's kicking the robot, the robot's navigating ice, and the robot's jumping like a horse over an obstacle.

Escape Velocity *** : Political sci-fi set in a medieval context. A little trite in spots, but better than I expected!

This is great: Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad -- "I'll see you at the debates, bitches!"

Vor Game **** : Obviously part of a much larger series (which I haven't read), but good by itself. Socio-political emphasis.

The "Read Everything on My Bookshelf" Project: I had a voracious appetite for science fiction and fantasy novels when I was a teenager. I would head to the bookstore and buy books all the time, most of which ended up on my bookshelf, unread. As I have moved throughout the years, I've dutifully packed up and transported all of these books with me.

Now, decades later, as I seek to de-clutter my life and get rid of unnecessary possessions, I feel obligated to read them before getting rid of them. For years, these books sat in silence. Now their stories will be heard...

Good article from Clayton Christensen on IEEE Spectrum about the application of the Toyota Production System to the semiconductor industry: The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing.

The other day, while waiting for my train home, I spent the idle minutes reading the fare information sign at the station. Portland's public transportation uses a three-zone system with different ticket prices depending on how far you travel.

Due to reasons unknown to me (but undoubtedly involving politics and gerrymandering), when the light rail was extended to Hillsboro several years ago, everything west of the zoo was put into zone 3. There are no zone 2 stops between the last stop on the west side (Sunset transit center) and the zoo stop halfway through the west-side tunnel (which is in zone 1).

What this means is that anybody buying a ticket out in Hillsboro is going to need either a one-zone ticket or a three-zone ticket. There are no possible destinations from Hillsboro that would require a two-zone ticket.

However, the ticket machines at these stops only sell two- and three-zone tickets! I hope there's some other explanation, but it certainly seems like Tri-met is ripping people off. The amount is small (the one-zone ticket is only five cents cheaper), but the principle of over-charging is the same nonetheless.

I need to purchase a three-zone ticket anyway so this doesn't affect me directly. But I am curious as to why such a blatant error/oversight persists.

A very interesting post on the mathematics behind fuel efficiency calculations: Miles per Gallon vs. Gallons per Mile

Where the Hell is Matt: Guy dances all around the world. Brought a big smile to my face. (Thanks Steve for the forward!)

Back when we designed the security for Wireless USB, one of the attacks we protected against was the man-in-the-middle attack. From a product marketing perspective, this was one of the hardest features to get agreement on because it requires the end user to perform a manual verification step.

Many people think that manual verification hurts usability unnecessarily since, in their eyes, MITM attacks are very difficult to do. Their reasoning is as follows: It's extremely unlikely that an attacker would be present at the exact moment in space and time when the end user performs the security pairing. Therefore we really don't need MITM protection.

However, the more paranoid members of our team correctly pointed out that it would be trivial for an attacker to simply jam the transmission of one of the devices. The connection would then stop working. When faced with this situation, most users "reboot" the devices and perform the pairing ritual again.

We ended up including fairly robust protection against MITM attacks. Which is a good thing, since a recent article discusses how easy it is to force a Bluetooth device to dump its pairing data and initiate the rekeying process. This attacks the protocol directly and is even easier to accomplish than the denial-of-service-type jamming attack that we were concerned with.

I finally found a decent Expose clone for Vista: Switcher. Yes, Mac people, no need to leave a comment about how this is built-in to Macs. I already know it's an awesome feature. That's why I want it in Vista. I'm not sure why Microsoft didn't build this feature in themselves, but Switcher seems to do the job. Of course, if anybody knows of something better, I'd love to hear about it.

The Illusionist **** : Is there room in the world for two prestidigitation movies that were released almost simultaneously? It appears so. While not as good as the Prestige, this movie is beautifully filmed, has great acting from Edward Norton, and is worthy in its own right.

Three more reasons I prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL:

First: MySQL only supports constants in default clauses. In other words, this is forbidden:

create table times ( time1 datetime default now(), time2 datetime default now() );

Things are even more complicated when you look into why MySQL has the very confusing situation of a datetime type and a timestamp type. And, in my opinion, the MySQL documentation on the subject is poorly formatted, at least in comparison to PostgreSQL's documentation.

Second: MySQL date/time fields don't support microsecond resolution! Aye-yah. Yet another feature that needs to be handled in application code when it really belongs in the database.

Third: The MySQL time zone support seems very clunky to the point where it's easier just to store everything as GMT and handle conversions at the application layer.

PostgreSQL handles all of these issues no problem.

Kurt turned me on to Bikely, a sweet bike route mapping site. It has a great user interface, provides an elegant Google Maps mashup, offers elevation profiles, and can print out turn-by-turn directions (cue sheets). Here's an example, the Portland Century route.

Up until now, the venerable gmaps-pedometer had been my favorite way of conveying this information, but I'm switching to Bikely! It has a few areas for improvement (such as its search) but development seems active so I'm sure they'll get resolved.

Three Cups of Tea ***** Very important book that everybody needs to read. Guy gets lost after climbing K2. Pakistani village nurses him to health. He pledges to build them a school, starting life-long mission to build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. By the end of the book, I was convinced that this is the only long-term solution to stopping terrorism.

One of my favorite new sites is SlimTimer. It's the best time tracker for tasks that I've found, either as a online Web 2.0-ish service or an offline installable application. SlimTimer offers a basic mode for free and premium services for a small fee.

I am hooked after using it for a couple of months. When I free up some project time, I am going to contact the author and see if he is interested in some collaboration opportunities. One thing I could help out with is a Windows Vista sidebar companion gadget.

After reading a glowing review from Wired, I finally got around to signing up for an Amazon Web Services account and playing around with Amazon EC2. It's cool!

At first, I didn't understand what exactly EC2 was. The Amazon promotional material could be a little more clear in this area. It's a virtual machine (what I refer to as a slice, Amazon calls it an instance) that is billed out by the hour (real world time, not CPU-used time). It has an impressive set of client command-line tools that let you control your slices from any Windows or Linux box on the Internet. Everything uses public key cryptography.

To get started, Amazon has an online forum that offers free, pre-configured instances. They have all of the Linux flavors, Solaris, OpenBSD, etc. I found a slimmed down version of Gentoo enabled with PHP and Apache2 and was up and running in under 5 minutes.

Another cool concept that Amazon has is the ability to purchase IP addresses and them route them to any machine on the EC2 network. Amazon calls this concept "elastic IP addresses". All of your instances run with private IP addresses on the Amazon network. For them to be accessible to the outside world, you use the client tools to connect your public IP address with the private one. One of the obvious advantages of doing this is that it makes it extremely easy to re-route your traffic to a different instance any time you want with zero DNS downtime.

Getting back to instances, they are ephemeral in the sense that when you shut them down, they are gone forever. I figured this out the hard way when I configured an instance to serve up a custom web page, shut it down, and then started it back up again and discovered that my changes were gone. If you want to preserve any changes you made to the pre-configured image, you need to store them on Amazon S3. Luckily, Amazon provides tools to make this very easy to do.

In addition to getting up and running very quickly with minimal capital, AWS provides essentially unlimited scaling. Read this blog post about Animoto's launch of their Facebook app for a case study. SmugMug is another good case study.

One interesting facet of Amazon's web services offerings is the ecosystem that's starting to build up around them. Look at RightScale as one example of a company offering value-added services to AWS.

All in all, a very impressive offering: compute, storage, queue, database, and (with third-party help) scaling. Everything you need to launch whatever you want to.

But you do pay for everything: Instance time, data transferred in/out of AWS, storage. I estimate the minimum monthly cost of a basic instance at around $100. Still dirt cheap compared to buying your own equipment for colo, but not as cheap as Slicehost or some of the other VPS vendors (around $20 including quite a bit of bandwidth and a fair amount of storage).

Interested in starting your own EC2 instance? These may help: link1, link2

Next up on my to-investigate list: Google App Engine.

I finally made the upgrade to Firefox 3. The speed enhancements are incredible - it screams! Other notable improvements include an incredibly improved address bar (it's very Apple-Spotlight-inspired), a very nice new download manager, and some significant usability enhancements to the add-on manager. MozillaLinks has a thorough review of the changes.

Unfortunately, like all Firefox upgrades, there are quite a few of my favorite add-ons that are no longer compatible. Hopefully they will be updated soon, because now that I've used FF3 for a few days, there's no going back now!

Charity Navigator just released their report on the fundraising efficiency of the top 30 metropolitan areas. Portland was ranked 26th - doh!

From CNN online video: Man biked 42-mile work commute every day in May - each way!

Anchorman ** : A little too zany for me.

I picked up a Navigon 2100 GPS for $120 off of bensbargains.net last month. This is the least expensive GPS that I know of that will read the street names to you. Other low-cost models just say "turn right", "turn left", etc. Some online reviews said that the Navigon has a slow user interface, but I didn't think it was bad at all.

Two unique Navigon features are lifetime free map updates and an awesome highway interchange mode that makes it easy to determine which lane you should be in. It also has an excellent three-dimensional "reality view" which is extremely intuitive.

This unit pretty much does everything that I would want a GPS to do. Some more points of interest would be nice, but at this price point, I really can't complain! Highly recommended if you are in the market for a GPS unit for your car.

Update: Oops, my bad. Turns out the Navigon doesn't have free map updates after all. It does have free software updates, but probably most of the other GPS manufacturers offer that also.

You want to print to PDF and you don't want to mess with ad-supported drivers with pop-ups and you don't want to pay for Acrobat from Adobe? (Or you're like me and you did pay for Acrobat, but the overly aggressive licensing server keeps deactivating your product?) BullZip PDF is the answer.

The Mexican *** : Better than I expected!

I was given a Trek Pro bicycle saddle bag as a gift about a year ago. This past weekend, the zipper on the bag broke. I emailed Trek customer support and was told that the warranty expires after a year and that I was out of luck!

Trek's bicycle warranties are great, but I'd recommend against buying any of their accessories due to this very poor warranty policy. Other companies (like SunLite Cycling Gear) have lifetime warranty on all of their products. Either that, or buy the Trek stuff at REI so you can return it when it breaks :)

I rode the Reach the Beach ride on Saturday with my friend Par. We did the 100-mile route, which started in Portland and ended at Pacific City. We got going around 7:45am and the first 60 miles went down easily. Most of that was with Par in the lead and me drafting. After Amity, the heat started to get to me and I bonked for a 10-mile segment. The last 25 miles got a lot easier, especially as we cleared the coastal range and the cool ocean air revitalized us. We arrived at the beach around 4:00pm (6.5 hours ride time), did a quick dip in the ocean to cool off, had dinner, and headed back home.

Overall, a very well-organized event. I would definitely ride it again (although I should probably do a little more pre-training next time). This ride was an eye-opener for me that the Seattle-to-Portland ride is less than two months away. I really need to up my training game if I'm going to make it in one day.

Subtle Knife **** Sequel to the Golden Compass. Quantum mechanics (many-worlds theory) in a children's novel!

Color of Magic **** Quirky fun. First Discworld book. There are over 30 books in this series... eep!

I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival last night at the Bagdad Theater.

We saw shorts on kite snowboarding in Finland ("Entropy"), crazy mountain biking in British Columbia ("Trial and Error"), rock climbing in England, and ice climbing in abandoned Swedish mines. The feature was a documentary called "20 Seconds of Joy" on a Norwegian woman's addiction to base jumping.

Although quite long at almost an hour, I thought "20 Seconds" was an excellent insight into adrenaline addiction. The other films were fine, but I missed the fun-loving/humorous element from previous festivals (anybody remember the rock climbing dog?).

I wish the Banff folks would find a way to publish an annual DVD series so we could see more of the submissions! One night is not enough...

Good Earth **** Simple yet enticing story of rural life in pre-revolutionary China.