Testing a client-server application on your local box is very convenient, but it can hide situations where the program’s network usage exacerbates performance problems on high-latency connections. It is very cool to be able to increase the latency on the localhost network adapter.

Back when I was using Netscape Navigator (or Communicator) 4.75 or so, I used mod_roaming to sync bookmarks between my various home and work computers. It appears that mod_roaming worked up until Mozilla 1.8. I don’t know what led to its demise, but I started using sitebar at the time. It didn’t really sync your bookmarks, but it made it fairly easy to store bookmarks in its database rather than your browsers. Fortunately, Google Browser Sync came along to satisfy my need for real syncing. It worked great in Firefox 2.0, but Google has abandoned it. Maybe, it would be still around if it had embedded adds making them billions of dollars. Now, I am using Foxmarks, which has been around for a while and works with the Firefox 3, so I’m happy again. At least bookmark syncing tools are free as opposed to the rediculous modem upgrade cycle: 1200 baud, 2400 baud, 4800 bps, 9600 bps, 14.4 kbps, 28.8kbps, 33.6 kbps, and the unrealistic 55.6 kbps. Fortunately, I never had to suffer using a 300 baud modem.

But I digress. After setting up Foxmarks, I realized that I still had my sitebar server up and running, which surely has many unpatched security holes by now. Before I shut it down, I decided to go through that list of several hundred bookmarks, to see if there was something interesting that never made it back over to my browser’s bookmarks. As you can imagine, most of the bookmarks could be scrapped. Bookmarks definitely aren’t as important anymore now that Google can find almost anything quicker than you can find an old bookmark. I’ve started using bookmarks as a to-do list for things I want to blog about, and I will continue to collect hundreds of them as if they were scrapbook photos. It’s hard to imagine that before search engines and before yahoo’s index, you had to wait for the trickle of new content that showed up on NCSA Mosaic’s What’s New page. Here are the measly few links that I collected that I think are worth sharing:

• MocoLoco: The Mondern & Contemporary Design Blog. Hmm, I doubt they used the term “blog” when I bookmarked that page.
• JONGL: The Juggling Simulator. I’m probably the only person that thinks this is cool.
  
• The Easter Egg Archive. I totally forgot that this site existed.
  
• Isometric Screenshots. So this guy is interested in assassinations, riots, and The Sound of Music? Huh?
• GRAFICA Obscura. Be sure to check out the Geometric Paper Folding. It’s so cool, but how did he get a Ph.D.?

I brew coffee with a coffee press, aka French press or coffee plunger. It is really nice since I’m only brewing coffee for myself, and I don’t have to deal with paper filters. However, it does leave a certain amount of silt from coffee grounds at the bottom of my mug, since the wire mesh doesn’t filter it as well as paper. One solution is to use a coffee grinder with a coarser setting, but I’ve found that the ones that you can use for free at the grocery store still leave a fair amount of silt, and I haven’t decided to make the plunge on a good burr grinder yet. Using a coarse grind also has the side effect of requiring twice as much coffee grounds to brew the same strength coffee.

The cheaper and easier solution is to use a nylon fine sediment filterscreen which fits on the coffee press plunger. I could only find these at Sweet Maria’s online store, and they have an annoying $15 minimum, which wouldn’t be so bad, but they don’t sell anything else I’m interested in. They have coffee roasters (did I mention I was looking for the easy solution), green coffee (roaster not included), and roasted whole bean coffee (but I don’t have a grinder). This worked quite well. It didn’t filter all of the sediment, but it did reduce the effect on the entire cup of coffee except for the bottom 2mm. I also think that cleaning the coffee grounds out of the coffee press is much easier than cleaning a re-usable filter in a drip coffee maker.

You can also read someone else’s opinion of the filterscreen.

I recently watched two movies using Netflix’s WatchNow streaming video, which finally works on the Mac. The movies are very different, but they both have interesting aspects for geeks.

The first movie is Primer.  This is one of the most amazing yet confusing movies that I’ve watched in years. What I found most compelling is how hard they work to make the situations believable. It starts off with engineers trying to start up a company, while still performing their day jobs at a big engineering firm. The movie soon veers into the realm of sci-fi, but the characters continue to act in the most believable way possible through unusual circumstances, whereas many sci-fi movies start spouting platitudes or indulge in childish what-if scenarios. Towards the end, the movie becomes very confusing, since the writer only lets you see things that the characters see, but there is a forum where obsessed fans provide their detailed analyses.

The second movie is The King of Kong. It is a documentary of a fairly normal middle-school science teacher who takes on a quest to beat the world record score in Donkey Kong. Not only is Donkey Kong considered the hardest of all the classic arcade games, the record has been held for years by an almost mythic and definitely narcissistic hero of video game addicts. Though this is a documentary, some of the people in the classic video game culture appear as absurd as the characters from Napoleon Dynamite. There are some similarities between this movie and American Movie, but I find the people in The King of Kong to be much more endearing, not to mention the fact that I still have doubts that American Movie really could be a documentary and not a hoax like the Blair Witch Project.

David Walker, former US Comptroller General and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, will be
giving the talk, America on the Brink of Financial Crisis, in San Antonio on January 15.

Interview with David Walker on 60 Minutes:

30 minute version of the movie I.O.U.S.A:
I started to wonder how the debt-to-GDP ration in the US compares to other countries, and the numbers are actually worse for many industrialized countries, but the US may be in much worse shape because we also have high private debt combined with growing public debt.