Posts from — July 2007

Will someone please invent a way to search for ideas?

Short on inspiration? Harvest ideas from the web by searching Google for “someone please invent” and see what people are wishing for. Using quotes around “someone please invent” insures that Google searches for that exact phrase only.

You can further refine the query by adding related terms at the end of the query. For example, try searching for “someone please invent” game* to see game-related results.

I don’t usually write about software, but this is an issue of general interest. When you uninstall a program, it often leaves behind little bits of itself. This cruft accumulates over time and, especially in Windows, can reduce the performance of your machine.

I recently stumbled on a pair of utilities that quickly and easily remove this cruft: AppDelete for OS X and Revo Uninstaller for Windows (XP and Vista).

AppDelete is exactly what you see in this screenshot. You drag a program’s icon onto the little wooden garbage pail from the Applications folder. It asks if you’re certain that you want to delete the program, and then removes it. I’ve been using it for several weeks, and it works great.

Revo Uninstaller is a bit more complicated, but it has many more features. When you load the program, it displays a list of all of your applications (and somehow does this much faster than Windows itself). You can choose an application to remove, run that application’s built-in uninstaller, and then use a utility to scan for left-over files and registry keys. It worked perfectly for me.

Revo also lets you manage applications that run at startup with the AutoRun manager, cleans up “junk files”, and gives you quick access to important Windows utilities. As far as I can tell you can accomplish most of this with astute registry editing and manual file deletion, but this program makes it much easier. [From Lifehacker, thanks!].

I love utilities that make our lives better and easier, and these two solve a real problem. If you’re using Linux, try rpm -e, and quit smirking.

WindLight 1,
originally uploaded by Lex Zhaoying.

The Second Life Scripters mailing list just had a great discussion on the cycle of the sun and the seasons in Second Life. As very detail-oriented residents may have already determined, the sun and moon in SL do not follow the Earth’s natural course.

Scripter Extraordinaire Zyzzy Zarf (who doesn’t seem to have a web site, but if I’m wrong, please let me know in the comments!) provided some code obtained from a Linden that indicates that the sun moves in a circle around a tilted plane. The angle of the plane rotates around each year.

This results in a “good enough” simulation of how the sun and moon ought to behave. When we design virtual environments, do we really need accurate simulations of the sun and moon? Or is this “good enough” simulation good enough?

I’m also fascinated by the emergence of a class of SL Astronomers… studying the Second Life skies.