Wit Winner

It seems that I won a "battle of wits" on another website and I didn't even realize it. I posted a comment back in May, 2005. It wasn't until today that I discoved Chris Dye later recognized my winning contribution.

The way I found out is thanks to Google. I regularly search for other websites that link back to my website just to see who is citing me. You can do this easily with the following Google query: http://google.com/search?q=link:williamfrantz.com

Another lesser known feature of Google is finding pages similar to my own. You can do that with this query: http://www.google.com/search?q=related:williamfrantz.com

Oh, my winning entry went like this:

Invent a cheesy line of dialogue that thankfully was dropped from a movie. Name the movie, the scene, and the line.

"Luke, I'm your father and I built C3PO so he's your half-brother." -- Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back

Team America Costumes for Sale

Last year, Angela and I dressed as Team America World Police for Halloween. We spent a lot of time collecting the pieces and creating the jackets. The final result was pretty good and the costumes proved to be a crowd pleaser.

We can't very well use these again this year, so they are up for sale on e-Bay. Please bid on them if you are interested.

UPDATE: The Team America costumes were sold to some gent in Canada. I hope he had fun with them.

Zune Can and Cannot

Here's an interesting post from a Microsoft employee called "Zune Sharing explained"
http://www.zunester.com/2006/09/zune-sharing-explained.html

I still have a few questions.

FAAD2 for OSX

This started as a simple task. I wanted to convert some cassette tapes into MP3 files. I have a shiny new iMac that I thought would be perfect for the task. Then I ran into lots of problems.

I used GarageBand to record the audio. I thought I could simply save it as an MP3 file but that would be too simple, wouldn't it? GarageBand only creates AAC encoded audio in M4A files. Unbelievable! Eventually I got a solution.

Improve Your PageRank

binocular222 at experts-exchange.com asked

How do I know the rank of my site?
It seems that there're some tips to make one webpage get high rank in google search where can I have reference?

I use the Google toolbar to find the PageRank of my site. When installed, the toolbar indicates the PageRank of each URL you visit. BTW, "PageRank" is not the same as your search result number. Let's look at an example...

The Probability of Terrorists

[The Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation][1] article by Floyd Rudmin tries to show how futile the NSA domestic surveillance effort is by throwing around a bunch of math. To the casual reader, it looks impressive, but if you take a closer look at the math, you'll realize that Floyd demonstrates the program can actually be pretty effective.

[1]: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/rudmin1.html

Grand Unified Web Tools

Tools, Tools (Ad Nausium) [sic.]

"There are problems with the many-tools-hacked-together approach that adds an odd balance to it."

[Bruce Alderson][1] and I have a common vision. I wish that there was a stable platform for PHP applications that provided all the common stuff like database abstraction, user login and account management. I just want to seamlessly combine the best of [MediaWiki][mw], [WordPress][wp], [Gallery][g] and [PHPbb][bb]. I don't want to have 4 different logins and spend weeks trying to make templates for each so that they all look alike. Somehow these Open Source packages need to cleanly separate the functional engine from the application presentation layer. Then I could mix and match them.

[1]: http://www.technorati.com/profile/madmaxx
[mw]: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
[wp]:http://wordpress.org/
[g]:http://gallery.menalto.com/
[bb]:http://www.phpbb.com/