Shadows. Also from Lockergnome:

The human eye can see three-dimensional objects because of how light bounces off of the objects and into our eyes. Well, you could apply the same principle to your Windows environment by adding shadows to your open windows, because then your mind would perceive light and the open windows would stand out as if they were three-dimensional. Y’z Shadow for Windows XP does just that, and takes your Windows experience to the third dimension. The application simply adds a slight shadow to every open window and the taskbar. You can change the depth and color of the shadow, which can give your Desktop environment a whole new feel. I decided to give all of my open windows a little neon glow and I must say I think the effect is here to stay.

Update: this looks really cool but man does it slow down window painting. I wonder if it is implemented efficiently using the latest directx/videocard facilities. I wonder if it will be faster on my Radeon 9700 machine at home.

FLAC v1.0.4. From Lockergnome:

I don’t claim to be an audiophile, but I still love good music. I’m content with the quality and sound of an MP3 file, but I do have some friends who don’t like MP3s because of the loss of audio quality in the compressed format. That’s great, but who wants a bunch of huge WAV audio files taking up all your hard drive space? FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, and basically that means that you can use FLAC to compress your WAV files without losing audio quality in the compression process. FLAC won’t let you make a file nearly as small as an MP3, but it was able to turn one of my 42MB WAV files into a much smaller 30MB FLAC file. That may not seem like a lot, but imagine doing that to an entire music directory! FLAC also comes with a plug-in that allows you to listen to FLAC files in Winamp. FLAC does run from a command prompt, but on the same Web site you can download a Windows GUI front end that makes the whole conversion process much easier. For you programmers out there, FLAC is open source, so that means that you have access to all the source code and can incorporate this codec into your own applications. I guess my best friend may not have to buy a second hard drive now!

BCS Rankings Nov 4. WHOO HOO! – Bowl Championship Series - Full Rankings Chart. Ohio State is #2!!!!!!!!!

OK here is what needs to happen to guarantee we stay there:

• Ohio State has to win out.
• Va Tech needs to beat Miami. This would ice it.
• WSU needs to keep winning. They should but the UW game will be emotional.
• It wouldn’t hurt if OSU’s other opponents kept on winning – Michigan, Texas Tech, Penn State, etc. Keep that strength of schedule gap vs Miami.
• Oklahoma needs to keep playing tough and hopefully leapfrog Miami in the USA Today/ESPN poll.

How Many Megapixels. So I saw yesterday that kodak is introducing a 14 Megapixel camera for prosumers. Wow. I remember when a guy in a camera store told me “you’ll never need more than 3 megapixels”. Yeah, just like I will never need more than 16K of RAM…

I started to wonder about the logical limit to megapixel growth in cameras. Will we want 100 megapixel cameras? Gigapixel cameras? Terapixel cameras?

Well some quick internet searching tells me that the demand for cameras in the gigapixel range will happen in our lifetime. It is pretty easy to find discussions today on the net of people needing cameras approaching 100 megapixels. For great resolution prints at 11x14, you can chew up pixels fast. I think average people will do this.

And bleeding edge people are talking about gigapixel cameras – for instance NASA mission planning and people researching petabyte database scaling (again astronomy images).

Will average joes like me want to have a gigapixel camera? My guess is yes or something close to it. I am betting we will all want to eventually have digital photos with at least the resolution of today’s film. And per some discussions on various photo sites, that means we will want 400Megapixel+ cameras for images with the resolution (pixel, color, and intensity) of film.

My gut says we won’t stop there but that will be a topic for a later post…

College Football. Wow what a great day for the Buckeyes. A super win over Minnesota, and losses by so many other contenders. I just did a quick pro forma recalc of the BCS polls and, if OSU/Miami/Oklahoma all move up as expected in the computer polls, and if WSU moves up as expected, it is going to be just about a dead heat between OSU and Miami for the 3rd spot. If the effect of WSU winning is greater than linear (ie it opens up the strength of schedule lead OSU has over Miami even more, or WSU moves up higher than 5 in the BCS), OSU could take the number 2 spot! On pins and needles…

Quick Halloween Report. Another great evening. At least 400 kids came by. We gave away a car trunkful of candy. Big successes: my tombstones, the floating graveyard lantern, the creepy shipping crate. Failures: my axworthy ghost quit running after a short time. My “Ben” rat crate fizzled totally – soundtrack died, door rattling motor died. My DMX remote failed so I couldn’t manually turn on the doghouse fogger, tho the automated system did just fine. I know I should relax but I am already starting to think about next year – replacement of all x10 with DMX, a better remote control option (maybe using a pda and 802.11), some pneumatic effects.

And where was Vin? Marking the start of the Vin Baker era in Boston, the Celtics take their worst loss in franchise history.

Air Force Loses. Check out what happened last night – ESPN.com - NCF - Recap - Colorado State at Air Force - 10/31/2002. Why do I care? Because it further weakens Notre Dame’s strength of schedule rating (Air Force was one of their vaunted opponents) and thus weakens their BCS rating. Go Bucks!

Sniper Rifle. Perhaps we shouldn’t leave enforcement of our limited gun regulations up to the weakest point in the chain – local retailers – Tacoma shop can’t account for 340 guns, including sniper rifle.

Expensing Options. Reading SNS this week, it just struck me that, rather than trying to assign some debateable value number to options and passing them thru the P&L, let’s do a simpler thing. Let’s just have companies publish quarterly a statement of ownership – who owns what shares; how many new options were granted in the quarter; how many grants expired or were cancelled; new stock issuances as a result of financing moves, etc. And then a clear state of EPS impacts of all this – I just want to know, as a stockholder, did I suffer unfair and unwise dilution during the quarter? This is something that companies could do today without solving the problem of how to value options. And it would be valuable.

Christmas Wish List. Here’s my geek wishlist as of 10-31. The Xantech MRC88 multizone audio controller, so i can centralize and control all my Halloween audio. Or maybe the AVM20 for the same purpose. The Video xb – one simple box to add on to my PCs to solve all my video capture, storage, and authoring issues. Something from Azden for wireless distribution of all my Halloween audio. The Cambridge SoundWorks Radio CD to replace my noisy cheap Timex alarm/cd player. The Samsung 24” LCD Monitor for my desk. The RCA Scenium 35-Hour Digital Media Recorder (DRS7000N) to replace my existing DVD player and add another HD recorder in addition to my Tivo box. Some nifty Verbatim Vinyl CDs. And the Nike psa[play - Portable Sport Audio by Philips for treadmill time. And a late addition, the Casio exilim camera/mp3 player.

For the garage I need the Wall-Mount Desk from Duluth Trading.

Finally for the music hour, the Yamaha SLG100N would be a nice practice guitar tho it is dorky looking. And the Chordmaster is way cool for finding chords.

BCS Rankings. I’ve been noodling over these. What a strange way to pick the teams to play for the championship. Brad Edwards at ESPN does a good job digging into the mechanics of the system. I’ve been looking at Ohio State’s numbers the last two weeks and have seen some interesting things:

• Most of the top 6 teams lost “strength of schedule” points this week. Only OSU and Georgia improved. OSU gets a double win here and for quality wins as WSU keeps winning. This is really going to come down to nonconference wins for both teams, as the rest of the way they are in conference play and their conference opponents are going to beat the lights out of each other. OSU needs WSU to continue to win.
• While scoring margin has been eliminated as a factor in computer polls, it clearly is still a factor for human voters, as OSU lost two positions in the AP Poll while Notre Dame climbed two positions. This cost us at least a point and maybe more with downstream effects
• Throwing out the worst computer ranking, it is the NY Times, Sagarin, and Colley Matrix polls that are hurting OSU the most, as they have us two positions behind Georgia. TheColley Matrix poll is out of Atlanta, so that explains that. I don’t fully understand the other polls yet.

Lockergnome. Love this newsletter. More great stuff over the weekend. Phone Scoop for user reviews of cell phones. Serial ATA Working Group website for info on serial ATA – I am dying to get this in my PCs, existing cabling is just too intimidating. Amaze your friends with A List of the Keyboard Shortcuts That Are Available in Windows XP. See how deleted your files really are with Deleted File Analysis Utility. Quick kb access to directories in open/save dialogs with Pathbuddy.

And for some reason nothing appeals to my sensibilities like Scott’s Box Shot Maker.

Orbitz. Fare Idea Returns to Haunt Airlines

Buckeyes. Nerve wracking win on Saturday but a win is a win. The computer polls don’t care about margin of victory tho clearly the voters do as OSU dropped two spots in the AP Poll. We need some help tho…very disappointing to watch FSU collapse against Notre Dame. Tho the vaunted Notre Dame schedule doesn’t seem so tough now as Michigan lost against, Michigan State has collapsed, Air Force lost again, and of course FSU is having an off year.