Christopher Allen

"Introducing the Active Storage XRAID™ – High-performance, High-availability, massive capacity, and the first native Mac OS X storage management suite. The Active Storage XRAID™ represents an evolution in storage for Apple users. Developed with one goal in mind, to deliver the best overall experience for Apple users; performance, reliability, capacity, and out of the box ease of use. - Christopher Allen

"This website is dedicated to finding additional uses for the Apple TV by (legitimately) enabling its Potential Capabilities, and is a place for the community to share ideas, discoveries and solutions. As such, when you add any comments or questions (not contributions to an informational page) please sign it using the signature button, , or four tildes (~~~~). It is for informational purposes only. AwkwardTV is not responsible if you void your warranty or damage your device. - Christopher Allen

"Free Watermark. Add Custom Watermark with PicMarkr! PicMarkr lets you to add custom watermark (image or text) to your images online and free. It is useful when you need to protect your copyrights or if you want to add comments to your photos. - Christopher Allen

"Apparently I have bad luck with MacBooks, because I have found myself going through this Time Machine repair guide with shocking frequency. The process of migrating an old Time Machine backup to a new machine is pretty involved and prone to errors, so I wrote a shell script that gets the job done automatically: - Christopher Allen

"Here are some egregious sins that you must not perform on social media sites. Avoid these violations and learn how to manage and maintain online relationships on a variety of popular social media sites. - Christopher Allen

"To restore the "Compress PDF" workflow to the Print dialog in OS X Leopard, install this package, from an account with administrator privileges. This restores the Tiger functionality that Leopard ate. - Christopher Allen

"So when it comes to designing our icons for our own software products, we almost always end up obsessing over them. The redesign of the application icon for xScope went through nearly 20 different revisions before we settled on a final version. This time around, the drama was caused by the new icon for Frenzic for the iPhone. - Christopher Allen

"Calaboration makes it easy to set up iCal to view and edit your Google Calendar calendars. It automatically finds all of your calendars and allows you to add any of them to iCal with the press of a button. - Christopher Allen

"Many of my past posts have talked about the benefits of having a community for a company or organization. However, I have not spent enough time talking about the benefit to the participants in the community. It has to go both ways. A community will only be successful if the participants and the sponsoring organization both find value in participating regularly in the community." - Christopher Allen

"Familiar strangers are common throughout our urban existence: for example, commuters that we recognise at the bus stop or the old man who walks his dog in the morning. It is our hypothesis that familiar strangers are in fact an emergent property of the movement and temporal patterns of any modern city. Despite the outward appearance of chaotic motion, the behaviours of urban inhabitants possess strong temporal, spatial and intentional patterns. For example, travelling to work in the morning (rush-hour being a common manifestation of this behaviour), meeting friends at a cafe or picking up the children from school. Deeper, contextual connections may also exist between those who frequent certain areas, such as where there are clusters of specific service industries or the stratification of retail outlets (e.g. budget stores often occupy different areas to those store that cater to fashionable or niche markets). - Christopher Allen

"This paper explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar Strangers. We describe several experiments and studies that led to designs for both a personal, body-worn, wireless device and a mobile phone based application that extend the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and affinities with strangers in pubic places. - Christopher Allen

"As humans we live and interact across a wildly diverse set of physical spaces. We each formulate our own personal meaning of place using a myriad of observable cues such as public-private, large-small, daytime-nighttime, loud-quiet, and crowded-empty. Unsurprisingly, it is the people with which we share such spaces that dominate our perception of place. Sometimes these people are friends, family and colleagues. More often, and particularly in public urban spaces we inhabit, the individuals who affect us are ones that we repeatedly observe and yet do not directly interact with – our Familiar Strangers. This research project explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar Strangers. We describe several experiments and studies that lead to a design for a personal, body-worn, wireless device that extends the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and relationships with strangers in public places." - Christopher Allen

"Pixlr is a free online image editor, jump in and start edit, adjust, filter. It's just what you imagine! Jump in n' get started! - Christopher Allen

About Thread Sizes... 5/8-27, 3/8-16, 5/16-18, 1/4-20 The standard thread size for music mic stands is 5/8-27. The standard thread size for fishpoles and most shockmounts (for film/TV) is 3/8-16. Note that this is also the standard thread size for professional camera mounting. The old Hollywood thread size for studio booms and fishpoles was 5/16-18. This size is no longer used on currently manufactured equipment, but may still be found on some older poles and shockmount handles. The standard thread size for amateur video and 35mm still photography is 1/4-20. To take advantage of the wide array of small clamps, tripods, and mounting tricks available for amateur photographers, you should have a few 1/4-20 female to 3/8 male adapters ($7.50). - Christopher Allen

"We present the Priority R-tree, or PR-tree, which is the first R-tree variant that always answers a window query using O((N/B)1−1/d + T /B) I/Os...Spatial data naturally arise in numerous applications, including geographical information systems, computer-aided design, computer vision and robotics. Therefore spatial database systems designed to store, manage, and manipulate spatial data have received considerable attention over the years. Since these databases often involve massive datasets, disk based index structures for spatial data have been re- searched extensively—see e.g. the survey by Gaede and Gunther. Especially the R-tree and its numerous variants have emerged as practically efficient indexing methods. In this paper we present the Priority R-tree, or PR-tree, which is the first R-tree variant that is not only practically efficient but also provably asymptotically optimal" - Christopher Allen

I wrote up a spec for Broderbund 20 years ago (1988!) about doing interactive audio games, and even spec'ed a script for one in the 90s. It is nice that someone is finally doing one. We still don't know how to do drama well with games, and I think it is because in game design we skipped too fast from interactive text games to trying to do interactive movies without doing the work between. - Christopher Allen