Blog Entries
New Paintings Page: Ward Shelley
4 days agoInfographic oil paintings of things like the historical influences of avant garde or the life of Frank Zappa.No, you can’t do that with H.264 « Digital Diary of Ben Schwartz
4 days agoOn the crappy licensing of the H.264 and MPEG codecs in popular video encoding software.Methods of Watching TV
5 days agoIf you've got cable, Internet, and Netflix you end up with a large number of TV viewing options. Its nice to have the options but is there some way to collect and summarize my available options at any one time?|
|
TV | PC |
|---|---|---|
| Comcast TV | Xbox 360 + Windows Media Center | Windows Media Center |
| Comcast OnDemand | Cable box | Fancast |
| Hulu | Xbox 360 + PlayOn + Windows Media Center | Hulu |
| Netflix Watch Instantly | Xbox 360 + Netflix App | Netflix Watch Instantly |
| Netflix DVDs | Xbox 360 | PC |
Unreality - Dolphin Assassins Yield the Greatest Movie Poster and Tagline Ever? |
5 days ago"Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States." It sounds like a sentence constructed one word at a time by different people
ARMY MAN: America's Only Magazine - a set on Flickr
6 days agoA small number of select scans at higher resolution
Picasa Web Albums - JanJaap - army man scans
6 days agoScans of the Army Man zine. Unfortunately they're in just poor enough quality to make you squint and wish and pretend.Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy? | Video on TED.com
7 days agoSynthesized happiness at around 11min sounds a lot like my relationship with my phone.Steven Pinker on the myth of violence | Video on TED.com
7 days ago"Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence." Working up towards Forever Peace?TED Blog: TED's Chris Anderson answers Reddit's questions
7 days agoInteresting Q&A on TED plus Chris Anderson's list of favorite TED talks.YouTube - Charlie Brooker - How To Report The News
Jan 30, 2:26Similar to the "This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post" (http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/incendiary/) except this is a typical news report. "...and this is a lighthouse keeper being beheaded by a lighthouse beam."Thought Experiments and Design Principles
Jan 29, 3:54Raymond Chen has some thought experiments useful for discovering various kinds of stupidity in software design:
- What if two programs did this?
- Who says there's only one?
- Imagine if this were possible. / Imagine if things actually worked that way.
Tim Berners-Lee's principles of Web design includes my favorite: Test of Independent Invention. This has a thought experiment containing the construction of the MMM (Multi-Media Mesh) with MRIs (Media Resource Identifiers) and MMTP (Muli-Media Transport Protocol).
The Internet design principles (RFC 1958) includes the Robustness Principle: be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving. A good one, but applied too liberally can lead to interop issues. For instance, consider web browsers. Imagine one browser becomes so popular that web devs create web pages and just test out their pages in this popular browser. They don't ensure their pages conform to standards and accidentally end up depending on the manner in which this popular browser tolerantly accepts non-standard input. This non-standard behavior ends up as de facto standard and future updates to the standard essentially has had decisions made for it.



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