2009 Apr 15, 10:00Its like Google Fight but with trend lines over time and with Flickr photos. "Flickr Trends Search kicked off a whole Flickr Central thread of This vs That"
flickr api tool this-vs-that photo graph 2009 Mar 23, 9:41"So heres my trip to Chernobyl in pictures." Nice photo of the tree growing through the floor next to the chair. The whole set is like Fallout 3 but there's plants. Didn't realize plants could do
well in such a situation.
via:swannman photo history science nuclear russia chernobyl 2009 Jan 15, 9:21"My friend Amanda had never seen a whole Star Wars film. When I asked her if she wanted to watch the original trilogy she said that she would, but that she already knew what happens. So I took out my
voice recorder and asked her to start from the top. I then created some very basic animation in Final Cut to go along with her narration."
via:boingboing humor video starwars 2008 Sep 23, 2:15
The names in the following anecdote have been changed. Except for my name
(I'm Dave).
I got a new laptop a while back. I had it in my office and Tim came in to ask me something but paused when he saw my laptop. "Oh, is this one of those new touch screen laptops?" he asked, the whole
time moving his hand towards my laptop and punctuating his sentence by pressing his finger to the screen. "No" I responded.
Walking down a hallway I heard Winston, one of our managers, say, "Hey Tim!" Winston catches up to me and asks, "Are you almost done with the XYZ bug?" I realized Winston was talking to me and got
my name wrong but I figured I'll ignore it and perhaps he'll realize his mistake. Winston continued "I just talked with some people who say they're blocked and waiting for Tim to finish the XYZ
bug." "Dave" I said helpfully attempting to diplomatically correct Winston since he apparently hadn't realized his error. "No, it was Jeremy and Bill." Winston said naming the people he had talked
to who were waiting for me to fix the XYZ bug. At this point I decided it would be easier to just answer his question and end the conversation than to get into this whole thing. As far as I know,
Winston has not gotten my name wrong at any other time.
work nontechnical 2008 Sep 5, 1:56This is the game from the same person I linked to previously who has a son named Link: "I'm very excited to finally announce our first game, Liight, for WiiWare! So... what is it? Liight is a puzzle
solving game where the pieces are colored lights and the goal is to make cool music! Anyone can play! Just illuminate all the targets in each puzzle with light of the matching color... but it's not
always so easy! You'll have to mix colors, cast shadows and make the most of your limited resources to solve these brain teasers. Solve 100 challenging puzzles! Create your own puzzles, and Share
them with your friends via WiiConnect24. Host a Contest to see who can solve your puzzle the fastest. If you're ready, take on Nonstop mode, a whole new way to play where arcade-style scoring meets
split-second strategy!"
liight game videogame nintendo wii wiiware 2008 Sep 3, 9:49Notes on how COM classes are registered on 64bit versions of Windows. Whole swaths of the registry (among other things) are redirected to a subnode named Wow6432Node when you're a 32bit process
running on a 64bit Windows.
msdn registry development microsoft 64bit 2008 Feb 26, 2:24
At the grocery store the other day Sarah and I attempted to find shallot for a recipe, but I can't
tell the difference between shallot, sweet onions, yellow onions, etc. etc. We found something that we decided was the closest we'd find in the store and I believe we picked correctly because at
checkout the cashier rang it up as shallot.
I think this could be
a practical problem that the 20q Pocket Mind Reader should be able to solve: obtain the name of an unidentified object. When we got home
I decided to test the 20q Pocket Mind Reader on shallot. Unfortunately, it told me I had an onion, but I think if these were designed for identifying unknown objects based solely on information you
can obtain by looking at it, rather than requiring knowledge of seeds, where it grows, etc. it would do better. Or I could just ask someone who works at the grocery store.
onion shallot toy 20q random 2007 Dec 24, 12:41These days it seems like there's a social sharing website for everything representable as bits. Like
Scribd for (mostly legal) documents,
SciVee for scientific research videos,
Wordie for words, and
Kuler for color themes. Kuler seems
like a ridiculous website (overkill) but I had been meaning to update my homepage's color design and Kuler has an
RSS based REST API.
The API lets you obtain things like the most recently added color themes or the most popular or all themes containing the color dark red, etc... So of course rather than update my website's design I
hooked up my css to the color themes coming out of Kuler. Select my main page's color theme from a
list of random Kuler themes. As I'm sure
the regular readers can guess I use
an xslt and blah blah blah... It looks OK with
Silver Surfer and
Happy Hipo but in general changing the colors
this way doesn't produce something pretty.
When reading about Kuler I found that they may have stolen the whole idea wholeslae from
ColourLovers. They discuss
the thievery in an article on their blog. I would have switched over to ColourLovers out of principle but
they don't have an easily accessible API.
colourlovers color xslt theme homepage technical kuler design 2007 Oct 22, 4:47
I purchased the
Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like
others before me who have
discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of
HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can
gift them to you.
HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and
objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding
more. The humor and the sort of
play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest
ending theme I've heard (also
blogged
by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't always trying to kill me. Additionally the
weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers' attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box
and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of
Solitary the reality show that sticks contestants alone in small rooms
forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...
RPS has articles on Portal including
a Portal review, a page
suggesting Portal is a tale of
lesbianism, and
others.
hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical 2007 Aug 9, 5:41To satisfy my hands which have already learned to type *nix commands I like to install
Win32 versions of common GNU utilities. Unfortunately, the
which command is a rather literal port and requires you to enter the entire name of the command for which you're looking. That is '
which which' won't find itself but
'
which which.exe' will. This makes this almost useless for me so I thought to write my own as a batch file. I had learned about a few goodies available in cmd.exe that I thought would
make this an easy task. It turned out to be more difficult than I thought.
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in ( `"echo %PATH:;=& echo %"` ) do (
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%b in ( `"echo %PATHEXT:;=& echo %"` ) do (
if exist "%%a"\%1%%b (
for %%c in ( "%%a"\%1%%b ) do (
echo %%~fc
)
)
)
)
The environment variables
PATH and
PATHEXT hold the list of paths to search through to find commands, and the extensions of files that should be run as
commands respectively. The '
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in (...) do (...)' runs the '
do' portion with
%%a sequentially taking on the value of every line in
the '
in' portion. That's nice, but
PATH and
PATHEXT don't have their elements on different lines and I don't know of a way to escape a newline character to
appear in a batch file. In order to get the
PATH and
PATHEXT's elements onto different lines I used the
%ENV:a=b% syntax which replaces occurrences of a with b
in the value of ENV. I replaced the '
;' delimiter with the text '
& echo ' which means
%PATHEXT:;=& echo% evaluates to something like "
echo .COM& echo
.EXE& echo .BAT& ...". I have to put the whole expression in double quotes in order to escape the '&' for appearing in the batch file. The
usebackq and the backwards quotes means
that the backquoted string should be replaced with the output of the execution of its content. So in that fashion I'm able to get each element of the env. variable onto new lines. The rest is pretty
straight forward.
Also, it supports wildcards:
C:\Users\davris>which.cmd *hi*
C:\Windows\System32\GRAPHICS.COM
C:\Windows\System32\SearchIndexer.exe
D:\bin\which.exe
D:\bin\which.cmd
which cmd technical batch for 2007 Aug 3, 3:11The JavaScript language. The whole thing.
javascript reference language specification 2007 Jun 20, 3:38This tool lets you create (among other things) video captures of you using your computer for specific screen regions, specific windows, or the whole desktop.
encoding free microsoft live video videos tool download 2007 May 17, 5:16Previously I created some
resource tools and then I used them to
overwrite msxml3's
XML source view. In this update I've added support for the XPointer Framework.
This time around I've started to add support for the
XPointer Framework to my
XML source view and
I've added
installation instructions. The framework consists of a series of pointer segments each of which has a scheme name followed
by data in parenthesis. For example 'scheme1(data1)scheme2(data2)scheme3(data3)'. A pointer segment resolves to a portion of the XML document based on the data and the scheme name. The whole pointer
resolves to the first segment that successfully resolves. That is, from the example, if scheme1 resolves to nothing and scheme2 resolves to something then that's used and scheme3 is ignored. In
addition to the framework I've added support for the
xmlns scheme which binds namespace prefixes to a namespace URI and the
element scheme which is a simple way to resolve to particular elements in an XML. I also have limited support for the
xpointer scheme the content of which is resolved as an
XPath with some extra functions (which I don't support --
hence the limited). I've also thrown in schemes for the two
SelectionLanguage values supported by msxml3.
Next time I might try to support the xpointer functions that aren't in xpath using
msxml script. But I think I'm losing steam on
this project... we'll see.
resource technical xml xpointer res xpath xslt 2007 May 17, 1:04I've seen several humorous kitty related stories recently and then happened upon the whole
lolcat scene. Rather than post all the links to humorous
kitty lolcat photos to delicious I figure I'll roundup the links here.
A cat in England enjoys
riding the bus and does so regularly (
associated lolcat commentary).
A cat
trees a bear (also with
lolcat
commentary).
xkcd has a
comic on the topic of lolcat commentary. xkcd also had a
non-lolcat cat related comic recently that I found
funny.
And now I'm out of commentary so I'll just... "X cat is X":
interested,
aggressive/defensive. VG related:
SF,
Zelda. Other:
cookie,
sad.
roundup comic kitty personal cat humor nontechnical 2007 Mar 30, 11:36During the whole intelligent design & evolution thing in Kansas this guy wrote an open letter requesting that they also teach the creation beliefs of his religion as a follower of the Flying
Spaghetti Monster.
religion humor politics education fsm flying-spaghetti-monster evolution satire 2006 Nov 19, 9:25I've had a few thoughts recently on
Polytope Tetris. Constructive thoughts:
- One dimensional view. It should be easy to just hack up the two dimensional view.
- Cross sectional view. I want to have a view that displays cross sections of the game space taken across one dimension all in a row. It'd be nice if this cross sectional view could use any other
view to display each cross section, however I don't think the game's arch easily allows for that. Instead I may have to make it specific to the three dimensional view
Deconstructive thoughts:
- I went to the site the other day and saw that the project had an activity rating in the 90s. And this is while its still marked as Beta. I think I'm going to re-release the exact same bits
under a new name and move it out of Beta or Alpha. I'll call it Platinum Edition.
- There are a number of issues with this whole project. I'm trying to get my thoughts down here.
project polytopetetris 2006 Nov 6, 6:51I've updated my webpage some more. I now have the onmouseover on the thumbnails in my photos section. So that's fun. I'm using the
flickr badge
script and then including a javascript file I made that finds the flickr imgs in my page and adds in onmouseover and onmouseout events. I've also got the whole thing validating on
W3C's HTML validator and
W3C's CSS validator.
The one thing I'd like to fix is the comments for my blog posts. They aren't included in the RSS feed. I'm shopping for a blog site that supports
comment counts in the RSS feed at least. If possible I'd like the actual comments to appear in
the feed but I doubt anyone does that.
css html script validator homepage flickr 2005 Dec 29, 3:37Linus says Slashdot is "big public wanking session": "I don't tend to bother about slashdot, because quite frankly, the whole _point_ of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with
people getting together and making their own "insightful
slashdot linus humor linux trademark 2005 Sep 4, 3:31Kids in the Hall sketch transcripts, news, etc.
tv humor kith encyclopedia search
Some rights reserved