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Extreme JavaScript Performance

2009 Nov 12, 3:35Presentation comparing the performance of different JavaScript operations on different web browsers. Suggestions cover full range of good to know to common sense to ugly ugly ugly.PermalinkCommentsvia:thefangmonster performance javascript browser web technical tips presentation

I Love Local Commercials - Sponsored by MicroBilt Corporation

2009 Nov 5, 2:07Two guys sponsored by MicroBilt to travel around the country and make totally awesome commercials for local companies. Includes such gems as Salt Lake Community Barbering & Cosmetology School: "Your hairdo is only limited by your immagination. And how far along we are in the semester.", as well as Cullman Liquidation: "They're used. Some of them have stains. We cover that up."PermalinkCommentsvia:boingboing video advertising commercial tv monthly

Sense and Reference on the Web

2009 Oct 30, 10:33"What does a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) mean? Does it have a sense, and can it refer to things?" I hope it will cover some of the new scheme vs always HTTP scheme and distinct vs not distinct URLs for a real world object and its web page perma-arguments.PermalinkCommentsvia:connolly url uri w3c semanticweb http todo technical

YouTube - The Web That Wasn't

2009 Oct 28, 8:31"The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown's Intermedia system." Covers things like As We May Think and others who could have made the Web. Would love to have this as a summary with links to everything rather than a video =)PermalinkCommentsvia:connolly technical google video internet web information technology memex

Comcast Digital Switch Impact on My Windows Media Center

2009 Sep 25, 2:19

Amateur wireless station (LOC)Irritatingly out of line with what their commercials say, in my area Comcast, under the covers of the national broadcast digital switch, is sneaking in their own switch to digital, moving channels above 30 to their own digital format. Previously, I had Windows 7 Media Center running on a PC with a Hauppauge PVR500 which can decode two television signals at once setup to record shows I like. The XBox 360 works great as a Media Center client letting me easily watch the recorded shows over my home network on my normal TV.

Unfortunately with Comcast's change, now one needs a cable box or a Comcast digital to analog converter in order to view their signal, but Comcast is offering up to two free converters for those who'd like them. The second of my two free converters I hooked up to the Media Center PC and I got the IR Blaster that came with my Hauppauge out of the garage. I plugged in the USB IR Blaster to my PC, connected one of the IR transmitters to the 1st port on the IR Blaster, and sat the IR transmitter next to the converter's IR receiver. I went through the Media Center TV setup again and happily it was able to figure out how to correctly change the channel on the converter. So I can record now, however:

  1. I can only record one thing at a time now
  2. Changing the channel is slow taking many seconds (no flipping through channels for me)
  3. The Hauppauge card can't know if the channel change worked. So if it tries to change to HBO (I get it for free with one of the Comcast packages) which is encrypted and the converted won't show, the channel doesn't change but the PC doesn't know it and ends up recording some other channel.
To fix (3) I need to manually go through and remove channels I don't have from the Media Center. To fix (1) I may be able to get a second IR transmitter, a third digital converter, hook it up to one of the other inputs on my Hauppauge, and go back through the Media Center TV setup. There's no fix for (2) but that's not so bad. All in all, its just generally frustrating that they're breaking my setup with no obvious benefit.PermalinkCommentsdigital tv hauppauge mce cable windows media center comcast

RFC 959 - File Transfer Protocol

2009 Sep 9, 5:35The FTP spec's section 3.5 'ERROR RECOVERY AND RESTART' describes how to resume an FTP download.PermalinkCommentsietf reference ftp rfc resume download internet technical

Creating Accelerators for Other People's Web Services

2009 Aug 18, 4:19

Before we shipped IE8 there were no Accelerators, so we had some fun making our own for our favorite web services. I've got a small set of tips for creating Accelerators for other people's web services. I was planning on writing this up as an IE blog post, but Jon wrote a post covering a similar area so rather than write a full and coherent blog post I'll just list a few points:

PermalinkCommentstechnical accelerator ie8 ie

Mythbuster Adam Savage goes undercover at Comic-Con - TV Squad

2009 Aug 5, 2:18"Mythbuster Adam Savage attended this year's Con ... he roamed the convention floor in his own costume and egged his Twitter followers to sniff him out." He dressed as The Joker from the opening scene of The Dark Knight.
PermalinkCommentscomic-con humor adam-savage myth-busters tv

James O'Neill's blog : Borrowing from Windows Explorer in PowerShell part 2: extended properties

2009 Jun 26, 8:59"When I stated looking at what could be done using explorer objects from PowerShell I 'discovered' the extended properties."PermalinkCommentsshell windows powershell tutorial code programming explorer technical

Analysis of the Green Dam Censorware System

2009 Jun 12, 12:20"We have discovered remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in Green Dam, the censorship software reportedly mandated by the Chinese government. Any web site a Green Dam user visits can take control of the PC. According to press reports, China will soon require all PCs sold in the country to include Green Dam. This software monitors web sites visited and other activity on the computer and blocks adult content as well as politically sensitive material."PermalinkCommentscensorship china hack security internet greendam

CoCam: Infrared Photography: Recipe for Coating Flash Bulbs with Infrared Paint

2009 May 29, 8:59Don't need to cover _flash bulbs_ with infrared paint, but the paint is to block out all but infrared light so could be useful otherwise. ViaPermalinkCommentsir photography recipe ir-paint

Rules for Time Travelers | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

2009 May 22, 6:59"...but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed. ... So if you wanted to create a fictional world involving travel through time, here are 10+1 rules by which you should try to play." I always liked Bill & Ted's time travel mechanics better than Back to the Future's - not that it made for a better movie of course. I'd like to see a chart comparing the time travel mechanics of well known fiction that features time travel.PermalinkCommentstime-travel movie fiction bttf

Awesome Spokesmen Billy Mays and Vince Offer

2009 Apr 8, 4:06
Vince Offer photo from onebutan-iphoneBilly Mays photo from onebutan-iphone

There can be no doubt that infomercial pitchmen Billy Mays and Vince Offer are awesome, but how can I decide which is my favorite?

Infomercial Performance.
Among other things they sell Zorbeez and ShamWow respectively, both of which are absorbant towels so first up I can get a somewhat apples-to-apples comparison on informercials for comparable products. Thankfully someone has created a Vince Offer vs Billy Mays youtube video featuring these informercials.

Billy has an upbeat yell to everything he says while Vince has an endearing condescension to his "You followin' me camera guy?" In the end I must give this one to Vince Offer.

Extracurriculars.
Billy Mays has a new show Pitchmen on the Discovery Channel, a reality show involving folks pitching inventions to the pitchmen Billy Mays and someone else. Vince Offer was arrested for assaulting a prostitute. A clear win for Billy.
Intra-pitchman Interactions.
Billy has challenged Vince to a pitchman-off which on the surface sounds like a point for Billy, but if you listen to the challenge Billy says that Vince attempted to extend the olive branch. Billy Mays calls out Vince on the Adam Corolla Show
PermalinkCommentspersonal2 infomercial stupid vince offer billy mays

Notes on Creating Internet Explorer Extensions in C++ and COM

2009 Mar 20, 4:51

Working on Internet Explorer extensions in C++ & COM, I had to relearn or rediscover how to do several totally basic and important things. To save myself and possibly others trouble in the future, here's some pertinent links and tips.

First you must choose your IE extensibility point. Here's a very short list of the few I've used:

Once you've created your COM object that implements IObjectWithSite and whatever other interfaces your extensibility point requires as described in the above links you'll see your SetSite method get called by IE. You might want to know how to get the top level browser object from the IUnknown site object passed in via that method.

After that you may also want to listen for some events from the browser. To do this you'll need to:

  1. Implement the dispinterface that has the event you want. For instance DWebBrowserEvents2, or HTMLDocumentEvents, or HTMLWindowEvents2. You'll have to search around in that area of the documentation to find the event you're looking for.
  2. Register for events using AtlAdvise. The object you need to subscribe to depends on the events you want. For example, DWebBrowserEvents2 come from the webbrowser object, HTMLDocumentEvents come from the document object assuming its an HTML document (I obtained via get_Document method on the webbrowser), and HTMLWindowEvents2 come from the window object (which oddly I obtained via calling the get_script method on the document object). Note that depending on when your SetSite method is called the document may not exist yet. For my extension I signed up for browser events immediately and then listened for events like NavigateComplete before signing up for document and window events.
  3. Implement IDispatch. The Invoke method will get called with event notifications from the dispinterfaces you sign up for in AtlAdvise. Implementing Invoke manually is a slight pain as all the parameters come in as VARIANTs and are in reverse order. There's some ATL macros that may make this easier but I didn't bother.
  4. Call AtlUnadvise at some point -- at the latest when SetSite is called again and your site object changes.

If you want to check if an IHTMLElement is not visible on screen due how the page is scrolled, try comparing the Body or Document Element's client height and width, which appears to be the dimensions of the visible document area, to the element's bounding client rect which appears to be its position relative to the upper left corner of the visible document area. I've found this to be working for me so far, but I'm not positive that frames, iframes, zooming, editable document areas, etc won't mess this up.

Be sure to use pointers you get from the IWebBrowser/IHTMLDocument/etc. only on the thread on which you obtained the pointer or correctly marshal the pointers to other threads to avoid weird crashes and hangs.

Obtaining the HTML document of a subframe is slightly more complicated then you might hope. On the other hand this might be resolved by the new to IE8 method IHTMLFrameElement3::get_contentDocument

Check out Eric's IE blog post on IE extensibility which has some great links on this topic as well.

PermalinkCommentstechnical boring internet explorer com c++ ihtmlelement extension

25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers

2009 Feb 26, 11:52This is what I'd like in a newspaper: "1: Focus on original content, do not rewrite wire stories or press releases." and "2: Focus on hyper-local coverage, newspapers should "own" their regional beat because they have the best contacts and the best understanding of local companies and issues."PermalinkCommentsvia:sambrook newspaper advertising business journalism internet

Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol IETF Draft Document

2009 Feb 5, 8:39The long expired draft of the Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol (WPAD). To summarize, use DHCP and failing that DNS to find the name of a web server and on that web server find a Proxy Auto-Config file at a well known localtion.PermalinkCommentswpad proxy internet reference browser dns dhcp

Noisy Decent Graphics: All the ephemera that's fit to print *

2009 Jan 15, 9:41"Russell and I thought it would be interesting to take some stuff from the internet and print it in a newspaper format. Words as well as pictures. Like a Daily Me, but slower. When we discovered that most newspaper printers will let you do a short run on their press (this was exactly the same spec as the News Of The World) we decided to have some fun."PermalinkCommentsblog internet design art newspaper typography print publishing via:mattb

Google LatLong: New ways to get around with the Transit Layer

2009 Jan 14, 2:03Google Maps now has a public transit route finder. Would have been useful in Munich and certainly will be useful here at home since they cover the Seattle area including the east-side. "I'm pleased to announce the launch of the Transit Layer on Google Maps in more than 50 cities around the world making it easier for citizens and tourists around the globe to access public transportation line information in their cities."PermalinkCommentsgoogle map travel bus traffic seattle redmond munich transportation maps public-transportation transit

Barbie's finger nail painter makes gaming writers beautiful

2009 Jan 10, 1:00We may not have 3D printers yet but this is certainly a step in the correct direction. "A second later, you remove your finger from the terrifyingly feminine gom jabbar, and you have your nail all done and ready to go. A brief cover of clear fingernail polish for protection, and you're ready to go out and enjoy the rest of CES while awkwardly not explaining why you have a heart on your finger."PermalinkCommentsbarbie humor nail ces arstechnica video technology

Top Ten Songes I Learned About via Taggedhype

2008 Dec 29, 2:37"When the Hype Machine finds new songs in the blogosphere, Taggedhype looks up each track's tags on Last.fm and stores the result in Delicious. It's an elegant and useful mashup, that somehow has managed to remain relatively undiscovered."PermalinkCommentsdelicious music tag geek taggedhype via:thefangmonster podcast
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