Blog Entries
laughingsquid: The Ultimate Spaceship Face-off, Interactive...
May 22, 3:10
When they went to the Moon, they received the same per diem...
2012 Aug 28, 4:38
When they went to the Moon, they received the same per diem compensation as they would have for being away from base in Bakersfield: eight dollars a day, before various deductions (like for accommodation, because the government was providing the bed in the spaceship).
Apollo 11’s Astronauts Received an $8 Per Diem for the Mission to the Moon
The astronauts of Apollo 11: Intrepid explorers. Inspirational heroes. Government employees.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
A New HTTP Status Code for Legally-restricted Resources
2012 Jun 11, 2:00451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons: The 451 status code is optional; clients cannot rely upon its use. It is imaginable that certain legal authorities may wish to avoid transparency, and not only forbid access to certain resources, but also disclosure that the restriction exists.
That was fast.
EFF White Paper Outlines How Businesses Can Avoid Assisting Repressive Regimes
2012 Apr 18, 6:24A House subcommittee has passed the Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA), which would require disclosure from companies about their human rights practices and limit the export of technologies that “serve the primary purpose of” facilitating government surveillance or censorship to countries designated as “Internet-restricting.”
Star Trek: TNG Season 8 illustration has us longing for more [Star Trek]
2012 Mar 5, 3:17Fictional plot summaries of TNG S8 episodes. Like:
- Q’s back: he’s wearing scuba gear and needs Picard’s help dumping his girlfriend. Barclay accidentally locks himself outside the ship.
- Geordie and Data nurse a space bird back to health, and are sad when they have to release it. Picard is trapped in a turbolift with a baby.
- Starfleet sends a cantankerous admiral to boss around Picard during delicate peace talks. Data seems to have mastered bragging.
- Riker’s ex-girlfriend arrives and dies, leaving behind a pile of glowing dust and a mystery. Picard is trapped on a turbolift with a horse.
- A planet of suspicious docents abduct Riker for their museum of amazing men. Geordi and Data are too excited to sleep at their sleepover.
- Picard is trapped inside a sentient turbolift. A clip show highlights the most memorable “Picard is trapped on a turbolift” moments.
URI Percent-Encoding Ignorance Level 1 - Purpose
2012 Feb 15, 4:00As a professional URI aficionado I deal with various levels of ignorance on URI percent-encoding (aka URI encoding, or URL escaping).
Worse than the lame blog comments hating on percent-encoding is the shipping code which can do actual damage. In one very large project I won't name, I've fixed code that decodes all percent-encoded octets in a URI in order to get rid of pesky percents before calling ShellExecute. An unnamed developer with similar intent but clearly much craftier did the same thing in a loop until the string's length stopped changing. As it turns out percent-encoding serves a purpose and can't just be removed arbitrarily.
Percent-encoding exists so that one can represent data in a URI that would otherwise not be allowed or would be interpretted as a delimiter instead of data. For example, the space character (U+0020) is not allowed in a URI and so must be percent-encoded in order to appear in a URI:
-
http://example.com/the%20path/ -
http://example.com/the path/
For an additional example, the question mark delimits the path from the query. If one wanted the question mark to appear as part of the path rather than delimit the path from the query, it must be percent-encoded:
-
http://example.com/foo%3Fbar -
http://example.com/foo?bar
/foo" from the query "bar". And in the first, the querstion mark is percent-encoded and so
the path is "/foo%3Fbar".
MPAA Boss: If The Chinese Censor The Internet, Why Can't The US? (techdirt.com)
2011 Dec 10, 8:31FTA:
The MPAA is getting pretty desperate, it seems. MPAA boss Chris Dodd was out trying to defend censoring the internet this week by using China as an example of why censorship isn’t a problem. It’s kind of shocking, really.
“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.”
Iran blocks Tor; Tor releases same-day fix ...
2011 Sep 19, 12:53Counter intuitive argument for not making the larger fix: "Should we fix them all preemptively, meaning the next time they block us it will be through some more complex mechanism that's harder to figure out? Or should we leave things as they are, knowing there will be more blocking events but also knowing that we can solve them easily?"Telex
2011 Jul 18, 2:38Neat idea: "When the user wants to visit a blacklisted site, the client establishes an encrypted HTTPS connection to a non-blacklisted web server outside the censor’s network, which could be a normal site that the user regularly visits... The client secretly marks the connection as a Telex request by inserting a cryptographic tag into the headers. We construct this tag using a mechanism called public-key steganography... As the connection travels over the Internet en route to the non-blacklisted site, it passes through routers at various ISPs in the core of the network. We envision that some of these ISPs would deploy equipment we call Telex stations."David Risney - Google Profile
2011 Jul 1, 5:52Hooking up my authorship tags: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/authorship-markup-and-web-search.htmlclip.exe - Useful tool I didn't know shipped with Windows
2011 May 26, 11:00When you run clip.exe, whatever comes into its standard input is put onto the clipboard. So when you need to move the result of something in your command window somewhere else you can pipe the result into clip.exe. Then you won't have to worry about the irritating way cmd.exe does block copy/pasting and you avoid having to manually fixup line breaks in wrapped lines. For instance, you can put the contents of a script into the clipboard with:
more cdo.cmd | clip
I've got a lot of stuff dumped in my bin folder that I sync across all my PCs so I didn't realize that clip.exe is a part of standard Windows installs.
Nice for avoiding the block copy in cmd.exe but I'd prefer to have the contents sort of tee'd into the clipboard and standard output. So TeeClip.ps1:
$input | tee -var teeclipout | clip;
$teeclipout;
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
2011 Apr 27, 2:21Competing price setting algorithms create a very high priced book. "But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping)."Internet Explorer team sent us cake for shipping Firefox 4 #fx4 on Twitpic
2011 Mar 22, 12:51We've now got IE9 and FF4 which means time for more cake!Chapter 16. The Registry - Master-PowerShell | With Dr. Tobias Weltner - Powershell.com – Powershell Scripts, Tips and Resources
2011 Jan 4, 7:25How to take ownership and re-ACL registry keys from a powershell prompt.
Party Down: Season 1
2010 Jul 5, 4:28
I just finished watching both seasons of this very funny and engaging TV series Id previously never heard of and I highly recommend it. Adam Scott stars as an actor who has given up on his dream of acting and joins a catering company working along side actors trying to make it in LA. There are many ties to Veronica Mars: the shows creator is Rob Thomas (the creator of Veronica Mars), the show features Ken Marino and Ryan Hansen, and has guest stars of Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, and Enrico Colantoni, among others. It has many of the same talented people from Veronica Mars but Party Down is more like a smarter and funnier The Office given the relationship between Adam Scott and Lizzy Caplan and their subtle mockery of their wackier workmates and inept boss.
TiMER
2010 Jun 29, 1:24
An excellent movie I'd never heard of. An entertaining and humorous sci-fi indie romance comedy. It stars Emma Caulfield (who I recognize as Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) who obsesses over her timer, an implanted device that counts down to when she'll meet the love of her life. Thematically its similar to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which similarly adds a scifi device to society in order to examine the value of failed relationships on a persons life.
Some rights reserved