2008 Oct 15, 10:47The artist Harriet Russell encodes the destination postal address of her letters with anagrams, crosswords, and other puzzles: "Despite fears of a Royal Mail backlash, Russell found the system more
than willing to play her game. The crossword edition was returned completed with the comment "Solved by the Glasgow Mail Centre". Only 10 of the 130 letters posted lost their way through the system,
some held particularly testing anagrams, others were without a postal code."
humor puzzle crossword art mail postal-system harriet-russell book 2008 Oct 5, 9:17
Sarah asked me if I knew of a syntax highlighter for the QuickBase formula language which she uses at work. I couldn't find one but thought it might be fun to make a QuickBase Formula syntax highlighter based on the QuickBase help's
description of the formula syntax. Thankfully the language is relatively simple since my skills with ANTLR, the parser generator, are rusty now and I've only
used it previously for personal projects (like Javaish, the ridiculous Java based shell idea I had).
With the help of some great ANTLR examples and an ANTLR cheat
sheet I was able to come up with the grammar that parses the QuickBase Formula syntax and prints out the same formula marked up with HTML SPAN tags and various CSS classes. ANTLR produces the
parser in Java which I wrapped up in an applet, put in a jar, and embedded in an HTML page. The script in that page runs user input through the applet's parser and sticks the output at the bottom
of the page with appropriate CSS rules to highlight and print the formula in a pretty fashion.
What I learned:
- I didn't realize that Java applets are easy to use via script in an HTML page. In the JavaScript I
can simply refer to publicly exposed methods on the applet and run JavaScript strings through them. It makes for a great combination: do the heavy coding in Java and do the UI in HTML. I may end up
doing this again in the future.
- I love ANTLRWorks, the ANTLR IDE, that didn't exist the last time I used ANTLR. It tells you about issues with your grammar as you create it,
lets you easily debug the grammar running it forwards and backwards, display parse trees, and other useful things.
java technical programming quickbase language antlr antlrworks 2008 Oct 2, 9:37Cool graphical ANTLR IDE! They didn't have this the last time I used ANTLR. "ANTLRWorks is a novel grammar development environment for ANTLR v3 grammars written by Jean Bovet (with suggested use
cases from Terence Parr). It combines an excellent grammar-aware editor with an interpreter for rapid prototyping and a language-agnostic debugger for isolating grammar errors. ANTLRWorks helps
eliminate grammar nondeterminisms, one of the most difficult problems for beginners and experts alike, by highlighting nondeterministic paths in the syntax diagram associated with a grammar."
antlr ide graph grammar tool free download development opensource java 2008 Sep 22, 1:21Nathan Evans and Christian Grothoff, de-Tor-iorate Anonymity. The presentation notes for a DefCon talk about an attack on Tor in which the attacker may discover Tor nodes used in a session.
tor anonymity privacy security network defcon 2008 Sep 9, 8:29Article on the data centers that backup the Internet Archive and handle CERN's LHC's data. "CERN embodies borderlessness. The Swiss-French border is a drainage ditch running to one side of the
cafeteria; it was shifted a few metres to allow that excellent establishment to trade the finicky French health codes for the more laissez-fair Swiss jurisdiction. And in the data sphere it is
utterly global."
lhc history internet cory-doctorow nature physics network hardware library science cern internet-archive 2008 Sep 8, 7:00A brief history of user agent strings in web browsers, culminating in: "And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and
all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user
agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded."
humor internet browser mozilla google chrome user-agent ie 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, 6:15"National University of Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab is fast becoming my favorite in cutting edge (and a little wacky - okay, a lot) research. Take, for instance, this project titled Poultry
Internet, where a chicken is outfitted with a special dress that lets its owner pet it over the Internet." Johnny Cat writes: "Kudos to Gonzo for inventing this." I can't get to the actual site with
the info on the project but it is available on the Wayback Machine.
chicken humor internet virtual-reality mixed-reality 2008 Aug 29, 3:00"What if Ferris Bueller really was sick?" Another of those alternate trailers for a movie portraying the film in a completely different light. This is very well done.
humor via:ethan_t_hein video satire remix parody trailer movie 2008 Aug 29, 8:37"Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like
the National Security Agency." Described fixes all require significant changes to the software and probably hardware doing the routing. Ugh
wired article security internet bgp hack networking defcon 2008 Aug 28, 10:58"The patent is really bad, which is all part of the fun: Abstract: The invention consists of the process of reincarnation or rebirth resulting in immortality. Description: [0001] This invention
resulted from my combining Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Newton's Second Law of Physics. [0002] Reincarnation is defined in Webster's Third New Inernational Dictionary as "rebith". Thus my
invention is a process of rebirth or in other words immortality."
humor patent via:kris.kowal reincarnation 2008 Aug 26, 11:08
I've had a little fun messing around with Photosynth, a Microsoft research project turned into a Live service. You upload a bunch of photos from
around the same area and it makes a 3D panorama out of them. For instance, here's National Geographic's photosynth of the sphinx and pyramids in Egypt. Messing around with this I've made one of half a vase of roses, and a larger photosynth of my office.
microsoft photosynth photo office nontechnical 2008 Aug 26, 10:03"A new system devised by Carnegie Mellon University researchers aims to thwart man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks by providing a way to verify the authenticity of self-signed certificates. The system,
which is called Perspectives, uses a distributed network of "notary" servers to evaluate the public key of a target destination so that its validity can be ascertained."
security ssl pki certificate man-in-the-middle 2008 Aug 22, 1:25This is the best its-not-a-bug-its-a-feature ever: "As a response to a fan video from Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08, Tiger Woods and EA SPORTS demonstrate that the "glitch" Levinator25 thought he found in
the game, is not a glitch at all."
tiger-woods golf video videogame jesus humor 2008 Aug 15, 4:02VS debugs XSLT. Didn't know that. Neat. "You can use the Visual Studio debugger to debug XSLT. The debugger supports setting breakpoints, viewing XSLT execution state, and so on. The debugger can be
used to debug a style sheet, or to debug an XSLT transformation invoked from another application. XSLT debugging is available in the Visual Studio Team System and the Professional Edition."
Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to pass in parameter values... I just ended up setting the default value for my param elements. Otherwise, cool.
debug visual-studio microsoft msdn reference xsl xslt xml 2008 Aug 14, 9:38
I recently finished Braid, the Xbox Live game, and a comparison with Portal is helpful. From a screen shot Braid
looks like a normal 2D platformer, but that's like looking at a screen shot of Portal and saying its a first person shooter. While the scaffolding of the game-play may sort of fall into that
category, the games are actually about exploring the character's ability and solving puzzles. In Portal the ability is bending space and in Braid its bending time. However, whereas in Portal there
is one space bending mechanism, the portal gun, Braid's protagonist explores several different time bending techniques including, most prominently, reversing time, but also time dilation, multiple
time-lines, and other odd things.
Similar to the difference in game-play, while Portal has a strict simplicity to its visual style, Braid is much more ornate, like you're playing in an oil painting. Without seeing video of the game, or playing the demo (which is available for free on Xbox Live) its difficult to convey, but it is quite lovely and the
animation adds quite a bit. Both games too are rather short leaving you just a bit hungry for more and have an interesting plot and an ending that I'd hate to spoil although Braid replaces Portal's
humor with melancholy. If you enjoyed Portal and Twelve Monkeys then I'd recommend Braid.
braid game videogame portal nontechnical 2008 Aug 14, 4:29Scifi short story, "What's expected of us", by Ted Chiang. Younger cousin of 'The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution'. FTA: "Civilization now depends on self-deception."
ted-chiang scifi time time-travel fiction via:boingboing 2008 Aug 8, 12:29"Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald drags us into the sewer to discuss germs. Why are some more harmful than others? How could we make the harmful ones benign? Searching for answers, he examines a
disgusting, fascinating case: diarrhea."
video ted evolution biology 2008 Jul 25, 1:52Music that played in a bonus room of the game Skullmonkeys. Cited by Jonathan Coulton as inspiration for the Portal end theme.
video music humor skullmonkeys lil-bonus-room videogame 2008 Jul 21, 10:36
Saturday we went to Kirkland Uncorked,
a wine tasting festival near our home. We took the bus and after finding the correct one (they really should have different numbers for buses that are on the same route but traveling in different
directions) made it to the festival. Unfortunately I don't remember any of the names of the wines just which ones I enjoyed by order. Recalling that I enjoyed the first one I had and the second to
last one, doesn't really help me find them again. There were local artists who had setup booths and Sarah got
a lovely necklace. After that we ate at Cactus which, because it was such a lovely day, had all its windows and doors open.
Sunday was quieter. A few household chores and plenty of GTA4. I almost got the One Man Army achievement but I found that after four minutes with six
stars I eventually dropped back down to three stars without realizing it.
wine weekend nontechnical
Some rights reserved