2009 Sep 16, 4:48"German SSDeV member Ray is known all around the world for his impressive collection of handcuffs and his fun ways of opening most of them. ... At HAR he pulled another stunt: He used a 3D printer to
print handcuff keys. And not just any ordinary handcuff key … no, it’s the official handcuff key from the Dutch police!" Plus at the bottom a story on the legality of possessing handcuff keys.
legal security printer 3d key handcuff police 2009 Sep 3, 7:17"This specification defines a lossless compressed data format that compresses data using a combination of the LZ77 algorithm and Huffman coding." Also see RFC 1950 zlib, a wrapper compression format
that can use deflate, and RFC 1952 gzip, a compressed file format that can use deflate.
technical rfc ietf compression http deflate gzip zlib 2009 Sep 1, 4:59"...toy and apparel designers Kid Robot (with the help of creative ideas studio We Are Plus) have organized a mobile phone-based scavenger hunt in Manhattan centered around scanning QR codes."
qrcode phone scavenger-hunt toy advertising 2009 Sep 1, 4:39"...what effect does the large-scale structure of the JS output code have on the DEFLATE algorithm of GZIP which is used to serve up compressed script?" Another instance of using knowledge of the
specific file type to get gains in compression. Is there a web proxy running all this at which I can point my phone?
via:kris.kowal performance javascript gzip deflate compression web technical 2009 Sep 1, 4:36"I’ve written a small Java application that will read in a CSS file and output its contents to stdout or another file in a format that’s optimised for gzipping." Cool!
via:kris.kowal technical compression css web performance gzip java 2009 Aug 31, 4:22"This document is intended to describe a HTTP Archive format that should be used when exporting data from Firebug Net panel. The current version of the format isn't finalized and is open for further
proposals."
http fiddler debug format firebug technical via:mnot 2009 Aug 24, 9:52Notes on how bin diff'ing tools work and thoughts on defeating them. "We call the threat "1-day exploits". Just few minutes after the release of patches, binary diffing technique can be used to
identify the vulnerabilities that the security patches are remedying."
exploit security binary diff tool research technical system:filetype:pdf system:media:document 2009 Aug 24, 3:11"It turns out that flipping a coin has all sorts of non-randomness", includes link to research paper and blog post with gems like: "If the coin is tossed and caught, it has about a 51% chance of
landing on the same face it was launched"
security random coin coin-toss 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:
- The first thing to try is looking for developer help for the web service, specifically if there's a REST-ful URL based API. For example, Bing Maps has great URL API documentation that would
be enough to create an Accelerator.
- The Accelerator XML is very similar to HTML forms. If you can find an HTML form for the web service for which you want to create an Accelerator, you can view the HTML source and create an
Accelerator based on that.
- I created the FormToAccelerator extension based on the previous idea. You can
use the extension to create an Accelerator from an HTML form, or just use it to create the start of one and edit it manually after.
- If the page doesn't use an HTML form, you can start up an HTTP debugger like Fiddler, use the web service from the normal web
page, and then in Fiddler see if you can find a REST-ful looking URL you can use.
- When looking to create a preview for your Accelerator, see if the web page for the web service has a mobile version or a version that's intended to embed in other web pages via an iframe. On
this same line, iPhone apps make great Accelerators usually with lovely previews.
- If there's no mobile or embeddable version and the only thing wrong with the normal web page for the web service is that the useful information doesn't fit in the preview window then see if you
can find an HTML tag with a name or id near the useful information, and stick a '#' fragment pointing to that tag onto the preview URL template.
- Without a reasonable REST-ful API you can use a combination of Google's "site:" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" to find the most relevant page on a particular site.
- The value of a name and value pair need not consist of only a single Accelerator variable. You can get creative and put other text in there. For instance, I implemented a Google currency conversion by setting the query to "{selection} in US Dollars".
technical accelerator ie8 ie 2009 Aug 17, 8:39Laughed for this comment on the zombie photo used in the Wired article: 'Funny, the Wired article attribution ... says, "Fake Zombies attacking an innocent driver." I don't know who decided on that
caption, but it made me immediately want to ask 1. How do you know they're FAKE zombies? 2. How do you know the driver is INNOCENT?'
humor zombie photo flickr wired 2009 Aug 14, 9:58Photos of "...the smelting of Sonic's rings, the chiseling of the 1-Up mushroom, and the rubber-pressed rebounding blocks of Arkanoid."
videogame mario tetris factory photo 2009 Aug 12, 4:55"As a browser supplier, we want people to switch to the latest version of IE...", "Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the
lifespan of the product.", followed by a large number of comments from irate webdevs who missed the point.
blog microsoft ie ie6 dean-hachamovitch technical 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.
comic-con humor adam-savage myth-busters tv 2009 Jul 31, 5:57"Is it worth the sensationalism and scaremongering? The endlessly inaccurate and dangerous science reporting? The pointless and news-free lifestyle articles? Do newspapers that prioritise stories
based on celebrities and spectacle rather than importance to the world deserve to exist?"
via:sambrook internet news journalism media 2009 Jul 29, 5:48The new draft IRI spec to replace RFC 3987. "To accomodate widespread current practice, additional derivative protocol elements are defined, and current practice for resolving IRI-based hypertext
references in HTML are outlined."
iri uri rfc html reference technical 2009 Jul 27, 5:34"This specification provides an API used to prompt the user with a file selection dialogue and obtain the data contained in files on the user's file system."
web w3c api upload script dom technical 2009 Jul 20, 11:40"My interactive media project this semester is about the augmentation of the classic communication medium business card... what came to my mind pretty quickly was Augmented Reality." Ever since I saw
those AR things you print out I've wished they were based completely off of QR codes that would tell the client app where to download the 3D scene to project.
3d business-card qrcode qr augmented-reality research technical video 2009 Jul 19, 4:00
Inspired by one of Penn's (of Penn & Teller) articles in which he mentions he has his computer tell him
what he wrote in his journal that day the previous year, I've wanted to implement a similar thing with my blog. Now that, as I mentioned previously, I've updated my blog such that its much easier to implement search and such,
I've added date range filtering to my site's search. So now I can easily see what on Delicious and my blog I was doing last
year.
I've also otherwise updated search on this site. You can now quote terms to match an entire string, stick 'tag:' in front of a term to only match that term against tags as opposed to the title and
body of the entry as well, and you can stick '-' in front of a term to indicate that it must not be found in the entry.
blog search homepage 2009 Jul 14, 4:28"Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was
surprised that State doesn’t use this browser." Starts at 26:30 in the video.
firefox government via:boingboing video browser web clinton technical 2009 Jul 6, 2:06"Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pate or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst... Although 72%
of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste... subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food."
humor science statistics food culture research study paper
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