2009 Oct 20, 8:24Against Transparency - The perils of openness in government. - Lawrence Lessig - October 9, 2009
lawrence-lessig transparent government essay privacy politics 2009 Oct 15, 6:33"Besides the canonical Bristlecone Pine, there are many other organism on earth that will outlive you. Photographer Rachel Sussman has been traveling around the world to find and photograph
them."
photo time nature biology age 2009 Oct 8, 4:59A brief introduction to Hadoop, its history, subprojects, and current status
via:pskomoroch hadoop introduction google yahoo facebook database technical 2009 Oct 7, 8:10Quirksmode does a chart comparing the differences in various versions of WebKit: "There’s iPhone WebKit, Android WebKit, S60 WebKit (at least two versions each), Bolt, Iris, Ozone, and Palm Pre, and
I don’t doubt that I’ve overlooked a few minor WebKits along the way. All 10 mobile WebKits I’ve identified so far are subtly or wildly different."
compatibility web development browser webkit apple google android iphone safari technical via:mattb 2009 Sep 10, 8:22Geoff Nunberg investigates issues in Google Books and in the comments Google Book's team manager responds in the comments. Apparently metadata is bad everywhere and not an issue new to the Web and
user generated content or tagging. Like finding Feynman lectures categorized as Death Metal on Napster back in the day.
language google library metadata catalog 2009 Sep 10, 6:42"Although HTML and XHTML appear to have similarities in their syntax, they are significantly different in many ways."
html html5 xml xhtml whatwg wiki technical 2009 Sep 10, 5:52Just in time for Comcast switching channels above 30 to digital only. My current Windows Media Center setup will not function soon. How much do you think I'm going to have to spend to get it working
now...
cablecard cable tv windows mediacenter media technical 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 25, 12:34
My parents visited this past weekend, met Sarah's parents, saw our house, and met our bunny. On Friday we went to BluWater in Kirkland
which was pretty busy and the service was slower and slightly worse than we usually find. Saturday my parents helped us with our yard quite a bit and for dinner we went to the Icon Grill with Sarah's parents. I had forgotten how much I enjoy the food at the Icon Grill - I had the very tasty meat loaf. Dinner went well and
afterward we stopped at the Three Lions pub in Redmond. On all previous occasions I had tried to go in there the place was packed for a
soccer game. This night however there was a man with a guitar, singing and it wasn't nearly as packed. I also found that near the bathrooms on the wall is what looks to be James Bond's jetpack.
On Sunday we went out to see Jeannie and Carl and see the renovations to Jeannie's place. We met up with them at the Fremont Market to
which I hadn't been previously, and had a look around there before going back to Jeannie's to see the lovely work they'd done to her place. For dinner my parents took us out to the Melting Pot for
my approaching birthday. It was fun having my parents up and I look forward to the next time they're here.
family weekend 2009 Aug 25, 7:10Research paper modelling zombie infection. "The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life." Also, love the
references section with "Snyder, Zack (director), 2004 Dawn of the Dead" next to things like "Bainov, D.D. & Simeonov, P.S. Impulsive Differential Equations: Asymptotic Properties of the
Solutions. World Scientific, Singapore (1995)."
humor zombie research via:schneier math science health apocalypse system:filetype:pdf system:media:document 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 5, 7:57"Ten times smaller than barcodes, Bokodes’ low-cost optical design can be read from as far as 4 meters away, much farther than barcodes, by taking an out-of-focus photo with any off-the-shelf
camera." Love for stuff like this to catch on, however compared to QR codes, these are much more difficult to produce than barcodes in that you can't just print them out and they require changes to
the photography technique (must be out of focus) rather than just analyzing any photograph of a barcode. They seem to be solving slightly different problems.
qrcode qr barcode camera information design bokode augmented-reality technical 2009 Aug 3, 8:30"The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day." I enjoy the graph animation when switching between different groups.
via:swannman graph visualization information graphic nytimes infographics demographics statistics 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 20, 5:06Berkman Center aggregate blog of its members and activies.
berkman harvard legal blog feed technical 2009 Jul 7, 6:02More on converting between different date/time formats and the effective range of the formats.
datetime time date programming c++ c technical 2009 Jul 1, 6:21"The QR code, used to store and decode small bits of data via printed symbol, received an artistic rendering by SET as part of its campaign for Marc by Marc Jacobs." I like the idea although in this
case its not very subtle or different from a regular QR code IMHO. Also, I was surprised that my phone could still read the QR code in this form.
qr qrcode marketing art internet mobile technical 2009 Jul 1, 2:24Stats on HTTP servers and HTTP server response headers. "Current statistics are based on a sample of 84604 probed servers, gathered in the last 386 days."
http statistics server internet http-header via:mnot technical 2009 Jun 29, 4:19
I've looked at my web server logs previously to see if anyone had used my Web Frotz Interpreter and until recently didn't realize that awstats (the web server log report generator) was truncating the query from my URL, so I couldn't tell that anyone was actually using
it. But after grepping the logs manually I've pulled out the URLs of visitor's text adventure sessions. If you'll recall, my Web Frotz Interpreter stores the game state in the
URL so its easy to see user's game states in the web server logs.
I've put some of the links up on the Web Frotz Interpreter page. Some of the interesting ones:
server-logs technical zork frotz pants interactive-fiction uri if
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