2007 Sep 12, 6:54I'm visiting
Wikipedia more and more recently but I always find myself reading the referenced webpages to get the full context of quotes and for
more info. Basically I use Wikipedia as an introduction and a place to look for links. For times when I'm looking for opinions rather than facts I like to use
Everything2. No need to check references there.
There's the much hyped
WikiScanner tool which reports who has been making anonymous (thought to be anonymous at the time anyway) edits to
Wikipedia. Its humorous and interesting in a few cases, but in general I think its stretching to say that because an IP address range is owned by a corporation and someone edited Wikipedia on an IP
in that range that you can attribute that edit to that corporation. If I edited Wikipedia I'd probably do a bit of that during my lunch break, but that wouldn't mean that Microsoft wants the
Wikipedia pages for Weird Al, Dave Risney, URIs, or whatever else I would edit on Wikipedia changed.
Also, via
Everything Is Miscellaneous I found the tool
Wiki Dashboard. Wiki Dashboard proxies
Wikipedia and on each page shows a timeline view at the top with who made edits and when. Its nice to see a gentle curve down from an initial spike at the beginning for topics you don't imagine to be
controversial. As the canonical test page for this service I looked up 'Elephant' the
Wikipedia page Stephen Colbert
suggested folks vandalize on his show on 2006 July 31st. If you look at the
Wiki Dashboard Elephant page you can see a very large spike
in edits on that date. That's all I need to see.
As a side note, for the link on Stephen Colbert suggesting folks vandalize Wikipedia I linked to a Wikipedia article. Is it inappropriate to provide info about Wikipedia being vandalized and thus
incorrect via a link to a Wikipedia article?
wikidashboard stephen-colbert wikality wikipedia wikiscanner colbert-report 2007 Sep 11, 2:55There's been
some news recently on some guy hating on FireFox for its ad-blocking.
On a similar note here's a fun tip for IE7 users I got from Eric. You can get decent ad-blocking in IE7 by putting ad servers in the restricted zone. By default script inclusion is blocked between
different zones so you can put domains that serve up ads in your restricted zone after which, normal internet zone sites won't be able to include script from them. This covers most of the ads I run
into these days.
I use
Fiddler to figure out the domains that are serving up ads which incidentally also has an ad-blocking^H^H^H^H general purpose content blocking plugin. Here's
a screenshot of Slashdot and ArsTechnica from my browser. Notice the large blank areas in the screenshots:
ad-blocking personal ad ie7 technical browser tip ie 2007 Aug 15, 3:20Listened to RSnake talk about this in person at one point. Pretty interesting without his scenario video with niave female Internet user narration.
ajax rsnake via:swannman reference dns security javascript dns-rebinding 2007 Aug 15, 2:33Accelerando had interesting stuff on this. I'm also reminded of the argument against time travel: If time is infinite and time travel is possible then we should be overrun with time travelers.
philosophy science simulate scifi article 2007 Aug 9, 5:41To satisfy my hands which have already learned to type *nix commands I like to install
Win32 versions of common GNU utilities. Unfortunately, the
which command is a rather literal port and requires you to enter the entire name of the command for which you're looking. That is '
which which' won't find itself but
'
which which.exe' will. This makes this almost useless for me so I thought to write my own as a batch file. I had learned about a few goodies available in cmd.exe that I thought would
make this an easy task. It turned out to be more difficult than I thought.
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in ( `"echo %PATH:;=& echo %"` ) do (
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%b in ( `"echo %PATHEXT:;=& echo %"` ) do (
if exist "%%a"\%1%%b (
for %%c in ( "%%a"\%1%%b ) do (
echo %%~fc
)
)
)
)
The environment variables
PATH and
PATHEXT hold the list of paths to search through to find commands, and the extensions of files that should be run as
commands respectively. The '
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in (...) do (...)' runs the '
do' portion with
%%a sequentially taking on the value of every line in
the '
in' portion. That's nice, but
PATH and
PATHEXT don't have their elements on different lines and I don't know of a way to escape a newline character to
appear in a batch file. In order to get the
PATH and
PATHEXT's elements onto different lines I used the
%ENV:a=b% syntax which replaces occurrences of a with b
in the value of ENV. I replaced the '
;' delimiter with the text '
& echo ' which means
%PATHEXT:;=& echo% evaluates to something like "
echo
.COM& echo .EXE& echo .BAT& ...". I have to put the whole expression in double quotes in order to escape the '&' for appearing in the batch file. The
usebackq and
the backwards quotes means that the backquoted string should be replaced with the output of the execution of its content. So in that fashion I'm able to get each element of the env. variable onto new
lines. The rest is pretty straight forward.
Also, it supports wildcards:
C:\Users\davris>which.cmd *hi*
C:\Windows\System32\GRAPHICS.COM
C:\Windows\System32\SearchIndexer.exe
D:\bin\which.exe
D:\bin\which.cmd
which cmd technical batch for 2007 Jul 15, 5:08This previous weekend Sarah and I went to Canada for my friends Palak and Meghal's wedding. Our five day stay took us on
the route from Toronto, to Burlington (for the wedding), and then Niagra.
In Toronto we visited the
CN Tower, the
ROM, and the
Bata Shoe Museum. We generally acted like tourists walking around taking photos of things, putting on sun block, and not saying 'eh'. But we could have been worse
like the drunk American college students in front of us in line for the CN Tower asking the guide if the CN Tower is taller than the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. We stumbled upon the
Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibit which was really interesting. Sarah in particular recalls the cute stuffed animal
monsters.
After Toronto we drove to Burlington where Palak and Meghal's wedding would take place. We got up early and made it on time to the wedding which was
lovely. I hadn't attended an Indian wedding previously so it was a new experience for me. During the ceremony the child in front of me kept peeking over her parent's shoulder and staring at me. It
lasted all day with a break after lunch during which we drove around and experienced small town Ontario. After the break cousins performed dances for Palak and Meghal and then we all danced the night
away until the wee hours.
In Niagra we stayed in a hotel room with a falls view which was lovely. We went on the
Maid of the Mist tour that takes tourists
right up to the falls in a boat and drenches them. We also went on the
Behind the Falls tour which was not as fun. In both we are
given rain coats which are essentially glorified plstic trash bags. For dinner we ate in the hotel restaurant which had a lovely view of the falls. At night the falls are lit up in various colors
with gigantic lights.
niagra wedding personal toronto nontechnical 2007 Jul 14, 3:12
I've been at Microsoft three years as of last Thursday. It makes me feel old but on the bright side I've upgraded offices. I now
have an office with a window. Its actually a coincidence that I got this office at the time of my Microsoft anniversary but I like to pretend. I've had a single office for only four or five months
now so its a nice surprise that I'm moving into a single window office so soon.
Of course this move means I'll be leaving some things behind. For instance the hanging dry erase pen holder that I created out
of office supplies I will leave attached to my old white board. My new office has fancy whiteboards with trays built-in (sooo fancy) so I know the person coming into my old office will make better
use of my hanging dry erase pen holder then I would. I explained to him that the rubber bands need to be replaced every eight months or so and not to exceed the maximum weight restrictions.
Additionally, the office art masterpiece I created I will also leave behind. When Bill Gates was featured on the cover of
Diversity Inc. for his amazing
philanthropic acts many of us got copies in our mailboxes. I
collected mine and some from the recycling bins and put up five of the covers on the wall. Eventually others added to it which was my intent, but I only started this when I eventually checked my
mailbox a week or so after the magazine arrived so there weren't as many covers left with which to work. At any rate I ended up with eleven on the wall. I'll leave the interpretation of the artwork
up to the viewer.
microsoft personal office nontechnical 2007 Jul 11, 3:52I realized that I have short list of chicken related things I find humorous and they're all available for the linking to via youtube.
Chicken: The Powerpoint Presentation. This is a power point presentation of a research paper written in the
language chicken. (
video)
Bluth Family Chicken Dances. From the show Arrested Development many Bluth family members had their own chicken
dance. (
video)
Peter Fights the Giant Chicken. A man sized chicken fights Peter from Family Guy for multiple
minutes in several episodes mimicking famous action sequences. I must admire the writers dedication to the gag. (
video1,
video2)
roundup video personal chicken humor nontechnical 2007 Jun 17, 10:46List of interesting scifi writers of the current century. I really enjoyed Accelerando
blog fiction scifi literature book shopping 2007 Jun 11, 2:46Humorous and interesting exchange on the Unicode mailing list concerning the velocity of Unicode character additions and the ability to accomidate alien (as in e.t.) writing systems.
blog humor unicode language microsoft article alien et 2007 Jun 7, 4:35
A few weekends ago Sarah and I visited the
Woodland Park Zoo (Finding its website I'm amazed that its domain is 'zoo.org'. Somebody in Seattle was
quick on the domain registration.) I liked the zoo except for all the children. Human children... As visitors to the zoo... What did you think I meant? The kids are everywhere! Shouldn't they be
inside playing video games or something?
There was a gorilla that was wrapped in a dirty blanket. It looked like a homeless person and very sad. I'm reminded of the episode of the Simpsons in which
the octuplets work at the zoo and the scene in which while Homer is breaking out the children a gorilla tries to get him to take her child too. Looking for a
clip of this to post here I can only find clips from the Simpsons in German for some reason.
Like this one.
Two thirds or so of the way through my camera started running low on power. We were forced to choose which animals were camera worthy. Is it too common? Is it cute enough? Etc. Sarah
took a very nice shot of some hippos under these conditions. Unfortunately I couldn't get a good angle and view of the Elephants. But they were cool and had an interesting habitat (that's zoo for
large-ish cage.)
zoo personal nontechnical 2007 Jun 5, 12:30Interesting past predictions of the future. Lots of cool retro visions of the future.
future humor predictions history scifi archive blog monthly 2007 May 29, 1:17An interesting blog
blog art humor design monthly 2007 May 17, 1:04I've seen several humorous kitty related stories recently and then happened upon the whole
lolcat scene. Rather than post all the links to humorous
kitty lolcat photos to delicious I figure I'll roundup the links here.
A cat in England enjoys
riding the bus and does so regularly (
associated lolcat commentary).
A cat
trees a bear (also with
lolcat
commentary).
xkcd has a
comic on the topic of lolcat commentary. xkcd also had a
non-lolcat cat related comic recently that I found
funny.
And now I'm out of commentary so I'll just... "X cat is X":
interested,
aggressive/defensive. VG related:
SF,
Zelda. Other:
cookie,
sad.
roundup comic kitty personal cat humor nontechnical 2007 May 15, 8:38
Last Saturday Sarah and I went to the
Sculpture Garden in Seattle. Its laid out with
exhibits all outside running down to the water.
Sarah and I followed the trail of sculptures down to the shore and took some more photos on the sand and rocks on the mini beach. There's also a green house
but it was closed the day we were there. The glass of the green house is tinted green and the long walls of the house slope down in the back giving a forced perspective to the viewer on one
end.
The sculptures aren't roped off rather they mingle with the normal urban artifacts. There are little signs around that politely ask viewers not to touch the
art for fear of damage that reminded me of the show Arrested Development.
sculpture washington personal art seattle nontechnical 2007 May 13, 5:21Video interviews with various interesting people on the Internet and other future thoughts.
video interview science 2007 May 11, 7:48
After
Carissa and Elijah's wedding Sarah and I went to San Francisco. We drove in, well Sarah drove anyway, still in
the PT Cruiser Sunday morning and checked into our hotel,
Hotel Diva. I was originally concerned that I wouldn't fit in as I don't really consider myself a
diva, however the hotel was cool. They have Internet rooms setup in various themes, the front desk is always staffed, our room had a very modern look, and when we entered the flat-screen over the
front desk was playing an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
We walked around a bit before going to the
SF Museum of Modern Art. There was a Picasso exhibit at the time
which we could see for only $3 more. It felt kind of wrong like my ticket was super-sized. I think the most memorable piece I saw was
three white
panels which consisted of three blank panels. Art. Sure. After that Sarah wanted to see the giant Hello Kitty store she had heard of from her sister. We ended up going to the Westfield Shopping
center which has a disappointingly average sized Hello Kitty store. Apparently the giant one is gone. That night we went to
First Crush for dinner. I had a
flight of wine which consists of three one-third sized glasses of various but complimentary wines. It was a great restaurant in terms of food, drink, atmosphere and service.
The next morning we were even more the tourists when we went down to Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39. We visited the famous wax museum and purchased multiple
pounds of taffy. On the way back to the Oakland airport we got to experience a little traffic as part of
the
580 freeway had collapsed the morning we arrived and was still under repair on our way out. We survived of course and I think the trip went rather well.
sanfrancisco personal california sfmoma nontechnical 2007 May 9, 4:15I read about
text/xml URI fragment resolution a few months ago. I was interested to find another kind of fragment reference other than the text/html URI
fragment but of course I didn't find an implementation in IE, Firefox, or Opera. I decided to see how much work would be required to implement this in IE.
In IE and Firefox when you open an XML file that doesn't have an XML stylesheet the XML source is rendered with syntax highlighting. In IE I also noticed that the gold bar appears when you open an
XML file off of your local machine. To me this suggested that the XML source was being rendered as HTML which I assumed was produced by running an XSLT on the source XML file. If so, I figured I
could modify the XSLT to implement text/xml URI fragments. I ran
FileMon to see if iexplore.exe loaded an
XSLT file when opening an XML file. Only the XML file and MSXML3.DLL were opened and no XSLTs were loaded as files. My next hope for modifying the XSLT was if it existed as a resource in MSXML3.DLL.
I did a findstr on the DLL for SCRIPT and found an XSLT so I decided to check for resources in MSXML3.DLL. Unfortunately my previous resource viewer didn't work correctly so I decided to write my
own.
I created
resource tools to view and modify resources in Windows modules. The viewer outputs HTML with links to the
individual resources of a module using the
res URI scheme that's built into IE. The modifier is a simple command line tool that
replaces or adds one resource at a time to a module.
Using these tools I found that the XSLT was stored as a resource in MSXML3.DLL. I'll talk more about the existing XSLT and the one I replaced it with next time.
resource technical xml msxml res xslt xsl
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