2009 Nov 23, 2:20"The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States. For instance, where
you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you "The Tawny One", derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured ,desert”."
humor reference map etymology translation atlas geography 2009 Nov 23, 1:24"This week Bell Labs plans to roll out the Telephone, the first viable Telegraph alternative, but reports indicate they may not be ready."
via:waxy humor telephone telegraph internet 2009 Nov 23, 11:28"Thanks to the utilization of new technology, we're now seeing large-scale success in eliminating the need for passwords while increasing the successful registration rate at websites to over 90%...In
addition, after a thorough evaluation of the security and privacy of these technologies, the same techniques are being piloted by President Obama's open identity initiative to enable citizens to sign
in more easily to government-operated websites."
identity openid google security authentication facebook password via:connolly technical 2009 Nov 18, 7:30Cat climbs cop
humor youtube video cat police cute 2009 Nov 13, 6:36Hooray for the Internet Archive! "The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs). This will
enable redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities."
url http redirect internet web internet-archive archive via:waxy technical 2009 Oct 13, 5:08Paper investigating chicken soup as a "remedy for symptomatic upper respiratory tract infections." Under methods is the recipe they used: "Traditional chicken soup was prepared according to a family
recipe, which will be referred to as “Grandma’s soup” (C. Fleischer; personal communication; 1970). This recipe is as follows..."
soup humor science medicine chicken paper 2009 Oct 6, 3:24The map/reduce tutorial for Hadoop the Apache open source project. "Hadoop Map/Reduce is a software framework for easily writing applications which process vast amounts of data (multi-terabyte
data-sets) in-parallel on large clusters (thousands of nodes) of commodity hardware in a reliable, fault-tolerant manner."
hadoop mapreduce java software programming opensource database distributed google yahoo apache technical todo 2009 Sep 24, 3:58"Put more constructively, if GCF mentioned application/xhtml+xml AND intercepted it, my site would “just work”. But that wouldn’t be an “opt in”, a concept that Ian Hickson once described as yet
another quirks mode switch."
chrome google web browser extension webbrowser mime xml xhtml technical 2009 Sep 24, 3:51A proposed new HTTP header 'X-Force-TLS' to indicate a site only wants to be over HTTPS.
http header security https extension noscript web browser webbrowser 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, 6:26Typekit's protections for their hosted fonts include referer header checking, and various obfuscations: "Our intent is only to discourage casual misuse and to make it clear that taking fonts from
Typekit is an explicit and intentional act."
via:kottke font typekit internet web security legal technical 2009 Sep 10, 6:11Google Documents can render any PDF on the web simply via an URL API. Step 2, implement HTML5. Step 3, call registerContentHandler('application/pdf', 'http://docs.google.com/gview?url=%s')
pdf google web internet html5 technical via:waxy 2009 Sep 10, 5:02Makes sense to me. Its the content not the transmission medium.
book library education literature news 2009 Sep 9, 10:52The wall of fluff is a mega unicorn chaser.
cute humor cat youtube video via:boingboing 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, 4:36"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 Sep 1, 4:25"Each unit has a stable URI, making it possible to link to it from your own domain models in a reliable way. For each unit, the ontology defines some useful metadata including abbreviation, a link to
DBpedia and a categorization of units into groups, such as length units."
semanticweb via:connolly web unit conversion uri technical 2009 Sep 1, 4:20"Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that's not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do."
via:waxy history tv read reading-rainbow levar-burton pbs npr 2009 Aug 24, 4:57"This specification defines the features and syntax for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Version 1.1, a modularized language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in
XML."
svg graphic web xml reference w3c technical