2007 May 1, 3:48The Sunday of the weekend before last I had friends over and we watched Antitrust and Sneakers. Watching Antitrust makes me wonder if Bill Gates has seen it. Tim Robbins plays a character that is
essentially based on him but so over the top that its ridiculous.
A few days before that I watched The Prestige with Sarah. I can't tell if I was or wasn't supposed to know what was going on until the end but it was cool anyway. I didn't know until later but David
Bowie plays Tesla which is just awesome all the way around.
We also watched The Illusionist sometime before. Both movies are adaptations of novels with stage magicians set in turn of the century England. And I enjoyed both of them. I thought one would be a
rushed attempt by one studio to compete with the another on the same ground but that doesn't seem to be the case. I've noticed this before with those asteroid disaster movies and the two movies about
Truman Capote. It turns out Wikipedia has a
huge list of competing similar movies.
personal movies nontechnical 2007 Apr 27, 3:46Interesting street art. I like the empty outfit with hoodie up sitting crosslegged.
art photos sculpture graffiti humor streetart street mark-jenkins 2007 Apr 23, 1:31As noted in the title, an interesting result from researchers who find that a third result which is clearly worse than the two other options will influence people picking from those two.
article raymond-chen business game-theory decoy-effect 2007 Apr 19, 3:35Interesting projects related to maps of physical space and the semantic web.
architecture data map ontology rdf place semanticweb tag wifi xml space research 2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (
the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named
Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable
pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no
coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.
By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of
navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by
malicious software to hijack
"about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.
Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.
- Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
- The user should be able to modify its content.
- Show links that the user uses.
- Show thumbnails of those links
- Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.
Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an
RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing
about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing
but hey, I said this was ugly.
In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's
Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could
be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...
browser technical hack 2007 Apr 15, 7:37Friday Jon, Daniil, and I saw
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters. It was really
great. The quality of individual Aqua Teen episodes varies wildly but this movie was very funny. It was like watching an excellent episode that happened to be 87 minutes long.
I had some difficulty generating interest for the movie as many didn't think this was 'their kind of movie'. I asked Sarah and she said no but I talked to her about it again later after she watched
a clip and she said she really didn't want to see it because it looked too weird. I asked her what she saw in the clip and she said a man with weird pants was talking with french fries while a
drink was getting a meatball to push him around in a cart.
Well, when you put it like that it does sound weird...
movie personal nontechnical 2007 Apr 11, 9:22Short tiny travel guide for Santa Cruz, CA. Found via Turn Here in Google Earth. All places mentioned in the video are great and I totally vouche for them.
geo video santa-cruz coffee food saturn-cafe 2007 Apr 8, 9:07A tool to produce FOAF files based on your delicious account. Appears to be down now but the tool's blog has other ineteresting links.
delicious foaf rdf tool phil-wilson blog 2007 Apr 8, 3:46This weekend was fun. Sarah and I went out for Jane's Birthday. We ate at a little Italian restaurant where our group was almost too large for the place and afterwards went to the
Viceroy lounge. The website apparently isn't very representative because although I looked at it before going out and I'd been to the place previously, I didn't
realize it was the same location until we got there.
I got several games for my Wii through Sarah's connections including
Wii Play and
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. We played both of them and I thought
Find Mii was especially fun.
Sarah's bunny is getting pretty big. Its been biting through wires now includig part way through the power cord to the cable box. You'd think after getting to the copper that it would learn to stop.
At any rate, it didn't hide any eggs. I don't have any new photos but you can see
the old bunny photos via my Vizicious
tool.
personal nontechnical seatle wii 2007 Mar 21, 1:20A site to share interesting products found for sale on the Internet with others on the site. Lots of funny and interesting products.
blog collaboration cool design review social shopping product 2007 Mar 14, 12:44I've been working on a personal project
Vizicious. Vizicious displays a graph of your
delicious links or (this is the new part) your flickr photos.
I had this previously on my old website but I've rewritten it and separated out the presentation portion from the part that does all the real work. This means its alot easier for me to incorporate
new kinds of input (like flickr feeds).
Anyway, if you're not interested in the details just
click here to see my photos tagged 'france' run
through Vizicious.
vizicious technical homepage 2007 Mar 13, 1:29Google will help you out sharing scientific information by shipping harddrives with terabytes of your info to some destination. In return they get a copy of your data. Interesting to note it costs
less to ship harddrives then transfer the data over the
article p2p offline data transfer google 2007 Feb 27, 12:30Sir Tim Berners Lee talks about how URI fragments. Interesting to note the known issue of HTTP content negotation at odds with URI fragments being content type specific.
design uri web fragment iri tim-berners-lee w3c 2007 Feb 12, 3:57Lots of interesting stuff in this paper. Abstract "The economics of information security has recently become a thriving and fastmovingdiscipline. As distributed systems are assembled from machines
belongingto principals with divergent interests, we find
article reference economics information security privacy network interesting read 2007 Feb 6, 2:39The MPAA's suggested curriculum for LA Boy Scouts on 'Respecting Copyright' badge. It doesn't have them learn about copyright which might have been interesting rather things like watch a movie's
credits and think about the people who will be hurt by pira
mpaa copyright humor boy-scouts 2007 Jan 22, 1:42Flash game in which you are airport security and must ensure no restricted materials are let through based on ever changing rules. More commentary than game. Who says games can't be art?
politics games security flash game airport 2006 Dec 6, 6:18I got another blog entry on the
IE Blog! I wrote about
file URIs in
IE. Lots of fun right? Woo for file URIs! I
added the post to del.icio.us and saw that it had already been added 6 times
previous. This compared to
my previous IE Blog post which was
added to del.icio.us a total of 1 time(s) by y.t. I guess people are more interested in blog posts that have 'URI' in the title than they
are about blog posts whose title references
Dijkstra. Coming soon (or later) to the IE Blog: a post on international mailto URIs. Hooray!
blog ie7 file uri delicious 2006 Nov 8, 12:57Abstract Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as "interestingness." These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of
user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the nu
flickr interestingness patent patents law legal attention humor 2006 Nov 6, 4:32Blog on Identity. Jim mentioned this and I'd seen it around previously. Good links to other things I've wanted to know more about like Infocard and Passport. Good thoughts on Identity in general.
Very interesting.
identity blog security privacy microsoft internet authentication cryptography programming information
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