2010 Sep 30, 2:48A surprisingly readable and delightfully accurate summary of the history of MIME in the web followed by proposed next steps. Sounds like a plan to me! "We need a realistic transition plan from the
unreliable web to the more reliable one. Part of this is to encourage senders (web servers) to mean what they say, and encourage recipients (browsers) to give preference to what the senders are
sending."mimecontenttypebrowserwebietfreferencehistorymimetypemime-sniffingsniffingtechnical
2010 Sep 27, 3:08Adam Barth's URI API draft starts to appear in webkit: "One of the things Adam Barth is currently working on is an URL API. Citing it, the API can be used for constructing, parsing and resolving URLs
through scripting, easening up tasks like getting and setting parameters. Today the first part landed in WebKit, which added the “origin” property."webkitadam-barthuriurlapijavascriptdomhtmlhtml5browserwebbrowsertechnical
2010 Sep 24, 8:38"Comedian Stephen Colbert joined the panel of witnesses at a House hearing on immigrant farm workers. Mr. Colbert has partnered with United Farm Workers and their campaign calling on unemployed
Americans to take jobs in the agriculture sector. The organization's president, Arturo Rodriguez, also testified at the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security hearing chaired by
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).
Washington, DC : 2 hr. 10 min."humorvideostephen-colbertpoliticsimmigrationfarmlaborhouse
2010 Sep 4, 7:40"In the past, Lions Gate, which owns the rights to the “Mad Men” clip, might have requested that TomR35’s version be taken down. But it has decided to leave clips like this up, and in return, YouTube
runs ads with the video and splits the revenue with Lions Gate."adadvertisingcopyrighteconomicsgoogleinternettvvideoyoutubearticle
I've just got a new media center PC connected directly to my television with lots of HD space and so I'm ripping a bunch of my DVDs to the PC so I don't have to fuss with the physical media. I'm
ripping with DVD Rip, viewing the results in Windows 7's Windows Media Center after turning on the WMC DVD Library, and using a powershell script I wrote to copy over cover art and metadata.
My powershell script follows. To use it you must do the following:
Run Windows Media Center with the DVD in the drive and view the disc's metadata info.
Rip each DVD to its own subdirectory of a common directory.
The name of the subdirectory to which the DVD is ripped must have the same name as the DVD name in the metadata. An exception to this are characters that aren't allowed in Windows paths (e.g.
<, >, ?, *, etc)
Run the script and pass the path to the common directory containing the DVD rips as the first parameter.
Running WMC and viewing the DVD's metadata forces WMC to copy the metadata off the Internet and cache it locally. After playing with Fiddler and reading this blog post on WMC metadata I made the following script that copies metadata and cover art from the WMC cache to the corresponding
DVD rip directory.
I previously described my desire to hook my Outlook calendar up to my
Google calendar. I just found out that I can do this and the reverse as both support publishing calendars to the Internet. The following are how I set this up under Outlook 2010 and Google
Calendar:
In Outlook, I go to the calendar view, right click on my calendar and select "Share Publish to Office.com". At this point I can change the permissions to allow anonymous Internet access, and under
Detail change between 'Full details' (full calendar), 'Limited details' (subject lines & availability only), 'Availability only'. Availability only is almost just what I want -- I'd also like
to include location but availability only is good enough. After hitting OK here I get a 'Do you want to send an invitation...' dialog box. I hit 'Yes' and I can copy the webcals:// URL out of the
email window that opens up. Next, to add it to my Google calendar, I open http://www.google.com/calendar/, and under 'Other calendars', I select 'Add
Add by URL', paste in that webcals:// URL but change the 'webcals' at the start to 'https'.
In Google Calendar, I can click on my calendar name under 'My calendars', select 'Calendar settings', and on the new page, look under 'Calendar Address', click the ICAL icon, and copy the URL in
the new dialog. Now back in Outlook I go to the Calendar view, right click on 'My Calendars', and select 'Add Calendar From Internet...'. In the new dialog that pops up I paste in the URL from
Google Calendar.
In this fashion I can share public calendar data between my personal and work calendars.
I just finished watching both seasons of this very funny and engaging TV series Id previously never heard of and I highly recommend it. Adam Scott stars as an actor who has given up on his dream of
acting and joins a catering company working along side actors trying to make it in LA. There are many ties to Veronica Mars: the shows creator is Rob Thomas (the creator of Veronica Mars), the show
features Ken Marino and Ryan Hansen, and has guest stars of Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, and Enrico Colantoni, among others. It has many of the same talented people from Veronica Mars but Party
Down is more like a smarter and funnier The Office given the relationship between Adam Scott and Lizzy Caplan and their subtle mockery of their wackier workmates and inept boss.
2010 Jul 1, 10:51"Sometimes it’s hard to judge whether an engineering effort has been successful or not. It can take years for an idea to catch on, to go from being the butt of jokes to becoming an international
imperative (IPv6). Uniform Resource Names (URNs), which are part of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) family, are conceptually at least as old as IPv6. While not figuring in international
directives for deployment, they-and the technology engineered to resolve them-are still going concerns."ietfurnurihistorytechnicalinterneturl
2010 Jul 1, 3:33"By charting the production of new books, new music albums, and new feature films over the last decade, the authors tried to see whether creative output went up or down in correlation with
file-sharing." They find that creative output is going up while piracy also increases. But this is correlation not causation. They can't say there wouldn't be more creative output with less piracy.
Regardless, still an interesting statistic.arstechnicacopyrightlaweconomicsippiracymusictechnical
2010 May 24, 6:26"What You See is What They Get: Protecting users from unwanted use of microphones, cameras, and other sensors," by Jon Howell and Stuart Schechter.
"We introduce the sensor-access widget, a graphical user interface element that resides within an application's display. The widget provides an animated representation of the personal data being
collected by its corresponding sensor, calling attention to the application's attempt to collect the data."
2010 May 14, 9:37New York Times article from May 15th 1910 titled "MEMBERS OF THE SUPREME COURT AS HUMAN BEINGS: When Not on the Bench They Are Pretty Much Like Other People — Characteristic Stores About Them". This
is the NYT 1910's version of US Weekly's current "Celebrities Are Just Like Us!" feature.humorhistoryarticlesupreme-court
2010 May 10, 8:59Iggy Pop interviews Shepard Fairey, including his Obama HOPE poster and AP lawsuit:
"... but the American public is generally pretty superficial, so an image like that just allows them to project whatever limited idea they have onto it. Obviously, not everyone is like that—I
actually think there were a lot of people who were bummed by the image because they felt it was shallow propaganda."
"If I spend time conceiving and making a piece of art and somebody else sees that it has market value and replicates it in order to steal part of my market, then that’s not cool. But the way I make
art—the way a lot of people make art—is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important. It’s about making a work that is inspired by something preexisting
but changes it to have a new value and meaning that doesn’t in any way take away from the original—and, in fact, might provide the original with a second life or a new audience." artlegallawipshepard-faireyobeyinterview
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