2008 Apr 26, 11:45
Last weekend while Sarah was up in Canada for a spa weekend with her sister and her sister's other bridesmaids, I went to Saul and Ciera's
wedding in Three Rivers, California near Sequoia National Park. I flew into Fresno picked up a rental car and my GPS device navigated me to a restaurant with the wedding location no where in sight.
"No problem," I thought, "I'll just call someone with an Internet connection and..." I had no cell reception. What did people do before GPS, Internet, and cell phones?
A waitress in the restaurant pointed me down the road a bit to the wedding location which was outside overlooking a
river. Their wedding cake was made up like a mountain with two backpacks at the top and rope hanging down. Ciera's father married them and the ceremony was lovely. The music after included Code Monkey to which all the nerds were forced to get up and awkwardly dance.
Besides getting to see Ciera and Saul who I hadn't seen in quite a while, I got to see Daniil and Val, Vlad, and Nathaniel. Since
last I saw Daniil and Val they had a child, Katie who is very cute and in whom I can see a lot of family resemblance. The always hilarious Vlad,
Daniil's brother, was there as well with his wife who I got to meet. Nathaniel, my manager from Vizolutions was there and I don't know if I've seen him since I moved to Washington. It was fun to
see him and meet his girlfriend who was kind enough to donate her extra male to male mini-phono cord so I could listen to my Zune in the rental car stereo on the drive back.
wedding saul and ciera california nontechnical 2008 Apr 25, 8:25
sequelguy posted a photo:
Jesse maintains a garden in his backyard.
california tree nature backyard 2008 Apr 25, 8:24
sequelguy posted a photo:
A part of the cactus in Jesse, Pat and Grib's backyard.
california cactus nature backyard 2008 Apr 24, 9:41This is a CAPTCHA in which you must id the center of subimages in a collage and then choose the correct caption for a second a photo. It took me seven tries to click close enough to the center of a
subimage. I'm human I swear! Lame implementation.
captcha image security 2008 Apr 12, 10:38
For Encode-O-Matic, my encoding tool written in C#, I had to figure out the appropriate DllImport declarations to use IDN Win32
functions which was a pain. To spare others that pain here's the two files CharacterSetEncoding.cs and NationalLanguageSupportUtilities.cs that declare the DllImports for IdnToUnicode, IdnToAscii,
NormalizeString, MultiByteToWideChar, and WideCharToMultiByte.
encodeomatic boring csharp widechartomultibyte idn tool dllimport 2008 Apr 7, 12:21USGS video of bear rubbing back against tree + music = humor.
video bear nature animal dance usgs humor 2008 Apr 3, 2:19"How one supercharged province cranks out lightbulbs, buttons, and bra rings, as well as instant cities for the factory workers. "
via:boingboing china economics environment politics video 2008 Apr 2, 6:29A pillow fight in Pike Place Market. "A group of web-connected friends converge at a specified location in the city and at a designated time produce previously concealed pillows and begin an awesome
fight."
flash-mob seattle washington pike-place-market pillow pillow-fight youtube video humor social via:swannman 2008 Mar 17, 10:16Jonathan Coulton's music available as CC mp3s. He did 'Still Alive' the ending theme for Portal and 'Re: Brains' the zombie song.
jonathan-coulton mp3 music download humor cc copyright 2008 Feb 26, 2:24
At the grocery store the other day Sarah and I attempted to find shallot for a recipe, but I can't
tell the difference between shallot, sweet onions, yellow onions, etc. etc. We found something that we decided was the closest we'd find in the store and I believe we picked correctly because at
checkout the cashier rang it up as shallot.
I think this could be
a practical problem that the 20q Pocket Mind Reader should be able to solve: obtain the name of an unidentified object. When we got home
I decided to test the 20q Pocket Mind Reader on shallot. Unfortunately, it told me I had an onion, but I think if these were designed for identifying unknown objects based solely on information you
can obtain by looking at it, rather than requiring knowledge of seeds, where it grows, etc. it would do better. Or I could just ask someone who works at the grocery store.
onion shallot toy 20q random 2008 Feb 24, 8:35The Amazing Randi discusses his friendship with Richard Feynman. FTA: "Randi discusses his friendship with Nobel prize winner, CalTech professor and Far Rockaway, NY native Richard Feynman."
richard-feynman amazing-randi podcast mp3 audio 2008 Feb 22, 9:50FTA: "This page summarises results for a set of tests aimed at discovering whether bidirectional text is displayed as expected in the window title bar and tooltips." Punchline: generally, no they're
not.
bidi internationalization w3c browser web ie6 firefox opera 2008 Feb 8, 3:24FTA: "...Using a mix of natural language processing, AI techniques, and a massive databases, Reuters' solution extracts important bits of information from raw HTML pages. People, Companies, Places,
and Events are really at the heart of many business artic
via:sambrook api reuters news tagging semantic semantic-web web 2008 Jan 24, 8:55A software kit for phishers that, unknown to the phisher, messages any stolen info back to the originators of the kit.
fraud article phishing 2008 Jan 14, 10:24Alarm clock that donates money to a charity you dislike when you hit the snooze button.
alarm clock humor geek gadget gift thinkgeek wifi wireless product alarm-clock 2007 Nov 28, 1:23One of the new Zune features that had me the most excited was the claimed improved Windows Media Center integration which unfortunately turned out to simply mean support for the Win MCE video format
(
with an exception for HD). I wanted to be able to pick shows recorded by my Win MCE and have the Zune automatically sync up the
latest episodes. However, with the improved podcast support in the Zune software one can easily create a ridiculous hack to accomplish this.
The new Zune software has podcast support which does everything I'd want to do with a
Win MCE recorded TV series so the goal is to shoehorn a TV series into a Zune podcast. An overview of the steps: Create an XSLT that converts Win MCE data to a podcast, run the XSLT as a scheduled
task every few hours per TV series, setup a Web server pointed at the resulting podcasts and the Win MCE Recorded TV directory, and subscribe to the resulting podcasts in the Zune software.
- Reading through the Win MCE data stored as an XML file in "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml" and the spec for podcasts I created an XSLT to convert a series from Win MCE data to a podcast.
- I added a new task to the Scheduled Tasks to run my XSLT using my xsltproc.js script. The task runs a handful of commands that look something like the following:
C:\windows\system32\wscript.exe C:\users\dave\bin\xsltproc.js C:\Users\Dave\Documents\trunk\development\mce-zune\mce-to-podcast.xslt
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml --param title "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" --param max 4 --param baseURI "http://groucho/" --param thisRelURI "tds.xml" -o
"D:\recorded tv\tds.xml"
For each TV series I run a command like the above and that outputs a podcast for that series into my "D:\Recorded TV\" directory.
- Zune only allows http URIs for its podcasts so I installed a web server on my Win MCE server. I'm running Vista Ultimate so it was quick and easy for me to install IIS7 but any Web server will do. Then I pointed it at "D:\Recorded TV\".
- Once all the above was done I just subscribed to the resulting podcasts via my Web server and viola! Since I'm forced to use a Web server I can even run the Zune software on a machine other
than my Win MCE server. You can see a screen-shot above of my Zune software showing my Colbert Report podcast.
technical xml mce hack windows media center zune windows xslt podcast 2007 Oct 29, 1:48FTA: "Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor who writes the Bad Science column in the Guardian, examining the claims of scaremongering journalists, quack remedy peddlers, pseudoscientific cosmetics
adverts, and evil multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Th
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