2009 May 3, 9:17
Netflix lets you watch a subset of their movies online via their website and a subset of those movies are available to watch on the Xbox 360's Netflix app. so its not always easy to find movies to
watch on Xbox 360. Yet, I regularly see my Xbox friends using the Netflix app and its a shame they didn't make an easy way to share movie recommendations with your friends. Instead we must share
movie recommendations the old fashioned way. Here's the movies I've found and enjoyed on my 360.
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Weeds
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You don't have to be a stoner to enjoy this humorous and dramatic satire featuring a widow trying to raise her children and deal pot in suburbia.
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Avatar The Last Airbender
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An American animated series that's an amalgamation of various Asian art, history, religion, etc. that maintains a great story line.
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Paprika
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If you enjoyed Paranoia Agent you'll enjoy this movie in the same animation style and by the same director and
writer, Satoshi Kon. Its like a feature length version of a Paranoia Agent episode in which a dream machine lets outsiders view one's dreams but eventually leads to blurring the dreams and
reality.
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Grindhouse Planet Terror
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I didn't see either of the Grindhouse movies when they first came out, but of the two, Planet Terror is the more humorous and exciting gore filled parody.
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Outsourced
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A refreshing romantic comedy that still has a few of the over played tropes but is easy to enjoy despite that.
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The King of Kong
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A hilarious documentary on the struggle between the reigning champ hot-sauce salesman and the underdog Washington state high school science teacher to obtain the Donkey Kong world record high
score. After watching, checkout this interview with the creators of the movie and the
villain.
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Primer
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I've mentioned Primer before, but I put it on
here again because its really good and you still haven't seen it, have you?
movie personal netflix 2009 May 1, 11:25Seems like this would be a good gift for someone. "...all of the characters ever played by William Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world. Their mission: hunt down and destroy the real William
Shatner. Featuring: Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker, Denny Crane, Rescue 911 Shatner, Singer Shatner, Shakespearean Shatner, Twilight Zone Shatner, Cartoon Kirk, Esperanto Shatner, Priceline Shatner, SNL
Shatner, and - of course - William Shatner!"
humor book gift wishlist william-shatner shatner startrek via:boingboing 2009 Apr 23, 1:35"This e-mail is an attempt to give a relatively concise yet reasonably complete overview of non-Unicode character sets and encodings for 'Chinese characters', excluding those which are not supported
by at least one of the four browsers IE, Safari, Firefox and Opera (henceforth 'all browsers'), and tentatively avoiding technical details which are out of scope for HTML5 unless they are important
to gain a general understanding of the relevant issues."
html html5 iso-2022 charset encoding character unicode cjk 2009 Apr 21, 1:22Play some classic Sierra games like Space Quest 1. Oddly, you can see other players and what they're typing while you play.
sierra game abandonware flash adventure browser videogame web 2009 Apr 15, 7:42"If you're like us, you live in constant fear of slipping into a wormhole and getting spit out in the 13th century, and the only real useful knowledge you have for your ignorant ancestors is 'watch
out for that Hitler guy' and 'some of the Popes are evil.'" Its like they're inside my head! Love this shirt and poster telling you everything you need to know in case you accidentally fall back in
time.
time-travel time shirt poster wishlist gift awesome 2009 Apr 13, 10:17If the face drawn onto the robot hadn't been as cute I doubt as many people would have helped =). "Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they
encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to
reach their goal."
tweenbot video social map robot cute nyc society humor 2009 Apr 10, 9:48
A while ago I promised to say how an xsltproc Meddler script would be useful and the general answer is
its useful for hooking up a client application that wants data from the web in a particular XML format and the data is available on the web but in another XML format. The specific case for this
post is a Flickr Search service that includes IE8 Visual Search Suggestions. IE8
wants the Visual Search Suggestions XML format and Flickr gives out search data in their Flickr web API XML format.
So I wrote an XSLT to convert from Flickr Search XML to Visual Suggestions XML and used my xsltproc Meddler script to actually
apply this xslt.
After getting this all working I've placed the result in two places: (1) I've updated the xsltproc Meddler script to include this XSLT and an
XML file to install it as a search provider - although you'll need to edit the XML to include your own Flickr API key. (2) I've created a service for this so you can just install the Flickr search provider if you're interested in having the functionality and don't care about the implementation. Additionally, to the
search provider I've added accelerator preview support to show the Flickr slideshow which I think looks snazzy.
Doing a quick search for this it looks like there's at least one other such implementation, but mine has the distinction of being done through XSLT which I provide, updated XML namespaces to work
with the released version of IE8, and I made it so you know its good.
meddler xml ie8 xslt flickr technical boring search suggestions 2009 Apr 7, 1:13A sort of vertical cross section of an overview of what the web should look like from HTTP & URIs to GRDDL & RDF. Oh, and there's a pretty graph at the bottom. "This finding describes how
document formats, markup conventions, attribute values, and other data formats can be designed to facilitate the deployment of self-describing, Web-grounded Web content."
web w3c xml html http semanticweb microformats xhtml atom grddl rdfa rdf 2009 Apr 7, 12:12HTML5's registerProtocolHandler seems to come from a cool FireFox 3 feature: "With web protocol handlers, the web application can register the specific protocol it wants to handle. Firefox will then
prompt the user to choose which of the registered applications (web or desktop) it should use to handle the action. Any protocol, real or imaginary, can be used - mailto: is only one example,
webcal:, tel: and fax: are others."
firefox uri scheme protocol mozilla html5 registerProtocolHandler 2009 Apr 7, 11:58
This past week I finished Anathem and despite the intimidating physical size of the book (difficult to take and read on the bus) I became very engrossed and was able to finish it in several orders of
magnitude less time than
what I spent on the Baroque
Cycle. Whereas reading the Baroque Cycle you can imagine Neal Stephenson sifting through giant economic tomes (or at least that's where my mind went whenever the characters began to explain
macro-economics to one another), in Anathem you can see Neal Stephenson staying up late
pouring over philosophy of mathematics. When not
exploring philosophy, Anathem has an appropriate amount of humor, love interests, nuclear bombs, etc. as you might hope from reading Snow Crash or Diamond Age. I thoroughly enjoyed Anathem.
On the topic of made up words: I get made up words for made up things, but there's already a name for cell-phone in English: its "cell-phone". The narrator notes that the book has been translated
into English so I guess I'll blame the fictional translator. Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the made up words nearly as much as some folk. Its a good thing I'm long
out of college because I can easily imagine confusing the names of actual concepts and people with those from the book, like Hemn space for Hamming distance. Towards the beginning, the description
of slines and the post-post-apocalyptic setting reminded me briefly of Idiocracy.
Recently, I've been reading everything of Charles Stross that I can, including about a month ago, The Jennifer Morgue from the surprisingly awesome amalgamation genre of spy thriller and Lovecraft
horror. Its the second in a series set in a universe in which magic exists as a form of mathematics and follows Bob Howard programmer/hacker, cube dweller, and begrudging spy who works for a
government agency tasked to suppress this knowledge and protect the world from its use. For a taste, try a short story from the series that's freely available on Tor's website, Down on the Farm.
Coincidentally, both Anathem and the Bob Howard series take an interest in the world of Platonic ideals. In the case of Anathem (without spoiling anything) the universe of Platonic ideals, under a
different name of course, is debated by the characters to be either just a concept or an actual separate universe and later becomes the underpinning of major events in the book. In the Bob Howard
series, magic is applied mathematics that through particular proofs or computations awakens/disturbs/provokes unnamed horrors in the universe of Platonic ideals to produce some desired effect in
Bob's universe.
atrocity archives neal stephenson jennifer morgue plato bob howard anathem 2009 Apr 7, 9:02
I'm a big fan of the concept of registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5 and in FireFox 3, but not quite the implementation. From a high level, it allows web apps to register themselves as
handlers of an URL scheme so for (the canonical) example, GMail can register for the mailto URL scheme. I like the concept:
- Better integration of web apps with your system.
- Its easy for web apps to do.
- Links to URNs can now take the user to the sites the user prefers for the sort of thing identified by the URN. For example, if I have a physical address in HTML, instead of making that an http
link to Yahoo Maps, I can make the link a geo scheme URI and those who follow the link will get their preferred mapping site that
has registered for that scheme. Actually, looking at the geo scheme's RFC, maybe I'd rather use some other URN scheme to represent the physical location, but you get the point.
However, the way its currently spec'ed out I don't like the following:
- There's no way to know if you are the handler for a particular URL scheme which is an important question for web app URL protocol handler authors.
- There's no way to fallback to an http URL in the case that a particular URL scheme isn't registered. A suggested solution to testing the registration of a scheme is for browsers to provide an additional script method
to check if a scheme is registered. I don't like the idea of writing script that walks over all my page's links and rewrites them based on that method. I'd much rather see a declarative and
backwards compatible fallback mechanism, although I don't know what that would look like.
- There's no way to register for a namespace within the urn scheme URI, the info scheme URI, or the tag scheme URI. I want to register
info:lccn/... (Library of Congress Card Number identifiers) to LibraryThing or Amazon and I want to register urn:duri:... (dated URIs) to the Web Archive, among other things.
- Will this result in a proliferation of unregistered URL schemes with clashing namespaces? The ESW Wiki notes why this would be bad.
- And last, although this is nitpickier than the rest, I don't like the '%s' syntax used in the registration method. I'd much rather pass in an URL template, like the URL template used
in OpenSearch. If an URL template is used for matching rather than registering against a particular URL scheme, this could also allow for registering a namespace within a URN. For example
something along the lines of:
registerProtocolHandler("info:lccn/{lccnID}", "htttp://www.librarything.com/search_works.php?q={lccnID}", "LibraryThing LCCN")
url template registerprotocolhandler firefox technical url scheme protocol boring html5 uri urn 2009 Apr 1, 6:19"The first four parameters to a function are passed in rcx, rdx, r8 and r9. Any further parameters are pushed on the stack. Furthermore, space for the register parameters is reserved on the stack, in
case the called function wants to spill them; this is important if the function is variadic."
amd64 calling-convention debug x64 msdn raymond-chen assembly 2009 Apr 1, 9:54Lol at end of final sentence: "Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality
ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest."
humor google gmail ai email 2009 Mar 26, 2:24"Yesterday's remix challenge -- to mock the ridiculous new "anti-terrorism" posters the London police have put up that tell you to spy on your neighbors -- was a smashing success. I've collected the
25 or so that came in to date below". I enjoyed: "A bomb won't go off here because people tend to be quite nice really." "Terribly convenient, isn't it? Incriminating evidence left right out where
you'll spot it and call it in..." "A bomb won't go off here because the true likelihood of you being the victim of a terror attack is really very low, especially when compared to other causes of
death or injury."
humor politics poster paranoia security via:boingboing.comments photoshop privacy 2009 Mar 25, 4:03"...we can look at the contemporary screen virus as a transitional phase - a growing pain, if you will, of the information age. Tiling our environment with screens is an extremely literal, and on top
of that rather unimaginative, way to introduce virtuality into the physical world: simply piling it on where seamless integration was what was wanted."
via:infosthetics visualization information architecture culture design art 2009 Mar 23, 9:41"So heres my trip to Chernobyl in pictures." Nice photo of the tree growing through the floor next to the chair. The whole set is like Fallout 3 but there's plants. Didn't realize plants could do
well in such a situation.
via:swannman photo history science nuclear russia chernobyl 2009 Mar 23, 8:13
I've made another extension for IE8,
Outline View, which gives you a side bar in IE that displays an outline of the current page and lets you make intrapage bookmarks.
The outline is generated based on the heading tags in the document (e.g. h1, h2, etc), kind of like what W3C's Semantic data extractor
tool displays for an outline. So if the page doesn't use heading tags the way the HTML spec intended or just sticks img tags in them, then the outline doesn't look so hot. On a page that does
use headings as intended though it looks really good. For instance a section from the HTML 4 spec shows up quite nicely and I find its
actually useful to be able to jump around to the different sections. Actually, I've been surprised going to various blogs how well the outline view is actually working -- I thought a lot more
webdevs would be abusing their heading tags.
I've also added intrapage bookmarks. When you make a text selection and clear it, that selected text is added as a temporary intrapage bookmark which shows up in the correct place in the outline.
You can navigate to the bookmark or right click to make it permanent. Right now I'm storing the permanent intrapage bookmarks in IE8's new per-domain DOM storage because I wanted to avoid writing
code to synchronize a cross process store of bookmarks, it allowed me to play with the DOM storage a bit, and the bookmarks will get cleared appropriately when the user clears their history via the
control panel.
technical intrapage bookmark boring html ie8 ie extension 2009 Mar 22, 11:40"We're going short and sweet today, with this brilliant interpretation of The Little Red Riding Hood, inspired by Royksopp's Remind Me."
humor visualization animation video graphic design royksopp 2009 Mar 20, 4:51
Working on Internet Explorer extensions in C++ & COM, I had to relearn or rediscover how to do several totally basic and important things. To save myself and possibly others trouble in the
future, here's some pertinent links and tips.
First you must choose your IE extensibility point. Here's a very short list of the few I've used:
Once you've created your COM object that implements IObjectWithSite and whatever other interfaces your extensibility point requires as described in the above links you'll see your SetSite method
get called by IE. You might want to know how to get the top level browser object from the IUnknown site object passed in via that method.
After that you may also want to listen for some events from the browser. To do this you'll need to:
- Implement the dispinterface that has the event you want. For instance DWebBrowserEvents2, or HTMLDocumentEvents, or HTMLWindowEvents2. You'll have
to search around in that area of the documentation to find the event you're looking for.
- Register for events using AtlAdvise. The object you need to subscribe to depends on the events you want. For example, DWebBrowserEvents2 come from the webbrowser object, HTMLDocumentEvents come
from the document object assuming its an HTML document (I obtained via get_Document method on the webbrowser), and
HTMLWindowEvents2 come from the window object (which oddly I obtained via calling the get_script method on the document object).
Note that depending on when your SetSite method is called the document may not exist yet. For my extension I signed up for browser events immediately and then listened for events like NavigateComplete before signing up for document and window events.
- Implement IDispatch. The Invoke method will get called with event notifications from the dispinterfaces you sign up for in AtlAdvise. Implementing Invoke manually is a slight pain as all the
parameters come in as VARIANTs and are in reverse order. There's some ATL macros that may make this easier but I didn't bother.
- Call AtlUnadvise at some point -- at the latest when SetSite is called again and your site object changes.
If you want to check if an IHTMLElement is not visible on screen due how the page is scrolled, try comparing the Body or
Document Element's client height and width,
which appears to be the dimensions of the visible document area, to the element's bounding client rect which appears to be
its position relative to the upper left corner of the visible document area. I've found this to be working for me so far, but I'm not positive that frames, iframes, zooming, editable document
areas, etc won't mess this up.
Be sure to use pointers you get from the IWebBrowser/IHTMLDocument/etc. only on the thread on which you obtained the pointer or correctly marshal the pointers to other threads to avoid weird crashes and hangs.
Obtaining the HTML document of a subframe is slightly more complicated then you might hope. On the other hand this might
be resolved by the new to IE8 method IHTMLFrameElement3::get_contentDocument
Check out Eric's IE blog post on IE extensibility which has some great links on this topic as well.
technical boring internet explorer com c++ ihtmlelement extension
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