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 5, 4:23Cross-site scripting attack on YouTube over the weekend: "That turned out to be as simple as using two script tags in a row (<script><script>fun scripting stuff goes here!), as noted by
F-Secure researcher Mikko H. Hypponen on Twitter—the first of the two tags would get stripped, and the second was allowed through."technicalyoutubesecuritycross-site-scriptingjavascript
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 Jun 29, 6:40A fan made Kings Quest sequel gets an official go-ahead: "After negotiations, the C&D [cease and desist] has been officially rescinded, and Phoenix Online has been granted a non-commercial
license to release The Silver Lining!"gamelegallawvideogamekings-questsierratechnical
2010 Jun 20, 1:18Protocol for doing distributed commenting and implemented by Google Buzz! "This document defines a lightweight, robust, and secure protocol for sending unsolicited notifications — especially comments
and responses on syndicated feed content — to specified endpoints; along with rules to enable resulting content to itself be syndicated robustly and securely."commentblogatomrssgooglebuzzsalmonreferencespecificationprotocolsyndicationtechnical
2010 Jun 20, 1:16"This document specifies relation types for Web links, and defines a registry for them. It also defines the use of such links in HTTP headers with the Link header-field."htmlhttpresturlurimetareferencetechnicallinkietf
Did I mention that I got married
two weeks ago today on May 29th? Its true! Our wedding was a kind of planning singularity -- all of my planning efforts would get sucked into that day and I couldn't make any plans past that date.
But the actual wedding itself was lovely and I didn't feel nearly as stressed out or nervous during the wedding as I did trying to plan for it. I've been gathering wedding photos on our wedding website photos page.
2010 Jun 9, 3:31"A 'geo' URI identifies a physical location in a two- or three-dimensional coordinate reference system in a compact, simple, human-readable, and protocol-independent way."technicalgeouriurlietfrfcstandard
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 23, 4:32"The ability to detect visitors' browsing history requires just a few lines of code. Armed with a list of websites to check for, a malicious webmaster can scan over 25 thousand links per second (1.5
million links per minute) in almost every recent browser."technicalprivacysecuritywebbrowser
2010 May 17, 5:05"With speechapi.com's javascript API, it is possible to build interesting speech-web mashups that include both speech-to-text as well as text-to-speech."apijavascriptspeechspeech-to-texttechnical
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 7, 6:29UMP instead of CORS for cross-domain access control: "...a developer can read only UMP and ignore CORS, yet still create safe code. This code can successfully message with CORS resources that do not
require credentials. UMP is therefore a way of messaging with the credential-free subset of CORS resources."w3csecuritywebbrowsertechnical
2010 May 6, 7:16"Today web gadgets, mashup components, advertisements, and other 3rd party content on websites either run with full trust alongside your content or are isolated inside of IFrames. As a result, many
modern web applications are intrinsically insecure, often with unpredictable service quality. Live Labs Web Sandbox addresses this problem."webbrowserweb-sandboxtechnicaljavascripthtmlwindowslivesecuritysandboxmicrosoftsilverlight
2010 May 4, 10:51Survey asks you for your gender and color blindness status and then shows you various colors one by one and asks you to type the name. The results of this survey are presented here. Very few
differences between genders but there's plenty of interesting results in this document.via:swannmansciencestatisticscolorpsychologyxkcdhumorart
2010 May 3, 7:27Amazon has the most highlighted passages of Kindle users. Of course Dan Brown is all over that. But in 94th place of most highlighted is a passage from the 'Kindle Shortcuts' book on how to highlight
passages: "Go to top Notes and Clippings (Kindle 2) To create a highlight: use the 5-way controller to highlight the content you want to clip and then press the 5-way to save your selection...
Highlighted by 319 Kindle users"humorhighlightamazonkindletechnicalmeta