2009 Dec 4, 10:24Flickr dev. blog on the accept-language HTTP header: "It’s true that the Accept-Language header has a troubled history. Because of this, many developers regard it the way medieval villagers might
have regarded a woman with a warty nose and a pet cat – it should be shunned, avoided and possibly burned at the stake." And this great anecdote: "In two and a half years of running as an
international site, we’ve only ever had one case where it didn’t work. Helio, a cellphone company, had a browser was custom-built for them in Korea, and had its “Accept-Language” header hard-coded to
always request Korean, something which led to much confusion for the Flickr users amongst their American customers."
flickr internationalization language accept-language http http-header development technical web 2009 Dec 4, 5:06"If you want to watch videos from the National Archives today, they try to talk you into buying a DVD from the official government partner, Amazon.Com...To demonstrate to the Congress that if we
liberated this wonderful content people would really care, I forked over $251 for 20 DVDs and posted them on-line."
video history politics government public-domain internet-archive 2009 Dec 3, 2:39"Android 2.0 comes with a bevy of refinements to its connectivity features. These include VPN support, multiple account support, exchange support, HTML5 support, bluetooth 2.1, and quite a few more
which can best be found in the Android Platform Highlights document."
android review droid motorola cellphone 2009 Dec 2, 3:00"These are tough questions, but the horrific problems of the "Victorian Internet" suggest that government overreach isn't the only thing to fear. In 1876, laissez-faire "freedom for all" meant (in
practice) the freedom for Henry Nash Smith to read your telegrams if he didn't like who you supported for President. It meant freedom for Associated Press to block criticism of Western Union, and
even to put potential critics and competitors out of business. And it meant freedom for a scoundrel to hijack the system at his leisure."
net-neutrality internet government politics communication telegraph technical 2009 Nov 27, 6:04"Megafonzies (coolness): We don’t know if Professor Hubert Farnsworth, inventor of the Finglonger, coined the term ‘Megafonzie.’ We can assume that one Fonzie is the amount of coolness generated by
Arthur Fonzarelli...", "Warhols (fame duration): 1 Warhol equals 15 minutes of fame, So if you’ve been famous for three years, that’s just over 105 kilowarhols..."
via:kottke humor measurement nerd 2009 Nov 23, 1:21"Je vous propose aujourd’hui de découvrir le travail de StarType, un ex typographe qui a connu le temps du plomb et travaillé dans de nombreuses imprimeries pour évoluer et devenir graphiste par la
suite."
typography advertising font french design history 2009 Nov 23, 11:47'Bill Gates is being taken on a guided tour of the product support department's new office building...Bill puts on a headset, sits down, and answers the phone. "Hello, this is Microsoft Product
Support, William speaking. How can I help you?"'
humor microsoft bill-gates raymond-chen support history 2009 Nov 23, 11:33A map of the sciences generated via science web portals: "Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most
significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia...The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and
clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences."
via:pskomoroch visualization science map graph 2009 Nov 17, 6:52"What if there was a backwards compatible way to transfer all of the resources that are used on every single page in your site — CSS, JS, images, anything else — in a single HTTP request at the start
of the first visit to the page? This is what Resource Package support in browsers will let you do." Another resource packaging implementation but this suggests they'll actually implement this in
FireFox. One issue with all of these is you can't use the resources from the package in any context that didn't ask to use the package for fear of security issues which means you can't stick the
packaged resources in your HTTP cache. The package itself could go in the cache which would mean multiple packages per page or all your page's resources in one package. Of course the same security
issues are a concern for all of the packaging proposals if a site has any way to inject into the source the request for the package. It'd be a similar vector to the UTF7 XSS issues but much worse
attack.
security web browser http zip firefox resource technical via:kris.kowal 2009 Nov 13, 6:36Hooray for the Internet Archive! "The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs). This will
enable redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities."
url http redirect internet web internet-archive archive via:waxy technical 2009 Nov 3, 1:33'A few hours after that, Tim Berners-Lee responded: I had imagined that figues would be reprented as <a name=fig1 href="fghjkdfghj" REL="EMBED, PRESENT">Figure </a>'. Ohhhh, that would
have been better.
html history mark-pilgrim browser web images technical 2009 Oct 30, 10:41All the stuff Nintendo forces developers to take out of the Nintendo Maniac Mansion port. I had read this before and didn't connect after watching Douglas Crockford's JavaScript talk that this was
the same guy.
douglas-crockford game videogame nintendo censorship pc history geek 2009 Oct 22, 12:33"When asked for the most valuable topic in Demand’s arsenal, he replies instantly: “‘Where can I donate a car in Dallas?’"
via:kris.kowal wired internet video howto automation business media marketing economics advertising 2009 Oct 13, 11:15
QFC, the grocery store closest to me, has those irritating shoppers cards. They try to motivate me to use it with
discounts, but that just makes me want to use a card, I don't care whose card and
I don't care if the data is accurate. They should let me have my data or make it useful to me so that I actually care.
I can imagine several useful tools based on this: automatic grocery lists, recipes using the food you purchased, cheaper alternatives to your purchases, other things you might like based on what
you purchased, or integration with dieting websites or software. At any rate, right now all I care about is getting the discount from using a card, but if they made the data available to me then
the grocery store could align our interests and I'd want to ensure the data's accuracy.
idea boring data grocery store 2009 Oct 13, 5:08Paper investigating chicken soup as a "remedy for symptomatic upper respiratory tract infections." Under methods is the recipe they used: "Traditional chicken soup was prepared according to a family
recipe, which will be referred to as “Grandma’s soup” (C. Fleischer; personal communication; 1970). This recipe is as follows..."
soup humor science medicine chicken paper 2009 Oct 8, 4:59A brief introduction to Hadoop, its history, subprojects, and current status
via:pskomoroch hadoop introduction google yahoo facebook database technical 2009 Oct 6, 3:24The map/reduce tutorial for Hadoop the Apache open source project. "Hadoop Map/Reduce is a software framework for easily writing applications which process vast amounts of data (multi-terabyte
data-sets) in-parallel on large clusters (thousands of nodes) of commodity hardware in a reliable, fault-tolerant manner."
hadoop mapreduce java software programming opensource database distributed google yahoo apache technical todo 2009 Oct 5, 8:44Brief history of the Luddites. "Are we all Luddites now? ... If you are reading this essay on your laptop or iPhone, chances are that you aren't an unemployed weaver staring starvation in the face."
Also: "The Luddites didn't oppose technology; they opposed the sudden collapse of their industry, which they blamed in part on new weaving machines." So the TV and newspaper associations and Rupert
Murdoch are Luddites.
history technology luddite 2009 Sep 17, 11:12This Javascript Nintendo emulator works amazingly well in Google Chrome. You can play Dr. Mario, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, The Legend of Zelda, etc.
browser javascript nintendo nes game videogame google tetris emulator