2008 Oct 15, 2:50VJ who does live illustrations on her Wacom tablet that's projected onto walls or crowds while DJ plays music: "An illustrator by training, Shantell's VJing style is to illustrate the music being
played, mesmerizing the crowd with the line art drawn in time to the beat. She originates from London where she received a degree in graphic design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
Moving to Tokyo in 2004, she began working as an illustrator and soon, the VJing scene found her."
music dj art vj wacom 2008 Oct 13, 2:40Watch out for too good to be true washing services (or free network traffic anonymization): "The laundry would then send out "color coded" special discount tickets, to the effect of "get two loads
for the price of one," etc. The color coding was matched to specific streets and thus when someone brought in their laundry, it was easy to determine the general location from which a city map was
coded. While the laundry was indeed being washed, pressed and dry cleaned, it had one additional cycle -- every garment, sheet, glove, pair of pants, was first sent through an analyzer, located in
the basement, that checked for bomb-making residue." From the comment section of Schneier on Security on this topic: "Yet another example of how inexpensive, reliable home washers and dryers help
terrorists. When will we learn?"
security history laundromat ira terrorism bomb 2008 Oct 7, 12:21
Last Thursday I saw a bunch of college friends that I hadn't seen in a while, despite all of us working at Microsoft, and Saul and Ciera who were visiting. We had dinner at Typhoon! which I haven't
been to in quite a while. Daniil and Val brought their cute child. I got to see Charlie and Matt who I'm not sure I've seen since my 25th birthday. There was much nerdiness. I need to remember to
organize such a night myself sometime in near future so I don't have to wait another year to see them.
On the weekend Sarah and I went out to dinner at Carnegie's, a former
public library in Ballard, Seattle that's now a restaurant. I saw the restaurant's website in Matt's delicious links and thought it looked interesting. The exterior and entryway look like a public
library, but just inside its redone as a sort of modern version of french classical with a bar and two dining rooms. No pictures since my replacement camera only arrived today, but there are
photos available. They serve french cuisine which was good and
not as expensive as I would have expected. An interesting place, although its a bit of a drive and I'm not sure if we'll be going back soon.
carnegies personal restaurant weekend nontechnical 2008 Oct 5, 9:17
Sarah asked me if I knew of a syntax highlighter for the QuickBase formula language which she uses at work. I couldn't find one but thought it might be fun to make a QuickBase Formula syntax highlighter based on the QuickBase help's
description of the formula syntax. Thankfully the language is relatively simple since my skills with ANTLR, the parser generator, are rusty now and I've only
used it previously for personal projects (like Javaish, the ridiculous Java based shell idea I had).
With the help of some great ANTLR examples and an ANTLR cheat
sheet I was able to come up with the grammar that parses the QuickBase Formula syntax and prints out the same formula marked up with HTML SPAN tags and various CSS classes. ANTLR produces the
parser in Java which I wrapped up in an applet, put in a jar, and embedded in an HTML page. The script in that page runs user input through the applet's parser and sticks the output at the bottom
of the page with appropriate CSS rules to highlight and print the formula in a pretty fashion.
What I learned:
- I didn't realize that Java applets are easy to use via script in an HTML page. In the JavaScript I
can simply refer to publicly exposed methods on the applet and run JavaScript strings through them. It makes for a great combination: do the heavy coding in Java and do the UI in HTML. I may end up
doing this again in the future.
- I love ANTLRWorks, the ANTLR IDE, that didn't exist the last time I used ANTLR. It tells you about issues with your grammar as you create it,
lets you easily debug the grammar running it forwards and backwards, display parse trees, and other useful things.
java technical programming quickbase language antlr antlrworks 2008 Oct 2, 9:37Cool graphical ANTLR IDE! They didn't have this the last time I used ANTLR. "ANTLRWorks is a novel grammar development environment for ANTLR v3 grammars written by Jean Bovet (with suggested use
cases from Terence Parr). It combines an excellent grammar-aware editor with an interpreter for rapid prototyping and a language-agnostic debugger for isolating grammar errors. ANTLRWorks helps
eliminate grammar nondeterminisms, one of the most difficult problems for beginners and experts alike, by highlighting nondeterministic paths in the syntax diagram associated with a grammar."
antlr ide graph grammar tool free download development opensource java 2008 Oct 2, 9:28Some good example grammars for ANTLR.
antlr example reference grammar 2008 Oct 2, 9:26Cheat sheet on ANTLR's syntax. ANTLR's another language parser generator.
antlr cheat parser language grammar opensource java software syntax quickreference 2008 Sep 30, 10:46A rogue group of knitters 'tag' public objects and places with knit pieces. See thier gallery. "tag crew of knitters, bombing the inner city with vibrant, stitched works of art, wrapped around
everything from beer bottles on easy nights to public monuments and utility poles on more ambitious outings."
humor art graffiti streetart knit cultural-disobediance 2008 Sep 29, 1:39Demos some of the working HTML5 features now available in recent builds of FireFox, IE8, Safari, and Opera. "Speaker: Ian Hickson. As the HTML5 effort reaches its first big milestone -- feature
completeness -- browsers are starting to implement it. It will be years before you can rely on HTML5 support when writing Web pages and applications, but you can start to experiment today to get a
feel of what the new standard offers. This talk will explore some of the most recent implementations of HTML5 features."
html5 ian-hickson html google video browser ie8 2008 Sep 26, 2:22This made me laugh: "People think of goths as weirdoes who take vampires too seriously, and therefore they can't help being worried on some level that a crazy goth might, you know, want to make them
bleed. Whereas steampunks are - what? Weirdoes who take pocket-watches too seriously? What are they gonna do, vehemently tell you what time it is?"
steampunk article goth scifi geek via:ethan_t_hein 2008 Sep 23, 10:58Matt says this is a good restaurant. It certainly looks interesting.
via:swannman seattle food restaurant 2008 Sep 18, 10:05Sarah Palin's Yahoo email addresses were hacked. I agree with the commenter: "I was just about to post how I feel bad for her despite disagreeing with most of her politics. There are plenty of
legitimate reasons to attack her (or any politician), but this is clearly personal, not politics. From what I've read, this wasn't even the account she used for those communications she wanted to
hide from subpoena, so the vigilante justice angle is BS. This is just plain mean." Although the last sentence of the following made me laugh: "A good samaritan in the /b/ thread reset the password
account with the intention of handing it over to Palin, a process known on /b/ as "white knighting". This locked everyone else out of the account. The "white knight" posted a screenshot to /b/ of his
pending message to one of Palin's contacts about how to recover the account, but made the critical mistake of not blanking out the new password he set."
security politics hack privacy government legal email yahoo 2008 Sep 16, 7:54
I just upgraded to the Zune 3.0 software which includes games and purchasing music on the Zune via WiFi
and once again I'm thrilled that the new firmware is available for old
Zunes like mine. Rooting around looking at the new features I noticed Zune Badges for
the first time. They're like Xbox Achievements, for example I have a Pixies Silver Artist Power Listener award for listening to the Pixies over 1000 times. I know its ridiculous but I like it, and
now I want achievements for everything.
Achievements everywhere would require more developments in self-tracking. Self-trackers, folks who keep statistics on exactly when and what they eat, when and how much they exercise, anything one
may track about one's self, were the topic of a Kevin Kelly Quantified Self blog post (also check out Cory Doctorow's SF
short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away featuring a colony of self-trackers).
For someone like me with a medium length attention span the data collection needs to be completely automatic or I will lose interest and stop collecting within a week. For instance, Nike iPod shoes that keep track of how many steps the wearer takes. I'll also need software to analyze, display, and share this data on a website like
Mycrocosm. I don't want to have to spend extreme amounts of time to create something as wonderful as the Feltron
Report (check out his statistic on how many daily measurements he takes for the report). Once we have the data we can give out achievements for everything!
Achievements for Everyday Life
|
Carnivore
Eat at least ten different kinds of animals.
|
|
Make Friends
Meet at least 10% of the residents in your home town.
|
|
Globetrotter
Visit a city in every country.
|
|
You're Old
Survive at least 80 years of life.
|
Of course none of the above is practical yet, but how about Delicious achievements based on the public Delicious feeds? That should be doable...
self-tracking data achievements 2008 Sep 16, 4:56All about self-trackers who track and graph all sorts of personal data. I suppose mycrocosm is like the self-tracker's twitter. "A quick overview of the emerging culture of self-tracking ran in the
Washington Post the other day. Called "Bytes of Life: For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There's a Web Site to Help You Keep Track." The subtitle is a gross exaggeration, although in time it
will be true."
privacy data social personal kevin-kelly 2008 Sep 16, 3:57Interview with Ben Adida on RDFa: "...RDFa is ready. It has just been approved by the W3C as a Candidate Recommendation, with the specific text of the specification and a brand new Primer published
on June 20th. Y!: What can I do with RDFa? BA: You can tell the world what various components on your web page mean by marking up things like: The title of a photo Your name and contact information
The license under which you're distributing your latest MP3 The ingredients of a cooking recipe The price of an item A gene on which you recently wrote a paper ... Anything that you want to make more
machine-readable"
rdf microformats yahoo semantic interview ben-adida semanticweb via:felix42 2008 Sep 15, 1:50This just in: people on the Internet are complaining. Also Radiohead has a remix contest. Neat. "No good deed goes unpunished. After letting fans pay whatever they wanted for In Rainbows and
releasing stem tracks via iTunes so that one of the songs on the record could be remixed, Radiohead is facing accusations that its "Nude" remix contest is unfair."
music wired radiohead remix contest 2008 Sep 14, 7:14Map of places to eat in Munich. "Eat the City - Munich, Some people like museums, others do walking tours, I get to know a city by eating it. By Megan D"
map google munich germany travel restaurant 2008 Sep 4, 6:08The new Windows ad campaign begins. I thought it was funny. I thought it'd be more directly aimed at the Mac ads and have something about Vista. I'm no ad expert though so what do I know? "The ad to
air tonight is the first of a series and is meant to be humorous, said a company spokeswoman. She would provide no additional details about the campaign." Oh, jokes! I get jokes. Thanks for the tip
company spokeswoman!
humor video advertising microsoft 2008 Sep 4, 11:30
This past weekend Sarah and I went to Salty's on Alki. I had never been
down to the Alki area so that was fun and I took a few photos while we were there. It turns out they were the last few photos I'll be taking with that camera as it turned itself
on in my pocket and the lens extension mechanism broke for the inner most lens. So now I'm looking for a new camera, preferably one that has a lock mechanism so I can't accidentally turn it on in
my pocket. The dinner was good and Salty's has a great view. On an unrelated note, the next day we went to an Audi dealership and test-drove the new 2009 A4 which was fun. I'm happy with my car but
Sarah's feeling antsy.
alki rambling camera weekend birthday nontechnical 2008 Aug 29, 8:37"Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like
the National Security Agency." Described fixes all require significant changes to the software and probably hardware doing the routing. Ugh
wired article security internet bgp hack networking defcon
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