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, 5:29"In response to the overwhelming demand for this made-up product, ThinkGeek has posted the following: ATTN Tauntaun Fanatics! Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have
decided to TRY and bring this to life."
humor starwars thinkgeek awesome 2009 Apr 7, 1:30I really dislike how IE deals with non-US-ASCII in URLs. I should write up a post on what exactly IE does with non-US-ASCII characters in URLs. "Just like IRIs the URL is mapped to a URI using UTF-8.
Except for the query component of the URL (the bit after the question mark). Here for legacy reasons the encoding of the document is used instead. Except if the encoding of the document is UTF-16, in
which case UTF-8 is used. Effectively, using non-ASCII characters in URLs in documents not encoded as UTF-8 or UTF-16 will give you surprising results, to say the least. Yay for browsers!"
http encoding html5 url uri unicode iri 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, 10:45HTML 5 allows websites to register themselves as handlers of particular URI schemes and particular content-types. I think this is great, but I'm surprised it doesn't support POSTing files to allow
for interactions with local content.
html5 url uri protocol reference html standard javascript webbrowser registerProtocolHandler 2009 Apr 5, 5:24A cross-site request forgery issue in Twitter posts to your Twitter account for you if you're logged in. Be careful what your RESTful APIs look like.
via:swannman security twitter xss 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 22, 10:35Graphic designer's awesome resume.
resume internet art design portfolio 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 2009 Mar 7, 12:43Photos of printed all-caps hilarious signs attached to posts. Can't ignore the time travel. Or the darning!
via:swannman time-travel humor sign photo 2009 Feb 28, 1:55
sequelguy posted a photo:
Why do security guards love Segway's so much?
vegas securityguard nevada segway 2009 Feb 28, 1:54
sequelguy posted a photo:
Penn and Teller's stage before their Las Vegas show
vegas rio nevada pennandteller 2009 Feb 28, 1:53
sequelguy posted a photo:
On the bridge in front of Treasure Island just before the first show of 'Sirens of TI' that day.
vegas friends beer nevada collegefriends 2009 Feb 28, 1:52
sequelguy posted a photo:
street vegas nevada crowd 2009 Feb 27, 11:00Raymond Chen has a years worth of blog content written and scheduled! "To give you an idea of how far in advance I write my blog entries, I wrote this particular entry on February 13, 2008. ... this
particular entry ended up on February 27, 2009 because that was the next available open day. ... Now, with a buffer of over a year, I do have quite a bit of leeway in choosing when any particular
article is published." Humorous commentor John writes in response: "If you were to disappear off the face of the Earth, how long would it be before we knew?"
blog raymond-chen writing humor 2009 Feb 23, 10:34Lots of neat web APIs. Added to Delicious network. "Over the past year, I've been tagging interesting data I find on the web in del.icio.us. I wrote a quick python script to pull the relevant links
from my del.icio.us export and list them at the bottom of this post. Most of these datasets are related to machine learning, but there are a lot of government, finance, and search datasets as well."
api data semanticweb information reference 2009 Jan 20, 6:01Olly Moss designs posters and things that I see people linking to all over the place on the web. Lots of good stuff, esp. the zombies. Check out his flickr account too.
olly-moss design poster movie art 2009 Jan 15, 6:02Projecting giant images onto buildings that appear to interact with their surface. Lovely video. "We have posted quite a few times now about using projectors in the city to beam images onto
Architecture and the screengrab above is one from one the best examples we have seen so far."
video graffiti cultural-disobediance art technology projector light 2009 Jan 15, 10:28Thanks to Matt, for the first time I can see myself using Twitter. Twitter app on my phone notifies me when something's posted so my build process can let me know when its done, or when sync finally
finishes, etc. I'd been meaning to setup a mini-notification system with a command line tool to my phone (w/o paying per text msg) but I didn't think of Twitter.
via:swannman api internet curl cli twitter 2009 Jan 12, 12:48Results of a FOIA request for the DHS travel records: "I had been curious about what's in my travel dossier, so I made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a copy. I'm posting here a few
sample pages of what officials sent me."
foia security airplane airport privacy government information
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