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Google Public DNS

2009 Dec 3, 4:52Having replaced HTTP with SPDY, Google digs deeper into the Web stack providing their own DNS servers. Also, as Waxy noted, you can't argue with the most memorable IP addresses I've seen: "Configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers". Also check out their DNS server's DNS prefetching in the performance notes.PermalinkCommentsgoogle dns internet network security performance dns-prefetching technical

ginger's thoughts » URI fragments vs URI queries for media fragment addressing

2009 Sep 11, 8:39"In the W3C Media Fragment Working Group (MFWG) we have had long discussions about the use of the URI query (”?”) or the URI fragment (”#”) addressing approach for addressing directly into media fragments, and the diverse new HTTP headers required to serve such URI requests, considering such side conditions as the stripping-off of fragment parameters from a URI by Web browsers, or the existence of caching Web proxies."PermalinkCommentsfragment uri via:connolly media url query http http-header

Eat Pants - Interactive Fiction Sessions from my Server Logs

2009 Jun 29, 4:19

I've looked at my web server logs previously to see if anyone had used my Web Frotz Interpreter and until recently didn't realize that awstats (the web server log report generator) was truncating the query from my URL, so I couldn't tell that anyone was actually using it. But after grepping the logs manually I've pulled out the URLs of visitor's text adventure sessions. If you'll recall, my Web Frotz Interpreter stores the game state in the URL so its easy to see user's game states in the web server logs.

I've put some of the links up on the Web Frotz Interpreter page. Some of the interesting ones:

PermalinkCommentsserver-logs technical zork frotz pants interactive-fiction uri if

Internationalization Best Practices: Specifying Language in XHTML and HTML Content

2009 Jun 25, 1:53"The document provides practical best practices related to specifying the language of content that HTML content authors can use to ensure that their HTML is easily adaptable for an international audience. These are best practices that are best addressed from the start of content development if unnecessary costs and resource issues are to be avoided later on."PermalinkCommentslanguage i18n internationalization html w3c xml reference xhtml technical

Mostly Moved Into New House

2009 Jun 19, 8:07

New House ExteriorThe weekend before the previous, Sarah and I moved our belongings into the new house and spent a lot of time packing and unpacking, and now we're officially living there (interested Facebook friends can find my new address or just ask me). The Saturday of the previous weekend Sarah's family came over for a half house warming and half Sarah's birthday celebration which was fun and served to force us to do more unpacking and forced me to take trips to Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc. On Sunday, Sarah and I went out to her favorite restaurant and she opened her gifts that I had to hide to keep her from opening before her birthday. Happy Birthday Sarah!

While at Home Depot I had trouble finding what I was actually looking for, but I did find everything I needed to terminate the Cat5e cables that are wired in the house. Each room has a wall plate with two RJ45 sockets, both sockets wired to Cat5e cable. One of the cables per plate was already hooked up to a standard phone service punchdown board and the other cables per plate were all hanging unterminated next to the punchdown board. So now I've terminated them all with RJ45 connectors and hooked them up to my hub, wireless router, cable modem, etc. I had the same sort of fun setting all that up as I did playing with model train sets as a child. Hopefully no therapy will be required to figure out why that is.

PermalinkCommentspersonal2 train address sarah house new-house birthday

BBC - Today - And Another Thing...

2009 Jun 8, 3:40I didn't hear about this at the time, but a sixth Hitchhikers Guide novel will be written by Eoin Colfer. This article has some quotes from Eoin about it and big-shoe filling is addressed. Also in the article is a clip of the voice actor of Arthur Dent from the radio series as Arthur Dent complaining about being brought back to life that had been played on BBC Radio.PermalinkCommentshhgttg douglas-adams eoin-colfer and-another-thing book news audio

Gravatar - Globally Recognized Avatars

2009 Apr 20, 3:37Web service that hosts avatar images for things like blog comments. The image is ID'ed by a hash of the user's email address. Auto generated or if the user signs up, the image can be whatever they upload. Lots of plugins for different blogging platforms.PermalinkCommentsblog web photo avatar image authentication identity icon hash

WP_Identicon :: Dammit Jim!

2009 Apr 20, 3:35Generate an icon for anonymous blog commentors that's easier to remember than an IP address.PermalinkCommentsblog anonymous web internet hash comment icon image avatar

Thoughts on registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5

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:

However, the way its currently spec'ed out I don't like the following: PermalinkCommentsurl template registerprotocolhandler firefox technical url scheme protocol boring html5 uri urn

Web addresses in HTML 5

2009 Mar 23, 11:06The HTML5 spec tells us how it is in the real world for URLs: "This specification defines various algorithms for dealing with Web addresses intended for use by HTML user agents. For historical reaons, in order to be compatible with existing Web content HTML user agents need to implement a number of processes not defined by the URI and IRI specifications [RFC3986], [RFC3987]."PermalinkCommentshtml html5 url uri reference w3c

7 Wii tricks Nintendo doesn't tell you | News | TechRadar UK

2008 Oct 25, 10:22My Xbox has a blog and my Wii has an email address: "Email a chum's Wii: You'll need to have a record of those damnably unmemorable friend codes for anyone you want to mail, but once you do it's simple: just drop a message to w[friendcode]@wii.com. For instance, w1234567891011@wii.com."PermalinkCommentswii howto email nintendo tips via:sarah

Mail Games: Testing the System | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration

2008 Oct 15, 10:47The artist Harriet Russell encodes the destination postal address of her letters with anagrams, crosswords, and other puzzles: "Despite fears of a Royal Mail backlash, Russell found the system more than willing to play her game. The crossword edition was returned completed with the comment "Solved by the Glasgow Mail Centre". Only 10 of the 130 letters posted lost their way through the system, some held particularly testing anagrams, others were without a postal code."PermalinkCommentshumor puzzle crossword art mail postal-system harriet-russell book

Sarah Palin's Hacked Yahoo Email Account Timeline

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."PermalinkCommentssecurity politics hack privacy government legal email yahoo

IE8 Beta2 Shipped

2008 Aug 27, 11:36

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is now available! Some of the new features from this release that I really enjoy are Tab Grouping, the new address-bar, and InPrivate Subscriptions.

Tab Grouping groups tabs that are opened from the same page. For example, on a Google search results page if you open the first two links the two new tabs will be grouped with the Google search results page. If you close one of the tabs in that group focus goes to another tab in that group. Its small, but I really enjoy this feature and without knowing exactly what I wanted while using IE7 and FF2 I knew I wanted something like this. Plus the colors for the tab groups are pretty!

The new address bar and search box makes life much easier by searching through my browsing history for whatever I'm typing in. Other things are searched besides history but since I ignore favorites and use Delicious I mostly care about history. At any rate its one of the things that makes it impossible for me to go machines running IE7.

InPrivate Subscriptions allows you to subscribe to a feed of URLs from which IE should not download content. This is intended for avoiding sites that track you across websites and could sell or share your personal information, but this feature could be used for anything where the goal is to avoid a set of URLs. For example, phishing, malware sites, ad blocking, etc. etc. I think there's some interesting uses for this feature that we have yet to see.

Anyway, we're another release closer to the final IE8 and I can relax a little more.

PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft browser technical ie8 ie

IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Now Available

2008 Aug 27, 12:22IE8 Beta2 is now available. This blog post mentions some of the features I like best in this release, like the updated address bar, visual search suggestions, and tab grouping.PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft ie browser ie8 beta blog article

[whatwg] Web Applications 1.0 Draft

2008 Aug 20, 9:48Apple will or will not license the canvas tag? 'Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple") believes it has intellectual property rights ("IP Rights") relative to WHATWG's Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, Section 10.1, entitled "Graphics: The bitmap canvas". At this time, Apple reserves all rights in its IP Rights and makes no representations as to Apple's willingness or unwillingness to license these IP Rights. However, in the event that the Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, becomes part of a formalized draft standard at W3C or IETF, for example, Apple is prepared to address the disclosure/licensing rules of such organizations.'PermalinkCommentsapple patent html ip html5 canvas whatwg browser browser-war

RFC 3675 - .sex Considered Dangerous

2008 Jun 30, 3:55FCC wants nationwide free wifi that's free of porn. They should read this. "Periodically there are proposals to mandate the use of a special top level name or an IP address bit to flag "adult" "unsafe" material or the like. This document explains why thiPermalinkCommentsdomain dns rfc ietf internet porn government politics censorship

Official Gmail Blog: 2 hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address

2008 Apr 11, 3:48Howto avoid spam with Gmail: "If your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com"PermalinkCommentsspam gmail blog google howto mail email

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Released with Activities

2008 Mar 5, 11:36

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available now. I can finally talk about some of the stuff I've been working on for the past year or so: activities. Activities let you select a document, some text on a document, or a link to a document and run that selection through a web service. For example, you could select a word on a webpage and look it up in Wikipedia, select an address and map it on Yahoo Maps, select a webpage and translate it into English with Windows Live Translator, or select a link and add it to Digg.

IE8 comes installed with some activities based on Microsoft web services but there's a page you can go to to install other activities. However, that page is missing some of my favorites that I use all the time, like del.icio.us. Accordingly, I've put together a page of the activities I use. MSDN has all the info on creating Activities.

Activities are very similar to other existing features in other browsers including the ability to add context menu items to IE. There's two important differences which make activities better. Activities have a preview window that pops out when you hover over an activity, which is useful to get in place information easily provided by developers. The other is that the interface is explicit and takes after HTML FORMs and OpenSearch descriptions. Because the interface is explicitly described in XML (unlike the context menu additions described above which run arbitrary script) we have the ability to use activities in places other than on a webpage in the future. And because activity definitions are similar to HTML FORMs, if your webservice has an HTML FORM describing it you can easily create an activity.

PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft technical activity openservice ie8 ie activities msdn

URI Addressable Text Adventure Games

2008 Mar 2, 9:18

This post is about creating a server side z-code interpreter that represents game progress in the URI. Try it with the game Lost Pig.

I enjoy working on URIs and have the mug to prove it. Along those lines I've combined thoughts on URIs with interactive fiction. I have a limited amount of experience with Inform which generates Z-Code so I'll focus on pieces written in that. Of course we can already have URIs identifying the Z-Code files themselves, but I want URIs to identify my place in a piece of interactive fiction. The proper way to do this would be to give Z-Code its own mimetype and associate with that mimetype the format of a fragment that would contain the save state of user's interactive fiction session. A user would install a browser plugin that would generate URIs containing the appropriate fragment while you play the IF piece and be able to load URIs identifying Z-Code files and load the save state that appears in the fragment.

But all of that would be a lot of work, so I made a server side version that approximates this. On the Web Frotz Interpreter page, enter the URI of a Z-Code file to start a game. Enter your commands into the input text box at the bottom and you get a new URI after every command. For example, here's the beginning of Zork. I'm running a slightly modified version of the Unix version of Frotz. Baf's Guide to the IF Archive has lists of IF games to try out.

There are two issues with this thought, the first being the security issues with running arbitrary z-code and the second is the practical URI length limit of about 2K in IE. From the Z-Code standard and the Frotz source it looks like 'save' and 'restore' are the only commands that could do anything interesting outside of the Z-Code virtual machine. As for the length-limit on URIs I'm not sure that much can be done about that. I'm using a base64 encoded copy of the compressed input stream in the URI now. Switching to the actual save state might be smaller after enough user input.

PermalinkCommentszork frotz interactive-fiction zcode if technical uri fragment
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