2009 Jun 1, 11:07
When I heard that
Live Search is now Bing one of my initial thoughts was how'd they get that domain
name given
the unavailability of pronouncable four letter .COM domain names. Well, the names been used in the past.
Here now, via the
Wayback Machine is a brief, somewhat speculative, and ultimately anticlimactic
history
of bing.com:
-
2003 July: The first archived version of bing.com features "bing! is a small device (e.g., possibly even a small
Band-Aid(R)-like sticker!) that vibrates when a person's cell phone rings." I can't recall 2003 cell phones, were they big enough to require this device?
-
2004 August: Site for the same device is rewritten and looks much better, IMHO.
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2006 June: The domain is now parked by easyDNS. I guess the "bing!" device didn't work out?
-
2006 November: Its now "BING*" and they won't say what they're working on ("we're still in stealth mode") but they are
hiring C#/.NET developers.
-
2007 January: And they're gone. Without even exiting stealth mode. Too bad, I liked their logo. Their domain is now for
sale...
-
2007 February: Looks like EasyMail buys the domain and offers a physical mailing service in Australia: "By simply clicking
a button on your computer, mail is beamed electronically to a bing post office. Your mail is automatically printed, folded, enveloped and dispatched into the Australia Post network the very same
day."
-
Present: Now its the new home for Live Search of course.
The new name reminds me of the show Friends. Also, I hope they get a new favicon - I don't enjoy the stretched 'b' nor its color scheme.
microsoft technical domain history search archive dns bing 2009 May 13, 11:21Lots of interesting notes on the company culture of Zappos. "Yesterday I was lucky enough to visit Zappos and get a tour and talk with some of their executives, including Tony Hsieh, CEO."
twitter marketing business culture zappos shoes ecommerce 2009 Apr 29, 1:06More than three decades after the Clean Water Act, iconic American waterways like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound are in perilous condition and facing new sources of contamination.
todo via:jen video pbs environment 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.
blog web photo avatar image authentication identity icon hash 2009 Apr 20, 3:35Generate an icon for anonymous blog commentors that's easier to remember than an IP address.
blog anonymous web internet hash comment icon image avatar 2009 Mar 22, 11:03'Speaker are high-quality multimedia speakers that plug directly into your computer or MP3 player. Their iconic shape put the "speak" in speakers. Set includes a left and right speaker and power
adapter.'
speaker purchase design shopping gadget comic 2008 Sep 5, 1:56This is the game from the same person I linked to previously who has a son named Link: "I'm very excited to finally announce our first game, Liight, for WiiWare! So... what is it? Liight is a puzzle
solving game where the pieces are colored lights and the goal is to make cool music! Anyone can play! Just illuminate all the targets in each puzzle with light of the matching color... but it's not
always so easy! You'll have to mix colors, cast shadows and make the most of your limited resources to solve these brain teasers. Solve 100 challenging puzzles! Create your own puzzles, and Share
them with your friends via WiiConnect24. Host a Contest to see who can solve your puzzle the fastest. If you're ready, take on Nonstop mode, a whole new way to play where arcade-style scoring meets
split-second strategy!"
liight game videogame nintendo wii wiiware 2008 Jun 10, 3:10Interview with guy from "the Seasteading Institute, the brainchild of two Silicon Valley software developers, aims to develop self-sufficient deep-sea platforms that would empower individuals to
break free of the cozy cartel of 190-odd world governments a
community politics seasteading society article arstechnica 2008 May 18, 6:45
While re-reading Cryptonomicon I thought
about what kind of information I'm leaking by posting links on Delicious. At work I don't post any Intranet websites for fear of revealing anything but I wondered if not posting would reveal
anything. For instance, if I'm particularly busy at work might I post less indicating something about the state of the things I work on? I got an archive of my Delicious posts via the Delicious API
and then ran it through a tool I made to create a couple of tables which I've graphed on Many Eyes
I've graphed my posts per week and with red lines I've marked IE7 and IE8 releases as stated by Wikipedia. As you can see, there doesn't seem to be much of a pattern so I suppose my concerns
we're unfounded. I use it for both work and non-work purposes and my use of Delicious isn't that consistent so I don't think it would be easy to find a pattern like I was thinking about. Perhaps if
many people from my project used Delicious and that data could be compared together it might be easier.
For fun I looked at my
posts per day of week which starts off strong on Mondays and decreases as the
week goes on, and my
posts per hour of day. It looks like I mostly post around lunch and on the extremes I've
only posted very late at night twice at 4am:
converting media for the Zune, and
Penn's archive of articles. In the morning at 7am I've posted only once:
document
introducing SGML.
manyeyes graph cryptonomicon delicious 2008 May 2, 10:20
![[The cover of Cryptonomicon]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0380788624.01._SX140_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
![[The cover of Quicksilver]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060593083.01._SX140_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
![[The cover of The Confusion]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060733357.01._SX140_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
![[The cover of The System of the World]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060750863.01._SX140_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
I've finally finished the Baroque Cycle, a historical fiction series set in the 17th and 18th centuries by Neal Stephenson whose work I
always enjoy. There were often delays where I'd forget about the books until I had to take plane somewhere, or get discouraged reading about the character's thoughts on economics, or have
difficulty finding the next volume, or become more engrossed in other books, projects or video games, and leave the Baroque Cycle books untouched for many months at a time. Consequently, my reading
of this series has, I'm ashamed to say, spanned years. After finishing some books which I enjoy I end up hungry for just a bit more to read. For this series I don't need a bit more to read, I'm
done with that, but I do want a badge or maybe a medal. Or barring that, college credit in European History and Macro Economics. I can recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed Neal
Stephenson's other work and has a few years of free time to kill.
history neal stephenson baroque cycle book nontechnical 2008 Apr 3, 9:00
With the new features of IE8 there's several easy ways to integrate Gmail, Google's web mail service, for mail composition, searching, and monitoring that I enjoy using.
-
Composition
-
I made a Send via Gmail activity that allows you to select some text, a document, or link and via the activity menu open a new tab to compose a new message with the selection. Go to my activity page and click "Send via Gmail" (source) to install it. I found info on the gmail composition URL in the comments of this gmail howto article and used that in the
activity. I talked about activities previously.
-
Search
-
I've made a search provider that searches your gmail account. See my search provider page and select 'Gmail' (source) to install the Gmail search provider. Search providers aren't new to IE8 but this fits in with Gmail integration in IE. Again in the
comments of another howto I found information on a Gmail search URL.
-
Monitor
-
New to IE8 is authenticated feed support and favorites bar monitoring which combined with the Gmail inbox feed
means you can see when you get new mail in your favorites bar in IE. To do this, navigate to the feed https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom,
click 'Subscribe to this feed', then click on the Add button in the upper left (the star with plus icon) and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar' to add this as a monitored item in the favorites
bar. Next, right click on the new item in your favorites bar, open the properties dialog, and enter your Gmail username and password into the new username and password fields. Now when you get
new mail the Gmail feed item will shine and bold and you'll be able to get to new messages in the dropdown. I described monitored feed items previously.
activity gmail search howto google ie feed rss opensearch 2008 Mar 27, 9:33
The Goodwin family, except for Michelle who is taking a class trip to Washington DC and New York, was in Seattle this week. Sarah and I met up with them for dinner last night at the Icon Grill. I
enjoy the Icon Grill in general and last night was no exception especially having dinner with the Goodwins which was a lot of fun. It was particularly cold and at one point snowed. The Goodwin's
are seeing all the classic tourist attractions in Seattle some of which are depicted in the following 1962
Seattle's Worlds Fair postcard. The postcard is featured on Paleo-Future and unsurprisingly the 1962 Worlds Fair favored Seattle's Space Needle and
monorail.
![[Icon Grill front. Licensed under under Creative Commons. By Troy B Thompson]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/17/22461595_7fb7e702c4_m_d.jpg)
![[Seattle's Worlds Fair Postcard]](http://bp0.blogger.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/R7NOl8B8s2I/AAAAAAAABX4/0gPURFTR4X4/s400/Seattle_Fair_Olympia_Brewing_PC_001.jpg)
icon grill life washington goodwins sarah seattle nontechnical 2008 Mar 7, 7:20
Internet Explorer 8 has made my plugin Feed Folder obselete in functionality and implementation -- which is good!
I made Feed Folder for IE7 because I wanted the Live Bookmarking feature from FireFox. The Feed Folder plugin for IE7 would allow you to
display your feeds as virtual folders in your Links Bar. When your feed is updated the virtual folder is updated as well with the new feed items. I use del.icio.us to store all my links so I could
add virtual folders of my daily links, my friends blogs links, quick reference links, etc. etc.
My plugin relied on shell folders to implement the virtual folders I described above, but IE8 doesn't support shell folders in the Favorites Bar. But I'm OK with Feed Folder not working in IE8
since there's a much better implementation already there. IE8 does better than my plugin on a number of points: First, there isn't the horrible perf. issue that my plugin had on Vista. Second, when
a feed is updated the virtual folder flashes to note the change in status. Third, unread items are bolded and the bolding bubbles up from feeds contained in subfolders. And lastly, the middle click
button is supported to open items in a new tab.
Accordingly, I don't plan to work on Feed Folder anymore unless someone comes up with a good reason. Instead I mark Feed Folder deprecated and suggest you use Internet Explorer 8 instead.
To use this feature in IE8 simply drag a feed from your feed list in your Favorites Center onto your Favorites Bar. Or, when viewing a feed, click on the 'Add to Favorites' Star Plus icon thing in
the upper left, and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar'. A .url Internet Shortcut file is produced as usual, but if you open up the .url file you'll see there's some additional info about the feed.
ie8 feed feedfolder plugin technical browser ie rss 2008 Jan 22, 9:56
More ideas stolen from me in the same vein as my stolen OpenID thoughts.
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
Windows Searching
Windows Media Center Recorded TV's Closed Captions. An Ars-Technica article on
a fancy DVR described one of the DVRs features: full text search over the subtitles of the recorded TV shows. I thought implementing this for Windows Media Center recorded TV shows and Windows
Search would be an interesting project to learn about video files, and extending Windows Search. As it turns out though some guy, Stephen Toub implemented Windows Search over MCE closed captions already. Stephen Toub's article is very long and describes some
other very interesting related projects including 'summarizing video files' which you may want to read.
stolen-thoughts windows search mce windows traffic closed captions four-way-stop windows-media-center 2008 Jan 16, 2:53These are as bad as favicons! Boo on URI space squatting.
howto apple iphone icon favicon webdesign web ipod development via:swannman 2007 Sep 19, 6:14The story of the first smiley emoticon.
history humor computer culture web internet emoticon smiley 2007 Sep 12, 1:06As close to the Cryptonomicon as you'll be able to find. The first few chapters of a rare 17th century work on cryptography.
book history crypto cryptography 2007 Aug 15, 3:30I've been experimenting with adding video to my webpage. I tried to
embed video in my livejournal blog posts previously however ran into
some issues with that. When creating the LJ post I added an
tag but when I submit that tags
turned into an
2007 May 22, 3:22I've created an
update to the IE7 feed display.
After working on my
update to the XML source view I tried running my resourcelist program on other IE DLLs including ieframe. I found that
one of the resources in ieframe is the XSLT used to turn an
RSS feed into the IE7 feed display.
My first thought for this was that I could embed enclosures into the feed display. For instance, have controls for youtube.com videos or podcast audio files directly in the feed display. However, I
found that I can't use object or embed tags that rely on ActiveX controls in the page or in frames in the feed display.
With that through I decided I could at least add support for some RSS extensions. Thanks to
IE7's RSS platform which provides a
normalized view of RSS feeds it was really easy to do this. I went to several popular RSS feeds and RSS feeds that I like and took a look at the source to see what extensions I might want to add
support for.
For
digg.com I added support for
their RSS extension which includes digg count, and submitter name and icon. I
added the digg count in a box on the right and tried to make it fit in stylistically. For the
iTunes RSS extension
I add the feed icon, feed author, and descriptions. I was surprised by how much of the podcasts content was missing from the feed view. I also added support for a few other misc things: the
slash RSS extension's section and department, the feed description to the top of the feed display, and the atom author icon.
I wonder what other goodies lurk in IE's resources...
feed res slashdot digg resource itunes technical browser ie rss extension
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
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