2009 Feb 13, 9:29"I have altered the pants, pray that I don't alter them further."
humor pants starwars quote scifi geek 2008 Oct 31, 7:10Bruce Schneier pointed out this book: "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (Paperback)". Its 600 pages of random numbers. I'd get a copy if it didn't cost $90! From the stats page
Amazon lists the 100 most used words in the book: "6 8 11 19 23 28 30 32 37 38 42 47 52 54 56 60 72 77 80 84 86 92 101 102 107 108 111 115 125 126 131 143 147 148 150 157 158 163 166 167 171 179 183
188 190 197 206 207 212 215 218 220 226 228 230 234 236 242 247 249 251 253 261 265 272 292 297 304 311 323 332 336 337 338 344 345 354 356 358 359 364 371 372 374 384 389 391 409 412 413 421 433 436
443 457 481 489 516 517 642"
via:schneier random book humor math csc 2008 Jul 30, 10:45"Reporters Without Borders therefore offers the following practical advice to foreign journalists to help them cover the human rights situation in China." Install Tor, use PGP and other interesting
things.
censorship china internet privacy olympics journalism 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"
spam gmail blog google howto mail email 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.
zork frotz interactive-fiction zcode if technical uri fragment 2008 Feb 27, 3:14This page helps you determine if you have a VRML plugin and lists plugins available.
3d browser firefox ie plugin vrml tool 2007 Nov 19, 3:47I really appreciate that
the first gen Zune's get the new Zune's
firmware and software. I like the updated Zune software personally because its faster and simpler, has better podcast support, and the whole social thing has is on their website now. So, I guess
I like the software because it has new features that should have been there in the first place.
The social thing is like a Zune social network. It uses your Xbox Live friends to seed your Zune friends list, lets you do the expected social network stuff, lets you preview songs, and unlike first
gen Zunes which required face to face time with other Zune owners, allows you to send songs to people. It also lets you display your recently played tracks and your favorite tracks, similar to what
Last.FM has, via a
Zune Card. I like the Zune Card from a technical perspective because it
separates
the
Zune Card view, written in flash from the
User Card data which is in XML. I hope
they intend to keep the XML available via this UserCard Service because I think there's potential to easily do cool things.
microsoft technical music zune social 2007 Oct 29, 1:48FTA: "Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor who writes the Bad Science column in the Guardian, examining the claims of scaremongering journalists, quack remedy peddlers, pseudoscientific cosmetics
adverts, and evil multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Th
monthly blog science politics religion media news healthy research humor 2007 Jun 17, 10:46List of interesting scifi writers of the current century. I really enjoyed Accelerando
blog fiction scifi literature book shopping 2007 May 2, 1:39From The Onion News Network: "In The Know: Do You Remember Life Before The Segway? Panelists discuss how the Segway personal transporter has revolutionized American life."
humor onion segway video 2007 Jan 24, 8:51Get Firefox's Live Bookmarking feature in IE7 using my extension Feed Folder. Feed Folder lets you view your feeds as lists of links that auto update. Works great with del.icio.us feeds!
projects ie ie7 browser extension extensions feed rss atom feed-folder free download me personal 2007 Jan 8, 1:40This site lists common tropes & idioms associated with television programs. If you want to be the Comic Book Guy all this is a good start.
tv lampshade lampshade-hanging trope idiom 2006 Dec 27, 2:52'Like Flickr, but without the photos.' Flickr : photos :: Wordie : words. Its kind of funny really. The web is dead. Long live the web.
web2.0 words social language collaboration list lists word english etymology 2006 Dec 4, 6:13This is my profile on Amazon's UnSpun.
amazon unspun list lists proldfile me 2006 Nov 29, 5:34List of Lists. Vote things up and down and create arbitrary lists. Neat!
amazon reference unspun social lists web2.0 2006 Nov 3, 3:02I'm updating my
homepage to include a sorted list of
my livejournal blog entries and
my del.icio.us bookmarks. I'm using
BadgerFish to convert the XML of the RSS feeds of the two into JavaScript objects. At
that point I can do fun stuff like sorting them into lists on my page. Neat. This is how I spend my free time... OK.
xml badgerfish feed rss script livejournal delicious homepage
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