2009 Feb 28, 2:21
Sarah and I met up with Jon, Scott, Jesse, and Grib in Las Vegas last weekend and we had a fun time.
- I got to play the Monorail Song via YouTube on my phone while on the Las Vegas Monorail rather than just chanting monorail like last
year.
- I didn't lose more gambling than I spent on food for the trip.
- Contrary to what some suggested, Sarah and I did not get married in Vegas.
- I finally saw a live Penn & Teller show and it was great!
personal2 monorail vegas penn-and-teller 2008 Nov 18, 1:10"...Just in case the previous 62 questions do not ferret out any potential controversy, the 63rd is all-encompassing: 'Please provide any other information, including information about other members
of your family, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the president-elect.' ... For those who clear all the hurdles, the reward
could be the job they wanted. But first there will be more forms, for security and ethics clearances from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Government Ethics."
government obama fbi privacy 2008 Oct 14, 11:14Similar in concept to the Pirate Bay suggestion of encrypting all TCP/IP connections if both server and client support it: "Obfuscated TCP is a transport layer protocol that adds opportunistic
encryption. It's designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet."
internet tcp encryption security google privacy opensource cryptography network ssl 2008 Oct 10, 3:35Apparently thanks to the Open House Project, US legislation can now have real and permanent links. I'm kind of surprised that legislation would exist so freely on the Internet without real links. The
Open House Project is "a collaborative effort by government and legislative information experts, congressional staff, non-profit organizers and bloggers to study how the House of Representatives
currently integrates the Internet into its operations, and to suggest attainable reforms to promote public access to its work and members."
internet url link uri politics 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 Sep 10, 1:32Discussion on IETF DNS mailing list about Mozilla's Public Suffix list and what they should do ultimately. "I'm inclined to suggest: Gather and hard-code your list into Firefox, and also provide a
mechanism by which domain authorities can publish information which overrides your list for their domain."
idn domain firefox publicsuffix ietf mozilla tld 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.
microsoft ie browser ie8 beta blog article 2008 May 13, 10:33
![[Seattle's Best Coffee logo in front of Pike Place logo]](http://www.seattlesbest.com/images/aboutus_b.jpg)
This past
Saturday Sarah and I took the Savor Seattle Tour of various food shops in Pikes Place. Sarah had suggested it at one point and when Jesse and Nicole
brought it up again when they came up to Seattle we decided to go. Surprisingly our tour group consisted of mostly locals. Except for the fish market I hadn't been to see any of the places on the
tour. I particularly enjoyed the chocolate cherries and the tea. Our tour guide Tim was funny and overall I enjoyed the tour and would recommend it. I've made a map of our tour including what free trials we got at each location. Yum!
food tour seattle savor seattle nontechnical 2008 Apr 21, 2:24"Unlike the engineers who saw the service as too slow, he saw the problem as one deriving from the boredom of those waiting for an elevator. ... He suggested putting mirrors in the elevator lobbies
to occupy those waiting by enabling them to look at thems
progress-bar psychology elevator 2008 Apr 7, 10:09
More of my thoughts have been stolen: In my
previous job the customer wanted a progress bar displayed while information was copied off of proprietary hardware, during which the software didn't get any indication of progress until the copy
was finished. I joked (mostly) that we could display a progress bar that continuously slows down and never quite reaches the end until we know we're done getting info from the hardware. The amount
of progress would be a function of time where as time approaches infinity, progress approaches a value of at most 100 percent.
This is similar to Zeno's Paradox which says you can't cross a room because to do so first you must cross half the room, then you must
cross half the remaining distance, then half the remaining again, and so on which means you must take an infinite number of steps. There's also an old joke inspired by Zeno's Paradox. The joke is the prototypical engineering vs sciences joke and is moderately humorous, but I think
the fact that Wolfram has an interactive applet demonstrating the joke is funnier than the joke itself.
I recently found Lou Franco's blog post "Using Zeno's Paradox For Progress Bars" which covers the same
concept as Zeno's Progress Bar but with real code. Apparently Lou wasn't making a joke and actually used this progress bar in an application. A progress bar that doesn't accurately represent
progress seems dishonest. In cases like the Vista Defrag
where the software can't make a reasonable guess about how long a process will take the software shouldn't display a progress bar.
Similarly a paper by Chris Harrison "Rethinking the Progress Bar" suggests that if a progress bar speeds up towards the end
the user will perceive the operation as taking less time. The paper is interesting, but as in the previous case, I'd rather have progress accurately represented even if it means the user doesn't
perceive the operation as being as fast.
Update: I should be clearer about Lou's post. He was actually making a practical and implementable suggestion as to how to handle the case of displaying progress when you have some idea of how long
it will take but no indications of progress, whereas my suggestion is impractical and more of a joke concerning displaying progress with no indication of progress nor a general idea of how long it
will take.
zenos paradox technical stolen-thoughts boring progress zeno software math 2008 Mar 17, 12:51Google toolbar updates the IE Feed View like I had suggested on my blog.
google ie rss feed ie7 browser via:walter 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 31, 10:47
![[Many books in large bookcase. Photo creator http://flickr.com/people/babblingdweeb/]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/18/23816128_d4acb70b2d_m_d.jpg)
I use my recently added
books feed from LibraryThing, a site I've mentioned before where you track, review, recommend, and share your books, and I put the recently added
books on my page. I thought it might be nice to include the book covers so I suggested adding book covers to RSS feeds in
LibraryThings 'Recommend Site Improvements' group. The next day I had a response from the founder and lead developer Tim Spalding who
had started implementing the feature. I noticed a few bugs, reported them on the same thread, and he fixed them soon after. Fantastic! It makes me want to upgrade to a paying account.
Incidentally, if you notice the Ghost in the Shell book appear multiple times in my RSS feed its due to the previously mentioned iterative bug fixes. The same item appeared multiple times slightly
differently with each bug fix and your RSS aggregator may have picked them up as distinct items.
tim-spalding librarything rss homepage 2008 Jan 25, 1:54Research paper suggests location aware cellphones ask their owners to charge them when the phones see they're at home.
article newscientist research cellphone battery power microsoft 2007 Dec 27, 3:36Mark Liberman suggests the paper on which recent articles like "Humor Develops From Aggression Caused By Male Hormones, Professor Says" was a joke. The paper is based on determitologist's notes on
reactions to his unicycle riding.
article blog language language-log mark-liberman sam-shuster science unicycle humor bad-science 2007 Oct 22, 4:47
I purchased the
Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like
others before me who have
discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of
HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can
gift them to you.
HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and
objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding
more. The humor and the sort of
play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest
ending theme I've heard (also
blogged by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't
always trying to kill me. Additionally the
weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers'
attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of
Solitary the reality show
that sticks contestants alone in small rooms forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...
RPS has articles on Portal including
a Portal review, a page
suggesting Portal is a tale of
lesbianism, and
others.
hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical 2007 Oct 15, 1:31This is a howto on using encryption with web based mail clients. This article suggests a FireFox plugin. I should look into doing this in IE.
email secure webmail google gmail pgp encryption howto article 2007 Sep 12, 6:54I'm visiting
Wikipedia more and more recently but I always find myself reading the referenced webpages to get the full context of quotes and for
more info. Basically I use Wikipedia as an introduction and a place to look for links. For times when I'm looking for opinions rather than facts I like to use
Everything2. No need to check references there.
There's the much hyped
WikiScanner tool which reports who has been making anonymous (thought to be anonymous at the time anyway) edits to
Wikipedia. Its humorous and interesting in a few cases, but in general I think its stretching to say that because an IP address range is owned by a corporation and someone edited Wikipedia on an IP
in that range that you can attribute that edit to that corporation. If I edited Wikipedia I'd probably do a bit of that during my lunch break, but that wouldn't mean that Microsoft wants the
Wikipedia pages for Weird Al, Dave Risney, URIs, or whatever else I would edit on Wikipedia changed.
Also, via
Everything Is Miscellaneous I found the tool
Wiki Dashboard. Wiki Dashboard proxies
Wikipedia and on each page shows a timeline view at the top with who made edits and when. Its nice to see a gentle curve down from an initial spike at the beginning for topics you don't imagine to be
controversial. As the canonical test page for this service I looked up 'Elephant' the
Wikipedia page Stephen Colbert
suggested folks vandalize on his show on 2006 July 31st. If you look at the
Wiki Dashboard Elephant page you can see a very large spike
in edits on that date. That's all I need to see.
As a side note, for the link on Stephen Colbert suggesting folks vandalize Wikipedia I linked to a Wikipedia article. Is it inappropriate to provide info about Wikipedia being vandalized and thus
incorrect via a link to a Wikipedia article?
wikidashboard stephen-colbert wikality wikipedia wikiscanner colbert-report 2007 Sep 10, 4:29Bookmarklet suggestions for the iPhone.
apple iphone bookmarklets browser hack script javascript 2007 Jul 4, 10:58Hackdiary
I really enjoy reading Matt Biddulph's blog
hackdiary. An entry some time ago talked about his
Second
Life flickr screen which is a screen in Second Life that displays images from flickr.com based on viewers suggested tags. I'm a novice to the Second Life scripting API and so it was from this
blog post I became aware of the
llHTTPRequest. This is like the XMLHttpRequest for Second Life code in that it lets you make HTTP requests.
I decided that I too could do something cool with this.
Translator
I decided to make a translator object that a Second Life user would wear that would translate anything said near them. The details aren't too surprising: The translator object keeps an owner
modifiable list of translation instructions each consisting of who to listen to, the language they speak, who to tell the translation to, and into what language to translate. When the translator
hears someone, it runs through its list of translation instructions and when it finds a match for the speaker uses the llHTTPRequest to send off what was said to
Google translate. When the result comes back the translator simply says the response.
Issues
Unfortunately, the llHTTPRequest limits the response size to 2K and no translation site I can find has the translated text in the first 2K. There's a flag HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH provided but it defaults
to 2K and you can't change its value. So I decided to setup a PHP script on my site to act as a translating proxy and parse the translated text out of the HTML response from Google translate. Through
experimentation I found that their site can take parameters text and langpair queries in the query like so:
http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=car%20moi%20m%C3%AAme%20j%27en%20rit&langpair=fr|en. On the topic of non US-ASCII characters (which is important for a translator) I
found that llHTTPRequest encodes non US-ASCII characters as percent-encoded UTF-8 when constructing the request URI. However, when Google translate takes parameters off the URI it only seems to
interpret it as percent-encoded UTF-8 when the user-agent is IE's. So after changing my
PHP script to use IE7's user-agent non
US-ASCII character input worked.
In Use
Actually using it in practice is rather difficult. Between typos, slang, abbreviations, and the current state of the free online translators its very difficult to carry on a conversation.
Additionally, I don't really like talking to random people on Second Life anyway. So... not too useful.
personal translate second-life technical translator sl code google php llhttprequest
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