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Bug Spotting: Smart pointers and parameter evaluation order

2011 Oct 19, 5:58PermalinkCommentsc++ technical bug programming smart-pointer cpp

WPAD Server Fiddler Extension Update v1.0.1

2011 Jun 12, 3:34
As it turns out the WPAD Server Fiddler Extension I made a while back actually has a non-malicious purpose. Apparently its useful for debugging HTTP on the WP7 phone (or so I'm told). Anyway I took some requests and I've fixed a few minor bugs (start button not updating correctly), changed the dialog to be a Fiddler tab so you can use it non-modally, and the WPAD server is now always off when Fiddler starts.
PermalinkCommentsextension fiddler technical update wpad

The ftp URI Scheme

2011 May 22, 10:38One step closer to completely deprecating the original URI spec by pulling out the ftp URI scheme specification into its own new updated spec!PermalinkCommentsuri url ftp uri-scheme ietf rfc reference technical

What's Happening in Egypt Explained. (UPDATED)

2011 Jan 30, 3:15PermalinkCommentspolitics information history media technology

Area Man Suddenly Realizes He's The One Who's Been Killing Off World's Bee Population | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

2010 Sep 8, 2:16'Following a news update on the depopulation of honeybees across North America and much of the world, it suddenly dawned on local bank teller Keith Orlander Tuesday that he, personally, was responsible for the dramatic and theretofore unexplained disappearance of the insects. "Boy, come to think of it, I guess I have been killing millions of bees lately,"'PermalinkCommentsbee bees humor onion

A quote from Sacramento Credit Union

2010 May 14, 8:52It really is an actual quote from the Sacramento Credit Union's website: "The answers to your Security Questions are case sensitive and cannot contain special characters like an apostrophe, or the words “insert,” “delete,” “drop,” “update,” “null,” or “select.”"

Out of context that seems hilarious, but if you read the doc the next Q/A twists it like a defense in depth rather than a 'there-I-fixed-it'.PermalinkCommentstechnical security humor sql

IDN TLD Update

2010 May 6, 5:48New IDN TLDs are up. Try out http://xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ (aka http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/) in your favorite IDN implementing browser.PermalinkCommentsidn tld dns icann technical web language

Ajaxian » Put your own tests up on BrowserScope

2010 Apr 21, 6:53"Lindsey Simon has got a powerful update to BrowserScope, the community-driven tool to test and profile browsers. The new feature is exciting as it truly delivers the “community-driven” piece at scale: you can now add your own tests to the corpus, TestSwarm style."PermalinkCommentsweb browser test google browser-scope internet technical

RFC 5843 - Additional Hash Algorithms for HTTP Instance Digests

2010 Apr 21, 6:51Adds SHA 256 & 512 to HTTP instance digest: 'The IANA registry named "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Digest Algorithm Values" defines values for digest algorithms used by Instance Digests in HTTP. Instance Digests in HTTP provide a digest, also known as a checksum or hash, of an entire representation of the current state of a resource. This document adds new values to the registry and updates previous values.'PermalinkCommentshash cryptography http instance-digest sha security technical ietf rfc standard

Encode-O-Matic: Guess Encoding

2010 Apr 4, 2:02

I've just updated Encode-O-Matic with a Guess Input Encoding feature. When you start Encode-O-Matic or when you use the 'Guess Input Encoding' menu item from the 'Tools' menu, Encode-O-Matic will try out various combinations of encodings and guess at which set seem to apply to your input. For instance given the following text, Encode-O-Matic will correctly guess that it is percent encoded, base64 encoded, deflate compressed text:

S%2BWqUEhLLMoFUulFpXnZQLogMa%2BkmCuPqxzILk%2FMyeHK4QIA
It should work fairly well for simple things but I did pick 'Guess' for the name of the feature to intentionally lower expectations. It doesn't currently apply to character encodings but that may be something to consider in the future.PermalinkCommentstechnical encodeomatic tool encoding

Getting started with Google Calendar Sync - Google Calendar Help

2010 Mar 21, 3:22Google Calendar Sync is an Outlook plugin that syncs your Google and Outlook calendars (you get to pick 1way and direction or 2way sync'ing). This almost looks like what I want but perhaps my feature requests are too obscure for someone to have already implemented them:
Events marked personal added on my Outlook calendar should get full 2-way sync'ing with my Google calendar.
All other events added on my Outlook calendar should be assumed to have private company information and should get 1-way sync'ing with just the time and location - no attendees or subject or desceiption.
All events added on my Google calendar should get full 2-way sync'ing with Outlook and there should be marked personal.

I doubt I'm going to find a pre-made app to do this so I guess I should get coding. Otoh, if they ever bring the updated Android OS that has Exchange support to my G1 maybe none of this would be necessary...PermalinkCommentsgoogle calendar outlook microsoft tool free technical

Buzz by Mark Pilgrim from Buzz

2010 Mar 11, 3:33"The headers and captions on http://diveintohtml5.org/ use an open source font called "Essays 1743." The creator of that font was looking for a tutorial on HTML5, came across my site, and was pleasantly surprised to see his own work on prominent display. He now wants to update his font to include stylistically appropriate Unicode arrows, which I will then use with my captions.

The internet is awesome. It's so wonderfully intertwingled."PermalinkCommentshtml html5 mark-pilgrim font technical

Encode-O-Matic Update: Compression, Hex View, Quick Show Output

2010 Mar 9, 9:08

I've just put up an update for Encode-O-Matic with the following improvements:

PermalinkCommentstechnical encodeomatic project

Thought Experiments and Design Principles

2010 Jan 29, 3:54

Raymond Chen has some thought experiments useful for discovering various kinds of stupidity in software design:

Tim Berners-Lee's principles of Web design includes my favorite: Test of Independent Invention. This has a thought experiment containing the construction of the MMM (Multi-Media Mesh) with MRIs (Media Resource Identifiers) and MMTP (Muli-Media Transport Protocol).

The Internet design principles (RFC 1958) includes the Robustness Principle: be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving. A good one, but applied too liberally can lead to interop issues. For instance, consider web browsers. Imagine one browser becomes so popular that web devs create web pages and just test out their pages in this popular browser. They don't ensure their pages conform to standards and accidentally end up depending on the manner in which this popular browser tolerantly accepts non-standard input. This non-standard behavior ends up as de facto standard and future updates to the standard essentially has had decisions made for it.

PermalinkCommentstechnical design principles software development

Ajaxian » New SVG Web Release: Gelatinous Cube

2009 Nov 23, 12:38Update to SVG Web: "SVG Web is a JavaScript library which provides SVG support on many browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Using the library plus native SVG support you can instantly target close to 100% of the existing installed web base."PermalinkCommentssvg development web browser ie firefox safari javascript technical

Best of Wikipedia

2009 Jul 27, 5:29"A twice-daily updated collection of some of the best reading on Wikipedia."PermalinkCommentswiki wikipedia daily reference blog via:ethan_t_hein

Dave's Blog Entries Last Year

2009 Jul 19, 4:00

Inspired by one of Penn's (of Penn & Teller) articles in which he mentions he has his computer tell him what he wrote in his journal that day the previous year, I've wanted to implement a similar thing with my blog. Now that, as I mentioned previously, I've updated my blog such that its much easier to implement search and such, I've added date range filtering to my site's search. So now I can easily see what on Delicious and my blog I was doing last year.

I've also otherwise updated search on this site. You can now quote terms to match an entire string, stick 'tag:' in front of a term to only match that term against tags as opposed to the title and body of the entry as well, and you can stick '-' in front of a term to indicate that it must not be found in the entry.

Telescope photo from Flickr Commons
PermalinkCommentsblog search homepage

Blog Layout and Implementation Improvements

2009 Jul 19, 11:44

Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, Charlottesville, Va. (LOC) from Flickr CommonsI've redone my blog's layout to remind myself how terrible CSS is -- err I mean to play with the more advanced features of CSS 2.1 which are all now available in IE8. As part of the new layout I've included my Delicious links by default but at a smaller size and I've replaced the navigation list options with Technical, Personal and Everything as I've heard from folks that that would actually be useful. Besides the layout I've also updated the back-end, switching from my handmade PHP+XSLT+RSS/Atom monster to a slightly less horrible PHP+DB solution. As a result everything should be much much faster including search which, incidentally, is so much easier to implement outside of XSLT.

PermalinkCommentsblog database redisgn xslt mysql homepage

Vincent Liu: Tab Completion for Vim (Updated)

2009 May 27, 3:39A fancy tab completion script for Vim that does neat things for Java. Links to other Java+Vim tips as wel.PermalinkCommentsvim java script reference

InfoQ: HTTP Status Report

2009 Apr 29, 12:34"In this presentation, recorded at QCon San Francisco 2008, HTTPbis WG chair Mark Nottingham gives an update on the current status of the HTTP protocol in the wild, and the ongoing work to clarify the HTTP specification."PermalinkCommentshttp httpbis protocol ietf reference video authentication cookie uri url tcp sctp mark-nottingham via:ericlaw
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