2009 May 3, 4:23"With Hyperwords for Firefox you can select any word on any web page and do useful things." That sounds useful -- he thought using his Delicious Accelerator in IE8 to bookmark the webpage. This has
existed since 2005?
mozilla firefox browser plugin extension via:ethan_t_hein 2009 May 3, 9:17
Netflix lets you watch a subset of their movies online via their website and a subset of those movies are available to watch on the Xbox 360's Netflix app. so its not always easy to find movies to
watch on Xbox 360. Yet, I regularly see my Xbox friends using the Netflix app and its a shame they didn't make an easy way to share movie recommendations with your friends. Instead we must share
movie recommendations the old fashioned way. Here's the movies I've found and enjoyed on my 360.
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Weeds
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You don't have to be a stoner to enjoy this humorous and dramatic satire featuring a widow trying to raise her children and deal pot in suburbia.
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Avatar The Last Airbender
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An American animated series that's an amalgamation of various Asian art, history, religion, etc. that maintains a great story line.
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Paprika
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If you enjoyed Paranoia Agent you'll enjoy this movie in the same animation style and by the same director and
writer, Satoshi Kon. Its like a feature length version of a Paranoia Agent episode in which a dream machine lets outsiders view one's dreams but eventually leads to blurring the dreams and
reality.
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Grindhouse Planet Terror
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I didn't see either of the Grindhouse movies when they first came out, but of the two, Planet Terror is the more humorous and exciting gore filled parody.
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Outsourced
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A refreshing romantic comedy that still has a few of the over played tropes but is easy to enjoy despite that.
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The King of Kong
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A hilarious documentary on the struggle between the reigning champ hot-sauce salesman and the underdog Washington state high school science teacher to obtain the Donkey Kong world record high
score. After watching, checkout this interview with the creators of the movie and the
villain.
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Primer
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I've mentioned Primer before, but I put it on
here again because its really good and you still haven't seen it, have you?
movie personal netflix 2009 Apr 23, 5:22"Network Monitor 3.3 is a protocol analyzer. It allows you to capture network traffic, view and analyze it. Version 3.3 is an update and replaces Network Monitor 3.2. Network Monitor 3.x is a
complete overhaul of the previous Network Monitor 2.x version."
microsoft network traffic netmon free msdn windows 2009 Apr 20, 4:23Some folks stab in the dark at handling incoming phone calls on Android.
android phone cellphone api java development 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 Apr 15, 7:42"If you're like us, you live in constant fear of slipping into a wormhole and getting spit out in the 13th century, and the only real useful knowledge you have for your ignorant ancestors is 'watch
out for that Hitler guy' and 'some of the Popes are evil.'" Its like they're inside my head! Love this shirt and poster telling you everything you need to know in case you accidentally fall back in
time.
time-travel time shirt poster wishlist gift awesome 2009 Apr 15, 7:38The Improv Everywhere's "Best Funeral Ever" April fools prank is reported as news and then runs into copyright issues: "The biggest fools of all were the CW 11 news team who reported on the funeral
as if it actually happened... I of course uploaded their story to my personal YouTube channel to show the world their lack of journalism skills. Tonight I got a copyright notice from YouTube
informing me that Tribune ... had filed a copyright claim against the video and that it had been removed."
copyright humor video prank improv-everywhere funeral via:boingboing 2009 Apr 15, 7:33The emulator behind those cool script based Mario hacks. "FCEUX is a cross platform, NTSC and PAL Famicom/NES emulator that ... gives the best of all worlds for the casual player, the ROM-hacking
community, Lua Scripters, and the Tool-Assisted Speedrun Community."
emulator nintendo videogame software programming game 2009 Apr 15, 7:30Another cool Mario hack via some sort of awesome emulator: "...the FCEUX emulator includes a second LUA script that turns Super Mario Bros. 3 into the DS game Nintendo never made. The hack disables
direct control of Mario completely, and only allows you to manipulate him (and protect him from the rest of the world) via mouse-drawn lines ala the DS's Kirby Canvas Curse and Atari's The Chase."
game video mario smb3 videogame emulator 2009 Apr 14, 9:26
I've made a QR Encode accelerator around Google Chart's QR code generator. QR codes are 2D bar-codes that can store (among other things) URLs and have good support on mobile
phones. The accelerator I've written lets you generate a QR code for a selected link and view it in the preview window. In combination with the ZXing
bar-code scanner app for my Android cellphone, its easy for me to right click on a link in IE8 on my desktop PC, hover over the QR Encode accelerator to have the link's associated QR code
displayed, and then with my phone read that QR code to open my phone's browser to the URL contained inside. Its much easier to browse around in the comfort of my desktop and only send particular
URLs to my cellphone as necessary.
technical boring accelerator android barcode ie8 google qr code 2009 Apr 10, 9:48
A while ago I promised to say how an xsltproc Meddler script would be useful and the general answer is
its useful for hooking up a client application that wants data from the web in a particular XML format and the data is available on the web but in another XML format. The specific case for this
post is a Flickr Search service that includes IE8 Visual Search Suggestions. IE8
wants the Visual Search Suggestions XML format and Flickr gives out search data in their Flickr web API XML format.
So I wrote an XSLT to convert from Flickr Search XML to Visual Suggestions XML and used my xsltproc Meddler script to actually
apply this xslt.
After getting this all working I've placed the result in two places: (1) I've updated the xsltproc Meddler script to include this XSLT and an
XML file to install it as a search provider - although you'll need to edit the XML to include your own Flickr API key. (2) I've created a service for this so you can just install the Flickr search provider if you're interested in having the functionality and don't care about the implementation. Additionally, to the
search provider I've added accelerator preview support to show the Flickr slideshow which I think looks snazzy.
Doing a quick search for this it looks like there's at least one other such implementation, but mine has the distinction of being done through XSLT which I provide, updated XML namespaces to work
with the released version of IE8, and I made it so you know its good.
meddler xml ie8 xslt flickr technical boring search suggestions 2009 Apr 9, 8:56Someone implemented the Ironic Sans artificial sundial clock concept! "Last year David Friedman published on his blog Ironic Sans an interesting design concept for something that he called The
Bulbdial Clock. That's like a sundial, but with better resolution-- not just an hour hand, but a minute and second hand as well, each given as a shadow from moving artificial light sources (bulbs).
We've recently put together a working bulbdial clock, with an implementation somewhat different from that of the original concept."
howto diy clock led sundial via:swannman 2009 Apr 7, 5:26"According to an exclusive interview Penn gave to Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello, he's been asked to serve in the Obama administration as as the associate director of the office of public
liaison." Spoilers in the link.
kal-penn house tv politics 2009 Apr 7, 11:58
This past week I finished Anathem and despite the intimidating physical size of the book (difficult to take and read on the bus) I became very engrossed and was able to finish it in several orders of
magnitude less time than
what I spent on the Baroque
Cycle. Whereas reading the Baroque Cycle you can imagine Neal Stephenson sifting through giant economic tomes (or at least that's where my mind went whenever the characters began to explain
macro-economics to one another), in Anathem you can see Neal Stephenson staying up late
pouring over philosophy of mathematics. When not
exploring philosophy, Anathem has an appropriate amount of humor, love interests, nuclear bombs, etc. as you might hope from reading Snow Crash or Diamond Age. I thoroughly enjoyed Anathem.
On the topic of made up words: I get made up words for made up things, but there's already a name for cell-phone in English: its "cell-phone". The narrator notes that the book has been translated
into English so I guess I'll blame the fictional translator. Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the made up words nearly as much as some folk. Its a good thing I'm long
out of college because I can easily imagine confusing the names of actual concepts and people with those from the book, like Hemn space for Hamming distance. Towards the beginning, the description
of slines and the post-post-apocalyptic setting reminded me briefly of Idiocracy.
Recently, I've been reading everything of Charles Stross that I can, including about a month ago, The Jennifer Morgue from the surprisingly awesome amalgamation genre of spy thriller and Lovecraft
horror. Its the second in a series set in a universe in which magic exists as a form of mathematics and follows Bob Howard programmer/hacker, cube dweller, and begrudging spy who works for a
government agency tasked to suppress this knowledge and protect the world from its use. For a taste, try a short story from the series that's freely available on Tor's website, Down on the Farm.
Coincidentally, both Anathem and the Bob Howard series take an interest in the world of Platonic ideals. In the case of Anathem (without spoiling anything) the universe of Platonic ideals, under a
different name of course, is debated by the characters to be either just a concept or an actual separate universe and later becomes the underpinning of major events in the book. In the Bob Howard
series, magic is applied mathematics that through particular proofs or computations awakens/disturbs/provokes unnamed horrors in the universe of Platonic ideals to produce some desired effect in
Bob's universe.
atrocity archives neal stephenson jennifer morgue plato bob howard anathem 2009 Apr 6, 10:40Charles Stross personal website that links to the text of a bunch of his short stories.
blog scifi fiction literature charles-stross 2009 Apr 1, 6:19"The first four parameters to a function are passed in rcx, rdx, r8 and r9. Any further parameters are pushed on the stack. Furthermore, space for the register parameters is reserved on the stack, in
case the called function wants to spill them; this is important if the function is variadic."
amd64 calling-convention debug x64 msdn raymond-chen assembly 2009 Apr 1, 9:26"Open source code will contain text ads in comments and variable names, and Google and other text ad companies will scan the open source code repositories and fund the projects based on what they
find in the code"
humor opensource advertising code 2009 Mar 25, 1:03Finally more storage for all those virtual console games I download: "What is going to interest gamers, however, is the expanded support for storage on the Nintendo Wii. The new update for the Wii
Menu allows you to download and launch content straight from an SD card, and there is now support for SDHC cards, meaning you can cheaply add as much storage to your system as you'd like. A game was
shown launching from a memory stick, with only a short loading time."
nintendo wii videogame storage 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]."
html html5 url uri reference w3c 2009 Mar 23, 9:41"So heres my trip to Chernobyl in pictures." Nice photo of the tree growing through the floor next to the chair. The whole set is like Fallout 3 but there's plants. Didn't realize plants could do
well in such a situation.
via:swannman photo history science nuclear russia chernobyl
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