2010 Sep 24, 8:38"Comedian Stephen Colbert joined the panel of witnesses at a House hearing on immigrant farm workers. Mr. Colbert has partnered with United Farm Workers and their campaign calling on unemployed
Americans to take jobs in the agriculture sector. The organization's president, Arturo Rodriguez, also testified at the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security hearing chaired by
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).
Washington, DC : 2 hr. 10 min."humorvideostephen-colbertpoliticsimmigrationfarmlaborhouse
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,"'beebeeshumoronion
I've just got a new media center PC connected directly to my television with lots of HD space and so I'm ripping a bunch of my DVDs to the PC so I don't have to fuss with the physical media. I'm
ripping with DVD Rip, viewing the results in Windows 7's Windows Media Center after turning on the WMC DVD Library, and using a powershell script I wrote to copy over cover art and metadata.
My powershell script follows. To use it you must do the following:
Run Windows Media Center with the DVD in the drive and view the disc's metadata info.
Rip each DVD to its own subdirectory of a common directory.
The name of the subdirectory to which the DVD is ripped must have the same name as the DVD name in the metadata. An exception to this are characters that aren't allowed in Windows paths (e.g.
<, >, ?, *, etc)
Run the script and pass the path to the common directory containing the DVD rips as the first parameter.
Running WMC and viewing the DVD's metadata forces WMC to copy the metadata off the Internet and cache it locally. After playing with Fiddler and reading this blog post on WMC metadata I made the following script that copies metadata and cover art from the WMC cache to the corresponding
DVD rip directory.
2010 Aug 13, 11:47Other characters sets for HTTP headers: "By default, message header field parameters in Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) messages cannot carry characters outside the ISO-8859-1 character set. RFC
2231 defines an encoding mechanism for use in Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) headers. This document specifies an encoding suitable for use in HTTP header fields that is compatible with
a profile of the encoding defined in RFC 2231."rfclanguagelocalizationcharsethttptechnicalreferencehttp-header
2010 Aug 13, 11:46RESTful machine learning API from Google... "The Prediction API implements supervised learning algorithms as a RESTful web service to let you leverage patterns in your data, providing more relevant
information to your users. Run your predictions on Google's infrastructure and scale effortlessly as your data grows in size and complexity."restaigoogleprogramminganalysismachine-learningdevelopmenttechnical
2010 Jul 26, 6:56"But in addition to all the views, you can go directly to the back-end that drives all the data: The MSDN/TechNet Publish System (MTPS) Content Service. With that interface, you can request the
back-end data and format it any way you like."msdnwebmicrosoftreferencewebservicetechnical
I previously described my desire to hook my Outlook calendar up to my
Google calendar. I just found out that I can do this and the reverse as both support publishing calendars to the Internet. The following are how I set this up under Outlook 2010 and Google
Calendar:
In Outlook, I go to the calendar view, right click on my calendar and select "Share Publish to Office.com". At this point I can change the permissions to allow anonymous Internet access, and under
Detail change between 'Full details' (full calendar), 'Limited details' (subject lines & availability only), 'Availability only'. Availability only is almost just what I want -- I'd also like
to include location but availability only is good enough. After hitting OK here I get a 'Do you want to send an invitation...' dialog box. I hit 'Yes' and I can copy the webcals:// URL out of the
email window that opens up. Next, to add it to my Google calendar, I open http://www.google.com/calendar/, and under 'Other calendars', I select 'Add
Add by URL', paste in that webcals:// URL but change the 'webcals' at the start to 'https'.
In Google Calendar, I can click on my calendar name under 'My calendars', select 'Calendar settings', and on the new page, look under 'Calendar Address', click the ICAL icon, and copy the URL in
the new dialog. Now back in Outlook I go to the Calendar view, right click on 'My Calendars', and select 'Add Calendar From Internet...'. In the new dialog that pops up I paste in the URL from
Google Calendar.
In this fashion I can share public calendar data between my personal and work calendars.
An excellent movie I'd never heard of. An entertaining and humorous sci-fi indie romance comedy. It stars Emma Caulfield (who I recognize as Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) who obsesses over
her timer, an implanted device that counts down to when she'll meet the love of her life. Thematically its similar to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which similarly adds a scifi device to
society in order to examine the value of failed relationships on a persons life.
2010 Jun 21, 1:15"We'd like to publicly apologize to the NPB for the confusion over unicorn and pork--and for their awkward extended pause on the phone after we had explained our unicorn meat doesn't actually exist."humorcopyrightlegallawthinkgeekunicornpork
2010 Jun 20, 2:05A more friendly summary of the Salmon Protocol -- the distributed commenting procotol. After telling Sarah I was reading about salmon, we watched the Salmon Dance video again.technicalsalmonprotocolcommentatomrsssocialreference
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