2007 Nov 21, 3:54An April Fools RFC about the Y10K problem. FTA: "Y10K compliant programs MAY choose to limit the range of dates they support to those consistent with the expected life of the universe. Y10K compliant
systems MUST accept Y10K dates from 10 ** 12 years in
humor date reference rfc time y2k y10k future internet 2007 Nov 18, 7:49Jon's blog.|Jon Clanton
jon-clanton blog friend calpoly amazon germany 2007 Nov 12, 12:52Program that generates tags for VIM.
c++ vim programming syntax tag tags ctags windows linux opensource 2007 Nov 9, 2:38Jon's leaving for Germany today which of course is sad. On Wednesday, Jon came over and we watched
Hackers. There's a few things you probably wouldn't
notice without repeated viewings of the film:
- Phantom Phreak is arrested and you never hear what happens to him. This is unlike Joey who is arrested but appears in the final hacking scene.
- Marc Anthony appears in the movie as a secret service agent.
- Everyone in the movie loves Coke.
- Hackers is the greatest movie of all time: it represents the pinnacle of human artistic achievement.
In similar ex college roommate news, I'm going to California over the weekend for Angie and Kane's goodbye party. They're heading for Australia for like a year or something. Angie's got a
blog about her travels but rarely seems to update it. I'll get to see Carissa and Elijah there too, almost completing the ex college roommate
experience. To avoid confusion I should mention that unlike everyone else I know, Carissa and Elijah aren't leaving the country.
personal nontechnical 2007 Nov 7, 1:40Interview with BBC's News Director Richard Sambrook mostly on the topic of news medias role on the Internet.
david-weinberger blog bbc interview news media richard-sambrook wired audio 2007 Nov 6, 9:02Dan Dennett's TED talk on memes.
dan-dennett ted memes video 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 21, 10:28Sarah's restaurant reviews on urbanspon. The site provides feeds of user's reviews too.
review people sarah-moffatt restaurant 2007 Oct 17, 10:49Chumby is a hackable little wifi computer. Its like an expensive alarm clock that also shows you stuff off the Internet. I kind of want one.
purchase shopping wifi wireless opensource flash design hardware chumby 2007 Oct 16, 12:22FTA: "Look at all those zero cents... there are data bits there, lying unused! It struck me that with every single restaurant transaction I could set the cents field to some number under my control,
thus allowing me to communicate with myself at a l
blog humor hack food article encoding restaurant via:ericlaw 2007 Oct 14, 3:12I've updated my homepage by moving stuff about me onto a separate
About page. Creating the About page was the perfect opportunity
to get
FoaF, a machine readable way of describing yourself and your friends, off my to do list. I have a
base FoaF file to which I add friends, projects, and accounts
from delicious
using an XSLT. This produces the
FoaF XML resource on which I use another
XSLT to convert into HTML and produce the About page.
I should also mention a few FoaF pages I found useful in doing this:
-
FOAF Vocabulary Specification - The standard on which I based my XSLT to add in info from delicious.
-
FoaF Explorer - Turns any RDF XML FOAF resource into a webpage with links to the other people, projects, etc mentioned in the FOAF file.
-
FoaF-a-Matic - I used this to produce my base FoaF file.
-
RDF Validator - This is the closest thing I could find for validation. It does RDF in general but unfortunately not FoaF specifically. I found two
links to sites that are down or dead that claimed to do what I actually wanted.
technical xml foaf personal xslt xsl homepage 2007 Oct 11, 7:49A how-to on creating a bluetooth handset for your cell-phone. I want this but like a regular phone and without the DIY part.
howto bluetooth phone hack hardware article diy 2007 Oct 10, 9:21Howto on signing your FoaF documents.
pgp security signing web trust foaf rdf semanticweb xml encryption howto 2007 Oct 9, 4:43A FOAF browser. It turns FOAF descriptions into HTML with links to those things described in the FOAF including links to other FOAF descriptions transformed in the same fashion.
browser community social foaf rdf semanticweb 2007 Oct 9, 4:41Notes on using XSLT on FOAF XML files. Apparently its not super simple due to the various equivalent ways of representing the same RDF in XML.
xml foaf xslt xsl reference rdf semanticweb 2007 Oct 3, 2:50Parody of anti-piracy ads you may have seen at the beginning of movies recently.
via:felix42 copyright humor video videos piracy legal law advertising politics ip 2007 Sep 27, 2:17Starting on a new simple project I wanted to get the history of my Delicious links. Delicious has an export tool available via the settings section so I thought I'd try that. However, the links
aren't exported in XML not even in XHTML but rather in HTML. Shocking. An example:
"Don't Tase Me, Bro!" (UF Student Tasered Remix)
Remix of the 'Don't tase me, bro!' guy getting tasered.At this point I'm already not going to use this file because its in HTML but I'm even more disgusted by those date time values.
Raymond Chen of the Old New Thing posted about recognizing timestamps and timestamp sentinel values. From the first blog post and with the use of a calculator for base conversion one can tell that
those are UNIX style timestamps counting the number of seconds since 1970.
It reminds me of my hatred for the MIME date time format I developed working on my webpage's server side parsing of atom and RSS. Atom is
of course my favorite as Atom uses the Internet date time format described in the following documents. Here's an example of one
2007-09-27T020:50:00.000-08:00
On the other hand the evil and villainous RSS uses the MIME date time format now described in the more
recent IETF MIME standard. Here's an example Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:50:00 -0800
The Internet date time format has the advantage of being so easy to sort. An alphabetic sort with normal C-style collation rules of strings containing Internet date times will also sort them
chronologically. This is not the case for the MIME date time due to the preceding day of the week and the spelled out month name. This also means that when producing these you have to figure out
the day of the week and when parsing them you have to match month names rather than just parsing out numbers. Anyway now days if I see mention of a date time in a new proposed standard or spec I be
sure to point out the numerous advantages of the Internet date time format.
date xml html feed time technical date-time code atom rss 2007 Sep 27, 12:01Another open effort to produce an XSLT library that does some standard things you might want like string manipulation, URI combining, etc etc
xsl xslt reference library xml xpath proramming api 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 11, 2:55There's been
some news recently on some guy hating on FireFox for its ad-blocking.
On a similar note here's a fun tip for IE7 users I got from Eric. You can get decent ad-blocking in IE7 by putting ad servers in the restricted zone. By default script inclusion is blocked between
different zones so you can put domains that serve up ads in your restricted zone after which, normal internet zone sites won't be able to include script from them. This covers most of the ads I run
into these days.
I use
Fiddler to figure out the domains that are serving up ads which incidentally also has an ad-blocking^H^H^H^H general purpose content blocking plugin. Here's
a screenshot of Slashdot and ArsTechnica from my browser. Notice the large blank areas in the screenshots:
ad-blocking personal ad ie7 technical browser tip ie
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