2008 Sep 15, 1:50This just in: people on the Internet are complaining. Also Radiohead has a remix contest. Neat. "No good deed goes unpunished. After letting fans pay whatever they wanted for In Rainbows and
releasing stem tracks via iTunes so that one of the songs on the record could be remixed, Radiohead is facing accusations that its "Nude" remix contest is unfair."
music wired radiohead remix contest 2008 Sep 9, 8:36"You'd better read this today, because it's possible the world will end tomorrow. Strictly speaking, the probability of doomsday isn't any higher than it is on any normal Wednesday, but there's been
a fair bit of kerfuffle and hullabaloo over the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and whether it will create a black hole that will destroy the entire planet."
lhc cern humor wired technology science blog physics apocalypse 2008 Sep 9, 8:33Wired's excellent and awesome photos from CERN's LHC. "On November 27, 2006, the final superconducting main magnet was delivered to CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- the most ambitious physics
experiment ever created."
wired photos lhc cern science photo 2008 Sep 9, 8:31Cory Doctorow's Flickr set of photos from various data centers (like CERN's LHC data center).
photos flickr data storage history internet cory-doctorow cern internet-archive lhc 2008 Sep 9, 8:29Article on the data centers that backup the Internet Archive and handle CERN's LHC's data. "CERN embodies borderlessness. The Swiss-French border is a drainage ditch running to one side of the
cafeteria; it was shifted a few metres to allow that excellent establishment to trade the finicky French health codes for the more laissez-fair Swiss jurisdiction. And in the data sphere it is
utterly global."
lhc history internet cory-doctorow nature physics network hardware library science cern internet-archive 2008 Sep 8, 7:00A brief history of user agent strings in web browsers, culminating in: "And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and
all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user
agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded."
humor internet browser mozilla google chrome user-agent ie 2008 Sep 8, 10:26"This is what I call the "cup of tea" problem, after Douglas Adams: Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the
Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day."
internet security humor douglas-adams via:sambrook 2008 Sep 3, 6:15"National University of Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab is fast becoming my favorite in cutting edge (and a little wacky - okay, a lot) research. Take, for instance, this project titled Poultry
Internet, where a chicken is outfitted with a special dress that lets its owner pet it over the Internet." Johnny Cat writes: "Kudos to Gonzo for inventing this." I can't get to the actual site with
the info on the project but it is available on the Wayback Machine.
chicken humor internet virtual-reality mixed-reality 2008 Sep 3, 12:44This is the public site for logging and tracking IE8 Beta bugs. Read access is available to all. Write access requires acceptance into the Technical Beta program. Check the blog for info on joining
that.
ie blog ie8 bug development microsoft 2008 Aug 29, 10:44Cool 30's Soviet Union tourist brochure logos and designs. "Intourist was renowned as the official state travel agency of the Soviet Union. It was founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin and was responsible
for managing the great majority of foreigners' access to, and travel within, the Soviet Union. It grew into one of the largest tourism organizations in the world, with a network embracing banks,
hotels, and money exchanges. Some of the best Intourist labels and brochures produced during the 1930's were designed by A. Selensky. Some of the labels in this set are signed by him, including a
rare constructivist style travel brochure I have included as well."
flickr photo propaganda graphic russia history design 2008 Aug 29, 8:37"Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like
the National Security Agency." Described fixes all require significant changes to the software and probably hardware doing the routing. Ugh
wired article security internet bgp hack networking defcon 2008 Aug 27, 11:36
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is now available! Some of the new features from this release that I really enjoy are Tab Grouping, the new address-bar, and InPrivate Subscriptions.
Tab Grouping groups tabs that are opened from the same page. For example, on a Google search results page if you open the first two links the two new tabs will be grouped with the Google search
results page. If you close one of the tabs in that group focus goes to another tab in that group. Its small, but I really enjoy this feature and without knowing exactly what I wanted while using
IE7 and FF2 I knew I wanted something like this. Plus the colors for the tab groups are pretty!
The new address bar and search box makes life much easier by searching through my browsing history for whatever I'm typing in. Other things are searched besides history but since I ignore favorites
and use Delicious I mostly care about history. At any rate its one of the things that makes it impossible for me to go machines running IE7.
InPrivate Subscriptions allows you to subscribe to a feed of URLs from which IE should not download content. This is intended for avoiding sites that track you across websites and could sell or
share your personal information, but this feature could be used for anything where the goal is to avoid a set of URLs. For example, phishing, malware sites, ad blocking, etc. etc. I think there's
some interesting uses for this feature that we have yet to see.
Anyway, we're another release closer to the final IE8 and I can relax a little more.
microsoft browser technical ie8 ie 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 Aug 26, 11:08
I've had a little fun messing around with Photosynth, a Microsoft research project turned into a Live service. You upload a bunch of photos from
around the same area and it makes a 3D panorama out of them. For instance, here's National Geographic's photosynth of the sphinx and pyramids in Egypt. Messing around with this I've made one of half a vase of roses, and a larger photosynth of my office.
microsoft photosynth photo office nontechnical 2008 Aug 26, 10:03"A new system devised by Carnegie Mellon University researchers aims to thwart man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks by providing a way to verify the authenticity of self-signed certificates. The system,
which is called Perspectives, uses a distributed network of "notary" servers to evaluate the public key of a target destination so that its validity can be ascertained."
security ssl pki certificate man-in-the-middle 2008 Aug 25, 10:13
As noted previously, my page consists of the
aggregation of my various feeds and in working on that code recently it was again brought to my attention that everyone has different ways of representing tag metadata in feeds. I made up a
list of how my various feed sources represent tags and list that data here so that it might help others in the future.
Tag markup from various sources
|
Source
|
Feed Type
|
Tag Markup Scheme
|
One Tag Per Element
|
Tag Scheme URI
|
Human / Machine Names
|
Example Markup
|
|
LiveJournal
|
Atom
|
atom:category
|
yes
|
no
|
no
|
, (source)
|
|
LiveJournal
|
RSS 2.0
|
rss2:category
|
yes
|
no
|
no
|
technical
(soure)
|
|
WordPress
|
RSS 2.0
|
rss2:category
|
yes
|
no
|
no
|
, (source)
|
|
Delicious
|
RSS 1.0
|
dc:subject
|
no
|
no
|
no
|
photosynth photos 3d tool
(source)
|
|
Delicious
|
RSS 2.0
|
rss2:category
|
yes
|
yes
|
no
|
domain="http://delicious.com/SequelGuy/">
hulu
(source)
|
|
Flickr
|
Atom
|
atom:category
|
yes
|
yes
|
no
|
term="seattle"
scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />
(source)
|
|
Flickr
|
RSS 2.0
|
media:category
|
no
|
yes
|
no
|
scheme="urn:flickr:tags">
seattle washington baseball mariners
(source)
|
|
YouTube
|
RSS 2.0
|
media:category
|
no
|
no
|
no
|
label="Tags">
bunny rabbit yawn cadbury
(source)
|
|
LibraryThing
|
RSS 2.0
|
No explicit tag metadata.
|
no
|
no
|
no
|
n/a, (source)
|
Tag markup scheme
|
Tag Markup Scheme
|
Notes
|
Example
|
Atom Category
atom:category
xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
|
-
category/@term
-
Required category name.
-
category/@scheme
-
Optional IRI id'ing the categorization scheme.
-
category/@label
-
Optional human readable category name.
|
term="catName"
scheme="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme"
label="category name in human readable format"/>
|
RSS 2.0 category
rss2:category
empty namespace
|
-
category/@domain
-
Optional string id'ing the categorization scheme.
-
category/text()
-
Required category name. The value of the element is a forward-slash-separated string that identifies a hierarchic location in the indicated taxonomy. Processors may establish conventions
for the interpretation of categories.
|
domain="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme">
MSFT
|
Yahoo Media RSS Module category
media:category
xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"
|
-
category/text()
-
Required category name.
-
category/@domain
-
Optional string id'ing the categorization scheme.
|
scheme="http://dmoz.org"
label="Ace Ventura - Pet Detective">
Arts/Movies/Titles/A/Ace_Ventura_Series/Ace_Ventura_-_Pet_Detective
|
Dublin Core subject
dc:subject
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
|
-
subject/text()
-
Required category name. Typically, the subject will be represented using keywords, key phrases, or classification codes. Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary.
|
humor
|
Update 2009-9-14: Added WordPress to the Tag Markup table and namespaces to the Tag Markup Scheme table.
feed media delicious technical atom youtube yahoo rss tag 2008 Aug 22, 5:35Photosynth now available and easy to use: "Photosynth, a technology demo from Microsoft Live Labs, has graduated from its "ooh, that's pretty" status to being a viable Web service for consumers. The
technology, which takes a grouping of photographs and stitches them into a faux 3D environment, can now be implemented with photos you've taken on your digital camera or mobile phone, and converted
right on your computer. Previously, the process of stitching these photos together took weeks of processing on specially configured server arrays. With its latest version, Microsoft has managed to
shrink that into around the time it takes to upload your photos."
via:felix42 photosynth photos photography 3d microsoft free tool 2008 Aug 20, 10:51
In my Intro to Algorithms course in college the Fibonacci sequence was used as the example algorithm to which various types of algorithm creation methods were applied. As the course went on we made
better and better performing algorithms to find the nth Fibonacci number. In another course we were told about a matrix that when multiplied successively produced Fibonacci numbers. In my linear
algebra courses I realized I could diagonalize the matrix to find a non-recursive Fibonacci function. To my surprise this worked and I
found a function.
Looking online I found that of course this same function was already well known. Mostly I was irritated that after all the
algorithms we created for faster and faster Fibonacci functions we were never told about a constant time function like this.
I recently found my paper depicting this and thought it would be a good thing to use to try out MathML, a markup language for
displaying math. I went to the MathML implementations page and installed a plugin for IE to display MathML and then began writing up my paper in
MathML. I wrote the MathML by hand and must say that's not how its intended to be created. The language is very verbose and it took me a long time to get the page of equations transcribed.
MathML has presentation elements and content elements that can be used separately or together. I stuck to content elements and while it looked great in IE with my extension when I tried it in
FireFox which has builtin MathML support it didn't render. As it turns out FireFox doesn't support MathML content elements. I had already finished creating this page by hand and wasn't about to
switch to content elements. Also, in order to get IE to render a MathML document, the document needs directives at the top for specific IE extensions which is a pain. Thankfully, the W3C has a
MathML cross platform stylesheet. You just include this XSL at the top of your XHTML page and it turns content elements into appropriate
presentation elements, and inserts all the known IE extension goo required for you. So now my page can look lovely and all the ickiness to get it to render is contained in the W3C's XSL.
technical mathml fibonacci math 2008 Aug 20, 4:29A description of IP with implementation guidance to avoid historical security issues.
reference ietf ip tcp network protocol security internet 2008 Aug 19, 4:45Finally, .NET executables from a share! =)
dotnet development microsoft blog article
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