2009 Apr 7, 12:14This makes plenty of sense, that a site should be able to check if a protocol handler exists for some URI scheme, but it'd be nice if this were some sort of declaritive fallback plan rather than
having to do it all with script. "The HTML5 standard function registerProtocolHandler() should probably remain void as in standard, but WhatWG could invent yet another boolean
protocolRegistered("area"), with the only argument (protocol name as string), to check whether a protocol is registered."
html5 registerProtocolHandler html script url uri scheme protocol 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 7, 10:45HTML 5 allows websites to register themselves as handlers of particular URI schemes and particular content-types. I think this is great, but I'm surprised it doesn't support POSTing files to allow
for interactions with local content.
html5 url uri protocol reference html standard javascript webbrowser registerProtocolHandler 2009 Apr 7, 9:02
I'm a big fan of the concept of registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5 and in FireFox 3, but not quite the implementation. From a high level, it allows web apps to register themselves as
handlers of an URL scheme so for (the canonical) example, GMail can register for the mailto URL scheme. I like the concept:
- Better integration of web apps with your system.
- Its easy for web apps to do.
- Links to URNs can now take the user to the sites the user prefers for the sort of thing identified by the URN. For example, if I have a physical address in HTML, instead of making that an http
link to Yahoo Maps, I can make the link a geo scheme URI and those who follow the link will get their preferred mapping site that
has registered for that scheme. Actually, looking at the geo scheme's RFC, maybe I'd rather use some other URN scheme to represent the physical location, but you get the point.
However, the way its currently spec'ed out I don't like the following:
- There's no way to know if you are the handler for a particular URL scheme which is an important question for web app URL protocol handler authors.
- There's no way to fallback to an http URL in the case that a particular URL scheme isn't registered. A suggested solution to testing the registration of a scheme is for browsers to provide an additional script method
to check if a scheme is registered. I don't like the idea of writing script that walks over all my page's links and rewrites them based on that method. I'd much rather see a declarative and
backwards compatible fallback mechanism, although I don't know what that would look like.
- There's no way to register for a namespace within the urn scheme URI, the info scheme URI, or the tag scheme URI. I want to register
info:lccn/... (Library of Congress Card Number identifiers) to LibraryThing or Amazon and I want to register urn:duri:... (dated URIs) to the Web Archive, among other things.
- Will this result in a proliferation of unregistered URL schemes with clashing namespaces? The ESW Wiki notes why this would be bad.
- And last, although this is nitpickier than the rest, I don't like the '%s' syntax used in the registration method. I'd much rather pass in an URL template, like the URL template used
in OpenSearch. If an URL template is used for matching rather than registering against a particular URL scheme, this could also allow for registering a namespace within a URN. For example
something along the lines of:
registerProtocolHandler("info:lccn/{lccnID}", "htttp://www.librarything.com/search_works.php?q={lccnID}", "LibraryThing LCCN")
url template registerprotocolhandler firefox technical url scheme protocol boring html5 uri urn 2009 Apr 3, 11:40"'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information." The page
is a lot easier to read with styling turned off. Actually, skip the text just watch the TED video.
visualization design research mit hci mobile interactive ted 2009 Apr 3, 11:38Har har
humor free paper photo flickr 2009 Apr 1, 10:42Lol at actual Facebook app that does IPv6 over Facebook. "...most network users are not aware of what IPv6 is or are even afraid by IPv6 because it is unknown. On the other hand, Social Networks
(like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) are well-known by users and the usage of those networks is huge... With IPv6 over Social Network (IPoSN): * Every user is a router with at least one loopback
interface; * Every friend or connection between users will be used as a point-to-point link... A working prototype has been developed by the author and is freely available: IPv6 over Facebook Social
Network [IPv6overFacebook]."
humor social network ipv6 ip iposn facebook ietf rfc 2009 Mar 25, 10:09Bookmarklet to apply the Yahoo media player to any page that has mp3 links. "Take the player with you. Run my bookmarklet that will simply insert the required javascript into the page."
bookmarklet mp3 javascript music yahoo 2009 Mar 23, 6:19"GraphML Primer is a non-normative document intended to provide an easily readable description of the GraphML facilities, and is oriented towards quickly understanding how to create GraphML
documents."
graphml graph format xml howto 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 2009 Mar 23, 9:35Ohhh some nice ones in here. "Command-Line-Fu is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again."
shell unix linux cli howto tips via:swannman 2009 Mar 20, 6:18
IE8, the software I've been working on for some time now, has finally been released at MIX09.
As I mentioned previously, I worked on
accelerators (previously named
Activities) in IE8. Looking at the
kinds of things I blog about on the IE Blog, you might also
correctly guess that I work on the networking stack. Ask me about what else I worked on during IE8 development. The past few months were very busy for me and I'm happy this is finally out.
technical internet explorer ie8 2009 Mar 20, 4:51
Working on Internet Explorer extensions in C++ & COM, I had to relearn or rediscover how to do several totally basic and important things. To save myself and possibly others trouble in the
future, here's some pertinent links and tips.
First you must choose your IE extensibility point. Here's a very short list of the few I've used:
Once you've created your COM object that implements IObjectWithSite and whatever other interfaces your extensibility point requires as described in the above links you'll see your SetSite method
get called by IE. You might want to know how to get the top level browser object from the IUnknown site object passed in via that method.
After that you may also want to listen for some events from the browser. To do this you'll need to:
- Implement the dispinterface that has the event you want. For instance DWebBrowserEvents2, or HTMLDocumentEvents, or HTMLWindowEvents2. You'll have
to search around in that area of the documentation to find the event you're looking for.
- Register for events using AtlAdvise. The object you need to subscribe to depends on the events you want. For example, DWebBrowserEvents2 come from the webbrowser object, HTMLDocumentEvents come
from the document object assuming its an HTML document (I obtained via get_Document method on the webbrowser), and
HTMLWindowEvents2 come from the window object (which oddly I obtained via calling the get_script method on the document object).
Note that depending on when your SetSite method is called the document may not exist yet. For my extension I signed up for browser events immediately and then listened for events like NavigateComplete before signing up for document and window events.
- Implement IDispatch. The Invoke method will get called with event notifications from the dispinterfaces you sign up for in AtlAdvise. Implementing Invoke manually is a slight pain as all the
parameters come in as VARIANTs and are in reverse order. There's some ATL macros that may make this easier but I didn't bother.
- Call AtlUnadvise at some point -- at the latest when SetSite is called again and your site object changes.
If you want to check if an IHTMLElement is not visible on screen due how the page is scrolled, try comparing the Body or
Document Element's client height and width,
which appears to be the dimensions of the visible document area, to the element's bounding client rect which appears to be
its position relative to the upper left corner of the visible document area. I've found this to be working for me so far, but I'm not positive that frames, iframes, zooming, editable document
areas, etc won't mess this up.
Be sure to use pointers you get from the IWebBrowser/IHTMLDocument/etc. only on the thread on which you obtained the pointer or correctly marshal the pointers to other threads to avoid weird crashes and hangs.
Obtaining the HTML document of a subframe is slightly more complicated then you might hope. On the other hand this might
be resolved by the new to IE8 method IHTMLFrameElement3::get_contentDocument
Check out Eric's IE blog post on IE extensibility which has some great links on this topic as well.
technical boring internet explorer com c++ ihtmlelement extension 2009 Mar 17, 6:02"With LUA scripting included in the latest version of NES emulator FCEUX, Rusted Logic blogger Xkeeper has woven some black magic into Super Mario that gives you full keyboard/mouse control over your
surroundings."
video youtube videogames videogame hack mario 2009 Mar 11, 1:24Penn & Teller's unreleased videogame included a minigame 'Desert Bus': 'The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of
45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.'
desert-bus penn-and-teller videogame humor wikipedia 2009 Mar 10, 9:22Justin Frankel (Previously Winamp/Nullsoft guy) makes a designated graffiti box on his garage with the note: "All are welcome to express themselves in the box below. Printing within the above box is
hereby expressly permitted and shall not be considered 'graffiti' in accordance with article #23 of the San Francico Municipal Code." Before graffiti: , And with graffiti:
graffiti cultural-disobediance legal san-francisco nullsoft justin-frankel blog 2009 Mar 10, 1:27Description of wfw:commentRss RSS extension: Content of the element is a URL to a feed of the comments for the particular RSS item. Exactly the sort of thing I was looking for a couple of years ago.
At the time none of my web services used it, but now the Delicious v2 feed uses it! Maybe its time to reexamine this sort of thing...
rss comment feed reference blog namespace xml wfw 2009 Mar 10, 11:26I've seen Yahoo's media player javascript widget around but until I read the dev. instructions I didn't appreciate it. You just include their js file and it finds all your links to mp3s (finer
grained and more explicit control available too), adds them to its playlist, and sticks a simple play/pause button on each link.
mp3 music ajax design yahoo javascript 2009 Mar 6, 5:02Reminds me of the guy from the Jose Chung episode of the X-Files that would repeatedly yell 'Roswell!' whenever he felt he was the subject of government oppression. The more time passes I only end up
remembering the awesome episodes of the X-Files.
comic cory-doctorow sheep humor censorship 2009 Feb 28, 2:21
Sarah and I met up with Jon, Scott, Jesse, and Grib in Las Vegas last weekend and we had a fun time.
- I got to play the Monorail Song via YouTube on my phone while on the Las Vegas Monorail rather than just chanting monorail like last
year.
- I didn't lose more gambling than I spent on food for the trip.
- Contrary to what some suggested, Sarah and I did not get married in Vegas.
- I finally saw a live Penn & Teller show and it was great!
personal2 monorail vegas penn-and-teller
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