2009 Apr 21, 1:28Fallout 3's May 5th DLC removes old ending, adds new quests, new levels, new perks. Sounds good! "In a nutshell, Broken Steel will remove the game's ending entirely, with Bethesda's Pete Hines saying
simply to fans that called for an open-ended resolution, "We got the idea." Players will still have to make the final choice, but following that climax the game will continue, presenting new epilogue
quests, another 10 levels to gain, and new perks, monsters and achievements to keep the climb interesting."
game videogame news fallout3 fallout 2009 Apr 20, 5:49Some awesome quotes from this video. Really need to watch the whole thing through though to fully experience the humor. "This is the most impressive business card I've ever seen. Its mine." On the
topic of its non-standard size: "It doesn't fit in a rolodex because it doesn't belong in a rolodex." More from the comments:
humor video via:boingboing viral business-card 2009 Apr 20, 3:37Web service that hosts avatar images for things like blog comments. The image is ID'ed by a hash of the user's email address. Auto generated or if the user signs up, the image can be whatever they
upload. Lots of plugins for different blogging platforms.
blog web photo avatar image authentication identity icon hash 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 20, 3:14This site does user generated reports on (mostly) spam phone numbers. They have a RESTful API to get at that data too! I'm looking for more like this.
api phone spam search reference telemarketing telephone lookup 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 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, 5:29"In response to the overwhelming demand for this made-up product, ThinkGeek has posted the following: ATTN Tauntaun Fanatics! Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have
decided to TRY and bring this to life."
humor starwars thinkgeek awesome 2009 Apr 7, 1:30I really dislike how IE deals with non-US-ASCII in URLs. I should write up a post on what exactly IE does with non-US-ASCII characters in URLs. "Just like IRIs the URL is mapped to a URI using UTF-8.
Except for the query component of the URL (the bit after the question mark). Here for legacy reasons the encoding of the document is used instead. Except if the encoding of the document is UTF-16, in
which case UTF-8 is used. Effectively, using non-ASCII characters in URLs in documents not encoded as UTF-8 or UTF-16 will give you surprising results, to say the least. Yay for browsers!"
http encoding html5 url uri unicode iri 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, 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 6, 10:47"It's 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing - and the Earth is flat. It's been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all
wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like
ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped."
charles-stross scifi read fiction free literature 2009 Apr 5, 5:24A cross-site request forgery issue in Twitter posts to your Twitter account for you if you're logged in. Be careful what your RESTful APIs look like.
via:swannman security twitter xss 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 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, 9:54Lol at end of final sentence: "Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality
ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest."
humor google gmail ai email 2009 Apr 1, 9:32'To help stem the downward spiral of the United States economy Congress has proposed a new dollar symbol. "Updating fonts on the world's computers and devices would be a huge economic stimulus" said
one representative after a late night session of the newly formed House Subcommittee - Font Economic Stimulus Technology Relief (FESTR). "The dollar is a shadow of its former self and the new design
reflects this."'
art design humor font dollar-sign typography government economics 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
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