2010 Feb 1, 8:39"Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most
peaceful time in our species' existence." Working up towards Forever Peace?
video history violence culture ted steven-pinker game-theory 2010 Jan 30, 2:26Similar to the "This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post" (http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/incendiary/) except this is a typical news report. "...and this is a lighthouse keeper
being beheaded by a lighthouse beam."
bbc humor video via:waxy satire journalism tv news 2010 Jan 29, 3:54
Raymond Chen has some thought experiments useful for discovering various kinds of stupidity in software design:
Tim Berners-Lee's principles of Web design includes my favorite: Test of Independent Invention. This has a thought experiment containing the construction of the MMM (Multi-Media Mesh) with
MRIs (Media Resource Identifiers) and MMTP (Muli-Media Transport Protocol).
The Internet design principles (RFC 1958) includes the Robustness Principle: be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving. A good one, but applied too liberally can lead to interop issues. For instance, consider web browsers.
Imagine one browser becomes so popular that web devs create web pages and just test out their pages in this popular browser. They don't ensure their pages conform to standards and accidentally end
up depending on the manner in which this popular browser tolerantly accepts non-standard input. This non-standard behavior ends up as de facto standard and future updates to the standard
essentially has had decisions made for it.
technical design principles software development 2010 Jan 29, 10:16Talk of Firefox on Android. Sounds good to me!
mobile google android firefox web browser technical 2010 Jan 25, 5:25"...file a complaint with the World Trade Organization, contesting China’s internet censorship as a breach of the international trade rules to which China, as a WTO member, is subject. The US can
argue that China’s “Great Firewall”–a system of filters and bottlenecks that effectively shutters the country within its own intranet–is an illegal restraint on international trade because it bars
foreign companies from competing, via the internet, in the vast Chinese market."
economics wto politics google china internet censorship us 2010 Jan 22, 1:44"He seeded the customer's parking lot with USB flash drives, each of which had a Trojan horse installed on it. When the employees arrived for work in the morning, they were quite excited to find the
free gadgets laying around the parking lot. Employees eagerly collected the USB drives and plugged them into the first computers they came across: their own workstations."
via:ericlaw security usb windows social-engineering computer technical 2010 Jan 22, 1:23Canada's National Film Board gives the successful stats of its website on which you can watch their films.
free video film canada movie internet statistics 2010 Jan 21, 4:25You cannot argue with his logic.
humor video garlic vampire news fail fail-blog 2010 Jan 20, 2:35Video of augmented reality t-shirt that plays rock paper scissors against you.
video rock-paper-scissors t-shirt augmented-reality 2010 Jan 19, 1:49Fonts are back in! "In this collection, we’d like to present an overview of 50 of the best Free, New and High-quality Modern, Handwritten, grunge, Cartoon style fonts for clean and professional
designs in 2009."
font typography text download design free 2010 Jan 18, 3:24"UVB-76 is the callsign of a shortwave radio station that usually broadcasts on the frequency 4625 kHz (AM full carrier). It's known among radio listeners by the nickname The Buzzer. It features a
short, monotonous buzz tone (help·info), repeating at a rate of approximately 25 tones per minute, for 24 hours per day. The station has been observed since around 1982.[1] In rare occasions, the
buzzer signal is interrupted and a voice transmission in Russian takes place. Only four such events have been noted. There is much speculation; however, the actual purpose of this station remains
unknown." Inspiration for Lost?
radio russia mystery 2010 Jan 15, 3:19"The .arpa domain is the “Address and Routing Parameter Area” domain and is designated to be used exclusively for Internet-infrastructure purposes. It is administered by the IANA in cooperation with
the Internet technical community under the guidance of the Internet Architecture Board. For the management guidelines and operational requirements of the .arpa domain, see RFC 3172."
technical arpa dns domain zone internet rfc reference iana 2010 Jan 14, 2:51Its Tetris on the Nintendo (sort of) from the perspective of the piece (sort of).
humor tetris game videogame nintendo flash 2010 Jan 13, 6:35Ars Technica rounds up links on the recent Google threatening to stop censoring itself in China including quotes from Secretary of State Clinton, and the EFF and info on the hacks.
google china arstechnica news politics security censorship 2010 Jan 11, 12:26Hulu lets you search through the textual captions of their shows
video tv hulu search caption accessibility 2010 Jan 11, 2:30A t-shirt that says 'Helvetica'. Set in Comic Sans.
humor tshirt font typography wishlist gift 2010 Jan 10, 4:07
Irritatingly, my G1 won't show me PDFs so I've made the Google Docs PDF viewer which will load PDFs on the
web up in Google Docs. Google Docs has the useful ability to display PDFs in web
browsers without any Adobe software and works (mostly) on Android.
This was very easy to put together as an Android activity. First its necessary to register the application as handling PDFs from the web. This is done via the intent-filter declaration in the
manifest:
intent-filter
action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW"/
data android:scheme="http" android:mimeType="application/pdf"/
category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"/
category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE"/
/intent-filter
The action part says my activity will view PDFs, the data part says it accepts data with the PDF mime-type and with a URL that has an HTTP scheme. The browsable category
is necessary to allow links from a browser to open this activity.
Second, the activity opens up the browser to Google Docs pointing to the PDF.
Intent intent = new Intent();
intent.setAction(getIntent().getAction());
intent.setData(Uri.parse(
"http://docs.google.com/gview?embedded=true&url=" +
percentEncodeForQuery(getIntent().getData().toString())));
startActivity(intent);
This is very simple code to invoke a new intent browsing to a newly constructed URL for the PDF in Google Docs. That was easy.
google docs technical g1 code activity programming android google pdf 2010 Jan 8, 2:55Get a free coffee after trying 8 of their competitors.
coffee card disloyalty-card economics 2010 Jan 8, 2:08Flickr dev talks image metadata the various forms which to prefer and how to guess at their character encodings.
unicode charset flickr photo image exif programming reference xmp technical 2010 Jan 8, 2:05"Photographer Noah Sheldon got in touch the other week with a beautiful series of photos documenting the decrepit state of Biosphere 2, a semi-derelict bio-architectural experiment in the Arizona
desert."
photo science images ecology biology arizona environment
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