2009 Jun 20, 9:43How to use the WIA APIs in C#. WIA is Windows API to get images from scanners and cameras. And, as I found out, if you want to use the API in PowerShell try '$deviceManager = new-object -ComObject
WIA.DeviceManager'
video scanner api wia csharp howto programming camera image photo .net webcam technical 2009 Jun 20, 9:39If you have Office installed you may have an OCR library sitting on your hard drive just waiting to be used via C#...
ocr microsoft office .net automation scanner camera windows technical 2009 Jun 19, 10:12
I'm excited by HTML5's video tag as are plenty of other people. Once that
comes about and once media fragments are adopted, linking to or embedding a portion of a video will be as easy as using the correct
fragment on your URL thanks to the Media Fragments WG who has been hard at work since the last time I looked at fragments.
However, until that work is embraced by browsers, embedding portions of videos will continue to require work specific to the site from which you are embedding the video. On the YouTube blog they
wrote about how to "link to the best parts in your videos", using a fragment syntax like '#t=1m15s' to start playback of the associated
video at 1 minute and 15 seconds. Of course if you want to embed part of a Hulu video it will be different. Although I haven't found an authoritative source describing the URL syntax to use, you
can follow Hulu's video guide on linking to part of a video and note how the URL changes as you adjust the
slider on the time-line. It looks like their syntax for linking to a Hulu page is to add '?c=[start time in seconds](:[end time in seconds])' with the colon and end time optional in order to link
to a portion of a video. And the syntax for embedding appears to be "http://www.hulu.com/embed/.../[start time in seconds](/[end time in
seconds])" again with the end time optional.
For more sites, check out the Media Fragments WG's list of existing applications' proprietary fragmenting
schemes.
hulu technical media fragment wg url youtube video html5 uri fragment 2009 Jun 15, 4:46"This was such a fun project - this is what users of Internet Explorer 6 see when they visit Momentile." Funny image. There's just two things I don't like about this: (a) it makes me feel sorry for
IE6 when the only thing anybody should feel in relation to IE6 is the urge to upgrade to IE8 and (b) I hate it when websites get all preachy and try to convert you to another browser.
humor webdesign ie6 ie browser comic 2009 Jun 12, 9:02"Because linking to sources and resources is the key gesture to being a citizen of the Web and not just a product on the Web...If, on the other hand, you want to embrace the traits that make blogs,
Twitter, and so many other online communication tools a vital part of the daily life of your readers, your news site shouldn't feel like an endpoint in the conversation. It should feel like the
beginning."
via:sambrook journalism news internet web article link 2009 Jun 10, 11:55"Six years after getting axed by Fox, Futurama is being resurrected on Comedy Central"
tv news futurama 2009 Jun 8, 4:56"List of known implementations of HTML 5 in web browsers (list is incomplete, feel free to extend it)"
reference browser html ie8 firefox html5 opera whatwg wiki 2009 Jun 8, 3:40I didn't hear about this at the time, but a sixth Hitchhikers Guide novel will be written by Eoin Colfer. This article has some quotes from Eoin about it and big-shoe filling is addressed. Also in
the article is a clip of the voice actor of Arthur Dent from the radio series as Arthur Dent complaining about being brought back to life that had been played on BBC Radio.
hhgttg douglas-adams eoin-colfer and-another-thing book news audio 2009 May 31, 7:52"jeffgrako: HOLLA IF YOUR AT THE #FIRE"
humor video satire culture internet fire college phone 2009 May 29, 9:17"Anyway, the idea is to find techniques, be they arrays of bright infrared LEDs, or paints that shine well in infrared but are not obvious in visible light, and create invisible graffiti that only
shows up in tourist photos and videos."
humor graffiti ir ir-paint magic tourist photography 2009 May 29, 8:59Don't need to cover _flash bulbs_ with infrared paint, but the paint is to block out all but infrared light so could be useful otherwise. Via
ir photography recipe ir-paint 2009 May 29, 2:50
I like the idea of QR codes, encoding URLs and placing them
on real world objects, but the QR codes themselves are kind of ugly. To make them less obvious I thought I could spray QR codes on to an object with an infrared reflective paint and shine infrared
light on the QR codes, since most cameras, for instance the camera in my G1 phone, pick up infrared that our eyes do not.
In my search for infrared paint I've found a seller of IR ink (via programming forum) and an Infrared Paint Recipe (via IR FAQ).
In looking for this paint I've found that it comes up a lot in relation to the military for things like paint markers that are visible at
night with proper equipment, and paint that absorbs IR light to make vehicles less obvious to night vision goggles. Even though the first
reflects infrared light and the second absorbs it websites end up refering to both as infrared paint which made it difficult to search.
Additionally I found links to some other geeky infrared projects:
ir paint technical ir infrared qr qr code 2009 May 27, 4:45"This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Duke Nukem Forever."
humor videogame video duke-nukem 2009 May 23, 4:45
In honor of Google Chrome's recent v2 release and because I read they don't make too big a deal about version numbers, I thought to create a graph of browser major version numbers over time.
Yeah that's not too useful of a graph. I got the release dates from Wikipedia of course.
As you can see from the graph, Netscape and Opera are leading all other browsers in terms of major version number. The other browsers really need to get on that.
browser technical boring google ie graph 2009 May 13, 10:17"Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication has brought Kenneth Crews of Columbia Law School to talk about "Protecting Your Scholarship: Copyrights, Publication Agreements, and Open Access.""
harvard kenneth-crews berkman david-weinberger blog copyright talk live-blog 2009 May 8, 8:23
I watched the new Star Trek movie Thursday morning, along with many others who work on Windows. Microsoft rented out a theater and played the movie on all screens. I greatly enjoyed the movie!
Spoilers follow... I'm obviously not the biggest Star Trek nerd (or at least TOS nerd) since I didn't even pick up on the fact that Kirk's dad being dead was a discrepancy from the TV series. I
only figured out the alternate time-line stuff when they killed most of the Vulcans. I was just surprised they didn't set right what once went wrong by the end of the movie with some more time
travel magic to bring back Vulcan. On that note, I'm pretty sure the Spock-Spock conversation at the end, is Nimoy Spock sending Sylar Spock off to school so that Nimoy Spock can get freaky
repopulating the Vulcan race. Although at first after his 'two places at once' comment I thought he was saying... something else. Also, was the main evil guy a random miner turned psycho? And his
crazy looking spaceship that destroys the Federation fleet was just a mining vessel from the future? Once they invent time travel anybody can get drunk, go back in time, and conquer Earth.
personal2 nerd movie star-trek spoliers time-travel 2009 May 3, 10:26Seems very similar to that ShellExecute/Firefox app URL protocol handler exploit last year. "A vulnerability in the ChromeHTML URI handler allows an attacker to bypass the Same Origin Policy for any
site and also enumerate victims files and directories. When loaded in Internet Explorer, a specially crafted HTML page can launch Google Chrome with an arbitrary URI without requiring any user
interaction."
exploit security google chrome browser web url protocol 2009 May 3, 4:42A comparison of the implementation status of various CSS features across mobile browsers.
via:connolly css html browser web mobile android google iphone compatibility 2009 May 3, 4:23"With Hyperwords for Firefox you can select any word on any web page and do useful things." That sounds useful -- he thought using his Delicious Accelerator in IE8 to bookmark the webpage. This has
existed since 2005?
mozilla firefox browser plugin extension via:ethan_t_hein 2009 May 3, 10:36
Looking at the HTTP traffic of Netflix under Fiddler I could see the HTTP request that added a movie to my queue and didn't see anything obvious that would
prevent a CSRF. Sure enough its pretty easy to create a page that, if the user has set Netflix to auto-login, will add movies to the user's queue without their knowledge. I thought this was pretty
neat, because I could finally get people to watch Primer. However, when I searched for Netflix CSRF I found that this issue has been known and reported to Netflix since 2006. Again my thoughts stolen from me and the
theif doesn't even have the common decency to let me have the thought first!
With this issue known for nearly three years its hard to continue calling it an issue. Really they should just document it in their API docs and be
done with it. Who knows what Netflix based web sites and services they'll break if they try to change this behavior? For instance, follow this link to add my Netflix recommended movies to your queue.
technical stolen-thoughts csrf netflix security
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