2009 Feb 4, 4:30New URN schemes with no central minting authority. duri allows you to name a resource that was identified by the specified URI at the specified date (e.g. refers to the IETF's homepage at the end of
the year 2001). tdb allows you to name a physical object or entity that was described by a resource that was identified by a specified URI at the specified date (e.g. refers to IETF the orginization
as referenced by their homepage at the end of the year 2001). Date format is concise but I'd prefer RFC3339 rather than roping in another date format.
duri tdb uri url scheme reference ietf date datetime rfc 2009 Jan 29, 10:22Play this game now. Its like half of a delicious club sandwhich. Love the music. "To make it in Nuevos Aires, one has to have nerves of silk and the filthiest of hands. Mix together a batch of
espionage, some high- speed car chases, fire-spewing assassins, and you've got one oven that'll never bake cookies again. We provide the pliers and you bring the moxie."
game videogame quake gravity-bone humor spy espionage 2009 Jan 27, 10:41I just noticed that Google's Feeling Lucky doesn't work if your query contains a 'site:...' entry unless the HTTP request has a referer header pointing to Google. This person noticed too and wrote a
Google App that acts like Feeling Lucky without this restriction. "It appears that Google has some secret threshold to decide when to get in the way of your destination like an angry ceiling cat
catapulting itself onto your face."
google im-feeling-lucky search http referer http-header app 2009 Jan 26, 2:12Mark Pilgrim's series of articles and slides from a corresponding talk on video encoding.
mark-pilgrim video encoding audio reference codec 2009 Jan 25, 5:39
Microsoft isn't completely shielded from our economies issues but I still have a job and
still get free soda. While that's all still the case, I decided to test Sarah's claimed ability to differentiate between Pepsi, Coke, and their diet counterparts by taste alone. I poured the four
sodas into marked cups and Sarah and I each took two runs through the cups with the following guesses.
Soda Identification Challenge Results
Drink
|
Sarah
|
Dave
|
Guess 1
|
Guess 2
|
Guess 1
|
Guess 2
|
Coke
|
Coke
|
Coke
|
Pepsi
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Coke
|
Pepsi
|
Pepsi
|
Pepsi
|
Coke
|
Coke
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Pepsi
|
Total (out of 8)
|
6
|
3
|
As you can see from the results, Sarah's claimed ability to identify Coke and Pepsi by taste is confirmed. The first run through she got completely correct and on the second run only mistook Diet
Pepsi for Diet Coke. Her excuse for the error on the second run was a tainted palate from the first run. I on the other hand was mostly incorrect. Surprisingly though my incorrect answers were
mostly consistent between run one and two. For instance I thought Pepsi was Coke in both runs.
coke microsoft waste of soda pepsi waste of time soda 2009 Jan 24, 2:42"PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once
we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken."
politics news government obama election president tracking 2009 Jan 23, 1:47"When you experiment with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, it feels like magic. ... Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it
cost for someone to reveal their face?"
privacy research amazon mechanicalturk internet photo experiment social 2009 Jan 22, 9:57'Dubbed the "Light Car," the concept car is designed to communicate with other drivers using a system of OLED lights, which rest on the some part of the body of the car including the front and rear
light, in the form of an OLED display panel.'
car led communication sign signal 2009 Jan 22, 9:48"Revocation presents another challenge. If a system relies only on a biometric for both identity and authentication, how do you revoke that factor? Forgotten passwords can be changed; lost smartcards
can be revoked and replaced. How do you revoke a finger?"
article microsoft security identity authentication biometrics 2009 Jan 22, 9:43'Behind the press reports, the academic community has been engaged in a hot debate over whether the evidence supports a connection between the violent content of games and any behavioral effects. One
of the researchers who has argued forcefully that it's not is Christopher Ferguson, who has just published a paper that argues that the continued societal focus on games as a causal factor in
violence is an example of what's termed a "moral panic."'
game violence society videogames 2009 Jan 20, 2:20"Because the G1 has a compass inside, nru presents its data as a sonar-like spinning map when held parallel to the ground, but presents a snazzy augmented reality overlay when tipped up towards the
horizon. It's easier to grok when you can see it in motion; there's a video up above."
g1 phone cellphone compass geolocation video android 2009 Jan 20, 2:04"Early this morning in San Francisco, Bush Street was changed to Obama Street along its entire length, from Presidio to Battery."
via:boingboing flickr obama cultural-disobediance streetart street sign photo 2009 Jan 19, 3:14Researchers make another dancing robot. Its sort of owl like.
keepon robot dancing music humor video 2009 Jan 16, 2:10A graph showing how many people use the word Khan spelled with varying number of 'A's.
humor via:boingboing graph data startrek khan google 2009 Jan 15, 4:57Lovely travel visualization: "We've generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It's a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that
we're delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we'd show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who's had a very busy
2008 - President Elect Barack Obama."
via:mattb visualization blog dopplr obama travel statistics map 2009 Jan 15, 9:41"Russell and I thought it would be interesting to take some stuff from the internet and print it in a newspaper format. Words as well as pictures. Like a Daily Me, but slower. When we discovered that
most newspaper printers will let you do a short run on their press (this was exactly the same spec as the News Of The World) we decided to have some fun."
blog internet design art newspaper typography print publishing via:mattb 2009 Jan 13, 6:20"So we've progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each
machine, to one that's encrypted - really more just obfuscated - to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads."
security privacy adware malware advertising ie browser scheme interview bho via:li 2009 Jan 13, 2:56Turn your snowed-in home's front door into a natural fridge. Good idea, although here we didn't get nearly enough snow to make this convenient.
humor beer cold brr snow canada design fridge 2009 Jan 13, 12:30A swarm of robots drag a child across the floor. The future is now! "In the meantime, the video below shows that an army of swarmbots belonging to researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de
Lausanne in Switzerland can work together to pull off quite a feat - transporting a small girl across the floor."
video humor robot robots drag 2009 Jan 12, 12:48Results of a FOIA request for the DHS travel records: "I had been curious about what's in my travel dossier, so I made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a copy. I'm posting here a few
sample pages of what officials sent me."
foia security airplane airport privacy government information