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 20, 3:26"I just found out they made a Ninja Turtles TV movie where the Turtles from the relatively dark 2003 cartoon meet the Turtles from the goofy 1987 cartoon"
cartoon humor teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles movie tv 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 2009 Dec 15, 2:01"Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror fame) was in for a horror when he realized that his server crashed and his data was gone and due to some reason, the backup mechanism was not working. ... So what should
Jeff do now? Since Coding horror is a high traffic blog, I think there is a way to get back at least some of the images." Reconstruct the HTML from Google's cache, change the HTTP server to tell the
client it has the correct cached image for all the images, add script to the HTML to grab the images and send them back. Awesome idea. Of course now I want to setup Fiddler to swap in random
images...
via:ericlaw jeff-atwood backup web http cache image javascript technical 2009 Nov 28, 3:50The downside of the placebo the nocebo: "This is the amazing world of the nocebo effect, where negative expectations can induce unpleasant symptoms, in the absence of a physical cause.", "In two of
them, the consent form contained a statement outling various gastrointestinal side effects, and in these centres there was a sixfold increase in the number of people reporting such symptoms and
dropping out of the trial, compared with the one centre that did not list such side effects in the form."
nocebo placebo science medicine ben-goldacre 2009 Oct 18, 2:23TED video of Stewart Brand: "The book tackles three of today’s most profound transformations — climate change, urbanization and biotechnology — in a way that’s part practical guide to damage control,
part prescriptive inspiration for a more efficient society, part bold anthem of design-thinking. And if Brand’s track record is any sign at all, Whole Earth Discipline may well become one of the
(counter)cultural classics of our generation."
stewart-brand climate-change biology biotech urban ted video ecology 2009 Sep 18, 1:54A HL2 mod in which guy replaces all game sound effects with his voice...
video humor halflife hl2 videogame game via:waxy 2009 Sep 1, 4:39"...what effect does the large-scale structure of the JS output code have on the DEFLATE algorithm of GZIP which is used to serve up compressed script?" Another instance of using knowledge of the
specific file type to get gains in compression. Is there a web proxy running all this at which I can point my phone?
via:kris.kowal performance javascript gzip deflate compression web technical 2009 Aug 14, 6:20"This paper presents efficient off-line anonymous e-cash schemes where a user can withdraw a wallet containing coins each of which she can spend unlinkably."
money future reference research economics cryptography technical system:filetype:pdf system:media:document 2009 Aug 3, 11:06"But how efficient is the alphabet at encoding information on a page?"
via:ericlaw humor paper storage encoding 2009 Jul 29, 11:00"Help to make sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it."
humor journalism health via:bengoldacre news science 2009 Jul 27, 11:28Olivia Wilde (I know her from House) who will appear in Tron Legacy gives an interview at Comic-Con that includes "...her experiences working with Jeff Bridges (she had to put her fist in her mouth
to not ask about “The Dude”)."
humor interview house olivia-wilde tron tron-legacy wired jeff-bridges dude video 2009 Jul 24, 5:13"Question Box, a service which effectively provides a speaking Wikipedia for people in remote villages in India and Africa without access to the internet and those unable to read."
africa wikipedia internet literacy india 2009 Jul 19, 11:44
I've redone my blog's layout to remind myself how terrible CSS is -- err I mean to play
with the more advanced features of CSS 2.1 which are all now available in IE8. As part of the new layout I've included my Delicious links by default but at a smaller size and I've replaced the
navigation list options with Technical, Personal and Everything as I've heard from folks that that would actually be useful. Besides the layout I've also updated the back-end, switching from my
handmade PHP+XSLT+RSS/Atom monster to a slightly less horrible PHP+DB solution. As a result everything should be much much faster including search which, incidentally, is so much easier to
implement outside of XSLT.
blog database redisgn xslt mysql homepage 2009 Jul 7, 6:02More on converting between different date/time formats and the effective range of the formats.
datetime time date programming c++ c technical 2009 Jun 22, 3:12HTML5's mime-sniffing is getting moved to an IETF doc: "Many web servers supply incorrect Content-Type headers with their HTTP responses. In order to be compatible with these servers, user agents
must consider the content of HTTP responses as well as the Content-Type header when determining the effective media type of the response. This document describes an algorithm for determining the
effective media type of HTTP responses that balances security and compatibility considerations."
mime mime-sniffing ietf http w3c html5 technical 2009 Jun 4, 3:14You've seen the YouTube clips demonstrating the riotous effect of dropping Mentos into Diet Coke. Why not turn the fizzy fun into an epic party prank of your own? Here's our recipe for a little
cocktail we call the Manhattan Project.
via:boingboing mentos meme wired humor coke soda howto alcohol drink for:hellosarah 2009 May 31, 7:52"jeffgrako: HOLLA IF YOUR AT THE #FIRE"
humor video satire culture internet fire college phone 2009 May 1, 11:25Seems like this would be a good gift for someone. "...all of the characters ever played by William Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world. Their mission: hunt down and destroy the real William
Shatner. Featuring: Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker, Denny Crane, Rescue 911 Shatner, Singer Shatner, Shakespearean Shatner, Twilight Zone Shatner, Cartoon Kirk, Esperanto Shatner, Priceline Shatner, SNL
Shatner, and - of course - William Shatner!"
humor book gift wishlist william-shatner shatner startrek via:boingboing 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