2009 Jun 1, 11:07
When I heard that
Live Search is now Bing one of my initial thoughts was how'd they get that domain
name given
the unavailability of pronouncable four letter .COM domain names. Well, the names been used in the past.
Here now, via the
Wayback Machine is a brief, somewhat speculative, and ultimately anticlimactic
history
of bing.com:
-
2003 July: The first archived version of bing.com features "bing! is a small device (e.g., possibly even a small
Band-Aid(R)-like sticker!) that vibrates when a person's cell phone rings." I can't recall 2003 cell phones, were they big enough to require this device?
-
2004 August: Site for the same device is rewritten and looks much better, IMHO.
-
2006 June: The domain is now parked by easyDNS. I guess the "bing!" device didn't work out?
-
2006 November: Its now "BING*" and they won't say what they're working on ("we're still in stealth mode") but they are
hiring C#/.NET developers.
-
2007 January: And they're gone. Without even exiting stealth mode. Too bad, I liked their logo. Their domain is now for
sale...
-
2007 February: Looks like EasyMail buys the domain and offers a physical mailing service in Australia: "By simply clicking
a button on your computer, mail is beamed electronically to a bing post office. Your mail is automatically printed, folded, enveloped and dispatched into the Australia Post network the very same
day."
-
Present: Now its the new home for Live Search of course.
The new name reminds me of the show Friends. Also, I hope they get a new favicon - I don't enjoy the stretched 'b' nor its color scheme.
microsoft technical domain history search archive dns bing 2009 May 13, 11:21Lots of interesting notes on the company culture of Zappos. "Yesterday I was lucky enough to visit Zappos and get a tour and talk with some of their executives, including Tony Hsieh, CEO."
twitter marketing business culture zappos shoes ecommerce 2009 May 3, 4:36Besides being an interesting presentation with real world examples off Web ideas applied to museums, the presentation itself (although its all icky flash) is lovely.
via:mattb museum flash presentation visualization 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 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 Mar 10, 5:15"We built this ... (many people wished we hadn't) ... the Rainbow Vomiting Panda of Awesomeness as an experiment (which used Ling Ling fwiw)." WTF? "It's a stream of, on average, more interesting
photos then you'd generally get from polling Everyone's photos. The quality is pretty good, the best thing to do is watch The Panda for a while and figure out if a) you want to build something with a
live stream of photos b) you can build something more better than a vomiting panda (which lets face it, it pretty hard to top!)."
humor panda flickr reference api photos 2009 Feb 23, 10:34Lots of neat web APIs. Added to Delicious network. "Over the past year, I've been tagging interesting data I find on the web in del.icio.us. I wrote a quick python script to pull the relevant links
from my del.icio.us export and list them at the bottom of this post. Most of these datasets are related to machine learning, but there are a lot of government, finance, and search datasets as well."
api data semanticweb information reference 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 2008 Dec 29, 2:26Some interesting work in here: "On a Sunday night back in January, Jen came up with a formula: (limited editions x low prices) + the internet = art for everyone"
art gift purchase wishlist gallery online photo shop via:thefangmonster 2008 Nov 16, 10:24Noah Sussman describes the 'via:' delicious tag with references including a bookmarklet to ensure the via: tags are added automatically. The bookmarklet would only be useful to me if it worked on the
'Save a new bookmark' page, but the history and references are interesting. Reminds me of my past idea for a project that shows who influences who in your Delicious network based on duplicate links
among friends with the influencer who saves it first.
via:ethan_t_hein delicious meta bookmarklet script whuffie noah-sussman 2008 Nov 16, 9:48Flickr's Developer Blog has some interesting posts including various folks personal projects that use Flickr.
development flickr monthly blog web 2008 Nov 9, 11:25
I've made an XSLT Meddler script in my continued XSLT adventures. Meddler is a
simple and easy web server that runs whatever JScript.NET code you give it. I wrote a script that takes an indicated XSLT on the server, downloads an indicated XML from the Internet and returns the
result of running that XML through the XSLT. This is useful when you want to work with something like the Zune software or IE7's feed platform which only reads feeds over the HTTP protocol. I'll
give more interesting and specific examples of how this could be useful in the future.
meddler technical xml script xslt 2008 Oct 29, 3:09Video showing some more interesting touch screen ideas from Microsoft Research. A touch sensitive sphere that can accomodate multiple users and a table which projects one image onto itself and
another image onto objects beyond itself: "But hold another piece of a translucent glass in the air above the table, and it catches a second ghostly image. This trick is in the tabletop glass, which
electronically flickers between translucent and transparent 60 times per second, faster than the eye can notice."
research microsoft video touchscreen table 2008 Oct 15, 2:53Stylish blog that looks like it has interesting cultural and business related articles and links (not just weird/humorous).
blog web advertising monthly design culture business 2008 Oct 14, 11:45A bit of interesting history on Apollo 7 on the 40year anniversary of its launch: "More surprising yet, this was the first US spaceflight in which there was major friction between the crew and
Mission Control."
history space nasa apollo apollo7 article 2008 Oct 7, 12:21
Last Thursday I saw a bunch of college friends that I hadn't seen in a while, despite all of us working at Microsoft, and Saul and Ciera who were visiting. We had dinner at Typhoon! which I haven't
been to in quite a while. Daniil and Val brought their cute child. I got to see Charlie and Matt who I'm not sure I've seen since my 25th birthday. There was much nerdiness. I need to remember to
organize such a night myself sometime in near future so I don't have to wait another year to see them.
On the weekend Sarah and I went out to dinner at Carnegie's, a former
public library in Ballard, Seattle that's now a restaurant. I saw the restaurant's website in Matt's delicious links and thought it looked interesting. The exterior and entryway look like a public
library, but just inside its redone as a sort of modern version of french classical with a bar and two dining rooms. No pictures since my replacement camera only arrived today, but there are
photos available. They serve french cuisine which was good and
not as expensive as I would have expected. An interesting place, although its a bit of a drive and I'm not sure if we'll be going back soon.
carnegies personal restaurant weekend nontechnical 2008 Oct 1, 1:08A weekly summary of the going-ons in the WHATWG usually on the topic of squabbles in HTML5 esp. what to do about the alt attribute in the img tag. Interesting stuff on charsets.
development software whatwg html5 html specification feed rss user-agent w3c 2008 Sep 30, 11:14Tools and hints for debugging esp. WinDbg. Some interesting things in here. "...When I'm not debugging applications with Windbg, I'm working on tools (utility software) like those presented in this
blog. My tools should help you during your debugging or troubleshooting session. "
blog windows debug windbg powershell tool programming 2008 Sep 23, 10:58Matt says this is a good restaurant. It certainly looks interesting.
via:swannman seattle food restaurant 2008 Sep 18, 10:31
Netflix has recommended three party movies over my time with Netflix and if you're OK with movies featuring sex, drugs, rock&roll (or techno) as almost the main character then I can recommend
at least The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down.
24 Hour Party People is based on the true story of Tony Wilson, journalist, band manager, and club owner (not all at once)
around the rise of punk and new wave in England. Like many true-story based movies it starts off strong and very interesting but gets very slow at the end like the writers got bored and just
started copying the actual events. Unless you have some interest in the history of music in the 80s in Manchester I don't recommend this movie.
Human Traffic is fun and funny following a group of friends going out for a night of clubbing and partying. I had to get over
seeing John Simm as not The Master from Doctor Who but rather as a partying youth. It felt like it was geared towards viewers who were on
something like the totally odd techno musical interludes with the characters dancing for no apparent reason. Otherwise the movie was good.
The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down is done in the style of an old educational movie on the topic
of clubbing and partying. It sounds like a premise that would get old but they do a good job. While demonstrating drinking and driving they have scientists push a mouse around in a toy convertible.
Enough said. It was funny and I recommend it.
party movie netflix