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Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop on Vimeo

2010 Feb 22, 7:11Video of an artist's conception of our future augmented reality. I like the addition of the video artifacts and the slightly out of sync overlay. I take issue with the sort of video artifacts and the 'level of advertising'. Maybe they had the advertising supported AR goggles...PermalinkCommentsaugmented-reality gui 3d advertising art design video

YouTube - Charlie Brooker - How To Report The News

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."PermalinkCommentsbbc humor video via:waxy satire journalism tv news

WPAD Server Fiddler Extension

2010 Jan 5, 7:42

I've made a WPAD server Fiddler extension and in a fit of creativity I've named it: WPAD Server Fiddler Extension.

Of course you know about Fiddler, Eric's awesome HTTP debugger tool, the HTTP proxy that lets you inspect, visualize and modify the HTTP traffic that flows through it. And on the subject you've probably definitely heard of WPAD, the Web Proxy Auto Discovery protocol that allows web browsers like IE to use DHCP or DNS to automatically discover HTTP proxies on their network. While working on a particularly nasty WPAD bug towards the end of IE8 I really wished I had a way to see the WPAD requests and responses and modify PAC responses in Fiddler. Well the wishes of me of the past are now fulfilled by present day me as this Fiddler extension will respond to WPAD DHCP requests telling those clients (by default) that Fiddler is their proxy.

When I started working on this project I didn't really understand how DHCP worked especially with respect to WPAD. I won't bore you with my misconceptions: it works by having your one DHCP server on your network respond to regular DHCP requests as well as WPAD DHCP requests. And Windows I've found runs a DHCP client service (you can start/stop it via Start|Run|'services.msc', scroll to DHCP Client or via the command line with "net start/stop 'DHCP Client'") that caches DHCP server responses making it just slightly more difficult to test and debug my extension. If a Windows app uses the DHCP client APIs to ask for the WPAD option, this service will send out a DHCP request and take the first DHCP server response it gets. That means that if you're on a network with a DHCP server, my extension will be racing to respond to the client. If the DHCP server wins then the client ignores the WPAD response from my extension.

Various documents and tools I found useful while working on this:

PermalinkCommentsproxy fiddler http technical debug wpad pac tool dhcp

Emanuel Derman's Blog: Trading Places

2009 Dec 31, 1:50Har har: "I had a fantasy in which the Fed and the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) switched roles. If a bank failed at 9 a.m. one morning and shut its doors, the TSA would announce that all banks henceforth begin their business day at 10 a.m. And, if a terrorist managed to get on board a plane between Stockholm and Washington, the Fed would increase the number of flights between the cities."PermalinkCommentseconomics humor airplane emanuel-derman tsa fed government

Astronaut-guided video tour of the International Space Station Boing Boing

2009 Dec 4, 5:05"Astronaut Michael Barratt (Expedition 20 Flight Engineer) walks you through the International Space Station in this 20-minute long HD video, which covers the entire 167 feet of the space station's pressurized modules."PermalinkCommentsspace video space-station

About a DROID: a review of Motorola's newest smartphone

2009 Dec 3, 2:39"Android 2.0 comes with a bevy of refinements to its connectivity features. These include VPN support, multiple account support, exchange support, HTML5 support, bluetooth 2.1, and quite a few more which can best be found in the Android Platform Highlights document."PermalinkCommentsandroid review droid motorola cellphone

Thanksgiving 2009

2009 Nov 29, 1:32

Pre Thanksgiving DinnerSarah and I had Thanksgiving dinner at our house the Sunday before. Sarah's parents and siblings came as well as my parents who came up for the a handful of days. It was our first time hosting Thanksgiving so I was a little nervous, but my parents helped us setup and get ready so of course it went well! I cheated a bit: I ordered a turkey online from Whole Foods where you can just tell them when you want to pick it up, they have it cooked and ready including garnish and you just need to warm it up. When we moved in together Sarah and I each had slightly different small dining room tables. Thankfully they're roughly the same height and width and we could put them together end to end and seat everybody with no room to spare. On actual Thanksgiving day we went over to Rachel & Anson's lovely new place for Thanksgiving and the annual game of Trivial Pursuit.

PermalinkCommentsturkey whole foods thanksgiving holiday

Reduce Your Chances of Dying in a Plane Crash | Information Is Beautiful

2009 Sep 14, 4:52PermalinkCommentsvia:kris.kowal information visualization plane airplane flight statistics death travel humor

Parents Visited

2009 Aug 25, 12:34

My parents visited this past weekend, met Sarah's parents, saw our house, and met our bunny. On Friday we went to BluWater in Kirkland which was pretty busy and the service was slower and slightly worse than we usually find. Saturday my parents helped us with our yard quite a bit and for dinner we went to the Icon Grill with Sarah's parents. I had forgotten how much I enjoy the food at the Icon Grill - I had the very tasty meat loaf. Dinner went well and afterward we stopped at the Three Lions pub in Redmond. On all previous occasions I had tried to go in there the place was packed for a soccer game. This night however there was a man with a guitar, singing and it wasn't nearly as packed. I also found that near the bathrooms on the wall is what looks to be James Bond's jetpack.

On Sunday we went out to see Jeannie and Carl and see the renovations to Jeannie's place. We met up with them at the Fremont Market to which I hadn't been previously, and had a look around there before going back to Jeannie's to see the lovely work they'd done to her place. For dinner my parents took us out to the Melting Pot for my approaching birthday. It was fun having my parents up and I look forward to the next time they're here.

PermalinkCommentsfamily weekend

The Future of Data Tags: Bokodes | Brain Pickings

2009 Aug 5, 7:57"Ten times smaller than barcodes, Bokodes’ low-cost optical design can be read from as far as 4 meters away, much farther than barcodes, by taking an out-of-focus photo with any off-the-shelf camera." Love for stuff like this to catch on, however compared to QR codes, these are much more difficult to produce than barcodes in that you can't just print them out and they require changes to the photography technique (must be out of focus) rather than just analyzing any photograph of a barcode. They seem to be solving slightly different problems.
PermalinkCommentsqrcode qr barcode camera information design bokode augmented-reality technical

Time lapse: Public helps build massive Lego light bulb | Boing Boing Gadgets

2009 Aug 4, 7:34PermalinkCommentsvideo time-lapse lego light-bulb

Cambridge Cop Accidentally Arrests Henry Louis Gates Again During White House Meeting | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

2009 Aug 4, 7:19"Witnesses said that Sgt. Crowley, failing to recognize Gates on their flight to Logan Airport, arrested the tenured professor in midair, once again at the baggage claim, and twice during their shared cab ride back to Cambridge"PermalinkCommentshumor onion politics

Olivia Wilde Talks Tron Legacy, Light Cycles | Underwire | Wired.com

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”)."PermalinkCommentshumor interview house olivia-wilde tron tron-legacy wired jeff-bridges dude video

Blog Layout and Implementation Improvements

2009 Jul 19, 11:44

Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, Charlottesville, Va. (LOC) from Flickr CommonsI'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.

PermalinkCommentsblog database redisgn xslt mysql homepage

Bits Up!: DNS Prefetching for Firefox

2009 Jun 22, 3:28Details on Firefox's DNS prefetching: "The Firefox implementation takes this approach one step further than just pre-resolving anchor href hostnames. It uses the prefetch logic on URLs that are being included in the current document. By this I mean that it uses the prefetch logic on things like images, css, and jscript that are being loaded right away, in addition to anchor links which might be clicked on at a slightly later time."PermalinkCommentsdns dns-prefetching html performance networking firefox mozilla technical

Ceci n'est pas un Bob: The Zone of Essential Risk

2009 Jun 10, 12:17"Bruce pointed out in his return email that while the fraud pattern was a good match for escrow, the transaction size wasn't: since the item exchanged in the eBay transaction he highlighted was sold for only $500, the price of an escrow agent would have been hard to justify. He's right."PermalinkCommentsblog security economics article bruce-schneier Bob-Blakley ebay

Nightmarker - IR Paint

2009 May 29, 9:28"During nighttime patrol, persons or vehicles using the entire NightMarker Detection Portocol can illuminate areas from distances of at least 100 meters out and look for disturbances in the road or guardrails. Long Lasting IR Paint and Aerosol Spray is guaranteed to last at least 6 months in direct sunlight."PermalinkCommentsir ir-paint military

Infrared patterns and paint to screw with tourist video/photos | Brad Ideas

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."PermalinkCommentshumor graffiti ir ir-paint magic tourist photography

IR Ink

2009 May 29, 9:01"These inks are completely invisible to the human eye yet can be seen by using a device which can see in the infrared range - such as our modified cameras and camcorders. These inks do not fluoresce in the visible range, cannot be seen with ultraviolet lights and cannot be seen by the human eye alone." Via and not via .PermalinkCommentsir ir-paint ink purchase

CoCam: Infrared Photography: Recipe for Coating Flash Bulbs with Infrared Paint

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. ViaPermalinkCommentsir photography recipe ir-paint
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