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Anitmaion Spotlight: The Little Red Riding Hood Meets Royksopp | Brain Pickings

2009 Mar 22, 11:40"We're going short and sweet today, with this brilliant interpretation of The Little Red Riding Hood, inspired by Royksopp's Remind Me."PermalinkCommentshumor visualization animation video graphic design royksopp

speak-er

2009 Mar 22, 11:03'Speaker are high-quality multimedia speakers that plug directly into your computer or MP3 player. Their iconic shape put the "speak" in speakers. Set includes a left and right speaker and power adapter.'PermalinkCommentsspeaker purchase design shopping gadget comic

Notes on Creating Internet Explorer Extensions in C++ and COM

2009 Mar 20, 4:51

Working on Internet Explorer extensions in C++ & COM, I had to relearn or rediscover how to do several totally basic and important things. To save myself and possibly others trouble in the future, here's some pertinent links and tips.

First you must choose your IE extensibility point. Here's a very short list of the few I've used:

Once you've created your COM object that implements IObjectWithSite and whatever other interfaces your extensibility point requires as described in the above links you'll see your SetSite method get called by IE. You might want to know how to get the top level browser object from the IUnknown site object passed in via that method.

After that you may also want to listen for some events from the browser. To do this you'll need to:

  1. Implement the dispinterface that has the event you want. For instance DWebBrowserEvents2, or HTMLDocumentEvents, or HTMLWindowEvents2. You'll have to search around in that area of the documentation to find the event you're looking for.
  2. Register for events using AtlAdvise. The object you need to subscribe to depends on the events you want. For example, DWebBrowserEvents2 come from the webbrowser object, HTMLDocumentEvents come from the document object assuming its an HTML document (I obtained via get_Document method on the webbrowser), and HTMLWindowEvents2 come from the window object (which oddly I obtained via calling the get_script method on the document object). Note that depending on when your SetSite method is called the document may not exist yet. For my extension I signed up for browser events immediately and then listened for events like NavigateComplete before signing up for document and window events.
  3. Implement IDispatch. The Invoke method will get called with event notifications from the dispinterfaces you sign up for in AtlAdvise. Implementing Invoke manually is a slight pain as all the parameters come in as VARIANTs and are in reverse order. There's some ATL macros that may make this easier but I didn't bother.
  4. Call AtlUnadvise at some point -- at the latest when SetSite is called again and your site object changes.

If you want to check if an IHTMLElement is not visible on screen due how the page is scrolled, try comparing the Body or Document Element's client height and width, which appears to be the dimensions of the visible document area, to the element's bounding client rect which appears to be its position relative to the upper left corner of the visible document area. I've found this to be working for me so far, but I'm not positive that frames, iframes, zooming, editable document areas, etc won't mess this up.

Be sure to use pointers you get from the IWebBrowser/IHTMLDocument/etc. only on the thread on which you obtained the pointer or correctly marshal the pointers to other threads to avoid weird crashes and hangs.

Obtaining the HTML document of a subframe is slightly more complicated then you might hope. On the other hand this might be resolved by the new to IE8 method IHTMLFrameElement3::get_contentDocument

Check out Eric's IE blog post on IE extensibility which has some great links on this topic as well.

PermalinkCommentstechnical boring internet explorer com c++ ihtmlelement extension

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable - Clay Shirky

2009 Mar 16, 2:35"Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That's been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we're going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead."PermalinkCommentsinternet clay-shirky newspaper copyright history journalism via:ethan_t_hein

Aimee Mullins | Profile on TED.com

2009 Mar 14, 10:23TED talks from Aimee Mullins mostly on the topics of her prosthetic legs. The two talks are eleven years apart and you can note the advances in tech. "A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and activist for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics."PermalinkCommentsaimee-mullins video ted prosthetic body-mod via:boingboing

Chart Types - Google Chart API - Google Code

2009 Mar 12, 12:04Google's chart API can generate QR codes. Just specify in the URL the chart type as 'qr', and the data you want encoded and the returned resource is a QR code image for that data. Just installed a QR code reader on my phone.PermalinkCommentsqr barcode google api chart mobile web cellphone qrcode

Code: Flickr Developer Blog - Panda Tuesday; The History of the Panda, New APIs, Explore and You

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!)."PermalinkCommentshumor panda flickr reference api photos

Epic! - Mario Paint Plays 'Paranoid Android' | taking tiger mountain

2009 Mar 7, 4:56Its my favorite song done Mario Paint style.PermalinkCommentsparanoid-android mario-paint mario radiohead music video youtube videogame

The Moth Podcast

2009 Mar 6, 5:36"The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization, was founded in New York in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer evenings on his native St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda's porch."PermalinkCommentsmoth podcast humor rss story nyc community

This Is Me - Archive: A Greater Force (March 6, 2009)

2009 Mar 6, 5:02Reminds me of the guy from the Jose Chung episode of the X-Files that would repeatedly yell 'Roswell!' whenever he felt he was the subject of government oppression. The more time passes I only end up remembering the awesome episodes of the X-Files.PermalinkCommentscomic cory-doctorow sheep humor censorship

Washington State Senate Honors Penny Arcade

2009 Mar 6, 1:21"BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That the Washington State Senate honor Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik for their hard work and dedication to improving the lives of hospitalized children worldwide through their creation and continued work with Child's Play Charity"PermalinkCommentscomic charity videogames penny-arcade goverment washington senate

Subst Allows Non-Letter Drive Letters

2009 Mar 4, 2:39

I knew that the command line tool subst would create virtual drives that map to existing directories but I didn't know that subst lets you name the virtual drives with characters that aren't US-ASCII letters. For instance you can run 'subst 4: C:\windows' and then 'more 4:\win.ini' to dump C:\windows\win.ini. This also works for non-US-ASCII characters like, "C" (aka U+FF23, Fullwidth Latin Capital Letter C), which when displayed by cmd.exe via some best fit style character conversions looks just like the regular US-ASCII 'C'. None of Explorer, IE, or the common file dialogs allow the use of these odd virtual drives -- just cmd.exe, so I'm not sure how this would ever be useful but I thought it was odd and I wanted to share.

PermalinkCommentscli technical boring subst windows

Some Datasets Available on the Web - Data Wrangling Blog

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."PermalinkCommentsapi data semanticweb information reference

Semantic Search the US Library of Congress

2009 Feb 23, 10:31"This is an experimental service that makes the Library of Congress Subject Headings available as linked-data using the SKOS vocabulary. The goal of lcsh.info is to encourage experimentation and use of LCSH on the web with the hopes of informing a similar effort at the Library of Congress to make a continually updated version available. More information about the Linked Data effort can be found on the W3C Wiki."PermalinkCommentslibrary-of-congress loc semanticweb web rdf metadata library api

Chart Porn: Create Your Own Original Star Trek Story

2009 Feb 10, 9:30A flowchart to help you create a Star Trek (TOS) episode.PermalinkCommentshumor howto scifi startrek television chart visualization tv flowchart

Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol IETF Draft Document

2009 Feb 5, 8:39The long expired draft of the Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol (WPAD). To summarize, use DHCP and failing that DNS to find the name of a web server and on that web server find a Proxy Auto-Config file at a well known localtion.PermalinkCommentswpad proxy internet reference browser dns dhcp

draft-masinter-dated-uri-05 - names are readily assigned, offer the persistence of reference that is required by URNs, but do not require a stable authority to assign the name. The first namespace ("duri") is used to refer to URI-

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.PermalinkCommentsduri tdb uri url scheme reference ietf date datetime rfc

Meteorology Law of the People's Republic of China -- china.org.cn

2009 Feb 4, 4:16From Sorting it all Out wrt the weather gadget in Vista's sidebar, this link to China's laws on weather forecast: "Article 22 The State applies a unified system for the issue of public meteorological forecast and severe weather warning... No other organizations or individuals may issue to the community such forecast or warning." "Article 25 When the media, including radio, television, newspaper and telecommunication, issue to the community public meteorological forecast or severe weather warning, they shall use the latest meteorological information provided by a meteorological office... Part of the revenues from the distribution of meteorological information shall be drawn to support the development of meteorological service." Whether an application is legally allowed to provide a weather forecast is not an attribute I would have imagined necessary for a localization API.PermalinkCommentsvia:michael-kaplan china law legal politics weather forecast localization

The WHATWG Blog - Blog Archive - This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 20

2009 Feb 3, 11:15"r2719 specifies that browsers should not allow scripts to set document.domain to anything on the Public Suffix List, such as "com" or "co.jp". Essential background reading on why this is dangerous: Untraceable XSS Attacks. Most browsers already block this attack, e.g. Firefox since 3.0. [Background: Re: Setting document.domain]"PermalinkCommentshtml5 tld publicsuffix dns security html internet web reference w3c

Sarah and I Are Engaged

2009 Jan 30, 5:21

Shot on the RocksOver the previous weekend Sarah and I got engaged. I had a limo pick us up and take us to a park that has a beautiful view of the Seattle skyline where I proposed, then out for dinner and drinks including a bottle of wine for the ride back. What's the point of a limo ride if you don't drink while being driven around? It was a nice night and only had a hint of rain when we came home. We don't yet have a date set.

PermalinkCommentsengagement personal nontechnical
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