2007 Nov 26, 12:32Guerrilla clockmakers fix famous Paris clock. Andrew says: "It seems a team of clockmakers broke into the Pantheon in Paris in September 2005 and spent a year fixing the historic and neglected clock,
which had been abandoned by the authorities. They were
clock culture history humor paris france via:boingboing cultural-disobediance 2007 Nov 15, 4:03Colossus set to compete against modern PC in decrypting Nazi messages in promotion of museum.
bbc article computer cryptography encryption hardware history turing 2007 Nov 12, 4:28Excerpts and brief history of Army Man a zine by one of the original Simpson's writers from before The Simpsons. I like 'An Amusing Anecdote' and the Bride's heckling.
humor culture history simpsons blog article via:boingboing 2007 Nov 7, 1:40Interview with BBC's News Director Richard Sambrook mostly on the topic of news medias role on the Internet.
david-weinberger blog bbc interview news media richard-sambrook wired audio 2007 Nov 6, 7:34Humorous TED talk based losely on the topic of 4AM.
humor video ted conspiracy history politics 2007 Oct 29, 1:48FTA: "Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor who writes the Bad Science column in the Guardian, examining the claims of scaremongering journalists, quack remedy peddlers, pseudoscientific cosmetics
adverts, and evil multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Th
monthly blog science politics religion media news healthy research humor 2007 Oct 29, 1:01FTA: "A prop to accompany my Halloween 2007 costume, which was a 19th century time traveler."
humor flickr photos photo steampunk time-travel bttf flux-capacitor 2007 Oct 24, 3:26Convert HTML into RSS with some predefined strings to look for.
feed rss tool free html convert 2007 Oct 22, 2:36How to create good headlines and subjects for webpages and email.
blog article design email howto usability tutorial language internet writing web 2007 Oct 22, 4:47
I purchased the
Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like
others before me who have
discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of
HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can
gift them to you.
HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and
objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding
more. The humor and the sort of
play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest
ending theme I've heard (also
blogged by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't
always trying to kill me. Additionally the
weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers'
attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of
Solitary the reality show
that sticks contestants alone in small rooms forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...
RPS has articles on Portal including
a Portal review, a page
suggesting Portal is a tale of
lesbianism, and
others.
hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical 2007 Oct 18, 5:06More on the ending song for Portal from the creator.
portal game games music jonathan-coulton blog valve videogames song 2007 Oct 17, 11:47A weighted companion cube you can make out of paper!
game games humor portal blog article 2007 Oct 17, 5:55Diego Doval expresses my thoughts on this topic very well and also likely well before I even had thoughts on this topic.
blog article history robustness-principle jon-postel internet tcp 2007 Oct 17, 5:17History of the various versions of Postel's Law or the Robustness Principle which paraphrased says: "In general, an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its
receiving behavior. That is, it should be careful to send
blog article history robustness-principle jon-postel internet tcp 2007 Oct 14, 3:12I've updated my homepage by moving stuff about me onto a separate
About page. Creating the About page was the perfect opportunity
to get
FoaF, a machine readable way of describing yourself and your friends, off my to do list. I have a
base FoaF file to which I add friends, projects, and accounts
from delicious
using an XSLT. This produces the
FoaF XML resource on which I use another
XSLT to convert into HTML and produce the About page.
I should also mention a few FoaF pages I found useful in doing this:
-
FOAF Vocabulary Specification - The standard on which I based my XSLT to add in info from delicious.
-
FoaF Explorer - Turns any RDF XML FOAF resource into a webpage with links to the other people, projects, etc mentioned in the FOAF file.
-
FoaF-a-Matic - I used this to produce my base FoaF file.
-
RDF Validator - This is the closest thing I could find for validation. It does RDF in general but unfortunately not FoaF specifically. I found two
links to sites that are down or dead that claimed to do what I actually wanted.
technical xml foaf personal xslt xsl homepage 2007 Oct 9, 5:10Cory Doctorow gives talk to Microsoft research on DRM.
via:thedpshow drm microsoft security politics read cory-doctorow 2007 Oct 3, 11:29University of Michigan's collection 'Traditions of Magic'.
magic history research michigan 2007 Oct 3, 10:21Tim Berners-Lee writes about principles for new technology in the context of the evolution of HTML and the development of namespaces and XML.
architecture article tim-berners-lee w3c internet history evolution html namespace xml web mmm multimedia-mesh humor test-of-independent-invention 2007 Sep 28, 11:24How to get mstsc to span multiple monitors -- sort of. Actually this kind of sucks. It just makes my TS session the size of a rectangle that would include all of my client side monitors.
desktop remote mstsc tools tool tips windows microsoft blog article howto vista 2007 Sep 27, 2:17Starting on a new simple project I wanted to get the history of my Delicious links. Delicious has an export tool available via the settings section so I thought I'd try that. However, the links
aren't exported in XML not even in XHTML but rather in HTML. Shocking. An example:
"Don't Tase Me, Bro!" (UF Student Tasered Remix)
Remix of the 'Don't tase me, bro!' guy getting tasered.At this point I'm already not going to use this file because its in HTML but I'm even more disgusted by those date time values.
Raymond Chen of the Old New Thing posted about recognizing timestamps and timestamp sentinel values. From the first blog post and with the use of a calculator for base conversion one can tell that
those are UNIX style timestamps counting the number of seconds since 1970.
It reminds me of my hatred for the MIME date time format I developed working on my webpage's server side parsing of atom and RSS. Atom is
of course my favorite as Atom uses the Internet date time format described in the following documents. Here's an example of one
2007-09-27T020:50:00.000-08:00
On the other hand the evil and villainous RSS uses the MIME date time format now described in the more
recent IETF MIME standard. Here's an example Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:50:00 -0800
The Internet date time format has the advantage of being so easy to sort. An alphabetic sort with normal C-style collation rules of strings containing Internet date times will also sort them
chronologically. This is not the case for the MIME date time due to the preceding day of the week and the spelled out month name. This also means that when producing these you have to figure out
the day of the week and when parsing them you have to match month names rather than just parsing out numbers. Anyway now days if I see mention of a date time in a new proposed standard or spec I be
sure to point out the numerous advantages of the Internet date time format.
date xml html feed time technical date-time code atom rss
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