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Big data: Welcome to the petacentre : Nature News

2008 Sep 9, 8:29Article on the data centers that backup the Internet Archive and handle CERN's LHC's data. "CERN embodies borderlessness. The Swiss-French border is a drainage ditch running to one side of the cafeteria; it was shifted a few metres to allow that excellent establishment to trade the finicky French health codes for the more laissez-fair Swiss jurisdiction. And in the data sphere it is utterly global."PermalinkCommentslhc history internet cory-doctorow nature physics network hardware library science cern internet-archive

Neil Fraser: News: Wooden Brain

2008 Sep 8, 6:51Neil prints out brain cross sections from an MRI and pastes them onto a set of wooden cubes forming a model of his brain. "Last month I took a left-right MRI scan, reconstructed it, and rerendered top-bottom and front-back scans... Another method to visualize a complex 3D object is to build a model. The dimensions of the MRI data cuboid are almost exactly 3x4x5. Accordingly, I obtained 60 one-inch cubes ... arranged them appropriately, varnished the 94 outside faces, printed nine carefully selected cross-sections and their mirror images, sliced the prints into 266 squares and glued them to the correct internal faces."PermalinkCommentsart design brain toy model wood

Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

2008 Sep 8, 11:40"Up and Then Down: The lives of elevators. by Nick Paumgarten". A story on elevators, the people behind them, elevator mishaps, etc. Interesting article.PermalinkCommentsarticle elevator history design newyorker

Voices without Votes | Americans vote. The world speaks.

2008 Sep 8, 10:23"Voices without Votes opens a window on what non-Americans are saying in blogs and citizen media about US foreign policy and the 2008 presidential elections."PermalinkCommentsvia:sambrook vote politics government blog

Studio Walljump Announces Liight For WiiWare - WiiWare World

2008 Sep 5, 1:56This is the game from the same person I linked to previously who has a son named Link: "I'm very excited to finally announce our first game, Liight, for WiiWare! So... what is it? Liight is a puzzle solving game where the pieces are colored lights and the goal is to make cool music! Anyone can play! Just illuminate all the targets in each puzzle with light of the matching color... but it's not always so easy! You'll have to mix colors, cast shadows and make the most of your limited resources to solve these brain teasers. Solve 100 challenging puzzles! Create your own puzzles, and Share them with your friends via WiiConnect24. Host a Contest to see who can solve your puzzle the fastest. If you're ready, take on Nonstop mode, a whole new way to play where arcade-style scoring meets split-second strategy!"PermalinkCommentsliight game videogame nintendo wii wiiware

Neatorama - Blog Archive - Pet Your Chicken Through the Internet!

2008 Sep 3, 6:15"National University of Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab is fast becoming my favorite in cutting edge (and a little wacky - okay, a lot) research. Take, for instance, this project titled Poultry Internet, where a chicken is outfitted with a special dress that lets its owner pet it over the Internet." Johnny Cat writes: "Kudos to Gonzo for inventing this." I can't get to the actual site with the info on the project but it is available on the Wayback Machine.PermalinkCommentschicken humor internet virtual-reality mixed-reality

Internet Explorer Beta Feedback

2008 Sep 3, 12:44This is the public site for logging and tracking IE8 Beta bugs. Read access is available to all. Write access requires acceptance into the Technical Beta program. Check the blog for info on joining that.PermalinkCommentsie blog ie8 bug development microsoft

Stop For Me, Its the Claw

2008 Sep 1, 9:35

sequelguy posted a photo:

Stop For Me, Its the Claw

Humorous modified sign: "Stop for me its the law" changed to "... its the claw" with a claw added to the stick figures arm.

PermalinkCommentsseattle washington alki watersign

INTOURIST Soviet Union Russia Labels - a set on Flickr

2008 Aug 29, 10:44Cool 30's Soviet Union tourist brochure logos and designs. "Intourist was renowned as the official state travel agency of the Soviet Union. It was founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin and was responsible for managing the great majority of foreigners' access to, and travel within, the Soviet Union. It grew into one of the largest tourism organizations in the world, with a network embracing banks, hotels, and money exchanges. Some of the best Intourist labels and brochures produced during the 1930's were designed by A. Selensky. Some of the labels in this set are signed by him, including a rare constructivist style travel brochure I have included as well."PermalinkCommentsflickr photo propaganda graphic russia history design

Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole | Threat Level from Wired.com

2008 Aug 29, 8:37"Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency." Described fixes all require significant changes to the software and probably hardware doing the routing. UghPermalinkCommentswired article security internet bgp hack networking defcon

Patenting reincarnation - Knowledge Jolt with Jack

2008 Aug 28, 10:58"The patent is really bad, which is all part of the fun: Abstract: The invention consists of the process of reincarnation or rebirth resulting in immortality. Description: [0001] This invention resulted from my combining Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Newton's Second Law of Physics. [0002] Reincarnation is defined in Webster's Third New Inernational Dictionary as "rebith". Thus my invention is a process of rebirth or in other words immortality."PermalinkCommentshumor patent via:kris.kowal reincarnation

Mystic Microsoft by Kraig Brockschmidt - Chapter Sixteen: Fade to Light

2008 Aug 28, 2:35Read about "Dress Like Raymond Day" (as in Raymond Chen of The Old New Thing) and 'The Microsoft Tie' at IBM.PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft humor article book

MSN Video - IE8's Videos

2008 Aug 28, 10:57Apparently we've got some videos showing off IE8 features. Some are the kind you would expect: informative with music. Others are trying to be funny. Those aren't nearly as lame as I would have expected.PermalinkCommentsvideo microsoft ie ie8

IE8 Beta2 Shipped

2008 Aug 27, 11:36

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is now available! Some of the new features from this release that I really enjoy are Tab Grouping, the new address-bar, and InPrivate Subscriptions.

Tab Grouping groups tabs that are opened from the same page. For example, on a Google search results page if you open the first two links the two new tabs will be grouped with the Google search results page. If you close one of the tabs in that group focus goes to another tab in that group. Its small, but I really enjoy this feature and without knowing exactly what I wanted while using IE7 and FF2 I knew I wanted something like this. Plus the colors for the tab groups are pretty!

The new address bar and search box makes life much easier by searching through my browsing history for whatever I'm typing in. Other things are searched besides history but since I ignore favorites and use Delicious I mostly care about history. At any rate its one of the things that makes it impossible for me to go machines running IE7.

InPrivate Subscriptions allows you to subscribe to a feed of URLs from which IE should not download content. This is intended for avoiding sites that track you across websites and could sell or share your personal information, but this feature could be used for anything where the goal is to avoid a set of URLs. For example, phishing, malware sites, ad blocking, etc. etc. I think there's some interesting uses for this feature that we have yet to see.

Anyway, we're another release closer to the final IE8 and I can relax a little more.

PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft browser technical ie8 ie

IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Now Available

2008 Aug 27, 12:22IE8 Beta2 is now available. This blog post mentions some of the features I like best in this release, like the updated address bar, visual search suggestions, and tab grouping.PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft ie browser ie8 beta blog article

Photosynth of my Office

2008 Aug 26, 11:08

I've had a little fun messing around with Photosynth, a Microsoft research project turned into a Live service. You upload a bunch of photos from around the same area and it makes a 3D panorama out of them. For instance, here's National Geographic's photosynth of the sphinx and pyramids in Egypt. Messing around with this I've made one of half a vase of roses, and a larger photosynth of my office.

PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft photosynth photo office nontechnical

Network notary system thwarts man-in-the-middle attacks

2008 Aug 26, 10:03"A new system devised by Carnegie Mellon University researchers aims to thwart man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks by providing a way to verify the authenticity of self-signed certificates. The system, which is called Perspectives, uses a distributed network of "notary" servers to evaluate the public key of a target destination so that its validity can be ascertained."PermalinkCommentssecurity ssl pki certificate man-in-the-middle

Tag Metadata in Feeds

2008 Aug 25, 10:13

As noted previously, my page consists of the aggregation of my various feeds and in working on that code recently it was again brought to my attention that everyone has different ways of representing tag metadata in feeds. I made up a list of how my various feed sources represent tags and list that data here so that it might help others in the future.

Tag markup from various sources
Source Feed Type Tag Markup Scheme One Tag Per Element Tag Scheme URI Human / Machine Names Example Markup
LiveJournal Atom atom:category yes no no , (source)
LiveJournal RSS 2.0 rss2:category yes no no technical
(soure)
WordPress RSS 2.0 rss2:category yes no no , (source)
Delicious RSS 1.0 dc:subject no no no photosynth photos 3d tool
(source)
Delicious RSS 2.0 rss2:category yes yes no domain="http://delicious.com/SequelGuy/">
hulu

(source)
Flickr Atom atom:category yes yes no term="seattle"
scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />

(source)
Flickr RSS 2.0 media:category no yes no scheme="urn:flickr:tags">
seattle washington baseball mariners

(source)
YouTube RSS 2.0 media:category no no no label="Tags">
bunny rabbit yawn cadbury

(source)
LibraryThing RSS 2.0 No explicit tag metadata. no no no n/a, (source)
Tag markup scheme
Tag Markup Scheme Notes Example
Atom Category
atom:category
xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
category/@term
Required category name.
category/@scheme
Optional IRI id'ing the categorization scheme.
category/@label
Optional human readable category name.
term="catName"
scheme="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme"
label="category name in human readable format"/>
RSS 2.0 category
rss2:category
empty namespace
category/@domain
Optional string id'ing the categorization scheme.
category/text()
Required category name. The value of the element is a forward-slash-separated string that identifies a hierarchic location in the indicated taxonomy. Processors may establish conventions for the interpretation of categories.
domain="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme">
MSFT
Yahoo Media RSS Module category
media:category
xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"
category/text()
Required category name.
category/@domain
Optional string id'ing the categorization scheme.
scheme="http://dmoz.org"
label="Ace Ventura - Pet Detective">
Arts/Movies/Titles/A/Ace_Ventura_Series/Ace_Ventura_-_Pet_Detective
Dublin Core subject
dc:subject
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
subject/text()
Required category name. Typically, the subject will be represented using keywords, key phrases, or classification codes. Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary.
humor

Update 2009-9-14: Added WordPress to the Tag Markup table and namespaces to the Tag Markup Scheme table.

PermalinkCommentsfeed media delicious technical atom youtube yahoo rss tag

YouTube - Tiger Woods 09 - Walk on Water

2008 Aug 22, 1:25This is the best its-not-a-bug-its-a-feature ever: "As a response to a fan video from Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08, Tiger Woods and EA SPORTS demonstrate that the "glitch" Levinator25 thought he found in the game, is not a glitch at all."PermalinkCommentstiger-woods golf video videogame jesus humor

YouTube - CHAINSAW MAID

2008 Aug 21, 7:55Zombie claymation video featuring a maid and also a chainsaw. So much gore. Also its quite awesome. "THEY are coming for your FLESH and BLOOD! Now the last hope of the family rests on a sexy faithful MAID! The most brutal clay-animation you've ever seen!"PermalinkCommentschainsaw zombie youtube claymation video maid
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