2008 Jul 15, 3:50This is 'Dr. Horrible' (Neil Patrick Harris) a man in love, and also a super villain fighting Nathan Fillion. This is all Joss Whedon's Internet only awesome thing. Its free if you watch now but
eventually it will go away unless you pay for it.
humor geek super-hero internet media video tv joss-whedon neil-patrick-harris nathan-fillion via:ericlaw 2008 Jun 19, 1:00"The new compression technique, called variable bitrate compression produces different size packets of data for different sounds...VoIP streams are encrypted to prevent eavesdropping. However, a team
... has shown that simply measuring the size of packets
security privacy phone compression encryption blog article 2008 Mar 31, 3:43Clay Shirky talks to a very small audience. Starts with more examples like prev. video. @20:30 describes interesting problems he hasn't resolved. @31:04 interesting exchange between listeners and
Clay.
video cooperation social web politics law internet culture collaboration community 2008 Mar 31, 2:33Clay Shirky gives a talk about how the Internet changes everything via organization and collaboration.
video book clay-shirky via:librarythingblog social talk research internet 2008 Mar 8, 10:48"remember Dawn Of The Dead? Did you ever wonder how that horrifying turn of events would effect Las Vegas? What about specifically Teller, of Penn and Teller?"
teller penn-and-teller video zombie humor sad via:boingboing 2008 Feb 8, 3:24FTA: "...Using a mix of natural language processing, AI techniques, and a massive databases, Reuters' solution extracts important bits of information from raw HTML pages. People, Companies, Places,
and Events are really at the heart of many business artic
via:sambrook api reuters news tagging semantic semantic-web web 2008 Feb 8, 12:52FTA: "Quantum mechanics has a number of weird consequences... In trying to come up with a classical conceptual model in which to capture these non-classical phenomena, we eventually hit upon using
the idea of using computer games as an analogy. ...let us
humor nerd science quantum-mechanics tomb-raider game gaming 2007 Dec 3, 10:44AJAX project that displays events on a timeline.
ajax javascript visualization timeline date 2007 Oct 3, 1:30"Hatcher explores the legal ramifications of tattoo artists who assert copyright over their works after they've been inked, objecting to the tatts being displayed in advertising -- and even seeking
to prevent old tattoos from being erased! "
boingboing via:felix42 copyright ip law legal tattoo art culture blog article advertising 2007 Jul 14, 3:12
I've been at Microsoft three years as of last Thursday. It makes me feel old but on the bright side I've upgraded offices. I now
have an office with a window. Its actually a coincidence that I got this office at the time of my Microsoft anniversary but I like to pretend. I've had a single office for only four or five months
now so its a nice surprise that I'm moving into a single window office so soon.
Of course this move means I'll be leaving some things behind. For instance the hanging dry erase pen holder that I created out
of office supplies I will leave attached to my old white board. My new office has fancy whiteboards with trays built-in (sooo fancy) so I know the person coming into my old office will make better
use of my hanging dry erase pen holder then I would. I explained to him that the rubber bands need to be replaced every eight months or so and not to exceed the maximum weight restrictions.
Additionally, the office art masterpiece I created I will also leave behind. When Bill Gates was featured on the cover of
Diversity Inc. for his amazing
philanthropic acts many of us got copies in our mailboxes. I
collected mine and some from the recycling bins and put up five of the covers on the wall. Eventually others added to it which was my intent, but I only started this when I eventually checked my
mailbox a week or so after the magazine arrived so there weren't as many covers left with which to work. At any rate I ended up with eleven on the wall. I'll leave the interpretation of the artwork
up to the viewer.
microsoft personal office nontechnical 2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (
the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named
Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable
pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no
coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.
By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of
navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by
malicious software to hijack
"about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.
Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.
- Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
- The user should be able to modify its content.
- Show links that the user uses.
- Show thumbnails of those links
- Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.
Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an
RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing
about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing
but hey, I said this was ugly.
In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's
Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could
be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...
browser technical hack 2007 Apr 11, 9:22Short tiny travel guide for Santa Cruz, CA. Found via Turn Here in Google Earth. All places mentioned in the video are great and I totally vouche for them.
geo video santa-cruz coffee food saturn-cafe 2006 Nov 6, 6:51I've updated my webpage some more. I now have the onmouseover on the thumbnails in my photos section. So that's fun. I'm using the
flickr badge
script and then including a javascript file I made that finds the flickr imgs in my page and adds in onmouseover and onmouseout events. I've also got the whole thing validating on
W3C's HTML validator and
W3C's CSS validator.
The one thing I'd like to fix is the comments for my blog posts. They aren't included in the RSS feed. I'm shopping for a blog site that supports
comment counts in the RSS feed at least. If possible I'd like the actual comments to appear in
the feed but I doubt anyone does that.
css html script validator homepage flickr 2006 Apr 4, 5:23IPv4 fragmentation is not sufficiently robust for general use in today's Internet. The 16-bit IP identification field is not large enough to prevent frequent incorrectly assembled IP fragments, and
the TCP and UDP checksums are insufficient t
ip fragmentation security internet rfc ietf 2004 Apr 22, 6:44My interview was scheduled for Monday starting at 8am, so when I signed up for the trip and MS suggested a departure time of 4:30pm on Monday I thought that'd be good. Unfortunately the entire
process ended at 4:15pm and it takes a little more than 15 minutes to get from Redmond to Seattle and then through the whole airport deal. So after the taxi ride to the airport and waiting in line
for like 20 minutes its 5:30pm and I'm at the front of the line asking this woman for a new ticket.
Woman: *typing* Well I can get you to LA... Me: Yeah well that's the right state. Woman: *still typing* Oh... Hmm... Uhoh... *other non-words* Me: *waiting patiently* ... Woman: Are you ready
to run? Here's your ticket. Gate C11.
I look at the ticket and the plane's boarding at, what do you know?, 5:30pm. So yeah I start running. I hit the security check point line and I know all about this. I take off my belt and shoes
and empty my pockets into my backpack, my only luggage. I am Mr. Prepared, or maybe Prepared-ness is my middle name, whatever. I get through the line with no problem, put on my backpack and holding
my shoes and belt in one hand I notice a big old clock just to my left. While I'm staring at it, it changes from 5:42 to 5:43. "Oh shit!" I think, so I start running again. I finally get to the
appropriate gate and get on the plane all out of breath. I'm walking down the aisle with shoes and belt in hand, and I guess I look a bit out of sorts. I sit in my seat and I'm telling the guy next
to me about my whole deal: "Ha. Yeah. I was late and with the running and the security checkpoint..." into incoherent mumbling and gesturing. So it turns out the pilot and copilot's incoming flight
was way late and I ended up sitting in my seat for another 15 minutes before we could take off. All that wasted running. What a shame. Coming into LA we've been "landing" for like 20 minutes. We
finally get on the ground and its 30 minutes passed the boarding time of my connecting flight. I start thinking about anyone I know who lives in LA. All the other passengers stand up and block the
aisle. Then, an announcement "Will Daniel Riesney please come to the front of the plane." OK I can tell that's supposed to be my name, but how the hell am I supposed to get to the front of the plane?
The people near me who have heard me talking to the guy next to me about this let me past easily enough. But now I have to explain this to each person out of ear shot to further my progress. "Hi.
Excuse me. They called me to the front of the plane. Pardon me. Can I get by." And so on. Its getting more hostile the closer I get to first class. Up to this one guy. He's trying to talk on his cell
phone but its not working because everybody is trying to talk on their cell phone now that we've landed. His phone connection has failed. I can't guess at what else has happened to him today but he's
decided to make his Custerian last stand here between me and the rest of the plane.
Me: *continuing from previous passengers* Excuse me. Pardon me. Guy: *spinning around* WHAT!? Me: Can I please get by? Guy: What? Why? Were not going anywhere! This whole time I've been
forcing my way past him. Guy: There OK your past me now! Your several feet ahead of me! Congratulations! Me: Dude, I'm sorry they called me to the front of the plane. Guy: I find that highly
unlikely!
Whatever. I keep walking and like 7 people past the asshole I guess the flight attendants give up on me and start letting people off the plane. Now who feels like an asshole? Its me. I get off
the plane and some airport guy has a new schedule for me. Oh good I'm thinking, I've got an hour until the next flight's boarding time at 10:30pm. So I get on a tram to travel to the other side of
LAX. I wait for oncoming traffic to stop so I can climb up a stopped escalator (Incidentally right next to it is another escalator which has been closed off. Why would they do that? Escalators cannot
break they just become stairs.) I get up there and wait in line for an extreeeeme amount of time and finally get up to claim my ticket. Its 10:20. I get my ticket and, yeah, the departure time is
10:30, the boarding time is 10:10. So I start running again. More security check fun. I finally find my boarding gate. I rush up...
Me: *breathing heavy* Here's my ticket Lady: Oh good your finally here. Just go right out that door, *points* down the stairs, *more pointing* and wait for the tram.
WHAT? Isn't there supposed to be a PLANE somewhere? This is what I'm thinking not what I'm saying. So I walk outside and down these steps. And I'm waiting. The lady from inside joins me.
*awkward silence* Lady: The bus should be here pretty soon. Me: So... I'm going to miss my plane huh? Lady: Oh no, see here? *points at my ticket* Your ticket is confirmed so they can't leave
without you. Me: Oh good... I hope they didn't tell the other passengers that.
Lets see how many passengers I can piss off in one night. Eventually this bus shows up. I get in and the guy starts driving. "Do you know where I'm going?" I ask. "Yeah" the guy says. Great.
Fine. Whatever. I don't care anymore. So we drive back around to the OTHER SIDE of the airport. You know, the side I started on. Yeah that side. So I get off the bus and walk into the small building
set aside for smaller airlines. I see the frantic looking ladies manning another of these gates. They see me, check my ID and ticket, and one of them ushers me out the door next to the gate. Out the
door and into a small gated area outside. So me and this new lady are just standing here. Even had I the energy to ask her what was going on its very loud what with all the planes. So we just stand
here at this gate facing the planes for a while. I look at her trying to make eye contact and get some sort of acknowledgment that we are in fact waiting for SOMETHING. Eventually one of the day-glow
guys appears from between some planes and saunters up. The lady hands him a paper and walks away. At the time I was kind of offended but looking back on it, maybe the lady was a deaf mute and I'm the
one being insensitive. So now I follow this guy through a bunch of planes. I'm yelling "San Luis Obispo?" trying to be heard over all the ambient noise and this guy is somehow responding to me with
an even tone no yelling required. I don't know how he did that. We finally get to the plane and its 10:40. So I delayed the flight ten minutes. I'm thinking its going to be really awkward when I sit
down and we immediately leave. Its going to be suspicious even. But, not to worry, we wait while the flight attendant argues with the guy who brought me to the plane for another ten minutes about how
many people are supposed to be on the plane. Whatever.
Some rights reserved