2009 May 28, 1:12A homemade CPU and computer. I love the primary colors on the mess of wires. The close up shot is lovely.
howto diy hardware computer electronics cpu homemade maker-faire 2009 May 25, 10:19"Wallace and Gromit return-this time as purveyors of the Top Bun bakery, despite the fact that 12 other local bakers have disappeared in the previous year. Now it's up to Gromit to solve the mystery
while Wallace woos new love interest Piella Bakewell."
humor movie wallace-and-gromit animation claymation for:hellosarah 2009 May 19, 1:43Lovely, although a bit out of my price range. "Formerly the Golden Gate Lutheran Church, this stunning Gothic Revival style building is now one of the most extraordinary and largest single family
homes in San Francisco."
for:hellosarah photo house home church california san-francisco flickr slideshow via:boingboing church-home 2009 May 3, 4:36Besides being an interesting presentation with real world examples off Web ideas applied to museums, the presentation itself (although its all icky flash) is lovely.
via:mattb museum flash presentation visualization 2009 Apr 23, 4:46Some lovely data visualizations. Is their Crimespotting visualization supposed to look like the map interface from GTA3SA? "Since 2001, Stamen has developed a reputation for beautiful and
technologically sophisticated projects in a diverse range of commercial and cultural settings."
blog web art visualization information interactive interface portfolio mashup 2009 Apr 15, 7:42"If you're like us, you live in constant fear of slipping into a wormhole and getting spit out in the 13th century, and the only real useful knowledge you have for your ignorant ancestors is 'watch
out for that Hitler guy' and 'some of the Popes are evil.'" Its like they're inside my head! Love this shirt and poster telling you everything you need to know in case you accidentally fall back in
time.
time-travel time shirt poster wishlist gift awesome 2009 Apr 13, 12:14On mad science vs mad engineering.
humor science comic engineering 2009 Apr 7, 11:58
This past week I finished Anathem and despite the intimidating physical size of the book (difficult to take and read on the bus) I became very engrossed and was able to finish it in several orders of
magnitude less time than
what I spent on the Baroque
Cycle. Whereas reading the Baroque Cycle you can imagine Neal Stephenson sifting through giant economic tomes (or at least that's where my mind went whenever the characters began to explain
macro-economics to one another), in Anathem you can see Neal Stephenson staying up late
pouring over philosophy of mathematics. When not
exploring philosophy, Anathem has an appropriate amount of humor, love interests, nuclear bombs, etc. as you might hope from reading Snow Crash or Diamond Age. I thoroughly enjoyed Anathem.
On the topic of made up words: I get made up words for made up things, but there's already a name for cell-phone in English: its "cell-phone". The narrator notes that the book has been translated
into English so I guess I'll blame the fictional translator. Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the made up words nearly as much as some folk. Its a good thing I'm long
out of college because I can easily imagine confusing the names of actual concepts and people with those from the book, like Hemn space for Hamming distance. Towards the beginning, the description
of slines and the post-post-apocalyptic setting reminded me briefly of Idiocracy.
Recently, I've been reading everything of Charles Stross that I can, including about a month ago, The Jennifer Morgue from the surprisingly awesome amalgamation genre of spy thriller and Lovecraft
horror. Its the second in a series set in a universe in which magic exists as a form of mathematics and follows Bob Howard programmer/hacker, cube dweller, and begrudging spy who works for a
government agency tasked to suppress this knowledge and protect the world from its use. For a taste, try a short story from the series that's freely available on Tor's website, Down on the Farm.
Coincidentally, both Anathem and the Bob Howard series take an interest in the world of Platonic ideals. In the case of Anathem (without spoiling anything) the universe of Platonic ideals, under a
different name of course, is debated by the characters to be either just a concept or an actual separate universe and later becomes the underpinning of major events in the book. In the Bob Howard
series, magic is applied mathematics that through particular proofs or computations awakens/disturbs/provokes unnamed horrors in the universe of Platonic ideals to produce some desired effect in
Bob's universe.
atrocity archives neal stephenson jennifer morgue plato bob howard anathem 2009 Mar 20, 10:10Its IE8 advertising that doesn't make me cringe. On the contrary it has Ask a Ninja, Janeane Garofalo, and several comedians I recall collectively from either 'I Love the [decade]' or 'Best Week
Ever'.
humor video ie8 advertising via:louis 2009 Mar 20, 6:18
IE8, the software I've been working on for some time now, has finally been released at MIX09.
As I mentioned previously, I worked on
accelerators (previously named
Activities) in IE8. Looking at the
kinds of things I blog about on the IE Blog, you might also
correctly guess that I work on the networking stack. Ask me about what else I worked on during IE8 development. The past few months were very busy for me and I'm happy this is finally out.
technical internet explorer ie8 2009 Feb 28, 1:55
sequelguy posted a photo:
Why do security guards love Segway's so much?
vegas securityguard nevada segway 2009 Jan 29, 10:22Play this game now. Its like half of a delicious club sandwhich. Love the music. "To make it in Nuevos Aires, one has to have nerves of silk and the filthiest of hands. Mix together a batch of
espionage, some high- speed car chases, fire-spewing assassins, and you've got one oven that'll never bake cookies again. We provide the pliers and you bring the moxie."
game videogame quake gravity-bone humor spy espionage 2009 Jan 15, 6:02Projecting giant images onto buildings that appear to interact with their surface. Lovely video. "We have posted quite a few times now about using projectors in the city to beam images onto
Architecture and the screengrab above is one from one the best examples we have seen so far."
video graffiti cultural-disobediance art technology projector light 2009 Jan 15, 4:57Lovely travel visualization: "We've generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It's a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that
we're delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we'd show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who's had a very busy
2008 - President Elect Barack Obama."
via:mattb visualization blog dopplr obama travel statistics map 2009 Jan 8, 5:49Gloves with the ends of the index finger and thumb missing for using phones and the like while keeping the rest of your hands warm. Good idea!
glove design shopping wishlist phone cellphone clothing gloves 2008 Dec 29, 12:06Too bad I missed these before Christmas: "Why buy a stupid Elmo when you can permanently disturb that young mind with a cute knitted plush rabbit killed with a giant carrot? Or a beautiful tiger
eating some human remains? I love these."
humor death macabre stuffed-animals toy gizmodo via:jen-johnston gift 2008 Nov 20, 11:01Woo! "I love making films for the cinema but the production of Chicken Run and Curse of the Were-Rabbit were virtually back to back and each film took five years to complete. A Matter of Loaf and
Death will be so much quicker to make. I'm delighted to be back into production and back with BBC One with Wallace and Gromit. Over the years the BBC has been incredibly supportive of Wallace and
Gromit, this film feels like their homecoming."
wallace gromit wallace-grommit bbc animation clay claymation via:kris.kowal humor 2008 Nov 16, 10:26Josh Olson's short story 'The Life and Death of Jesse James - An internet love mystery'.
short-story jesse-james internet love josh-olson via:rachel 2008 Oct 13, 2:40Watch out for too good to be true washing services (or free network traffic anonymization): "The laundry would then send out "color coded" special discount tickets, to the effect of "get two loads
for the price of one," etc. The color coding was matched to specific streets and thus when someone brought in their laundry, it was easy to determine the general location from which a city map was
coded. While the laundry was indeed being washed, pressed and dry cleaned, it had one additional cycle -- every garment, sheet, glove, pair of pants, was first sent through an analyzer, located in
the basement, that checked for bomb-making residue." From the comment section of Schneier on Security on this topic: "Yet another example of how inexpensive, reliable home washers and dryers help
terrorists. When will we learn?"
security history laundromat ira terrorism bomb 2008 Oct 5, 9:17
Sarah asked me if I knew of a syntax highlighter for the QuickBase formula language which she uses at work. I couldn't find one but thought it might be fun to make a QuickBase Formula syntax highlighter based on the QuickBase help's
description of the formula syntax. Thankfully the language is relatively simple since my skills with ANTLR, the parser generator, are rusty now and I've only
used it previously for personal projects (like Javaish, the ridiculous Java based shell idea I had).
With the help of some great ANTLR examples and an ANTLR cheat
sheet I was able to come up with the grammar that parses the QuickBase Formula syntax and prints out the same formula marked up with HTML SPAN tags and various CSS classes. ANTLR produces the
parser in Java which I wrapped up in an applet, put in a jar, and embedded in an HTML page. The script in that page runs user input through the applet's parser and sticks the output at the bottom
of the page with appropriate CSS rules to highlight and print the formula in a pretty fashion.
What I learned:
- I didn't realize that Java applets are easy to use via script in an HTML page. In the JavaScript I
can simply refer to publicly exposed methods on the applet and run JavaScript strings through them. It makes for a great combination: do the heavy coding in Java and do the UI in HTML. I may end up
doing this again in the future.
- I love ANTLRWorks, the ANTLR IDE, that didn't exist the last time I used ANTLR. It tells you about issues with your grammar as you create it,
lets you easily debug the grammar running it forwards and backwards, display parse trees, and other useful things.
java technical programming quickbase language antlr antlrworks
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