2008 Jan 26, 12:32Another hilarious Internet video generated from the writer strike. Yay for the strike!
via:boingboing wga writing writers-strike video youtube tv daily-show colbert-report 2008 Jan 10, 6:49A satirical blog of one NYC citizen reporting odd behavior to the authorities.
blog article comedy satire paranoia security humor nyc 2007 Dec 17, 9:25Johnny Lee has a couple of projects involving the Wii remote. In the first he uses his fingers as his pointers Minority Report style and in the second he uses an LED pen and a projector to create a
whiteboard system.
blog bluetooth wii wiimote remote free hardware hack ui howto interactive johnny-lee 2007 Nov 28, 1:23One of the new Zune features that had me the most excited was the claimed improved Windows Media Center integration which unfortunately turned out to simply mean support for the Win MCE video format
(
with an exception for HD). I wanted to be able to pick shows recorded by my Win MCE and have the Zune automatically sync up the
latest episodes. However, with the improved podcast support in the Zune software one can easily create a ridiculous hack to accomplish this.
The new Zune software has podcast support which does everything I'd want to do with a
Win MCE recorded TV series so the goal is to shoehorn a TV series into a Zune podcast. An overview of the steps: Create an XSLT that converts Win MCE data to a podcast, run the XSLT as a scheduled
task every few hours per TV series, setup a Web server pointed at the resulting podcasts and the Win MCE Recorded TV directory, and subscribe to the resulting podcasts in the Zune software.
- Reading through the Win MCE data stored as an XML file in "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml" and the spec for podcasts I created an XSLT to convert a series from Win MCE data to a podcast.
- I added a new task to the Scheduled Tasks to run my XSLT using my xsltproc.js script. The task runs a handful of commands that look something like the following:
C:\windows\system32\wscript.exe C:\users\dave\bin\xsltproc.js C:\Users\Dave\Documents\trunk\development\mce-zune\mce-to-podcast.xslt
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml --param title "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" --param max 4 --param baseURI "http://groucho/" --param thisRelURI "tds.xml" -o
"D:\recorded tv\tds.xml"
For each TV series I run a command like the above and that outputs a podcast for that series into my "D:\Recorded TV\" directory.
- Zune only allows http URIs for its podcasts so I installed a web server on my Win MCE server. I'm running Vista Ultimate so it was quick and easy for me to install IIS7 but any Web server will do. Then I pointed it at "D:\Recorded TV\".
- Once all the above was done I just subscribed to the resulting podcasts via my Web server and viola! Since I'm forced to use a Web server I can even run the Zune software on a machine other
than my Win MCE server. You can see a screen-shot above of my Zune software showing my Colbert Report podcast.
technical xml mce hack windows media center zune windows xslt podcast 2007 Nov 4, 11:20This weekend Sarah and I went to Tariq's house warming party in Issaquah and then to Seattle for Jon's going away party at Pike's Pub. On the drive over, just after getting through traffic on I-5
South, I saw emergency vehicles lights on the North bound side and suddenly found my lane stopped. I found out why when a man ran from the left most lane to my lane the right most, then darted left
one lane and back right again. Cars started leaving my lane and I could see the man now lounging on the pavement in front of a jeep. Apparently not hurt, he got up and started walking down the
highway. He didn't appear to be in his right mind and after walking by our car Sarah reported it to 911. The rest of the night went on as normal and I had fun with Jon and his friends. It'll be sad
to see him go next week.
nontechnical 2007 Sep 12, 6:54I'm visiting
Wikipedia more and more recently but I always find myself reading the referenced webpages to get the full context of quotes and for
more info. Basically I use Wikipedia as an introduction and a place to look for links. For times when I'm looking for opinions rather than facts I like to use
Everything2. No need to check references there.
There's the much hyped
WikiScanner tool which reports who has been making anonymous (thought to be anonymous at the time anyway) edits to
Wikipedia. Its humorous and interesting in a few cases, but in general I think its stretching to say that because an IP address range is owned by a corporation and someone edited Wikipedia on an IP
in that range that you can attribute that edit to that corporation. If I edited Wikipedia I'd probably do a bit of that during my lunch break, but that wouldn't mean that Microsoft wants the
Wikipedia pages for Weird Al, Dave Risney, URIs, or whatever else I would edit on Wikipedia changed.
Also, via
Everything Is Miscellaneous I found the tool
Wiki Dashboard. Wiki Dashboard proxies
Wikipedia and on each page shows a timeline view at the top with who made edits and when. Its nice to see a gentle curve down from an initial spike at the beginning for topics you don't imagine to be
controversial. As the canonical test page for this service I looked up 'Elephant' the
Wikipedia page Stephen Colbert
suggested folks vandalize on his show on 2006 July 31st. If you look at the
Wiki Dashboard Elephant page you can see a very large spike
in edits on that date. That's all I need to see.
As a side note, for the link on Stephen Colbert suggesting folks vandalize Wikipedia I linked to a Wikipedia article. Is it inappropriate to provide info about Wikipedia being vandalized and thus
incorrect via a link to a Wikipedia article?
wikidashboard stephen-colbert wikality wikipedia wikiscanner colbert-report 2007 Jun 26, 1:14Onion report on DOT study suggesting honking to alleviate traffic
onion humor video car driving traffic honk 2007 Apr 13, 3:06A personal annual report. This makes me want to spend time recording data about each day so that I can see how may times I ate out, phone calls made, etc, etc. On second thought that sounds tedious.
art chart data design humor information personal portfolio report statistics visualization 2007 Apr 13, 2:52Shocking newsflash: Kids view adult content! OMG! FTA: "Commission investigators also found that youth access to violent fare had fallen since 2000, especially in video games. Only 42 percent of
unaccompanied young buyers were able to buy games rated M (f
article business censorship government rights violence videogames 2007 Apr 1, 11:00Security issue report concerning the ability to see sensitive information through transparent windows (April Fools Day).
humor security windows 2007 Mar 24, 1:18A poster of the portrait above Stephen Colbert's fireplace on the Colbert Report.
colbert shopping poster stephen-colbert humor 2007 Mar 5, 2:13Scott uses Fiddler to automatically inject a report on HTML errors into webpages as you visit them.
fiddler tool hack html standard software blog article 2007 Mar 1, 1:01Wired reported pays a service to make his fake blog popular on Digg.com
article digg fraud bribe 2006 Aug 31, 7:49And still more BitTorrent research. This paper examines the performance of a particular bittorrent session.
performance torrent p2p report reference 2006 Aug 31, 7:44More Torrent research. This is a paper describing performance of BitTorrent's block and peer selection algorithms.
p2p torrent report reference internet algorithm performance 2006 Jun 9, 5:15Unicode Consortium report on security considerations with text
unicode security reference encoding language 2005 Oct 10, 11:31Unicode Security Considerations (Unicode Technical Report)
unicode security reference internet idna 2003 Mar 1, 5:22Today will produce the Mardi Gras parade in my town. I haven't been the previous two years, but I'm considering it this time around. San Luis Obispo, as a college town, contains many teens and young
adults who enjoy occasional festivities accompanied with inebriation. San Luis Obispo, as relatively cheap beach front or at least near beach property, contains many vacationing elderly. As we all
know, voting increases proportionally with age and, as such, any person under the age of thirty in public after dark is arrested. Mardi Gras is yet another of the bouts in the battle between the
Youngsters and the Old-timers in the SLO ring. I will be very happy when this quarter is over. Chemistry may yet have a happy ending, but I don't know that Technical Writing can. I don't believe any
grade in that class would make me think, "I'm glad I spent all those weekends working on that report". The quarter's end will also mean I can devote some time to my attention starved
Polytope Tetris project. As a side note, I was tempted to, yet again, not write in the journal on account of my poor attitude tonight. However, a journal
of one entry does seems a bit slim.
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