2009 Jun 25, 1:53"The document provides practical best practices related to specifying the language of content that HTML content authors can use to ensure that their HTML is easily adaptable for an international
audience. These are best practices that are best addressed from the start of content development if unnecessary costs and resource issues are to be avoided later on."
language i18n internationalization html w3c xml reference xhtml technical 2009 Jun 25, 1:51"By following this tutorial you should be able to: ... recognize the available alternatives for declaring language, and how they differ ..."
w3c internationalization language html xml xhtml i18n tutorial technical 2009 Jun 22, 3:28Details on Firefox's DNS prefetching: "The Firefox implementation takes this approach one step further than just pre-resolving anchor href hostnames. It uses the prefetch logic on URLs that are being
included in the current document. By this I mean that it uses the prefetch logic on things like images, css, and jscript that are being loaded right away, in addition to anchor links which might be
clicked on at a slightly later time."
dns dns-prefetching html performance networking firefox mozilla technical 2009 Jun 22, 3:12HTML5's mime-sniffing is getting moved to an IETF doc: "Many web servers supply incorrect Content-Type headers with their HTTP responses. In order to be compatible with these servers, user agents
must consider the content of HTTP responses as well as the Content-Type header when determining the effective media type of the response. This document describes an algorithm for determining the
effective media type of HTTP responses that balances security and compatibility considerations."
mime mime-sniffing ietf http w3c html5 technical 2009 Jun 22, 2:55"To speed up browsing, Google Chrome resolves domain names before the user navigates, typically while the user is viewing a web page." In addition to noting what and how they do it, and how web devs
can control it, they give a few stats on how much it helps.
google dns chrome dns-prefetching browser networking performance technical 2009 Jun 22, 2:53"Firefox 3.5 performs DNS prefetching. This is a feature by which Firefox proactively performs domain name resolution on both links that the user may choose to follow as well as URLs for items
referenced by the document, including images, CSS, JavaScript, and so forth."
dns firefox mozilla networking performance dns-prefetching technical 2009 Jun 20, 9:43How to use the WIA APIs in C#. WIA is Windows API to get images from scanners and cameras. And, as I found out, if you want to use the API in PowerShell try '$deviceManager = new-object -ComObject
WIA.DeviceManager'
video scanner api wia csharp howto programming camera image photo .net webcam technical 2009 Jun 19, 10:12
I'm excited by HTML5's video tag as are plenty of other people. Once that
comes about and once media fragments are adopted, linking to or embedding a portion of a video will be as easy as using the correct
fragment on your URL thanks to the Media Fragments WG who has been hard at work since the last time I looked at fragments.
However, until that work is embraced by browsers, embedding portions of videos will continue to require work specific to the site from which you are embedding the video. On the YouTube blog they
wrote about how to "link to the best parts in your videos", using a fragment syntax like '#t=1m15s' to start playback of the associated
video at 1 minute and 15 seconds. Of course if you want to embed part of a Hulu video it will be different. Although I haven't found an authoritative source describing the URL syntax to use, you
can follow Hulu's video guide on linking to part of a video and note how the URL changes as you adjust the
slider on the time-line. It looks like their syntax for linking to a Hulu page is to add '?c=[start time in seconds](:[end time in seconds])' with the colon and end time optional in order to link
to a portion of a video. And the syntax for embedding appears to be "http://www.hulu.com/embed/.../[start time in seconds](/[end time in
seconds])" again with the end time optional.
For more sites, check out the Media Fragments WG's list of existing applications' proprietary fragmenting
schemes.
hulu technical media fragment wg url youtube video html5 uri fragment 2009 Jun 15, 4:46"This was such a fun project - this is what users of Internet Explorer 6 see when they visit Momentile." Funny image. There's just two things I don't like about this: (a) it makes me feel sorry for
IE6 when the only thing anybody should feel in relation to IE6 is the urge to upgrade to IE8 and (b) I hate it when websites get all preachy and try to convert you to another browser.
humor webdesign ie6 ie browser comic 2009 Jun 12, 12:37"Last night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Microsoft's Kudo Tsunoda brought along his baby, Project Natal, and let Jimmy Fallon, John Krasinski, and Stephen Moyer go to town. The footage has made
its way onto Hulu and while these are pretty much the same demos for Ricochet and Burnout Paradise that we saw at E3 last week, they're still impressive."
video humor videogame natal xbox360 jimmy-fallon 2009 Jun 10, 3:36
I've made an OpenSearchDescriptionToHTML XSLT that given an OpenSearch description file produces
HTML that describes that file, lets you install it, or search with it. For example, here's a Google OpenSearch description that uses my
OpenSearchDescriptionToHTML XSLT.
I had just created an OpenSearch description for WolframAlpha at work and was going about the process of adding another install link to my search provider
page so that I could install it. Thinking about it, I realized I could apply an XSLT to the OpenSearch description XML to produce the HTML automatically so I wouldn't have to modify additional
documents everytime I create and want to install a new OpenSearch description. While I was in there writing the XSLT I figure why not let the user try out searching with the OpenSearch description
file too. And lastly I made the XSLT apply to itself to produce HTML describing its own usage.
Incidentally, I added WolframAlpha at work to replace my FileInfo search provider for the purposes of searching for information about
particular Unicode characters. For instance, look at WolframAlpha's lovely output for this search for "Bopomofo zh".
technical xml wolframalpha opensearchdescriptiontohtml xslt opensearch 2009 Jun 10, 12:17"Bruce pointed out in his return email that while the fraud pattern was a good match for escrow, the transaction size wasn't: since the item exchanged in the eBay transaction he highlighted was sold
for only $500, the price of an escrow agent would have been hard to justify. He's right."
blog security economics article bruce-schneier Bob-Blakley ebay 2009 Jun 4, 11:08"For our latest mission, Agent Lathan gave out 2,000 high fives by standing next to a subway escalator during the morning rush. Five additional agents spread out along the adjacent stairs, holding
signs that prepared commuters for the upcoming high five fun."
humor improv-everywhere high-five escalator video youtube nyc subway 2009 Jun 2, 4:00"A notice was sent out by the real estate department with the provocative subject line Campus notification - Building 7: Marking Boring Locations."
humor english language boring 2009 Jun 1, 11:07
When I heard that
Live Search is now Bing one of my initial thoughts was how'd they get that domain
name given
the unavailability of pronouncable four letter .COM domain names. Well, the names been used in the past.
Here now, via the
Wayback Machine is a brief, somewhat speculative, and ultimately anticlimactic
history
of bing.com:
-
2003 July: The first archived version of bing.com features "bing! is a small device (e.g., possibly even a small
Band-Aid(R)-like sticker!) that vibrates when a person's cell phone rings." I can't recall 2003 cell phones, were they big enough to require this device?
-
2004 August: Site for the same device is rewritten and looks much better, IMHO.
-
2006 June: The domain is now parked by easyDNS. I guess the "bing!" device didn't work out?
-
2006 November: Its now "BING*" and they won't say what they're working on ("we're still in stealth mode") but they are
hiring C#/.NET developers.
-
2007 January: And they're gone. Without even exiting stealth mode. Too bad, I liked their logo. Their domain is now for
sale...
-
2007 February: Looks like EasyMail buys the domain and offers a physical mailing service in Australia: "By simply clicking
a button on your computer, mail is beamed electronically to a bing post office. Your mail is automatically printed, folded, enveloped and dispatched into the Australia Post network the very same
day."
-
Present: Now its the new home for Live Search of course.
The new name reminds me of the show Friends. Also, I hope they get a new favicon - I don't enjoy the stretched 'b' nor its color scheme.
microsoft technical domain history search archive dns bing 2009 May 31, 8:29"When on a hot summer's day you buy a carbonated beverage to quench your thirst, how do you order it? Do you ask for a soda, a pop or something else? That question lay at the basis of an article in
the Journal of English Linguistics (Soda or Pop?, #24, 1996) and of a map, showing the regional variation in American English of the names given to that type of drink."
map language visualization statistics english culture soda coke for:hellosarah 2009 May 26, 11:28"But Data.gov is different. It is primarily for machines, not people, at least as a first step. It is a catalog of various sets of data from government agencies. And the idea is to offer the data in
one of several standardized formats, ranging from a simple text file that can be read by a spreadsheet program to the XML format widely used these days for the exchange of information between Web
services. Other data is presented in formats that are meant to feed into mapping programs."
data nytimes xml government 2009 May 25, 3:02
Checking out at a grocery store to which I rarely go, the cashier asks me if I want an
Albertson's card. I respond sure and she hands me the form on which I give up my personal information. I ask if I need to fill this out now, and she says yeah and it will only take two minutes,
which surprised me because at QFC they just hand me a new card and send me on my way. I fill in my phone number as the first ten digits of pi so I don't have to worry about getting phone calls but
its something I can remember next time I'm there and don't bring the card.
I turn to leave and the cashier asks me is that a '759' or '159' in my phone number. I stop for a second because I only know the digits as a sequence from the start and pause long enough reciting
it in my head that its clear its not my phone number. And she calls me out on it: "Is that your real phone number?" I sigh, "No, does it have to be? Are you going to call me?" "Yeah," she says,
"I'll call you." (ha ha) "Well I'll try entering this number," she says doubting the computer will accept the fake phone number. "On the number's already registered," she says, "So you already had
a card." "No," says the manager who had walked up during for this exchange, "It means someone else used that same number." So the moral of the story is, try your fake phone number before trying to
use it to get a new card.
personal2 pi albertsons 2009 May 23, 4:45
In honor of Google Chrome's recent v2 release and because I read they don't make too big a deal about version numbers, I thought to create a graph of browser major version numbers over time.
Yeah that's not too useful of a graph. I got the release dates from Wikipedia of course.
As you can see from the graph, Netscape and Opera are leading all other browsers in terms of major version number. The other browsers really need to get on that.
browser technical boring google ie graph 2009 May 13, 10:35In my first linear algebra book they had examples of linear tranformations applied to an image of a cartoon sheep. The fist example was a shear mapping.
sheep humor amazon mechanicalturk via:swannman
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