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April Fool's joke backfires on ThinkGeek | | A.V. Club

2009 Apr 7, 5:29"In response to the overwhelming demand for this made-up product, ThinkGeek has posted the following: ATTN Tauntaun Fanatics! Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have decided to TRY and bring this to life."PermalinkCommentshumor starwars thinkgeek awesome

The Old New Thing : Clap and the filter graph claps with you

2009 Apr 7, 12:45"First, you started up the application and picked a video clip. The video clip just sat there. As you started clapping, the video clip started playing. If you clapped at about 80 beats per minute, the video clip played at its normal speed. If you clapped faster, the video clip ran faster. If you clapped slower, the video clip ran slower. If you stopped clapping, the video clip stopped. It was freaky cool. Totally useless, but freaky cool."PermalinkCommentshumor clap video raymond-chen filter-graph reference-clock

[whatwg] [WhatWG] Some additional API is needed for sites to see whether registerProtocolHandler() call was successful

2009 Apr 7, 12:14This makes plenty of sense, that a site should be able to check if a protocol handler exists for some URI scheme, but it'd be nice if this were some sort of declaritive fallback plan rather than having to do it all with script. "The HTML5 standard function registerProtocolHandler() should probably remain void as in standard, but WhatWG could invent yet another boolean protocolRegistered("area"), with the only argument (protocol name as string), to check whether a protocol is registered."PermalinkCommentshtml5 registerProtocolHandler html script url uri scheme protocol

Mark Finkle's Weblog - Firefox 3 - Web Protocol Handlers

2009 Apr 7, 12:12HTML5's registerProtocolHandler seems to come from a cool FireFox 3 feature: "With web protocol handlers, the web application can register the specific protocol it wants to handle. Firefox will then prompt the user to choose which of the registered applications (web or desktop) it should use to handle the action. Any protocol, real or imaginary, can be used - mailto: is only one example, webcal:, tel: and fax: are others."PermalinkCommentsfirefox uri scheme protocol mozilla html5 registerProtocolHandler

Platonic Ideals in Anathem and The Atrocity Archives

2009 Apr 7, 11:58
The Atrocity ArchivesThe Jennifer MorgueAnathem

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.

PermalinkCommentsatrocity archives neal stephenson jennifer morgue plato bob howard anathem

Thoughts on registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5

2009 Apr 7, 9:02

I'm a big fan of the concept of registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5 and in FireFox 3, but not quite the implementation. From a high level, it allows web apps to register themselves as handlers of an URL scheme so for (the canonical) example, GMail can register for the mailto URL scheme. I like the concept:

However, the way its currently spec'ed out I don't like the following: PermalinkCommentsurl template registerprotocolhandler firefox technical url scheme protocol boring html5 uri urn

Subterranean Press - Fiction: Missile Gap by Charles Stross

2009 Apr 6, 10:47"It's 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing - and the Earth is flat. It's been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped."PermalinkCommentscharles-stross scifi read fiction free literature

Sunlight Labs: Blog - What is this Don't Click business?

2009 Apr 5, 5:24A cross-site request forgery issue in Twitter posts to your Twitter account for you if you're logged in. Be careful what your RESTful APIs look like.PermalinkCommentsvia:swannman security twitter xss

s i x t h s e n s e - a wearable gestural interface (MIT Media Lab)

2009 Apr 3, 11:40"'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information." The page is a lot easier to read with styling turned off. Actually, skip the text just watch the TED video.PermalinkCommentsvisualization design research mit hci mobile interactive ted

The Old New Thing : The history of calling conventions, part 5: amd64

2009 Apr 1, 6:19"The first four parameters to a function are passed in rcx, rdx, r8 and r9. Any further parameters are pushed on the stack. Furthermore, space for the register parameters is reserved on the stack, in case the called function wants to spill them; this is important if the function is variadic."PermalinkCommentsamd64 calling-convention debug x64 msdn raymond-chen assembly

RFC 5514 - IPv6 over Social Networks

2009 Apr 1, 10:42Lol at actual Facebook app that does IPv6 over Facebook. "...most network users are not aware of what IPv6 is or are even afraid by IPv6 because it is unknown. On the other hand, Social Networks (like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) are well-known by users and the usage of those networks is huge... With IPv6 over Social Network (IPoSN): * Every user is a router with at least one loopback interface; * Every friend or connection between users will be used as a point-to-point link... A working prototype has been developed by the author and is freely available: IPv6 over Facebook Social Network [IPv6overFacebook]."PermalinkCommentshumor social network ipv6 ip iposn facebook ietf rfc

New Dollar Sign Proposed by Congress to Reflect Economic Conditions | Typophile

2009 Apr 1, 9:32'To help stem the downward spiral of the United States economy Congress has proposed a new dollar symbol. "Updating fonts on the world's computers and devices would be a huge economic stimulus" said one representative after a late night session of the newly formed House Subcommittee - Font Economic Stimulus Technology Relief (FESTR). "The dollar is a shadow of its former self and the new design reflects this."'PermalinkCommentsart design humor font dollar-sign typography government economics

Remixes of the paranoid London police "anti-terror"/suspect your neighbours posters - Boing Boing

2009 Mar 26, 2:24"Yesterday's remix challenge -- to mock the ridiculous new "anti-terrorism" posters the London police have put up that tell you to spy on your neighbors -- was a smashing success. I've collected the 25 or so that came in to date below". I enjoyed: "A bomb won't go off here because people tend to be quite nice really." "Terribly convenient, isn't it? Incriminating evidence left right out where you'll spot it and call it in..." "A bomb won't go off here because the true likelihood of you being the victim of a terror attack is really very low, especially when compared to other causes of death or injury."PermalinkCommentshumor politics poster paranoia security via:boingboing.comments photoshop privacy

Information Decoration

2009 Mar 25, 4:03"...we can look at the contemporary screen virus as a transitional phase - a growing pain, if you will, of the information age. Tiling our environment with screens is an extremely literal, and on top of that rather unimaginative, way to introduce virtuality into the physical world: simply piling it on where seamless integration was what was wanted."PermalinkCommentsvia:infosthetics visualization information architecture culture design art

Nintendo GDC keynote: Wii Storage, new Zelda, world domination - Ars Technica

2009 Mar 25, 1:03Finally more storage for all those virtual console games I download: "What is going to interest gamers, however, is the expanded support for storage on the Nintendo Wii. The new update for the Wii Menu allows you to download and launch content straight from an SD card, and there is now support for SDHC cards, meaning you can cheaply add as much storage to your system as you'd like. A game was shown launching from a memory stick, with only a short loading time."PermalinkCommentsnintendo wii videogame storage

Warp Whistle - Chunnel

2009 Mar 25, 11:03Mario blows the warp whistle and finds himself in Chicago.PermalinkCommentsmario video videogames warp-whistle matthew-dominick via:boingboing

GraphML Primer

2009 Mar 23, 6:19"GraphML Primer is a non-normative document intended to provide an easily readable description of the GraphML facilities, and is oriented towards quickly understanding how to create GraphML documents."PermalinkCommentsgraphml graph format xml howto reference w3c

GRcade.com - View topic - BLH's tour of Chernobyl. Hello Digg/Reddit/world!!

2009 Mar 23, 9:41"So heres my trip to Chernobyl in pictures." Nice photo of the tree growing through the floor next to the chair. The whole set is like Fallout 3 but there's plants. Didn't realize plants could do well in such a situation.PermalinkCommentsvia:swannman photo history science nuclear russia chernobyl

Command-line Fu - The best UNIX commands on the web

2009 Mar 23, 9:35Ohhh some nice ones in here. "Command-Line-Fu is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again."PermalinkCommentsshell unix linux cli howto tips via:swannman

Outline View Internet Explorer Extension

2009 Mar 23, 8:13

I've made another extension for IE8, Outline View, which gives you a side bar in IE that displays an outline of the current page and lets you make intrapage bookmarks.

The outline is generated based on the heading tags in the document (e.g. h1, h2, etc), kind of like what W3C's Semantic data extractor tool displays for an outline. So if the page doesn't use heading tags the way the HTML spec intended or just sticks img tags in them, then the outline doesn't look so hot. On a page that does use headings as intended though it looks really good. For instance a section from the HTML 4 spec shows up quite nicely and I find its actually useful to be able to jump around to the different sections. Actually, I've been surprised going to various blogs how well the outline view is actually working -- I thought a lot more webdevs would be abusing their heading tags.

I've also added intrapage bookmarks. When you make a text selection and clear it, that selected text is added as a temporary intrapage bookmark which shows up in the correct place in the outline. You can navigate to the bookmark or right click to make it permanent. Right now I'm storing the permanent intrapage bookmarks in IE8's new per-domain DOM storage because I wanted to avoid writing code to synchronize a cross process store of bookmarks, it allowed me to play with the DOM storage a bit, and the bookmarks will get cleared appropriately when the user clears their history via the control panel.

PermalinkCommentstechnical intrapage bookmark boring html ie8 ie extension
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