2007 Dec 26, 5:45Miscellaneous thoughts I had that would have been relevant many months ago:
- A History Channel program had a reenactment of a 1920's archaeologist discovering a stone tablet, sending the tablet to a warehouse, etc. all behind the voice over giving the dry facts. The
reenactor hammed it up a bit and I would have rather had clips from Indiana Jones in the background. If they're already not showing me the archaeologist who discovered the tablet, they may as well
show me one who will be entertaining.
- There are many parodies of the Get a Mac ads and so when I saw a UK Get a Mac ad I payed attention to see what the joke was. I was
disappointed by the 'parody' because it was a conventional Get a Mac ad with different actors. Apple localized their Get a Mac ad campaign in this fashion in the UK and in Japan. I've got a
playlist of the US, UK, and Japan's version of the Piechart ad. Ranking the lovable bumblingness of the PC I give the order
UK, Japan, then US and ranking the sumgness of the Mac I give the order UK, US, then Japan. But don't take my word for it, view
the ads for yourself.
-
Yahoo Pipes lets users generate an RSS feed altering service that runs on Yahoo's server using a GUI. This is very different from Microsoft's Popfly which allows users to component-ize and share javascript utilities that run client side on a webbrowser. Both have the awesome power of buzzword associations
like 'Web 2.0' and 'Mashup' but in my mind Yahoo Pipes is for server side RSS feed modification and Popfly is about client side javascript webpages. And neither will allow me to run an arbitrary
XSLT =).
popfly apple personal history-channel indiana-jones pipes mac technical microsoft mashup yahoo nontechnical 2007 Dec 23, 8:46Banksy replaces Paris Hilton CDs with his own satirical music and cover art in stores.
art article culture graffiti hack humor music parody prank streetart paris-hilton bbc 2007 Dec 20, 7:15Another profile on another site that I keep track of with wonderful del.icio.us.
me proldfile web 2007 Dec 19, 3:39Article on REST vs WS webservices archs. Can be a starting point.
david-chappell article blog rest web webservices architecture soap ws 2007 Dec 11, 12:31
I wanted to give a brief update on what's been going on for me this weekend and the previous two.
Two weekends ago Sarah and I went down to Santa Cruz for a long weekend and a belated Thanksgiving. I have yet to sort through the photos but Sarah has already put up the
photos from our California trip. There's some nice shots from the Monterey Bay Aquarium in there and the place where we
stayed. It was a good trip and I'll write more about it at some point in the future.
This past weekend Sarah and I went bowling with Eric and Jane and other friends. And no bowling experience is complete without a DJ and black lights. Surprisingly my work shirt looked great in the
blacklight.
This coming weekend Sarah and I will stay at the MGM in Las Vegas where I'll meet up with college friends I haven't seen in a while. Previously the only non-gambling thing I did in Vegas was buffets
and
the Star Trek Experience (I'm cool) but this time we'll see some more shows which should be fun.
lasvegas personal bowling california weekend nontechnical 2007 Dec 6, 12:24The spec for FeedSync which allows for synchronizing RSS and Atom files among multiple machines.
sse rss atom feedsync feed specification microsoft 2007 Nov 28, 2:09Valve shows off their cool visualizations of stats they generated from folks playing HL2E2 including heat maps of player deaths by level.
visualization statistics hl2 game games valve development 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 19, 3:47I really appreciate that
the first gen Zune's get the new Zune's
firmware and software. I like the updated Zune software personally because its faster and simpler, has better podcast support, and the whole social thing has is on their website now. So, I guess
I like the software because it has new features that should have been there in the first place.
The social thing is like a Zune social network. It uses your Xbox Live friends to seed your Zune friends list, lets you do the expected social network stuff, lets you preview songs, and unlike first
gen Zunes which required face to face time with other Zune owners, allows you to send songs to people. It also lets you display your recently played tracks and your favorite tracks, similar to what
Last.FM has, via a
Zune Card. I like the Zune Card from a technical perspective because it
separates
the
Zune Card view, written in flash from the
User Card data which is in XML. I hope
they intend to keep the XML available via this UserCard Service because I think there's potential to easily do cool things.
microsoft technical music zune social 2007 Nov 15, 4:03Colossus set to compete against modern PC in decrypting Nazi messages in promotion of museum.
bbc article computer cryptography encryption hardware history turing 2007 Nov 14, 2:56News on recent privacy related matters with social websites and Donald Kerr's redefinition of privacy. Lots of good links.
privacy anonymity blog post article government politics donald-kerr steven-bellovin 2007 Nov 13, 8:47
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Cadbury yawns.
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video 2007 Nov 13, 8:45
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Cadbury hears something, slowly.
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video 2007 Nov 12, 1:15How to turn off the PC speaker in Windows.
audio tips howto pc-speaker sound windows beep setupnewcomputer 2007 Nov 12, 12:52Program that generates tags for VIM.
c++ vim programming syntax tag tags ctags windows linux opensource 2007 Nov 9, 2:38Jon's leaving for Germany today which of course is sad. On Wednesday, Jon came over and we watched
Hackers. There's a few things you probably wouldn't
notice without repeated viewings of the film:
- Phantom Phreak is arrested and you never hear what happens to him. This is unlike Joey who is arrested but appears in the final hacking scene.
- Marc Anthony appears in the movie as a secret service agent.
- Everyone in the movie loves Coke.
- Hackers is the greatest movie of all time: it represents the pinnacle of human artistic achievement.
In similar ex college roommate news, I'm going to California over the weekend for Angie and Kane's goodbye party. They're heading for Australia for like a year or something. Angie's got a
blog about her travels but rarely seems to update it. I'll get to see Carissa and Elijah there too, almost completing the ex college roommate
experience. To avoid confusion I should mention that unlike everyone else I know, Carissa and Elijah aren't leaving the country.
personal nontechnical 2007 Nov 7, 1:40Interview with BBC's News Director Richard Sambrook mostly on the topic of news medias role on the Internet.
david-weinberger blog bbc interview news media richard-sambrook wired audio 2007 Nov 7, 9:41Algorithm to tell you which blogs to read to be the most up to date. Graphs which blogs aggregate from other blogs.
information graph network news blog 2007 Nov 6, 2:46Video of TED lectures. TED is (from Wikipedia) "... an annual conference held in Monterey, California and recently, semi-annually in other cities around the world. TED describes itself as a "group of
remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of inc
analysis blog video visualization internet social technology ted business news ideas conference 2007 Oct 31, 4:41ONN piece on ninja parade.
humor onion news video ninja
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