os page 43 - Dave's Blog

Search
My timeline on Mastodon

Bits Up!: DNS Prefetching for Firefox

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."PermalinkCommentsdns dns-prefetching html performance networking firefox mozilla technical

Controlling DNS prefetching - MDC

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."PermalinkCommentsdns firefox mozilla networking performance dns-prefetching technical

Free OCR software? You may already have it... - Jon Galloway

2009 Jun 20, 9:39If you have Office installed you may have an OCR library sitting on your hard drive just waiting to be used via C#...PermalinkCommentsocr microsoft office .net automation scanner camera windows technical

Schneier on Security: Fraud on eBay

2009 Jun 19, 3:27You must wonder if Bruce Schneier is having trouble selling his laptop just because he's Bruce Schneier and he announced his sale on his blog. I thought his description was funny though: "But I still want to sell the computer, and I am pissed off at what is essentially a denial-of-service attack." A scam or attack to you or me is at worst a DoS to Bruce Schneier.PermalinkCommentsbruce-schneier ebay fraud security dos

Linking to or Embedding a Portion of a Video

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.

PermalinkCommentshulu technical media fragment wg url youtube video html5 uri fragment

Mostly Moved Into New House

2009 Jun 19, 8:07

New House ExteriorThe weekend before the previous, Sarah and I moved our belongings into the new house and spent a lot of time packing and unpacking, and now we're officially living there (interested Facebook friends can find my new address or just ask me). The Saturday of the previous weekend Sarah's family came over for a half house warming and half Sarah's birthday celebration which was fun and served to force us to do more unpacking and forced me to take trips to Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc. On Sunday, Sarah and I went out to her favorite restaurant and she opened her gifts that I had to hide to keep her from opening before her birthday. Happy Birthday Sarah!

While at Home Depot I had trouble finding what I was actually looking for, but I did find everything I needed to terminate the Cat5e cables that are wired in the house. Each room has a wall plate with two RJ45 sockets, both sockets wired to Cat5e cable. One of the cables per plate was already hooked up to a standard phone service punchdown board and the other cables per plate were all hanging unterminated next to the punchdown board. So now I've terminated them all with RJ45 connectors and hooked them up to my hub, wireless router, cable modem, etc. I had the same sort of fun setting all that up as I did playing with model train sets as a child. Hopefully no therapy will be required to figure out why that is.

PermalinkCommentspersonal2 train address sarah house new-house birthday

YouTube - "Weird Al" Yankovic - Craigslist

2009 Jun 16, 10:41Multiple friends on Facebook posted "Weird Al" Yankovic's Craigslist. Obviously a great topic for a Weird Al song: plenty of room for rhyming arbitrary nouns.PermalinkCommentsvideo humor weird-al doors music music-video youtube psychadelic

The Simpsons - Soviet Union - Treason season starts early - on BoreMe

2009 Jun 15, 10:06Took me a while to find this clip. Fox has been hard at work on YouTube getting videos redacted. Zombie Lenin says "Must, Crush, Capitalism!"PermalinkCommentshumor simpsons soviet-union tv video history russia lenin economics capitalism

Video: Project Natal invades Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

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."PermalinkCommentsvideo humor videogame natal xbox360 jimmy-fallon

Mao RTFM vectorize by ~cmenghi on deviantART

2009 Jun 12, 12:17Propaganda poster styled RTFM.PermalinkCommentshumor tshirt mao rtfm internet art propaganda

OpenSearchDescriptionToHTML Tool

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".

PermalinkCommentstechnical xml wolframalpha opensearchdescriptiontohtml xslt opensearch

YouTube - Iain Lee Hosts Celebrity Soup

2009 Jun 4, 10:22"Iain Lee Hosts Celebrity Soup". Its weird because it sounds and is paced just like The Soup except everyone has a British accent.PermalinkCommentsiain-lee the-soup tv england british soup

Mix an Exploding Drink - Wired How-To Wiki

2009 Jun 4, 3:14You've seen the YouTube clips demonstrating the riotous effect of dropping Mentos into Diet Coke. Why not turn the fizzy fun into an epic party prank of your own? Here's our recipe for a little cocktail we call the Manhattan Project.PermalinkCommentsvia:boingboing mentos meme wired humor coke soda howto alcohol drink for:hellosarah

E309: New Super Mario Bros Wii, the trailer

2009 Jun 3, 3:40The New Super Mario Bros for the Wii looks cool. I always wanted the multiplayer featured here in the previous games.PermalinkCommentsfor:hellosarah mario wii nintendo video videogame

The Artvertiser

2009 Jun 2, 12:51"The Artvertiser is an urban, hand-held, augmented-reality project exploring on-site substitution of advertising content for the purposes of exhibiting art." There's some videos on the site of their prototype software. I've got a similar idea I want to try with my G1.PermalinkCommentsvideo art design advertising aug augmented-reality

E309: the 7 things you need to know about Microsoft's press conference - Offworld

2009 Jun 1, 3:26Some unbelievable stuff in this video for future Xbox features. And I write 'unbelievable' as in, I find it difficult to believe the 3d motion sensing 'you are the controller' stuff would work as well as it does in the demo video. The rest of the described features seem practical and sound neat.PermalinkCommentsblog microsoft video videogames xbox e3

Parents at Eileen's Party

2009 Jun 1, 2:30

sequelguy posted a photo:

Parents at Eileen's Party

PermalinkCommentscalifornia family parents eileensparty

Sarah and I at Eileen's Party

2009 Jun 1, 2:30

sequelguy posted a photo:

Sarah and I at Eileen's Party

PermalinkCommentscalifornia me sarah eileensparty

Chairs and View at Eileen's Party

2009 Jun 1, 2:30

sequelguy posted a photo:

Chairs and View at Eileen's Party

PermalinkCommentscalifornia eileensparty

Lanterns at Night at Eileen's Party

2009 Jun 1, 2:30

sequelguy posted a photo:

Lanterns at Night at Eileen's Party

PermalinkCommentscalifornia eileensparty
Older EntriesNewer Entries Creative Commons License Some rights reserved.