2009 Apr 23, 5:22"Network Monitor 3.3 is a protocol analyzer. It allows you to capture network traffic, view and analyze it. Version 3.3 is an update and replaces Network Monitor 3.2. Network Monitor 3.x is a
complete overhaul of the previous Network Monitor 2.x version."microsoftnetworktrafficnetmonfreemsdnwindows
2009 Apr 23, 2:22Review of mime sniffing based XSS attacks with recommended protections for both web sites and browsers. Also, surprising to me since I rarely see it in this sort of a paper, thought and stats on the
compat. affects of their recommended changes for browsers. Very happy to see that in there!websecurityiebrowserxsssniffmimefirefoxchromesafarihtmlhtml5
2009 Apr 23, 1:35"This e-mail is an attempt to give a relatively concise yet reasonably complete overview of non-Unicode character sets and encodings for 'Chinese characters', excluding those which are not supported
by at least one of the four browsers IE, Safari, Firefox and Opera (henceforth 'all browsers'), and tentatively avoiding technical details which are out of scope for HTML5 unless they are important
to gain a general understanding of the relevant issues."htmlhtml5iso-2022charsetencodingcharacterunicodecjk
2009 Apr 21, 1:28Fallout 3's May 5th DLC removes old ending, adds new quests, new levels, new perks. Sounds good! "In a nutshell, Broken Steel will remove the game's ending entirely, with Bethesda's Pete Hines saying
simply to fans that called for an open-ended resolution, "We got the idea." Players will still have to make the final choice, but following that climax the game will continue, presenting new epilogue
quests, another 10 levels to gain, and new perks, monsters and achievements to keep the climb interesting."gamevideogamenewsfallout3fallout
2009 Apr 20, 5:49Some awesome quotes from this video. Really need to watch the whole thing through though to fully experience the humor. "This is the most impressive business card I've ever seen. Its mine." On the
topic of its non-standard size: "It doesn't fit in a rolodex because it doesn't belong in a rolodex." More from the comments:humorvideovia:boingboingviralbusiness-card
I've made a QR Encode accelerator around Google Chart's QR code generator. QR codes are 2D bar-codes that can store (among other things) URLs and have good support on mobile
phones. The accelerator I've written lets you generate a QR code for a selected link and view it in the preview window. In combination with the ZXing
bar-code scanner app for my Android cellphone, its easy for me to right click on a link in IE8 on my desktop PC, hover over the QR Encode accelerator to have the link's associated QR code
displayed, and then with my phone read that QR code to open my phone's browser to the URL contained inside. Its much easier to browse around in the comfort of my desktop and only send particular
URLs to my cellphone as necessary.
2009 Apr 13, 10:17If the face drawn onto the robot hadn't been as cute I doubt as many people would have helped =). "Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they
encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to
reach their goal."tweenbotvideosocialmaprobotcutenycsocietyhumor
2009 Apr 12, 6:36"MonasticXML.org is a look at XML from a different angle, focusing on what markup is best at rather than what markup can do to solve a particular problem or set of problems. While XML is powerful,
developers seem insistent on using XML in ways which seem convenient for a moment but which cause much greater trouble down the line to both their projects and to markup itself."xmlhowtotips
After getting this all working I've placed the result in two places: (1) I've updated the xsltproc Meddler script to include this XSLT and an
XML file to install it as a search provider - although you'll need to edit the XML to include your own Flickr API key. (2) I've created a service for this so you can just install the Flickr search provider if you're interested in having the functionality and don't care about the implementation. Additionally, to the
search provider I've added accelerator preview support to show the Flickr slideshow which I think looks snazzy.
Doing a quick search for this it looks like there's at least one other such implementation, but mine has the distinction of being done through XSLT which I provide, updated XML namespaces to work
with the released version of IE8, and I made it so you know its good.
2009 Apr 9, 8:56Someone implemented the Ironic Sans artificial sundial clock concept! "Last year David Friedman published on his blog Ironic Sans an interesting design concept for something that he called The
Bulbdial Clock. That's like a sundial, but with better resolution-- not just an hour hand, but a minute and second hand as well, each given as a shadow from moving artificial light sources (bulbs).
We've recently put together a working bulbdial clock, with an implementation somewhat different from that of the original concept."howtodiyclockledsundialvia:swannman
2009 Apr 8, 10:40A good gift for a particular subset of people I know. "Also has commentary from Limoncelli and some other internet gods. Worth many geek points - full of lulz!!"giftwishlistbookietfreferencerfchumor
2009 Apr 7, 5:26"According to an exclusive interview Penn gave to Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello, he's been asked to serve in the Obama administration as as the associate director of the office of public
liaison." Spoilers in the link.kal-pennhousetvpolitics
2009 Apr 7, 1:59A URL shortening service that tries to find the normal form (which hopefully translates to shorter in length) of a URL via
via:connollytinyurlcanonicalnormalizeuriurl
2009 Apr 7, 1:30I really dislike how IE deals with non-US-ASCII in URLs. I should write up a post on what exactly IE does with non-US-ASCII characters in URLs. "Just like IRIs the URL is mapped to a URI using UTF-8.
Except for the query component of the URL (the bit after the question mark). Here for legacy reasons the encoding of the document is used instead. Except if the encoding of the document is UTF-16, in
which case UTF-8 is used. Effectively, using non-ASCII characters in URLs in documents not encoded as UTF-8 or UTF-16 will give you surprising results, to say the least. Yay for browsers!"httpencodinghtml5urluriunicodeiri
2009 Apr 7, 1:13A sort of vertical cross section of an overview of what the web should look like from HTTP & URIs to GRDDL & RDF. Oh, and there's a pretty graph at the bottom. "This finding describes how
document formats, markup conventions, attribute values, and other data formats can be designed to facilitate the deployment of self-describing, Web-grounded Web content."webw3cxmlhtmlhttpsemanticwebmicroformatsxhtmlatomgrddlrdfardf
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.
2009 Apr 7, 10:04Aggregation of feeds concerning HTML5 including Ian Hickson's, Planet Mozilla, Planet WebKit, the IE Blog, the WHATWG blog, etc etc.w3chtml5htmlblogfeeddaily
I've made a QR Encode accelerator around Google Chart's QR code generator. QR codes are 2D bar-codes that can store (among other things) URLs and have good support on mobile
phones. The accelerator I've written lets you generate a QR code for a selected link and view it in the preview window. In combination with the ZXing
bar-code scanner app for my Android cellphone, its easy for me to right click on a link in IE8 on my desktop PC, hover over the QR Encode accelerator to have the link's associated QR code
displayed, and then with my phone read that QR code to open my phone's browser to the URL contained inside. Its much easier to browse around in the comfort of my desktop and only send particular
URLs to my cellphone as necessary.
A while ago I promised to say how an xsltproc Meddler script would be useful and the general answer is
its useful for hooking up a client application that wants data from the web in a particular XML format and the data is available on the web but in another XML format. The specific case for this
post is a Flickr Search service that includes IE8 Visual Search Suggestions. IE8
wants the Visual Search Suggestions XML format and Flickr gives out search data in their Flickr web API XML format.
Some rights reserved