2008 Oct 13, 2:35"The robotics community outdid itself once again at DARPA's 2007 Urban Challenge. This contest featured all the challenges of the original Grand Challenge, along with a few new ones: the vehicles
navigated a simulated urban environment and were required to interact with human-driven vehicles while obeying all traffic laws. Six teams successfully completed the course, with Boss, a car
developed at Carnegie Mellon, claiming the prize." Sure, sure but when will they fly?
article robot car science technology transportation ai 2008 Oct 13, 2:21Neat geolocation API for web apps: "Mozilla Labs has announced the availability of Geode, an experimental Firefox extension that implements the W3C Geolocation Specification. Geode provides an early
preview of the same location-aware functionality that will be included in both Fennec and Firefox 3.1."
geolocation geo w3c mozilla javascript web 2008 Oct 10, 1:43A blog comment included the phrase 'hard-core conlangers' which at first glance sounds dirty, then based on the context I thought it was made up, but of course Wikipedia has the actual answer: "A
conlanger ... is person who invents conlangs (constructed languages)."
language klingon nerd wikipedia conlang 2008 Oct 10, 1:32Xkcd providing answers to questions that I forgot I had, like what is the answer to the lawn-sprinkler question from Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman. "Feynman used to tell a story about a simple
lawn-sprinkler physics problem. The nifty thing about the problem was that the answer was immediately obvious, but to some people it was immediately obvious one way and to some it was immediately
obvious the other. (For the record, the answer to Feynman problem, which he never tells you in his book, was that the sprinkler doesn't move at all. Moreover, he only brought it up to start an
argument to act as a diversion while he seduced your mother in the other room.)"
humor feynman comic blog xkcd physics science math 2008 Oct 10, 10:26Sounds like Wayne Coyne, of the Flaming Lips has a home like you might expect if you've ever seen one of their concerts.
music via:boingboing architecture home flaming-lips wayne-coyne 2008 Oct 7, 2:49
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Cadbury the bunny takes a moment from hiding under the chair to eat some mint. She comes out just to grab some mint and then goes back under the chair repeatedly for two
minutes.
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Views: 328
1 ratings
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Time: 02:01
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More in Pets & Animals
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video 2008 Oct 7, 12:21
Last Thursday I saw a bunch of college friends that I hadn't seen in a while, despite all of us working at Microsoft, and Saul and Ciera who were visiting. We had dinner at Typhoon! which I haven't
been to in quite a while. Daniil and Val brought their cute child. I got to see Charlie and Matt who I'm not sure I've seen since my 25th birthday. There was much nerdiness. I need to remember to
organize such a night myself sometime in near future so I don't have to wait another year to see them.
On the weekend Sarah and I went out to dinner at Carnegie's, a former
public library in Ballard, Seattle that's now a restaurant. I saw the restaurant's website in Matt's delicious links and thought it looked interesting. The exterior and entryway look like a public
library, but just inside its redone as a sort of modern version of french classical with a bar and two dining rooms. No pictures since my replacement camera only arrived today, but there are
photos available. They serve french cuisine which was good and
not as expensive as I would have expected. An interesting place, although its a bit of a drive and I'm not sure if we'll be going back soon.
carnegies personal restaurant weekend nontechnical 2008 Oct 3, 5:29I thought the disemvowelment of trolls was a pretty funny punishment -- much better than simply removing the comment: "Disemvowelment is - obviously enough - the act of removing the vowels from a
passage of text, as well as a pun on the word 'disembowelling'. A number of blogs and websites do this to offensive text which has been placed in their 'comments' section. ... This site exists
because I couldn't resists the challenge of trying to re-emvowel disemvowelled text. This is a challenging task, as the disemvowelled word 'dg' may well have been 'dog', but also 'dig', 'dug',
'doge', diego' and so on. I have a first cut of this functionality at the re-emvowel link at the side of the page. A more advanced version is in progress."
tool disemvowelment web comment forum troll language 2008 Oct 2, 9:37Cool graphical ANTLR IDE! They didn't have this the last time I used ANTLR. "ANTLRWorks is a novel grammar development environment for ANTLR v3 grammars written by Jean Bovet (with suggested use
cases from Terence Parr). It combines an excellent grammar-aware editor with an interpreter for rapid prototyping and a language-agnostic debugger for isolating grammar errors. ANTLRWorks helps
eliminate grammar nondeterminisms, one of the most difficult problems for beginners and experts alike, by highlighting nondeterministic paths in the syntax diagram associated with a grammar."
antlr ide graph grammar tool free download development opensource java 2008 Sep 29, 3:07'These metal plates contain messages which will appear when they are X-Rayed.' What an awesome idea. Display messages to your friendly TSA x-ray security folk by cutting the messages into a plate of
metal and placing it in your bag.
humor security product wishlist tsa airport x-ray 2008 Sep 29, 2:33A short post on the topic of those irritating high fructose corn syrup commericals: 'Really, there's no way that you could make something called "high fructose corn syrup" sound good for you. Which
is why, instead of irritating the public with defensive commercials featuring gross, brightly colored "juice," the Corn Refiners Association should just call "high fructose corn syrup" something more
appealing: like "Deliciosity," or "Yummy Tummy Syrup," or "So You Think You Can Sweeten?" or "Fun Sugar"'
humor onion video corn-syrup corn propaganda tv commercial 2008 Sep 29, 1:39Demos some of the working HTML5 features now available in recent builds of FireFox, IE8, Safari, and Opera. "Speaker: Ian Hickson. As the HTML5 effort reaches its first big milestone -- feature
completeness -- browsers are starting to implement it. It will be years before you can rely on HTML5 support when writing Web pages and applications, but you can start to experiment today to get a
feel of what the new standard offers. This talk will explore some of the most recent implementations of HTML5 features."
html5 ian-hickson html google video browser ie8 2008 Sep 26, 2:22This made me laugh: "People think of goths as weirdoes who take vampires too seriously, and therefore they can't help being worried on some level that a crazy goth might, you know, want to make them
bleed. Whereas steampunks are - what? Weirdoes who take pocket-watches too seriously? What are they gonna do, vehemently tell you what time it is?"
steampunk article goth scifi geek via:ethan_t_hein 2008 Sep 23, 1:19The economic bailout program written as 419 spam. "I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800
billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you."
humor politics economics satire spam via:boingboing 2008 Sep 22, 1:21Rick Hill, War Ballooning-Kismet Wireless "Eye in the Sky". Presentation notes from Rick Hill's DefCon talk on WarBallooning.
hack balloon wireless warballoon defcon security 2008 Sep 18, 10:31
Netflix has recommended three party movies over my time with Netflix and if you're OK with movies featuring sex, drugs, rock&roll (or techno) as almost the main character then I can recommend
at least The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down.
24 Hour Party People is based on the true story of Tony Wilson, journalist, band manager, and club owner (not all at once)
around the rise of punk and new wave in England. Like many true-story based movies it starts off strong and very interesting but gets very slow at the end like the writers got bored and just
started copying the actual events. Unless you have some interest in the history of music in the 80s in Manchester I don't recommend this movie.
Human Traffic is fun and funny following a group of friends going out for a night of clubbing and partying. I had to get over
seeing John Simm as not The Master from Doctor Who but rather as a partying youth. It felt like it was geared towards viewers who were on
something like the totally odd techno musical interludes with the characters dancing for no apparent reason. Otherwise the movie was good.
The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down is done in the style of an old educational movie on the topic
of clubbing and partying. It sounds like a premise that would get old but they do a good job. While demonstrating drinking and driving they have scientists push a mouse around in a toy convertible.
Enough said. It was funny and I recommend it.
party movie netflix 2008 Sep 16, 7:54
I just upgraded to the Zune 3.0 software which includes games and purchasing music on the Zune via WiFi
and once again I'm thrilled that the new firmware is available for old
Zunes like mine. Rooting around looking at the new features I noticed Zune Badges for
the first time. They're like Xbox Achievements, for example I have a Pixies Silver Artist Power Listener award for listening to the Pixies over 1000 times. I know its ridiculous but I like it, and
now I want achievements for everything.
Achievements everywhere would require more developments in self-tracking. Self-trackers, folks who keep statistics on exactly when and what they eat, when and how much they exercise, anything one
may track about one's self, were the topic of a Kevin Kelly Quantified Self blog post (also check out Cory Doctorow's SF
short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away featuring a colony of self-trackers).
For someone like me with a medium length attention span the data collection needs to be completely automatic or I will lose interest and stop collecting within a week. For instance, Nike iPod shoes that keep track of how many steps the wearer takes. I'll also need software to analyze, display, and share this data on a website like
Mycrocosm. I don't want to have to spend extreme amounts of time to create something as wonderful as the Feltron
Report (check out his statistic on how many daily measurements he takes for the report). Once we have the data we can give out achievements for everything!
Achievements for Everyday Life
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Carnivore
Eat at least ten different kinds of animals.
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Make Friends
Meet at least 10% of the residents in your home town.
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Globetrotter
Visit a city in every country.
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You're Old
Survive at least 80 years of life.
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Of course none of the above is practical yet, but how about Delicious achievements based on the public Delicious feeds? That should be doable...
self-tracking data achievements 2008 Sep 15, 1:50This just in: people on the Internet are complaining. Also Radiohead has a remix contest. Neat. "No good deed goes unpunished. After letting fans pay whatever they wanted for In Rainbows and
releasing stem tracks via iTunes so that one of the songs on the record could be remixed, Radiohead is facing accusations that its "Nude" remix contest is unfair."
music wired radiohead remix contest 2008 Sep 11, 1:02Register to vote in Washington State online. "You must complete a voter registration form if you are registering for the first time in Washington or if you have moved to a new county. If you have
moved within the same county, you may transfer your registration by completing a new form or contacting your County Auditor by mail, email, or phone. There is no registration by political party in
Washington state."
politics government vote washington elections registration 2008 Sep 10, 1:32Discussion on IETF DNS mailing list about Mozilla's Public Suffix list and what they should do ultimately. "I'm inclined to suggest: Gather and hard-code your list into Firefox, and also provide a
mechanism by which domain authorities can publish information which overrides your list for their domain."
idn domain firefox publicsuffix ietf mozilla tld
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