2010 Feb 26, 8:50Did I read this already on Paleo-Future? Anyway still an awesome 1995 rant on why the Internet will fail. "Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for
great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an
afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of
capitalism: salespeople."
humor internet fail article history 2010 Feb 26, 5:00
sequelguy posted a photo:
Jen's going away surprise for me was to add to my Diversity Inc cover artwork with my own photoshopped cover. Note the attention to detail in the headlines.
me photoshop office diversity microsoft billgates 2010 Feb 3, 6:52"Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States." It sounds like a sentence constructed one word at a time by different people
humor movie dolphin us poster 2010 Feb 1, 8:39"Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most
peaceful time in our species' existence." Working up towards Forever Peace?
video history violence culture ted steven-pinker game-theory 2010 Jan 30, 2:26Similar to the "This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post" (http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/incendiary/) except this is a typical news report. "...and this is a lighthouse keeper
being beheaded by a lighthouse beam."
bbc humor video via:waxy satire journalism tv news 2010 Jan 26, 1:47Details on Safari and iPhone's HTML5 offline app cache.
html web technical html5 cache safari iphone 2010 Jan 22, 1:23Canada's National Film Board gives the successful stats of its website on which you can watch their films.
free video film canada movie internet statistics 2010 Jan 20, 8:56I had no idea of the amount of variation: "The Tetris Guideline is the current specification that The Tetris Company enforces for making all new (2001 and later) Tetris game products alike in form."
Covers things like piece color, vocabulary, speeds, rotation system etc etc etc. I'll be adopting some of this in Polytope Tetris...
tetris wiki reference game videogame 2010 Jan 18, 3:11Crayola's Law: "The number of colors doubles every 28 years!" With chart depicting Crayola colors over the years.
visualization via:waxy history timeline crayon crayola color 2010 Jan 15, 3:19"The .arpa domain is the “Address and Routing Parameter Area” domain and is designated to be used exclusively for Internet-infrastructure purposes. It is administered by the IANA in cooperation with
the Internet technical community under the guidance of the Internet Architecture Board. For the management guidelines and operational requirements of the .arpa domain, see RFC 3172."
technical arpa dns domain zone internet rfc reference iana 2010 Jan 6, 2:17Not shocking that papers freely available on the Internet are cited more than those not freely available... "Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited
significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. ... not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users
self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only."
via:bengoldacre science paper citation internet 2010 Jan 5, 7:42
I've made a WPAD server Fiddler extension and in a fit of creativity I've named it: WPAD Server Fiddler
Extension.
Of course you know about Fiddler, Eric's awesome HTTP debugger tool, the HTTP proxy that lets you inspect, visualize and modify the
HTTP traffic that flows through it. And on the subject you've probably definitely heard of WPAD, the Web Proxy Auto Discovery protocol
that allows web browsers like IE to use DHCP or DNS to automatically discover HTTP proxies on their network. While working on a particularly nasty WPAD bug towards the end of IE8 I really wished I
had a way to see the WPAD requests and responses and modify PAC responses in Fiddler. Well the wishes of me of the past are now fulfilled by present day me as this Fiddler extension will respond to
WPAD DHCP requests telling those clients (by default) that Fiddler is their proxy.
When I started working on this project I didn't really understand how DHCP worked especially with respect to WPAD. I won't bore you with my misconceptions: it works by having your one DHCP server
on your network respond to regular DHCP requests as well as WPAD DHCP requests. And Windows I've found runs a DHCP client service (you can start/stop it via Start|Run|'services.msc', scroll to DHCP
Client or via the command line with "net start/stop 'DHCP Client'") that caches DHCP server responses making it just slightly more difficult to test and debug my extension. If a Windows app uses
the DHCP client APIs to ask for the WPAD option, this service will send out a DHCP request and take the first DHCP server response it gets. That means that if you're on a network with a DHCP
server, my extension will be racing to respond to the client. If the DHCP server wins then the client ignores the WPAD response from my extension.
Various documents and tools I found useful while working on this:
proxy fiddler http technical debug wpad pac tool dhcp 2010 Jan 5, 1:47
The New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a great game. Its the fun of old school Mario with the addition of great graphics and the kind of multiplayer I've wanted for Mario since playing the original as a
child: its got up to four player simultaneous cooperative multiplayer. I recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed Mario in the past. Watch this amazing video of level 1-3 you can unlock in the game.
As noted elsewhere, multiple players attempting to navigate platforms, grab power ups, and throw turtle shells creates new
challenges but along with that there's new ways to be incredibly cheap.
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Jumping Higher
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A second player means a head one can jump on to reach higher locations. Jump on your friend's head at the apex of their jump while holding down the jump button yourself for maximum jumping. In
the game you can also grab other players and hold them over your head. This is useful for reaching the top of the flagpole at the end of levels. On that same line, if the player you grab has a
flying cap you can now use them to fly in the same manner you would use a flying block which makes it easy to get two players to the top of the finish flagpole if only one of you has a flying
cap.
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Power-Ups
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Normal power-up blocks now spawn enough power-ups for everyone. A mushroom is spawned for each small player and full power-ups for the rest, except in the case everyone is small: then one of the
power-ups is a full power-up. If there's two players and you're both small, the full power-up always jumps out of the block to the right. Some hidden power-up blocks only give out one power-up
and in that case its a mushroom or not based on the player who hits the block - so be sure that a big player hits that if you have one.
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Death & Bubbles
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When a player dies but at least one other player lives the dead player comes back in a limbo bubble from which they must be released before they may play again. Because of this, in a tough spot
you can send one player in and leave a second behind. If the first dies you don't lose your place in the level and the first comes back in a bubble ready to try again. For instance, if you're
trying to get the last star coin in 2-1 which sits just above the abyss, one player can just jump to their death for it and as long as another player lives you've collected the coin. However you
need not sacrifice your life to do this: you can press down and 'a' to force yourself into a bubble saving yourself from death. This is true in general as long as you have enough time to see your
death coming. This is also useful if one player runs ahead to the right. The screen will expand a bit but then it will just move to the right following the player in the lead. Players left behind
walls or now forced into lava pits will die unless they use the bubble.
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Misc.
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- If all players hit the ground at the same time from a ground pound it acts like hitting a pow block, killing the enemies on the screen.
- If you hold a player who has a projectile power over your head they can still use their power.
- Bubbles can be popped by hitting them with your fire or ice projectiles as well as thrown shells or blocks.
- All players get the extra lives from anyone collecting 100 coins or finishing a level with more than 7 enemies on the screen.
multiplayer mario wii 2009 Dec 31, 4:40"Nokia has been struggling a bit this year, but this "hack it" to get your phone unboxing is pretty interesting. Once you "root" the box it opens up and a little puff of smoke appears, along with
your phone (if you're a phone / gadget reviewer)." Makes me wonder how many devs and engineers they had working on the box to contain this phone.
phone video cellphone hack 2009 Dec 23, 10:03"Christopher “moot” Poole, the young founder of the irascible online forum 4chan, will speak in February at the TED conference, the elite gathering of thought leaders whose video-taped talks have
become immensely popular online." Its like TED is just asking for it.
ted 4chan christopher-poole moot 2009 Dec 4, 5:06"If you want to watch videos from the National Archives today, they try to talk you into buying a DVD from the official government partner, Amazon.Com...To demonstrate to the Congress that if we
liberated this wonderful content people would really care, I forked over $251 for 20 DVDs and posted them on-line."
video history politics government public-domain internet-archive 2009 Nov 29, 1:32
Sarah and I had Thanksgiving dinner at our house the Sunday before.
Sarah's parents and siblings came as well as my parents who came up for the a handful of days. It was our first time hosting Thanksgiving so I was a little nervous, but my parents helped us setup
and get ready so of course it went well! I cheated a bit: I ordered a turkey online from Whole Foods where you can just tell them when you want to pick it up, they have it cooked and ready
including garnish and you just need to warm it up. When we moved in together Sarah and I each had slightly different small dining room tables. Thankfully they're roughly the same height and width
and we could put them together end to end and seat everybody with no room to spare. On actual Thanksgiving day we went over to Rachel & Anson's lovely new place for Thanksgiving and the annual
game of Trivial Pursuit.
turkey whole foods thanksgiving holiday 2009 Nov 23, 11:33A map of the sciences generated via science web portals: "Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most
significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia...The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and
clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences."
via:pskomoroch visualization science map graph 2009 Nov 12, 8:37
sequelguy posted a photo:
Returning clothes at the mall and I get to observe this while I wait in line.
mall dancing accordian
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