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Super Mario Bloco em Santa! (by only4crap) Also, great...

2012 Feb 28, 7:20


Super Mario Bloco em Santa! (by only4crap)

Also, great BoingBoing comment:

beemohCollapse

The slow pace of the initial march and the placards makes it look more like an Occupy World 1-1 protest march.

PermalinkCommentshumor video-game mario music video

Using CSS without HTML (mathiasbynens.be)

2012 Feb 20, 6:11

Implied HTML elements, CSS before/after content, and the link HTTP header combines to make a document that displays something despite having a 0 byte HTML file.  Demo only in Opera/FireFox due to link HTTP header support.

PermalinkCommentstechnical humor hack css http html

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did (forbes.com)

2012 Feb 17, 12:17

What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

PermalinkCommentsad target pregnancy humor privacy

(via MakerBot Replicator, A New Larger 2 Color 3D Printer by...

2012 Jan 9, 5:43


(via MakerBot Replicator, A New Larger 2 Color 3D Printer by MakerBot)

PermalinkCommentsvideo maker-bot 3d-printer

Vohaul Astral: Space Quest Remake & Sequel | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

2012 Jan 6, 8:11

Space Quest II remake and a Space Quest 7!

PermalinkCommentshumor space-quest game video-game

(via Sugru Loves Lego)

2011 Dec 7, 11:27


(via Sugru Loves Lego)

PermalinkCommentslego video make

Bug Spotting: Ctors with default parameters

2011 Dec 1, 4:59

The following code compiled just fine but did not at all act in the manner I expected:

BOOL CheckForThing(__in CObj *pObj, __in IFigMgr* pFigMgr, __in_opt LPCWSTR url)
{
BOOL fCheck = FALSE;
if (SubCheck(pObj))
{
...
I’m calling SubCheck which looks like:
bool SubCheck(const CObj& obj);

Did you spot the bug? As you can see I should be passing in *pObj not pObj since the method takes a const CObj& not a CObj*. But then why does it compile?

It works because CObj has a constructor with all but one param with default values and CObj is derived from IUnknown:

CObj(__in_opt IUnknown * pUnkOuter, __in_opt LPCWSTR pszUrl = NULL);
Accordingly C++ uses this constructor as an implicit conversion operator. So instead of passing in my CObj, I end up creating a new CObj on the stack passing in the CObj I wanted as the outer object which has a number of issues.

The lesson is unless you really want this behavior, don't make constructors with all but 1 or 0 default parameters. If you need to do that consider using the 'explicit' keyword on the constructor.

More info about forcing single argument constructors to be explicit is available on stack overflow.

PermalinkCommentsc++ technical bug programming

Replacing Google Reader Shared Feeds with Tumblr

2011 Nov 28, 7:36

Last time I wrote about how I switched from Delicious to Google Reader's shared links feature only to find out that week that Google was removing the Google Reader shared links feature in favor of Google Plus social features (I'll save my Google Plus rant for another day).

Forced to find something new again, I'm now very pleased with Tumblr. Google Reader has Tumblr in its preset list of Send To sites which makes it relatively easy to add articles. And Tumblr's UX for adding things lets me easily pick a photo or video to display from the article - something which I had put together with a less convenient UX on my bespoke blogging system. For adding things outside of Google Reader I made a Tumblr accelerator to hookup to the Tumblr Add UX.

Of course they have an RSS feed which I hooked up to my blog. The only issue I had there is that when you add a link (and not a video or photo) to Tumblr, the RSS feed entry title for that link is repeated in the entry description as a link followed by a colon and then the actual description entered into Tumblr. I want my title separate so I can apply my own markup so I did a bit of parsing of the description to remove the repeated title from the description.

PermalinkCommentsblog tumblr me technical google-reader

Features of image type input tags in HTML

2011 Nov 21, 11:00

A bug came up the other day involving markup containing <input type="image" src="http://example.com/.... I knew that "image" was a valid input type but it wasn't until that moment that I realized I didn't know what it did. Looking it up I found that it displays the specified image and when the user clicks on the image, the form is submitted with an additional two name value pairs: the x and y positions of the point at which the user clicked the image.

Take for example the following HTML:

<form action="http://example.com/">
<input type="image" name="foo" src="http://deletethis.net/dave/images/davebefore.jpg">
</form>
If the user clicks on the image, the browser will submit the form with a URI like the following:http://example.com/?foo.x=145&foo.y=124.

This seemed like an incredibly specific feature to be built directly into the language when this could instead be done with javascript. I looked a bit further and saw that its been in HTML since at least HTML2, which of course makes much more sense. Javascript barely existed at that point and sending off the user's click location in a form may have been the only way to do something interesting with that action.

PermalinkCommentsuri technical form history html

Replacing Delicious with Google Reader

2011 Nov 17, 11:00

I had previously replaced my use of Delicious with Google Reader. Delicious had a number of issues during their switch over from Yahoo to the new owners and I was eventually fed up enough to remove it from daily use. I used Delicious to do the following things:

  • Create a list of things to read later
  • Save things to read again in the future
  • Search through things I read and enjoyed (esp via tags)
  • Annotate and share things on my blog
I realized that since I did most of my web browsing in Google Reader now anyway I may as well make use of its features. I star things to note I want to read it later or save to read again later. I can annotate with notes in Google Reader and I can share items to my web site by way of the shared items feed. Additionally for when I'm not in Google Reader there's a bookmarklet to add an arbitrary web site as a shared item in Google Reader.

Of course I wrote this and switched over about 1 week before Google removed the sharing feature from Google Reader. I'm irritated but in practice it forced me to find a different option which has worked out mostly better. New blog post coming soon about that...

PermalinkCommentsblog delicious me technical google-reader google feed

iPod Godfather Tony Fadell Finally Reveals His New Product: A Thermostat. No, Really. | TechCrunch

2011 Oct 25, 5:37
An original iPod guy has a new company that makes... wait for it... thermostats. Weird. Well they look cool anyway.
PermalinkCommentstechnical

John Hodgman's presentation at Maker Faire New York (Video)

2011 Sep 23, 10:13PermalinkCommentsPost technical

The magic button — Make Everything OK

2011 Jul 13, 5:48Like the big red button that doesn't do anything but better "because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters on the cover"PermalinkCommentshumor internet web

A true American Patriot recites Bill Pullman’s Independence Day speech around New York City  | Great Job, Internet! | The A.V. Club

2011 Jul 6, 7:28"Over this past Fourth Of July weekend, we neglected to note that it was the 15th anniversary of Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. New York comedian Sean Kleier remembered, and decided to make his own tribute, going to various locations around New York City—Times Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway, and inside a Victoria’s Secret—reciting Bill Pullman’s rousing speech before the movie's final battle sequence, megaphone and all."
PermalinkCommentshumor video bill-pullman independence-day new-york

Lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions

2011 Jun 20, 11:25A cautionary tale in chart form: lesson is make sure you can always upgrade your hashing algorithm or don't have security dependencies on hashing algorithms.PermalinkCommentsreference hash encryption security table technical humor

ViewText: Enter a URL to view its text

2011 Jun 5, 4:57"ViewText.org is a service provided to make reading content on the web easier, faster, and safer by extracting the main article content from news items, blog posts, RSS feeds, and PDF's." Includes API to extract the article text!PermalinkCommentsinternet web article html text api technical

[whatwg] CORS requests for image and video elements

2011 May 23, 4:26Applying CORS to the media elements: "I've added a content attribute to <img>, <video>, and <audio> that makes the image or media resource be fetched with CORS And have the origin of the page if CORS succeeded. The attribute is "cross-origin" and it has two allowed values, "use-credentials" and "anonymous". The latter is the default, so you can just say <img cross-origin src="data.png">."PermalinkCommentscors crossdomain web browser webbrowser html technical

PowerShell Script Batch File Wrapper

2011 May 22, 7:20

I'm trying to learn and use PowerShell more, but plenty of other folks I know don't use PowerShell. To allow them to use my scripts I use the following cmd.exe batch file to make it easy to call PowerShell scripts. To use, just name the batch file name the same as the corresponding PowerShell script filename and put it in the same directory.

@echo off
if "%1"=="/?" goto help
if "%1"=="/h" goto help
if "%1"=="-?" goto help
if "%1"=="-h" goto help

%systemroot%\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Command . %~dpn0.ps1 %*
goto end

:help
%systemroot%\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Command help %~dpn0.ps1 -full
goto end

:end

Additionally for PowerShell scripts that modify the current working directory I use the following batch file:

@echo off
if "%1"=="/?" goto help
if "%1"=="/h" goto help
if "%1"=="-?" goto help
if "%1"=="-h" goto help

%systemroot%\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Command . %~dpn0.ps1 %*;(pwd).Path 1> %temp%\%~n0.tmp 2> nul
set /p newdir=
PermalinkCommentspowershell technical programming batch file console

Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Remake - AGS Games Database

2011 May 14, 3:31Fan remake of the Infocom HHGTTG text adventure as an adventure game.PermalinkCommentshhgttg game videogames adventure-game

Experiences from an IPv6-Only Network

2011 Apr 30, 4:05"This document discusses our experiences from moving a small number of users to an IPv6-only network, with access to the IPv4-only parts of the Internet via a NAT64 device. The document covers practical experiences as well as road blocks and opportunities for this type of a network setup. The document also makes some recommendations about where such networks are applicable and what should be taken into account in the network design. The document also discusses further work that is needed to make IPv6-only networking applicable in all environments."PermalinkCommentsinternet ip ipv6 ipv4 nat technical reference
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