2011 Aug 6, 1:53Description of the inner workings of both of Window's TLS options, the Win32 APIs like TlsAlloc as well as __declspec(thread). I didn't know that the max number of TLS indices is now 1088.blogprogrammingdevelopmentwindowsdebugtlsthread-local-storage
2011 Jun 20, 2:25I knew it was a game but still felt bad war-dialing and otherwise messing around in there. What if I accidentally find a way out? "Telehack is the most interesting game I've played in the last
year... a game that most users won't realize is a game at all. It's a tour de force hack — an interactive pastiche of 1980s computer history, tying together public archives of Usenet newsgroups, BBS
textfiles, software archives, and historical computer networks into a multiplayer adventure game." Also, see all the accounts of people finding their teenage selves in the game.internettechnicaldevelopmenthacktelnetwardialgame
2011 Jun 12, 3:48Charles Stross puts parts of his new book Rule 34 on his blog: "By kind consent of the publishers, I'm able
to give you a sneak preview of the first few chapters. So I'm going to roll them out on consecutive Fridays. Here's the opening."
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!internetwebarticlehtmltextapitechnical
2011 Apr 8, 2:28Trailer for the upcoming video for the upcoming Beastie Boys album. Took me a second viewing to realize that was Elijah Wood and to see the DeLorean (from the future?!). humorvideoyoutubebeastie-boys
I just found out that I like the group Ratatat. I'd first heard them way back when the Zune was first released as the backing for Los Corazones on the zune-arts.net website.
But I didn't know who they were until today when I watched this Filmography 2010 video (via Kottke)
Until about 1:16 in, the music is Ratatat's Nostrand. On the first viewing it drove me crazy because I could only vaguely recall hearing
something like that music before. I tracked it down via the zune-arts thing above and eventually found my way to the Nostrand video. Funny, all the recent comments on that one are from people who
also just watched the Filmography video.
I've just got a new media center PC connected directly to my television with lots of HD space and so I'm ripping a bunch of my DVDs to the PC so I don't have to fuss with the physical media. I'm
ripping with DVD Rip, viewing the results in Windows 7's Windows Media Center after turning on the WMC DVD Library, and using a powershell script I wrote to copy over cover art and metadata.
My powershell script follows. To use it you must do the following:
Run Windows Media Center with the DVD in the drive and view the disc's metadata info.
Rip each DVD to its own subdirectory of a common directory.
The name of the subdirectory to which the DVD is ripped must have the same name as the DVD name in the metadata. An exception to this are characters that aren't allowed in Windows paths (e.g.
<, >, ?, *, etc)
Run the script and pass the path to the common directory containing the DVD rips as the first parameter.
Running WMC and viewing the DVD's metadata forces WMC to copy the metadata off the Internet and cache it locally. After playing with Fiddler and reading this blog post on WMC metadata I made the following script that copies metadata and cover art from the WMC cache to the corresponding
DVD rip directory.
2010 Jul 26, 6:56"But in addition to all the views, you can go directly to the back-end that drives all the data: The MSDN/TechNet Publish System (MTPS) Content Service. With that interface, you can request the
back-end data and format it any way you like."msdnwebmicrosoftreferencewebservicetechnical
I previously described my desire to hook my Outlook calendar up to my
Google calendar. I just found out that I can do this and the reverse as both support publishing calendars to the Internet. The following are how I set this up under Outlook 2010 and Google
Calendar:
In Outlook, I go to the calendar view, right click on my calendar and select "Share Publish to Office.com". At this point I can change the permissions to allow anonymous Internet access, and under
Detail change between 'Full details' (full calendar), 'Limited details' (subject lines & availability only), 'Availability only'. Availability only is almost just what I want -- I'd also like
to include location but availability only is good enough. After hitting OK here I get a 'Do you want to send an invitation...' dialog box. I hit 'Yes' and I can copy the webcals:// URL out of the
email window that opens up. Next, to add it to my Google calendar, I open http://www.google.com/calendar/, and under 'Other calendars', I select 'Add
Add by URL', paste in that webcals:// URL but change the 'webcals' at the start to 'https'.
In Google Calendar, I can click on my calendar name under 'My calendars', select 'Calendar settings', and on the new page, look under 'Calendar Address', click the ICAL icon, and copy the URL in
the new dialog. Now back in Outlook I go to the Calendar view, right click on 'My Calendars', and select 'Add Calendar From Internet...'. In the new dialog that pops up I paste in the URL from
Google Calendar.
In this fashion I can share public calendar data between my personal and work calendars.
I just finished watching both seasons of this very funny and engaging TV series Id previously never heard of and I highly recommend it. Adam Scott stars as an actor who has given up on his dream of
acting and joins a catering company working along side actors trying to make it in LA. There are many ties to Veronica Mars: the shows creator is Rob Thomas (the creator of Veronica Mars), the show
features Ken Marino and Ryan Hansen, and has guest stars of Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, and Enrico Colantoni, among others. It has many of the same talented people from Veronica Mars but Party
Down is more like a smarter and funnier The Office given the relationship between Adam Scott and Lizzy Caplan and their subtle mockery of their wackier workmates and inept boss.
An excellent movie I'd never heard of. An entertaining and humorous sci-fi indie romance comedy. It stars Emma Caulfield (who I recognize as Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) who obsesses over
her timer, an implanted device that counts down to when she'll meet the love of her life. Thematically its similar to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which similarly adds a scifi device to
society in order to examine the value of failed relationships on a persons life.
2010 May 10, 8:59Iggy Pop interviews Shepard Fairey, including his Obama HOPE poster and AP lawsuit:
"... but the American public is generally pretty superficial, so an image like that just allows them to project whatever limited idea they have onto it. Obviously, not everyone is like that—I
actually think there were a lot of people who were bummed by the image because they felt it was shallow propaganda."
"If I spend time conceiving and making a piece of art and somebody else sees that it has market value and replicates it in order to steal part of my market, then that’s not cool. But the way I make
art—the way a lot of people make art—is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important. It’s about making a work that is inspired by something preexisting
but changes it to have a new value and meaning that doesn’t in any way take away from the original—and, in fact, might provide the original with a second life or a new audience." artlegallawipshepard-faireyobeyinterview
2010 Mar 28, 4:37Mike Davey builds a Turing Machine drawing ones and zeros on tape. Pretty cool, but the tape length is only finite.fsmturing-machinevideotechnical