2007 Dec 26, 5:45Miscellaneous thoughts I had that would have been relevant many months ago:
- A History Channel program had a reenactment of a 1920's archaeologist discovering a stone tablet, sending the tablet to a warehouse, etc. all behind the voice over giving the dry facts. The
reenactor hammed it up a bit and I would have rather had clips from Indiana Jones in the background. If they're already not showing me the archaeologist who discovered the tablet, they may as well
show me one who will be entertaining.
- There are many parodies of the Get a Mac ads and so when I saw a UK Get a Mac ad I payed attention to see what the joke was. I was
disappointed by the 'parody' because it was a conventional Get a Mac ad with different actors. Apple localized their Get a Mac ad campaign in this fashion in the UK and in Japan. I've got a
playlist of the US, UK, and Japan's version of the Piechart ad. Ranking the lovable bumblingness of the PC I give the order
UK, Japan, then US and ranking the sumgness of the Mac I give the order UK, US, then Japan. But don't take my word for it, view
the ads for yourself.
-
Yahoo Pipes lets users generate an RSS feed altering service that runs on Yahoo's server using a GUI. This is very different from Microsoft's Popfly which allows users to component-ize and share javascript utilities that run client side on a webbrowser. Both have the awesome power of buzzword associations
like 'Web 2.0' and 'Mashup' but in my mind Yahoo Pipes is for server side RSS feed modification and Popfly is about client side javascript webpages. And neither will allow me to run an arbitrary
XSLT =).
popfly apple personal history-channel indiana-jones pipes mac technical microsoft mashup yahoo nontechnical 2007 Dec 24, 12:41These days it seems like there's a social sharing website for everything representable as bits. Like
Scribd for (mostly legal) documents,
SciVee for scientific research videos,
Wordie for words, and
Kuler for color themes. Kuler seems
like a ridiculous website (overkill) but I had been meaning to update my homepage's color design and Kuler has an
RSS based REST API.
The API lets you obtain things like the most recently added color themes or the most popular or all themes containing the color dark red, etc... So of course rather than update my website's design I
hooked up my css to the color themes coming out of Kuler. Select my main page's color theme from a
list of random Kuler themes. As I'm sure
the regular readers can guess I use
an xslt and blah blah blah... It looks OK with
Silver Surfer and
Happy Hipo but in general
changing the colors this way doesn't produce something pretty.
When reading about Kuler I found that they may have stolen the whole idea wholeslae from
ColourLovers. They discuss
the thievery in an article on their blog. I would have switched over to ColourLovers out of principle but
they don't have an easily accessible API.
colourlovers color xslt theme homepage technical kuler design 2007 Dec 23, 8:46Banksy replaces Paris Hilton CDs with his own satirical music and cover art in stores.
art article culture graffiti hack humor music parody prank streetart paris-hilton bbc 2007 Dec 23, 8:44Banksy adds his own pieces to NY's museums.
art article culture graffiti hack humor museum nyc painting prank streetart banksy 2007 Dec 19, 2:49Despair, Inc. makes humorous shirts and posters that parody the office standard inspirational posters. I haven't been in a while and it looks like they have new stuff with more variety.
parody geek wallpaper shopping technology poster office humor 2007 Dec 13, 4:54Some interesting animated videos created for the Zune Ad campaign but created by actual artists.
zune art advertising animation design flash microsoft music video 2007 Dec 13, 1:02Video of a cup of boiling water being thrown into the air outside with sub-freezing temp. Found on The Old New Thing
youtube science water ice video 2007 Dec 7, 9:45FTA: "OpenAerialMap is a site for collecting, hosting, and mapping freely available aerial imagery. "
aerial geo map opensource photography social data via:felix42 2007 Dec 4, 8:20Various interesting semantic web related projects.
ajax semanticweb simile rdf mit 2007 Dec 3, 8:03Angie and Kane's Chaing Mai photo album 2.
friend angie-sommer photo photos thailand 2007 Dec 3, 8:01Angie and Kane's Chian Mai photo album 1
friend thailand angie-sommer photo photos 2007 Nov 28, 1:23One of the new Zune features that had me the most excited was the claimed improved Windows Media Center integration which unfortunately turned out to simply mean support for the Win MCE video format
(
with an exception for HD). I wanted to be able to pick shows recorded by my Win MCE and have the Zune automatically sync up the
latest episodes. However, with the improved podcast support in the Zune software one can easily create a ridiculous hack to accomplish this.
The new Zune software has podcast support which does everything I'd want to do with a
Win MCE recorded TV series so the goal is to shoehorn a TV series into a Zune podcast. An overview of the steps: Create an XSLT that converts Win MCE data to a podcast, run the XSLT as a scheduled
task every few hours per TV series, setup a Web server pointed at the resulting podcasts and the Win MCE Recorded TV directory, and subscribe to the resulting podcasts in the Zune software.
- Reading through the Win MCE data stored as an XML file in "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml" and the spec for podcasts I created an XSLT to convert a series from Win MCE data to a podcast.
- I added a new task to the Scheduled Tasks to run my XSLT using my xsltproc.js script. The task runs a handful of commands that look something like the following:
C:\windows\system32\wscript.exe C:\users\dave\bin\xsltproc.js C:\Users\Dave\Documents\trunk\development\mce-zune\mce-to-podcast.xslt
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml --param title "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" --param max 4 --param baseURI "http://groucho/" --param thisRelURI "tds.xml" -o
"D:\recorded tv\tds.xml"
For each TV series I run a command like the above and that outputs a podcast for that series into my "D:\Recorded TV\" directory.
- Zune only allows http URIs for its podcasts so I installed a web server on my Win MCE server. I'm running Vista Ultimate so it was quick and easy for me to install IIS7 but any Web server will do. Then I pointed it at "D:\Recorded TV\".
- Once all the above was done I just subscribed to the resulting podcasts via my Web server and viola! Since I'm forced to use a Web server I can even run the Zune software on a machine other
than my Win MCE server. You can see a screen-shot above of my Zune software showing my Colbert Report podcast.
technical xml mce hack windows media center zune windows xslt podcast 2007 Nov 28, 5:07Vishu, my ex-office-mate, has left Washington and Microsoft for California and Facebook. Vishu and I shared an office for a while and I really enjoyed it. We were able to distract one another from,
and help each other with work. We'd often bounce ideas off of one another, work related or otherwise. For one such idea I recently received a Microsoft patent cube, a small marble cube inscribed with
my and my invention's name. There are some photos of
other people's patent cubes on flickr. Vishu
would have received one for this idea too since we developed the idea and wrote the document about it together, but they wait a long time to send you the cube and he was gone a few weeks before they
sent it (don't worry, he got the credit and other rewards though).
A week or two after I got my cube Vishu was visiting the Microsoft campus just before moving his family down with him to California. A bunch of us joined him for lunch that day and it sounds like
he's enjoying his new job already. Have fun Vishu!
microsoft facebook vishu cube patent nontechnical 2007 Nov 19, 3:47I really appreciate that
the first gen Zune's get the new Zune's
firmware and software. I like the updated Zune software personally because its faster and simpler, has better podcast support, and the whole social thing has is on their website now. So, I guess
I like the software because it has new features that should have been there in the first place.
The social thing is like a Zune social network. It uses your Xbox Live friends to seed your Zune friends list, lets you do the expected social network stuff, lets you preview songs, and unlike first
gen Zunes which required face to face time with other Zune owners, allows you to send songs to people. It also lets you display your recently played tracks and your favorite tracks, similar to what
Last.FM has, via a
Zune Card. I like the Zune Card from a technical perspective because it
separates
the
Zune Card view, written in flash from the
User Card data which is in XML. I hope
they intend to keep the XML available via this UserCard Service because I think there's potential to easily do cool things.
microsoft technical music zune social 2007 Nov 19, 12:35
Two weekends ago I went down to California for Angie and Kane's
going away party. It was fun despite going to a country western club. It was a very large place with plenty of space for line dancing, a dentist chair turned into a make-margaritas-in-your-mouth
chair, and of course a mechanical bull. Surprisingly, I did not fit in.
This past weekend Sarah and I went to the
EMP and SciFi Museum. The last time I was there was for the Star Trek convention (I'm cool) and Sarah hadn't been before. We also ate in the attached diner which
was acceptable.
emp seattle nontechnical 2007 Nov 16, 12:2424 parody: 24 set in 1994. Thankfully, specific knowledge of 24 is not a prerequisite to enjoying this video.
humor video via:ericlaw 2007 Nov 15, 4:04Coming soon: case law freely available in the public domain.
copyright government information internet law legal 2007 Nov 15, 4:03Colossus set to compete against modern PC in decrypting Nazi messages in promotion of museum.
bbc article computer cryptography encryption hardware history turing
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