2007 Nov 15, 12:27Article on encrypted email company Hushmail giving email up to The Man. Includes interview with Hushmail CTO Brian Smith.
encryption article cryptography crypto anonymity anonymous email government privacy webmail mail legal security 2007 Nov 9, 4:29Another website's profile to keep track of. Associated Live ID: sequelguy@hotmail.com
proldfile microsoft popfly mashup web internet webservices 2007 Nov 7, 4:28Out of date W3C document containing stats on frequency of use of various charsets in HTML pages (in 1997)
charset encoding i18n language reference w3c statistics 2007 Nov 4, 11:20This weekend Sarah and I went to Tariq's house warming party in Issaquah and then to Seattle for Jon's going away party at Pike's Pub. On the drive over, just after getting through traffic on I-5
South, I saw emergency vehicles lights on the North bound side and suddenly found my lane stopped. I found out why when a man ran from the left most lane to my lane the right most, then darted left
one lane and back right again. Cars started leaving my lane and I could see the man now lounging on the pavement in front of a jeep. Apparently not hurt, he got up and started walking down the
highway. He didn't appear to be in his right mind and after walking by our car Sarah reported it to 911. The rest of the night went on as normal and I had fun with Jon and his friends. It'll be sad
to see him go next week.
nontechnical 2007 Nov 2, 1:29EFF has a fair use video test suite for developers of copyright violation detection software. They picked some good videos.
archive copyright education law legal research video eff 2007 Nov 1, 1:25Video of people at Maker Faire including a cute dino robot.
make boingboing cute dino video 2007 Oct 31, 4:41ONN piece on ninja parade.
humor onion news video ninja 2007 Oct 29, 1:48FTA: "Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor who writes the Bad Science column in the Guardian, examining the claims of scaremongering journalists, quack remedy peddlers, pseudoscientific cosmetics
adverts, and evil multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Th
monthly blog science politics religion media news healthy research humor 2007 Oct 22, 2:36How to create good headlines and subjects for webpages and email.
blog article design email howto usability tutorial language internet writing web 2007 Oct 22, 4:47
I purchased the
Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like
others before me who have
discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of
HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can
gift them to you.
HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and
objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding
more. The humor and the sort of
play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest
ending theme I've heard (also
blogged by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't
always trying to kill me. Additionally the
weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers'
attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of
Solitary the reality show
that sticks contestants alone in small rooms forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...
RPS has articles on Portal including
a Portal review, a page
suggesting Portal is a tale of
lesbianism, and
others.
hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical 2007 Oct 19, 4:10FTA: 'This letter was sent to a Russian student by her French friend, who manually wrote the address that he received by e-mail. His e-mail client, unfortunately, was not set up correctly to display
Cyrillic characters, so they were substituted with diacr
encoding charset unicode language humor article 2007 Oct 17, 4:48ICANN's wiki on their new IDN TLDs.
idn wiki icann dns domain i18n internet tld 2007 Oct 15, 1:33Info on a plugin for FireFox that gives GMail S/MIME support. This is a similar idea to the last but these folks have executed the idea in a different fashion.
article browser blog cryptography crypto mail mime mozilla pgp privacy security extension firefox gmail google 2007 Oct 15, 1:31This is a howto on using encryption with web based mail clients. This article suggests a FireFox plugin. I should look into doing this in IE.
email secure webmail google gmail pgp encryption howto article 2007 Oct 14, 3:12I've updated my homepage by moving stuff about me onto a separate
About page. Creating the About page was the perfect opportunity
to get
FoaF, a machine readable way of describing yourself and your friends, off my to do list. I have a
base FoaF file to which I add friends, projects, and accounts
from delicious
using an XSLT. This produces the
FoaF XML resource on which I use another
XSLT to convert into HTML and produce the About page.
I should also mention a few FoaF pages I found useful in doing this:
-
FOAF Vocabulary Specification - The standard on which I based my XSLT to add in info from delicious.
-
FoaF Explorer - Turns any RDF XML FOAF resource into a webpage with links to the other people, projects, etc mentioned in the FOAF file.
-
FoaF-a-Matic - I used this to produce my base FoaF file.
-
RDF Validator - This is the closest thing I could find for validation. It does RDF in general but unfortunately not FoaF specifically. I found two
links to sites that are down or dead that claimed to do what I actually wanted.
technical xml foaf personal xslt xsl homepage 2007 Oct 12, 11:50Daily news to replace Digg
daily blog boingboing news 2007 Oct 12, 10:04FTA: 'From just released Microsoft security bulletin: "..formerly known as Wang Image Viewer, handles specifically crafted images files.."'. Specially crafted eh?
humor article michael-kaplan blog wang msrc microsoft security 2007 Oct 12, 3:20And now to fit in better with the rest of the emo kids on LJ, in no particular order here are some reasons why I feel old:
- I've attended friends weddings sorted chronologically by when I met them: Lucas from high school, followed by Carissa from college,
and then Palak from Microsoft.
- I rarely get carded for alcohol.
- Jon's moving to Germany soon -- this time permanently. He's already started the process of getting rid of possessions he's not taking with him like his car and TV. However, after doing so he
couldn't maintain his smug "I don't even own a TV" attitude and ended up trading me my small CRT TV
(as mentioned previously) for his DDR pads and games. A good trade for both since we were each looking to dump these items. So far I've
only convinced Sarah to try DDR once with me. Somehow I've gotten much worse at something I wasn't that great at to begin with.
- I have business cards.
- I still have semi-monthly nightmares in which I'm taking a Linear Algebra course for which I haven't studied or done homework in years. This differs from the more frequent nightmares I had
immediately after finishing that series of classes in which I was taking the final and it was all on the one topic I didn't study. In reality, the prof. had done his PhD work on this one topic and
I, correctly betting it wouldn't appear on the final, didn't study it. Apparently this was a traumatic bet for me to make given the wake of destruction left on my dreams.
- I have to remind myself that 2005 was two years ago.
personal nontechnical
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