2009 Dec 4, 10:24Flickr dev. blog on the accept-language HTTP header: "It’s true that the Accept-Language header has a troubled history. Because of this, many developers regard it the way medieval villagers might
have regarded a woman with a warty nose and a pet cat – it should be shunned, avoided and possibly burned at the stake." And this great anecdote: "In two and a half years of running as an
international site, we’ve only ever had one case where it didn’t work. Helio, a cellphone company, had a browser was custom-built for them in Korea, and had its “Accept-Language” header hard-coded to
always request Korean, something which led to much confusion for the Flickr users amongst their American customers."
flickr internationalization language accept-language http http-header development technical web 2009 Dec 4, 5:08Gmail will send out holiday postcards for you for free.
free google advertising gmail christmas mail postcard 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 Dec 3, 4:52Having replaced HTTP with SPDY, Google digs deeper into the Web stack providing their own DNS servers. Also, as Waxy noted, you can't argue with the most memorable IP addresses I've seen: "Configure
your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers". Also check out their DNS server's DNS prefetching in the performance notes.
google dns internet network security performance dns-prefetching technical 2009 Dec 3, 2:39"Android 2.0 comes with a bevy of refinements to its connectivity features. These include VPN support, multiple account support, exchange support, HTML5 support, bluetooth 2.1, and quite a few more
which can best be found in the Android Platform Highlights document."
android review droid motorola cellphone 2009 Dec 3, 1:54Uses Amazon's mechanical Turk program to test framing: "Framing the outcomes in positive vs. negative terms produced a reversal of participants’ preferences for the two programs. In condition 1, the
majority of respondents (69.4%) favored Program A, exhibiting risk aversion. In condition 2, the majority of respondents (65.3%) favored Program B, exhibiting risk seeking."
via:pskomoroch science experiment social risk security mechanicalturk amazon 2009 Dec 2, 3:00"These are tough questions, but the horrific problems of the "Victorian Internet" suggest that government overreach isn't the only thing to fear. In 1876, laissez-faire "freedom for all" meant (in
practice) the freedom for Henry Nash Smith to read your telegrams if he didn't like who you supported for President. It meant freedom for Associated Press to block criticism of Western Union, and
even to put potential critics and competitors out of business. And it meant freedom for a scoundrel to hijack the system at his leisure."
net-neutrality internet government politics communication telegraph technical 2009 Dec 2, 2:52Webkit just implemented this iframe element sandbox attribute.
security html html5 webkit browser web technical 2009 Dec 1, 9:40Wow: 'The fact that federal, state, and local law enforcement can obtain communications "metadata"—URLs of sites visited, e-mail message headers, numbers dialed, GPS locations, etc.—without any real
oversight or reporting requirements should be shocking, but it isn't. The courts ruled in 2005 that law enforcement doesn't need to show probable cause to obtain your physical location via the cell
phone grid. All of the aforementioned metadata can be accessed with an easy-to-obtain pen register/trap & trace order. But given the volume of requests, it's hard to imagine that the courts are
involved in all of these.'
privacy security gps phone cellphone government politics 2009 Dec 1, 5:55A cross browser javascript implementation of SVG, XUL, portions of HTML5 and more. Check out their demos. "Ample SDK, a must-see: cross-browser (Gecko, Webkit, Opera, Chrome, and even IE 5.5+ !!),
XInclude 1.0, XML Events 1.0, XML Schema, SMIL 3.0, REX 1.0, XBL 2.0 (!), SVG, XUL (cross-browser !), HTML5, XForms, ..., superb demos (SVG-based @shepazu in IE, wow...), dual MIT/GPL licensing
terms, open-source"
technical browser svg xul webkit opera ie javascript web html5 2009 Nov 30, 6:31"At Mozilla Labs, we’ve been working on some potential integrations of identity directly into the browser. Note, this is an extremely rough draft." Looks pretty!
firefox browser identity web mozilla security authentication openid 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 28, 8:04humor cute kitten cat 2009 Nov 28, 3:50The downside of the placebo the nocebo: "This is the amazing world of the nocebo effect, where negative expectations can induce unpleasant symptoms, in the absence of a physical cause.", "In two of
them, the consent form contained a statement outling various gastrointestinal side effects, and in these centres there was a sixfold increase in the number of people reporting such symptoms and
dropping out of the trial, compared with the one centre that did not list such side effects in the form."
nocebo placebo science medicine ben-goldacre 2009 Nov 27, 6:10"What follows is a brief description of the method we have developed for encoding arbitrary shellcode as English text. This English shellcode is completely self-contained, i.e., it does not require
an external loader, and executes as valid IA32 code."
security polyglot intel paper research programming hack obfuscation english language technical system:filetype:pdf system:media:document 2009 Nov 27, 6:04"Megafonzies (coolness): We don’t know if Professor Hubert Farnsworth, inventor of the Finglonger, coined the term ‘Megafonzie.’ We can assume that one Fonzie is the amount of coolness generated by
Arthur Fonzarelli...", "Warhols (fame duration): 1 Warhol equals 15 minutes of fame, So if you’ve been famous for three years, that’s just over 105 kilowarhols..."
via:kottke humor measurement nerd 2009 Nov 25, 7:09Relative URI resolution differences in browsers vs programming language libraries.
via:ericlaw url uri rfc web browser programming dotnet java technical 2009 Nov 24, 5:51"Metalink/HTTP describes multiple download locations (mirrors), Peer-to-Peer, checksums, digital signatures, and other information using existing standards for HTTP headers. Clients can transparently
use this information to make file transfers more robust and reliable."
http metalink url p2p http-header cache redirect reference technical 2009 Nov 23, 2:20"The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States. For instance, where
you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you "The Tawny One", derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured ,desert”."
humor reference map etymology translation atlas geography 2009 Nov 23, 1:24"This week Bell Labs plans to roll out the Telephone, the first viable Telegraph alternative, but reports indicate they may not be ready."
via:waxy humor telephone telegraph internet
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