2010 Feb 1, 8:39"Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most
peaceful time in our species' existence." Working up towards Forever Peace?
video history violence culture ted steven-pinker game-theory 2010 Jan 29, 10:28"Is your browser configuration rare or unique? If so, web sites may be able to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies." Examines HTTP headers and browser features and reports if your
configuration is unique (mine is). Good info for anyone looking at creating an anonymous browsing plugin or service
web security privacy eff education identity surveillance cookies cookie anonymity anonymous technical 2010 Jan 26, 1:47Details on Safari and iPhone's HTML5 offline app cache.
html web technical html5 cache safari iphone 2010 Jan 13, 6:35Ars Technica rounds up links on the recent Google threatening to stop censoring itself in China including quotes from Secretary of State Clinton, and the EFF and info on the hacks.
google china arstechnica news politics security censorship 2010 Jan 5, 7:42
I've made a WPAD server Fiddler extension and in a fit of creativity I've named it: WPAD Server Fiddler
Extension.
Of course you know about Fiddler, Eric's awesome HTTP debugger tool, the HTTP proxy that lets you inspect, visualize and modify the
HTTP traffic that flows through it. And on the subject you've probably definitely heard of WPAD, the Web Proxy Auto Discovery protocol
that allows web browsers like IE to use DHCP or DNS to automatically discover HTTP proxies on their network. While working on a particularly nasty WPAD bug towards the end of IE8 I really wished I
had a way to see the WPAD requests and responses and modify PAC responses in Fiddler. Well the wishes of me of the past are now fulfilled by present day me as this Fiddler extension will respond to
WPAD DHCP requests telling those clients (by default) that Fiddler is their proxy.
When I started working on this project I didn't really understand how DHCP worked especially with respect to WPAD. I won't bore you with my misconceptions: it works by having your one DHCP server
on your network respond to regular DHCP requests as well as WPAD DHCP requests. And Windows I've found runs a DHCP client service (you can start/stop it via Start|Run|'services.msc', scroll to DHCP
Client or via the command line with "net start/stop 'DHCP Client'") that caches DHCP server responses making it just slightly more difficult to test and debug my extension. If a Windows app uses
the DHCP client APIs to ask for the WPAD option, this service will send out a DHCP request and take the first DHCP server response it gets. That means that if you're on a network with a DHCP
server, my extension will be racing to respond to the client. If the DHCP server wins then the client ignores the WPAD response from my extension.
Various documents and tools I found useful while working on this:
proxy fiddler http technical debug wpad pac tool dhcp 2009 Dec 28, 2:19"This document specifies Metalink, an XML-based download description format. Metalink describes download locations (mirrors), checksums, and other information. Clients can transparently use this
information to reliably transfer files."
xml download browser web url todo 2009 Dec 26, 7:11Wow, that was easy to setup. After installing the driver Eclipse just asks me if I want to debug on my phone or my virtual device.
technical reference android programming development cellphone g1 documentation google 2009 Dec 16, 9:41"This sort of model should remind you of 1-piece click-out toys packaged with action figures such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Michael Johansson specializes in parodying this particular moment in
toydom by creating life-sized models with that molded-plastic “break-apart and play” action specifically in mind."
art sculpture design product commodity parody 2009 Dec 15, 2:01"Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror fame) was in for a horror when he realized that his server crashed and his data was gone and due to some reason, the backup mechanism was not working. ... So what should
Jeff do now? Since Coding horror is a high traffic blog, I think there is a way to get back at least some of the images." Reconstruct the HTML from Google's cache, change the HTTP server to tell the
client it has the correct cached image for all the images, add script to the HTML to grab the images and send them back. Awesome idea. Of course now I want to setup Fiddler to swap in random
images...
via:ericlaw jeff-atwood backup web http cache image javascript technical 2009 Dec 14, 2:25Recommendations on writing HTML for email clients... Ugh.
via:mattb html email css web reference technical 2009 Nov 29, 1:53Fictional characters with beards. "Bearded: Brock Samson, Bearded: Robocop, Bearded: Hellboy, Bearded: Boba Fett, Bearded: Black Mage, Bearded: Wario, Bearded: Clint Eastwood, Bearded: Batman"
humor art beard facial-hair hero brock-samson robocop batman boba-fett 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, 11:33A map of the sciences generated via science web portals: "Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most
significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia...The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and
clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences."
via:pskomoroch visualization science map graph 2009 Nov 18, 7:30Cat climbs cop
humor youtube video cat police cute 2009 Oct 18, 2:23TED video of Stewart Brand: "The book tackles three of today’s most profound transformations — climate change, urbanization and biotechnology — in a way that’s part practical guide to damage control,
part prescriptive inspiration for a more efficient society, part bold anthem of design-thinking. And if Brand’s track record is any sign at all, Whole Earth Discipline may well become one of the
(counter)cultural classics of our generation."
stewart-brand climate-change biology biotech urban ted video ecology 2009 Sep 25, 2:19
Irritatingly out of line with what their commercials say, in my area Comcast, under the covers of the national
broadcast digital switch, is sneaking in their own switch to digital, moving channels above 30 to their own digital format. Previously, I had Windows 7 Media Center running on a PC with a Hauppauge PVR500 which can decode two television signals at once setup to record shows I like. The XBox 360 works
great as a Media Center client letting me easily watch the recorded shows over my home network on my normal TV.
Unfortunately with Comcast's change, now one needs a cable box or a Comcast digital to analog converter in order to view their signal, but Comcast is offering up to two free converters for those
who'd like them. The second of my two free converters I hooked up to the Media Center PC and I got the IR Blaster that came with my Hauppauge out of the garage. I plugged in the USB IR Blaster to
my PC, connected one of the IR transmitters to the 1st port on the IR Blaster, and sat the IR transmitter next to the converter's IR receiver. I went through the Media Center TV setup again and
happily it was able to figure out how to correctly change the channel on the converter. So I can record now, however:
- I can only record one thing at a time now
- Changing the channel is slow taking many seconds (no flipping through channels for me)
- The Hauppauge card can't know if the channel change worked. So if it tries to change to HBO (I get it for free with one of the Comcast packages) which is encrypted and the converted won't show,
the channel doesn't change but the PC doesn't know it and ends up recording some other channel.
To fix (3) I need to manually go through and remove channels I don't have from the Media Center. To fix (1) I may be able to get a second IR transmitter, a third digital converter, hook it up to
one of the other inputs on my Hauppauge, and go back through the Media Center TV setup. There's no fix for (2) but that's not so bad. All in all, its just generally frustrating that they're breaking
my setup with no obvious benefit.
digital tv hauppauge mce cable windows media center comcast 2009 Jul 20, 11:40"My interactive media project this semester is about the augmentation of the classic communication medium business card... what came to my mind pretty quickly was Augmented Reality." Ever since I saw
those AR things you print out I've wished they were based completely off of QR codes that would tell the client app where to download the 3D scene to project.
3d business-card qrcode qr augmented-reality research technical video 2009 Jul 14, 4:28"Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was
surprised that State doesn’t use this browser." Starts at 26:30 in the video.
firefox government via:boingboing video browser web clinton technical 2009 Jul 10, 7:37"Code Rush aired nationally on PBS in March 2000. It documents the Mozilla team as they struggle to publish the first open source release of the Netscape Browser."
video mozilla browser browser-war internet opensource documentary free download web technical
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