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The Filing Cabinet : Don't judge a book by its cover - why Windows Vista Defrag is cool

2008 Mar 31, 1:19Some interesting notes on Vista defrag."We don't try to make the volume 100% defragmented because defragmenting to the point where there are no fragmented files has negligible benefits.", "We don't give a percent complete or time to completion estimatPermalinkCommentsprogress progress-bar windows vista blog msdn microsoft defrag

CD Cover Meme - Brainiac - The Boston Globe

2008 Mar 18, 3:52Method to generate CD album covers similar to the 'what's your porn name' rules but takes advantage of Wikipedia and Flickr.PermalinkCommentsvia:ethan_t_hein cd graphic art meme internet flickr album-art article

Rain Barrel: Army of Me

2008 Feb 24, 12:22A scan of the cover of an issue of Army Man.PermalinkCommentssimpsons army-man humor article

Test results: Bidi in window title and tooltip

2008 Feb 22, 9:50FTA: "This page summarises results for a set of tests aimed at discovering whether bidirectional text is displayed as expected in the window title bar and tooltips." Punchline: generally, no they're not.PermalinkCommentsbidi internationalization w3c browser web ie6 firefox opera

Calais - API Guide

2008 Feb 9, 12:57The Calais API documentation. Looks like its geared towards discovering companies, people associated with companies, mergers between companies, etc etcPermalinkCommentsapi reference calais reuters web semantic

LibraryThing Developers are Responsive

2008 Jan 31, 10:47

[Many books in large bookcase. Photo creator http://flickr.com/people/babblingdweeb/]I use my recently added books feed from LibraryThing, a site I've mentioned before where you track, review, recommend, and share your books, and I put the recently added books on my page. I thought it might be nice to include the book covers so I suggested adding book covers to RSS feeds in LibraryThings 'Recommend Site Improvements' group. The next day I had a response from the founder and lead developer Tim Spalding who had started implementing the feature. I noticed a few bugs, reported them on the same thread, and he fixed them soon after. Fantastic! It makes me want to upgrade to a paying account.

Incidentally, if you notice the Ghost in the Shell book appear multiple times in my RSS feed its due to the previously mentioned iterative bug fixes. The same item appeared multiple times slightly differently with each bug fix and your RSS aggregator may have picked them up as distinct items.

PermalinkCommentstim-spalding librarything rss homepage

Old Miscellaneous Thoughts

2007 Dec 26, 5:45Miscellaneous thoughts I had that would have been relevant many months ago:
PermalinkCommentspopfly apple personal history-channel indiana-jones pipes mac technical microsoft mashup yahoo nontechnical

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Paris Hilton targeted in CD prank

2007 Dec 23, 8:46Banksy replaces Paris Hilton CDs with his own satirical music and cover art in stores.PermalinkCommentsart article culture graffiti hack humor music parody prank streetart paris-hilton bbc

Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock | Art, Architecture & Design | Guardian Unlimited Arts

2007 Nov 26, 12:32Guerrilla clockmakers fix famous Paris clock. Andrew says: "It seems a team of clockmakers broke into the Pantheon in Paris in September 2005 and spent a year fixing the historic and neglected clock, which had been abandoned by the authorities. They werePermalinkCommentsclock culture history humor paris france via:boingboing cultural-disobediance

Ad Blocking built into IE7

2007 Sep 11, 2:55There's been some news recently on some guy hating on FireFox for its ad-blocking.

On a similar note here's a fun tip for IE7 users I got from Eric. You can get decent ad-blocking in IE7 by putting ad servers in the restricted zone. By default script inclusion is blocked between different zones so you can put domains that serve up ads in your restricted zone after which, normal internet zone sites won't be able to include script from them. This covers most of the ads I run into these days.

I use Fiddler to figure out the domains that are serving up ads which incidentally also has an ad-blocking^H^H^H^H general purpose content blocking plugin. Here's a screenshot of Slashdot and ArsTechnica from my browser. Notice the large blank areas in the screenshots:
PermalinkCommentsad-blocking personal ad ie7 technical browser tip ie

Duck and Cover! - a photoset on Flickr

2007 Aug 15, 3:24From the article: "... a scan of a brochure from the Kelsey-Hayes Company, Detroit, MI for their pre-fabricated fallout shelters, circa 1963." Very cool.PermalinkCommentsculture design flickr history images photo photography photos retro via:swannman

Office with a View

2007 Jul 14, 3:12New OfficeI've been at Microsoft three years as of last Thursday. It makes me feel old but on the bright side I've upgraded offices. I now have an office with a window. Its actually a coincidence that I got this office at the time of my Microsoft anniversary but I like to pretend. I've had a single office for only four or five months now so its a nice surprise that I'm moving into a single window office so soon.

Hanging Pen HolderOf course this move means I'll be leaving some things behind. For instance the hanging dry erase pen holder that I created out of office supplies I will leave attached to my old white board. My new office has fancy whiteboards with trays built-in (sooo fancy) so I know the person coming into my old office will make better use of my hanging dry erase pen holder then I would. I explained to him that the rubber bands need to be replaced every eight months or so and not to exceed the maximum weight restrictions.

Diversity in NumbersAdditionally, the office art masterpiece I created I will also leave behind. When Bill Gates was featured on the cover of Diversity Inc. for his amazing philanthropic acts many of us got copies in our mailboxes. I collected mine and some from the recycling bins and put up five of the covers on the wall. Eventually others added to it which was my intent, but I only started this when I eventually checked my mailbox a week or so after the magazine arrived so there weren't as many covers left with which to work. At any rate I ended up with eleven on the wall. I'll leave the interpretation of the artwork up to the viewer.PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft personal office nontechnical

stereogum presents...OK X: A Tribute to OK Computer

2007 Jul 11, 2:10A tribute to OK Computer consisting of various bands covering the songs. I'm surprised to find its been ten years since my favorite album was released.PermalinkCommentsaudio music mp3 blog download free radiohead ok-computer

I Chat, Therefore I Am... | Technology | DISCOVER Magazine

2007 May 17, 11:48Two AIM bots face off and generate some humorous conversations.PermalinkCommentsai humor article im robot science

New XSLT - IE7 XML Source View Upgrade Part 2

2007 May 11, 8:55Last time, I had written some resource tools to allow me to view and modify Windows module resources in my ultimate and noble quest to implement the XML content-type fragment in IE7. Using the resource tools I found that MSXML3.DLL isn't signed and that I can replace the XSLT embedded resource with my own, which is great news and means I could continue in my endevour. In the following I discuss how I came up with this replacement for IE7's XML source view.

At first I thought I could just modify the existing XSLT but it turns out that it isn't exactly an XSLT, rather its an IE5 XSL. I tried using the XSL to XSLT converter linked to on MSDN, however the resulting document still requires manual modification. But I didn't want to muck about in their weird language and I figured I could write my own XSLT faster than I could figure out how theirs worked.

I began work on the new XSLT and found it relatively easy to produce. First I got indenting working with all the XML nodes represented appropriately and different CSS classes attached to them to make it easy to do syntax highlighting. Next I added in some javascript to allow for closing and opening of elements. At this point my XSLT had the same features as the original XSL.

Next was the XML mimetype fragment which uses XPointer, a framework around various different schemes for naming parts of an XML document. I focused on the XPointer scheme which is an extended version of XPath. So I named my first task as getting XPaths working. Thankfully javascript running in the HTML document produced by running my XSLT on an XML document has access to the original XML document object via the document.XMLDocument property. From this this I can execute XPaths, however there's no builtin way to map from the XML nodes selected by the XPath to the HTML elements that I produced to represent them. So I created a recursive javascript function and XSLT named-template that both produce the same unique strings based on an XML node's position in the document. For instance 'a3-e2-e' is the name produced for the 3rd attribute of the second element of the root element of the XML document. When producing the HTML for an XML node, I add an 'id' attribute to the HTML with the unique string of the XML node. Then in javascript when I execute an XPath I can discover the unique string of each node in the selected set and map each of them to their corresponding positions in the HTML.

With the hard part out of the way I changed the onload to get the fragment of the URI of the current document, interpret it as an XPath and highlight and navigate to the selected nodes. I also added an interactive floating bar from which you can enter your own XPaths and do the same. On a related note, I found that when accessing XML files via the file URI scheme the fragment is stripped off and not available to the javascript.

The next steps are of course to actually implement XPointer framework parsing as well as the limited number of schemes that the XPointer framework specifies.PermalinkCommentsxml xpointer msxml res xpath xslt resource ie7 technical browser ie xsl

SSRN-Privacy's Other Path: Recovering the Law of Confidentiality by Neil Richards, Daniel Solove

2007 Mar 20, 5:13From the abstract: "...Today, in contrast to the individualistic conception of privacy in American law, the English law of confidence recognizes and enforces expectations of trust within relationships. Richards and Solove explore how and why privacy law dPermalinkCommentslaw privacy confidentiality security legal history article

20 Things You Didn't Know About (DISCOVER Magazine)

2007 Mar 19, 1:1020 facts on various topics like skin, rats, and aliens.PermalinkCommentsblog education list monthly science trivia

Moved to Server-Side Scripting

2007 Jan 19, 9:15I've moved my homepage to server-side scripting. Previously I've mentioned that I was using client side scripting to interpret and sort my livejournal and delicious entries together. Now I'm using PHP and XSLTs to process and sort my livejournal, delicious, flickr, and librarything entries. See my homepage for the finished result.
LibraryThing is pretty cool despite being pretty niche. Its like flickr but for books. I display a random sampling of the covers of books I have listed in librarything on my page. I've also hooked the display of the covers of my book up to the corner image. Now when you hover over the cover of a book a bigger picture of its cover appears in the corner of the webpage. Also, flickr entries in the main section how have the same on hover behavior.
This may not be the best use of my time, but its still fun.PermalinkCommentslibrarything xslt delicious homepage flickr technical php livejournal script

IDNSearch - Search and Discover IDN

2006 Oct 31, 10:57PermalinkCommentsidn example dns language unicode web2.0 social internet

An Avalanche of Coverage -- or, Diary of a Feeding Frenzy (Kevin Schofield's Weblog)

2006 Aug 4, 2:25Kevin Schofield talks about what Avalanche really is and how the media got it wrong.PermalinkCommentsresearch avalanche microsoft kevin-schofield p2p internet
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