transparent page 6 - Dave's Blog

Joho the Blog » Larry Lessig: Beyond Transparency, and Net Triumphalism

2009 Oct 20, 8:41David Weinberger on Larry Lessig's Transparency essay with links to others' responses as well.

Against Transparency | The New Republic

2009 Oct 20, 8:24Against Transparency - The perils of openness in government. - Lawrence Lessig - October 9, 2009

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The Art Institute of Chicago: The Collection: Examination Techniques

2009 May 29, 9:13"Developed in the late 1960s by Dutch physicist J. R. J. van Asperen De Boer, infrared reflectography (IRR) is a technique used to look through the paint layers. ... Many paints will appear partially or completely transparent while others, such as black, will absorb the infrared radiation and appear dark."

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Awesome Spokesmen Billy Mays and Vince Offer

2009 Apr 8, 4:06

There can be no doubt that infomercial pitchmen Billy Mays and Vince Offer are awesome, but how can I decide which is my favorite?

Infomercial Performance.: Among other things they sell Zorbeez and ShamWow respectively, both of which are absorbant towels so first up I can get a somewhat apples-to-apples comparison on informercials for comparable products. Thankfully someone has created a Vince Offer vs Billy Mays youtube video featuring these informercials.

Billy has an upbeat yell to everything he says while Vince has an endearing condescension to his "You followin' me camera guy?" In the end I must give this one to Vince Offer.
Extracurriculars.: Billy Mays has a new show Pitchmen on the Discovery Channel, a reality show involving folks pitching inventions to the pitchmen Billy Mays and someone else. Vince Offer was arrested for assaulting a prostitute. A clear win for Billy.
Intra-pitchman Interactions.: Billy has challenged Vince to a pitchman-off which on the surface sounds like a point for Billy, but if you listen to the challenge Billy says that Vince attempted to extend the olive branch. Billy Mays calls out Vince on the Adam Corolla Show

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Microsoft takes touchscreens to the next dimension - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist

2008 Oct 29, 3:09Video showing some more interesting touch screen ideas from Microsoft Research. A touch sensitive sphere that can accomodate multiple users and a table which projects one image onto itself and another image onto objects beyond itself: "But hold another piece of a translucent glass in the air above the table, and it catches a second ghostly image. This trick is in the tabletop glass, which electronically flickers between translucent and transparent 60 times per second, faster than the eye can notice."

research microsoft video touchscreen table

Technical Proposal (IPETEE) - TFR Wiki

2008 Jul 10, 4:43"The goal is to implement IP-transport encryption in a way that is transparent both to the IP-layer (including nodes in the network path) and to the applications that benefit from the encryption." Seems like a good idea to me.

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Kids in the Hall Live in Seattle

2008 May 17, 7:58

Sarah and I saw the Kids in the Hall "Live As We'll Ever Be" Tour in the WaMu theater in Seattle this past Thursday. I'd only ever seen their television show so it was cool to see them live. I thought that them being in a live format on stage would make the show significantly different, but other than having a bad seat and not being able to see very well, and the Kids sometimes ad-libbing or breaking character, it was like watching their show. It consisted of mostly new material with some returning characters like the Chicken Lady, Buddy Cole, the head crusher, etc. Their Facebook page has two videos that they played during the show.

I've been using the best Kids in the Hall fansite with an archive of searchable transcripts since high school. But now days what with all the new fangled video websites I can link right to some of my favorite sketches from the show. Like the Inexperienced Cannibal.

And the meta-sketch The Raise.

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Translucent and shaped windows in core Java

2008 Mar 5, 6:32"... today's build 12 of JDK 6.0u10 delivers on the promise - translucent and shaped windows with core Java classes only!"

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Chumby will be cool, despite its name

2008 Feb 19, 1:51

I signed up for the pre-release beta and purchased a Chumby last year. Chumby looks like a cousin to a GPS unit. Its similar in size with a touch screen, but has WiFi, accelerometers, and is pillow like on the sides that aren't a screen. In practice its like an Internet alarm clock that shows you photos and videos off the Web. Its hackable in that Chumby Industries tells you about the various ways to run your own stuff on the Chumby, modifying the boot sequence (it runs Linux), turning on sshd, etc, etc. The Chumby forum too has lots of info from folks who have found interesting hacks for the device.

When you turn on the Chumby it downloads and runs the latest version of the Chumby software which lets you set alarms, play music, and display Flash widgets. The Chumby website lets anyone upload their own Flash widgets to share with the community. I tried my hand at creating one using Adobe's free Flash creation SDK but I don't know Flash and didn't have the patience to learn.

Currently my Chumby is set to wake me up at 8am on weekdays with music from ShoutCast and then displays traffic and weather. At 10am everyday it switches to showing me a slide-show of LolCats. At 11pm it switches to night mode where it displays the time in dark grey text on a black background at a reduced light level so as not to disturb me while I sleep.

I like the Chumby but I have two complaints. The first is that it forces me to learn flash in order to create anything cool rather than having a built-in Web browser or depending on a more Web friendly technology. The second complaint is about its name. At first I thought the name was stupid in a kind of silly way, but now that I'm used to the name it sounds vaguely dirty.

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