2010 Jan 30, 2:26Similar to the "This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post" (http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/incendiary/) except this is a typical news report. "...and this is a lighthouse keeper
being beheaded by a lighthouse beam."
bbc humor video via:waxy satire journalism tv news 2010 Jan 29, 3:54
Raymond Chen has some thought experiments useful for discovering various kinds of stupidity in software design:
Tim Berners-Lee's principles of Web design includes my favorite: Test of Independent Invention. This has a thought experiment containing the construction of the MMM (Multi-Media Mesh) with
MRIs (Media Resource Identifiers) and MMTP (Muli-Media Transport Protocol).
The Internet design principles (RFC 1958) includes the Robustness Principle: be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving. A good one, but applied too liberally can lead to interop issues. For instance, consider web browsers.
Imagine one browser becomes so popular that web devs create web pages and just test out their pages in this popular browser. They don't ensure their pages conform to standards and accidentally end
up depending on the manner in which this popular browser tolerantly accepts non-standard input. This non-standard behavior ends up as de facto standard and future updates to the standard
essentially has had decisions made for it.
technical design principles software development 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 28, 4:28Photos of locations in present day with aging photos of the same location overlaid. Cool idea, nice execution, and also does that lady have a pet rabbit on a leash?
art photo flickr history 2010 Jan 28, 4:00Jonathan Zittrain on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, artificial AI, and related topics.
jonathan-zittrain video amazon mechanical-turk mechanicalturk technical 2010 Jan 28, 2:36Amazon's Mechanical Turkers enact the Prisoners Dilemma.
amazon mechanical-turk psychology economics prisoners-dilemma 2010 Jan 25, 5:25"...file a complaint with the World Trade Organization, contesting China’s internet censorship as a breach of the international trade rules to which China, as a WTO member, is subject. The US can
argue that China’s “Great Firewall”–a system of filters and bottlenecks that effectively shutters the country within its own intranet–is an illegal restraint on international trade because it bars
foreign companies from competing, via the internet, in the vast Chinese market."
economics wto politics google china internet censorship us 2010 Jan 22, 1:44"He seeded the customer's parking lot with USB flash drives, each of which had a Trojan horse installed on it. When the employees arrived for work in the morning, they were quite excited to find the
free gadgets laying around the parking lot. Employees eagerly collected the USB drives and plugged them into the first computers they came across: their own workstations."
via:ericlaw security usb windows social-engineering computer technical 2010 Jan 21, 12:44Awesome: "It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay."
humor art ebay internet web 2010 Jan 20, 8:56I had no idea of the amount of variation: "The Tetris Guideline is the current specification that The Tetris Company enforces for making all new (2001 and later) Tetris game products alike in form."
Covers things like piece color, vocabulary, speeds, rotation system etc etc etc. I'll be adopting some of this in Polytope Tetris...
tetris wiki reference game videogame 2010 Jan 20, 8:28GZip vs Deflate execution speeds. Deflate found to be much faster in particular cases and about the same in the rest.
gzip deflate performance technical http compression programming development blog 2010 Jan 20, 3:26"I just found out they made a Ninja Turtles TV movie where the Turtles from the relatively dark 2003 cartoon meet the Turtles from the goofy 1987 cartoon"
cartoon humor teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles movie tv 2010 Jan 20, 2:35Video of augmented reality t-shirt that plays rock paper scissors against you.
video rock-paper-scissors t-shirt augmented-reality 2010 Jan 20, 2:03The only doctor in Antarctica has to remove his own appendix. "When Rogozov had made the incision and was manipulating his own innards as he removed the appendix, his intestine gurgled, which was
highly unpleasant for us..." Oh wow, Rogozov should for sure appologize for making you uncomfortable. Jerk. There's photos in the report too. Gross.
history science medicine antarctic appendix russia via:kottke 2010 Jan 19, 2:21"In the latest of an occasional series of demoscene-related posts on GameSetWatch before, AteBit's Paul 'EvilPaul' Grenfell presents a multi-part retrospective on 2009's best demos - starting out
with the top ten real-time PC demos of the year."
demo demoscene graphic game videogame video programming 2010 Jan 19, 1:49Fonts are back in! "In this collection, we’d like to present an overview of 50 of the best Free, New and High-quality Modern, Handwritten, grunge, Cartoon style fonts for clean and professional
designs in 2009."
font typography text download design free 2010 Jan 18, 3:24"UVB-76 is the callsign of a shortwave radio station that usually broadcasts on the frequency 4625 kHz (AM full carrier). It's known among radio listeners by the nickname The Buzzer. It features a
short, monotonous buzz tone (help·info), repeating at a rate of approximately 25 tones per minute, for 24 hours per day. The station has been observed since around 1982.[1] In rare occasions, the
buzzer signal is interrupted and a voice transmission in Russian takes place. Only four such events have been noted. There is much speculation; however, the actual purpose of this station remains
unknown." Inspiration for Lost?
radio russia mystery 2010 Jan 18, 3:22"Today I finally launched ASCIImeo (asciimeo.com)...In a nutshell, it renders Vimeo videos in different textmode’s." Now if only it did the audio as midi. Try out
video ascii humor text 2010 Jan 18, 3:11Crayola's Law: "The number of colors doubles every 28 years!" With chart depicting Crayola colors over the years.
visualization via:waxy history timeline crayon crayola color
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