2009 Dec 18, 2:36"I somehow ended up reading about spite houses (homes built specifically to piss off a neighbor) this evening, which I had never heard of before. Flickr has several when you search the tags,
including the sad story behind this house in Connecticut."
humor spite hose flickr image 2009 Dec 13, 1:27
I was reading Makers, Cory Doctorow's latest novel, as it was serialized on Tor's website but with no ability to save my place within a page I set out to find a book reading app
for my G1 Android phone. I stopped looking once I found Aldiko. Its got bookmarks within chapters, configurable fonts, you can look-up words in a
dictionary, and has an easy method to download public domain and creative common books. I was able to take advantage of Aldiko's in-app book download system to get Makers onto my phone so I didn't
have to bother with any conversion programs etc, and I didn't have to worry about spacing or layout, the book had the correct cover art, and chapter delimiters. I'm very happy with this app and
finished reading Makers on it.
Makers is set in the near future and features teams of inventors, networked 3d printers, IP contention, body modifications, and Disney -- just the sort of thing you'd expect from a Cory
Doctorow novel. The tale seems to be an allegory for the Internet including displacing existing businesses and the conflict between the existing big entertainment IP owners and the plethora of fans
and minor content producers. The story is engaging and the characters filled out and believable. I recommend Makers and as always its Creative Commons so go take a look right now.
tor aldiko cory doctorow g1 makers ebook android book 2009 Dec 12, 12:56Gizmodo has a list of some excellent Android apps. Includes an OpenTable app, Flixster, and others. But doesn't mention the Aldiko, the ebook reader I like.
reference android g1 cellphone app 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 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 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 2009 Nov 20, 7:20I think I'm stuck on the first part of the Ars review "so it has taken the netbook, which was already a crippled notebook, and crippled it even further by removing a ton of flexibility and
functionality". Still conceptually I like the idea and hope they figure out all their use cases.
google chrome video os web browser technical 2009 Nov 16, 7:40Part 11 (of 11?) in a series on why you shouldn't freak out about the transition from UCS2 to UTF16. The answer is: you're already doing it wrong.
technical ucs2 unicode utf16 text windows programming language michael-kaplan 2009 Oct 30, 10:41All the stuff Nintendo forces developers to take out of the Nintendo Maniac Mansion port. I had read this before and didn't connect after watching Douglas Crockford's JavaScript talk that this was
the same guy.
douglas-crockford game videogame nintendo censorship pc history geek 2009 Oct 28, 11:02"This session will expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. Within the language is an elegant subset that is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being
more reliable, readable and maintainable." Zeke recommended listening to his talks.
google video technical douglas-crockford javascript programming presentation jslint web browser 2009 Oct 5, 8:44Brief history of the Luddites. "Are we all Luddites now? ... If you are reading this essay on your laptop or iPhone, chances are that you aren't an unemployed weaver staring starvation in the face."
Also: "The Luddites didn't oppose technology; they opposed the sudden collapse of their industry, which they blamed in part on new weaving machines." So the TV and newspaper associations and Rupert
Murdoch are Luddites.
history technology luddite 2009 Sep 30, 4:07The hashing part makes sense, but not the 'why no URL query' bit: "But because victim=12345 has already been visited they satisfy condition 2 and they get the 404 page fooling them into thinking the
site has already been taken down. So query strings don't really work." You could implement the same thing in the path and even were that not the case there's no telling that removing the query would
get you the same page. What's described here is a general method to circumvent the AP filter not an explaination as to why it avoids the query portion of the URL.
phishing technical web browser http url hash 2009 Sep 23, 7:56"I do understand that it would be annoying to warn users every time they run a bookmarklet, but I think it would be sensible to show a warning at least the first time a given bookmarklet is executed.
If you work for a popular web browser vendor such as Microsoft or Mozilla, you can think of this as my wish for the day! I'd love to hear your feedback if you are reading this!"
technical bookmarklet bookmarklets security web webbrowser javascript 2009 Sep 12, 3:51
sequelguy posted a photo:
Wtf? For more see the 'Most Condescending Game Ever' thread on www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/33357
wtf boardgame parkerbrothers careersforgirls 2009 Sep 10, 10:26"Here’s the reading list for an upcoming session of Scott Bradner’s class on Internet Architectural Principles"
reference internet history architecture todo technical 2009 Sep 1, 4:36"I’ve written a small Java application that will read in a CSS file and output its contents to stdout or another file in a format that’s optimised for gzipping." Cool!
via:kris.kowal technical compression css web performance gzip java 2009 Sep 1, 4:20"Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that's not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do."
via:waxy history tv read reading-rainbow levar-burton pbs npr 2009 Aug 28, 9:12
sequelguy posted a photo:
Saw this at the Fremont Market. The tag read along the lines of Veterinary related tool -- three guesses.
seattle wa tool veterinary 2009 Aug 28, 3:39
I built timestamp.exe, a Windows command line tool to convert between computer and human readable date/time formats
mostly for working on the first run wizard for IE8. We commonly write out our dates in binary form to the registry and in order to test and debug my work it became useful to be able to determine to
what date the binary value of a FILETIME or SYSTEMTIME corresponded or to produce my own binary value of a FILETIME and insert it into the registry.
For instance, to convert to a binary value:
[PS C:\] timestamp -inString 2009/08/28:10:18 -outHexValue -convert filetime
2009/08/28:10:18 as FILETIME: 00 7c c8 d1 c8 27 ca 01
Converting in the other direction, if you don't know what format the bytes are in, just feed them in and timestamp will try all conversions and list only the valid ones:
[PS C:\] timestamp -inHexValue "40 52 1c 3b"
40 52 1c 3b as FILETIME: 1601-01-01:00:01:39.171
40 52 1c 3b as Unix Time: 2001-06-05:03:30:08.000
40 52 1c 3b as DOS Time: 2009-08-28:10:18:00.000
(it also supports OLE Dates, and SYSTEMTIME which aren't listed there because the hex value isn't valid for those types). Or use the guess
option to get timestamp's best guess:
[PS C:\] timestamp -inHexValue "40 52 1c 3b" -convert guess
40 52 1c 3b as DOS Time: 2009-08-28:10:18:00.000
When I first wrote this I had a bug in my function that parses the date-time value string in which I could parse 2009-07-02:10:18 just fine, but I wouldn't be able to parse 2009-09-02:10:18
correctly. This was my code:
success = swscanf_s(timeString, L"%hi%*[\\/- ,]%hi%*[\\/- ,]%hi%*[\\/- ,Tt:.]%hi%*[:.]%hi%*[:.]%hi%*[:.]%hi",
&systemTime->wYear,
&systemTime->wMonth,
&systemTime->wDay,
&systemTime->wHour,
&systemTime->wMinute,
&systemTime->wSecond,
&systemTime->wMilliseconds) > 1;
See the problem?
To convert between these various forms yourself read The Old New Thing date conversion article or
Josh Poley's date time article. I previously wrote about date formats I like and dislike.
date date-time technical time windows tool
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