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PicoCool

2008 Feb 18, 6:02FTA: "PicoCool is dedicated to bringing you tiny bytes and obscure content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures. Cool content from real people."PermalinkCommentsblog design culture art emily-chang monthly

Reuters Wants The World To Be Tagged - ReadWriteWeb

2008 Feb 8, 3:24FTA: "...Using a mix of natural language processing, AI techniques, and a massive databases, Reuters' solution extracts important bits of information from raw HTML pages. People, Companies, Places, and Events are really at the heart of many business articPermalinkCommentsvia:sambrook api reuters news tagging semantic semantic-web web

TED | Talks | Stephen Petranek: 10 ways the world could end (video)

2007 Nov 6, 8:06TED talk on ten ways the world could end that no one thinks about.PermalinkCommentsastronomy video ted humor science earth technology stephen-petranek

TED: Ideas worth spreading

2007 Nov 6, 2:46Video of TED lectures. TED is (from Wikipedia) "... an annual conference held in Monterey, California and recently, semi-annually in other cities around the world. TED describes itself as a "group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incPermalinkCommentsanalysis blog video visualization internet social technology ted business news ideas conference

Small World ride revamped for bigger passengers (CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

2007 Oct 30, 12:29DisneyLand is updating the Small World ride to support fatter passengers. That is so sad.PermalinkCommentshumor health article disney obesity

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

Two-for Script File

2007 Aug 6, 5:40I was messing with the XSLT to XSL Converter source which is a javascript file that can be run with cscript.exe. I've changed it to be like a very basic version of xsltproc that simply runs an XML file through an XSLT. I also wanted to run this from the command prompt without writing "cscript ..." everytime. I decided to make like perl programmers I've seen and make a JS file that works as a batch file and a JS file at the same time.

Here's a basic version of what I ended doing applied to a 'hello world' script named helloworld.cmd:
/* 2> NUL
@echo off
cscript /e:javascript /nologo "%~f0" %*
@goto :eof

    Hello World
        Says 'Hello world.' when you run it.
*/

var outText = 'Hello world.';
WScript.Echo(outText);
Running this on a command prompt gives the following:
C:\Users\davris>helloworld

C:\Users\davris>/*  2>NUL
Hello world.
However, after a little more experimentation I found this was slightly overkill for my purposes since if I rename the file to helloworld.js and just type its name like a command it is run by cscript:
C:\Users\davris>helloworld
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.7
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Hello world.
So this time I didn't need all that but if ever in the future I need to run a batch file then a JS file I can do it with one file...PermalinkCommentscmd js technical cscript batch xslt xsl javascript

YouTube - Trojan Horse - The Chaser

2007 Jul 11, 2:21Would real world trojan horses work today?PermalinkCommentsvideo humor youtube history trojan-horse the-chaser

What the World Eats

2007 Jul 2, 9:15Photos of what a family eats in a week in various parts of the world.PermalinkCommentsphotos culture diet food health artle

Wiimote wiissues

2007 Jun 7, 5:29The other day I had the best idea for my Wii remote. Clearly I should use it to control the rotation of Tetris pieces in my N-dimensional Tetris game Polytope Tetris. One of the issues I described with Polytope Tetris is user input. Given a Wii remote the user could rotate a piece through 3 dimensions in a manner that's much easier to adjust to than particular keys on the keyboard.

Anyway, I did a little research into how this might work. I knew that the Wii remote used infrared for absolute positioning and Bluetooth for everything else (LEDs, speaker, accels.) I bought a Bluetooth adapter for my PC after realizing that none of my computers had one already. I used GlovePIE to ensure that my Wii remote could connect and successfully communicate with my computer. GlovePIE is actually pretty cool -- it provides a simple script layer over the Wii remote to control things like your mouse.

Since Polytope Tetris is in Java I looked for and found a Java library for operating with the Wii remote and a long forum thread discussing its use. I then read up on Bluetooth in Java. Apparently JSR 82 is the name of the standard that describes the API a Bluetooth stack should expose in Java. That is, to get Bluetooth working in Java one needs an additional package for Java that actually implements the Bluetooth Java API. This package would depend on the system so I suppose I can't fault Sun for not including it... Where to find such a package? I found a comparison list of implementations and tried the ones that support javax.bluetooth. None of them worked for me because none can address USB devices it seems or they cost money and I couldn't get the trial version working. I also tried bluesock (not listed on the previous list) which seemed promising and could produce an address for my Wii remote as a connected device but couldn't use that address.

And I thought that after I found the Wii remote Java library it would be easy... Oh well...PermalinkCommentsjava bluetooth wii technical remote jsr82 tetris polytopetetris wiimote

Ironic Sans: The Google Maps Guide to Ghostbusters

2007 Jun 4, 1:11A map of the various real world locations depicted in the Ghostbusters movie using Google Maps.PermalinkCommentsblog map movie ghostbusters nyc google mashup

WebWorld of J.P: Project - CatCamera using VistaQuest VQ1005

2007 Jun 3, 11:31Attaches digital camera to cat and creates photo journey.PermalinkCommentsart camera cat hack diy images humor photography photos electronics

MathTrek: Can't Knock It Down

2007 Apr 17, 12:28Mathematicians design an object that can't be knocked down. I like the part when looking for self righting objects in the natural world they test turtles...PermalinkCommentsmath humor balance

Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

2007 Apr 9, 12:51One of the greatest classical musicians in the world plays as a street performer to see how much attention and money he gets.PermalinkCommentsart classical music social video article humor news via:swannman

Digital Future of the United States: Part I -- The Future of the World Wide Web

2007 Mar 1, 1:43Sir Timothy Berners-Lee talks at a congressional hearing. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet hearing "Digital Future of the United States: Part I -- The Future of the World Wide Web".PermalinkCommentspolitics tim-berners-lee semanticweb web internet congress reference video

The World As I See It - Einstein

2006 Dec 23, 11:51PermalinkCommentsarticle essay read einstein

The world is in your hand | haha.nu - a lifestyle blogzine

2006 Dec 21, 3:21Cool photos of miniatures, toys, postcards or photos held up over their real world counterparts. Some look pretty cool.PermalinkCommentshumor photos blog gallery

microformats

2006 Nov 28, 5:23A quick-fire round up of what’s happened in the microformats world this week; new implementations, major mailing list discussions and microformat-related discussion from the web at large.PermalinkCommentsmicroformats web2.0 semanticweb reference monthly xhtml html blog

RDF Primer

2006 Nov 28, 5:13The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. This Primer is designed to provide the reader with the basic knowledge required to effectively use RDF. It introduces the basic concPermalinkCommentsrdf xml semanticweb w3c web reference standards specification metadata

Doublespeak and the War on Terror

2006 Nov 27, 12:46Exec Summary: ... Since some high-ranking government officials and pundits are now referring to the war on terror as the “Long War” or “World War III,” because its duration is not clear, now is an appropriate time to take a few steps back andPermalinkCommentsdoublespeak orwell orwellian government politics propaganda
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