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Yahoo! Media Player

2009 Mar 10, 11:26I've seen Yahoo's media player javascript widget around but until I read the dev. instructions I didn't appreciate it. You just include their js file and it finds all your links to mp3s (finer grained and more explicit control available too), adds them to its playlist, and sticks a simple play/pause button on each link.PermalinkCommentsmp3 music ajax design yahoo javascript

timemachine.jpg

2009 Mar 7, 12:43Photos of printed all-caps hilarious signs attached to posts. Can't ignore the time travel. Or the darning!PermalinkCommentsvia:swannman time-travel humor sign photo

The Moth Podcast

2009 Mar 6, 5:36"The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization, was founded in New York in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer evenings on his native St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda's porch."PermalinkCommentsmoth podcast humor rss story nyc community

This Is Me - Archive: A Greater Force (March 6, 2009)

2009 Mar 6, 5:02Reminds me of the guy from the Jose Chung episode of the X-Files that would repeatedly yell 'Roswell!' whenever he felt he was the subject of government oppression. The more time passes I only end up remembering the awesome episodes of the X-Files.PermalinkCommentscomic cory-doctorow sheep humor censorship

Washington State Senate Honors Penny Arcade

2009 Mar 6, 1:21"BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That the Washington State Senate honor Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik for their hard work and dedication to improving the lives of hospitalized children worldwide through their creation and continued work with Child's Play Charity"PermalinkCommentscomic charity videogames penny-arcade goverment washington senate

The 'Is It UTF-8?' Quick and Dirty Test

2009 Mar 6, 5:16

I've found while debugging networking in IE its often useful to quickly tell if a string is encoded in UTF-8. You can check for the Byte Order Mark (EF BB BF in UTF-8) but, I rarely see the BOM on UTF-8 strings. Instead I apply a quick and dirty UTF-8 test that takes advantage of the well-formed UTF-8 restrictions.

Unlike other multibyte character encoding forms (see Windows supported character sets or IANA's list of character sets), for example Big5, where sticking together any two bytes is more likely than not to give a valid byte sequence, UTF-8 is more restrictive. And unlike other multibyte character encodings, UTF-8 bytes may be taken out of context and one can still know that its a single byte character, the starting byte of a three byte sequence, etc.

The full rules for well-formed UTF-8 are a little too complicated for me to commit to memory. Instead I've got my own simpler (this is the quick part) set of rules that will be mostly correct (this is the dirty part). For as many bytes in the string as you care to examine, check the most significant digit of the byte:

F:
This is byte 1 of a 4 byte encoded codepoint and must be followed by 3 trail bytes.
E:
This is byte 1 of a 3 byte encoded codepoint and must be followed by 2 trail bytes.
C..D:
This is byte 1 of a 2 byte encoded codepoint and must be followed by 1 trail byte.
8..B:
This is a trail byte.
0..7:
This is a single byte encoded codepoint.
The simpler rules can produce false positives in some cases: that is, they'll say a string is UTF-8 when in fact it might not be. But it won't produce false negatives. The following is table from the Unicode spec. that actually describes well-formed UTF-8.
Code Points 1st Byte 2nd Byte 3rd Byte 4th Byte
U+0000..U+007F 00..7F
U+0080..U+07FF C2..DF 80..BF
U+0800..U+0FFF E0 A0..BF 80..BF
U+1000..U+CFFF E1..EC 80..BF 80..BF
U+D000..U+D7FF ED 80..9F 80..BF
U+E000..U+FFFF EE..EF 80..BF 80..BF
U+10000..U+3FFFF F0 90..BF 80..BF 80..BF
U+40000..U+FFFFF F1..F3 80..BF 80..BF 80..BF
U+100000..U+10FFFF F4 80..8F 80..BF 80..BF

PermalinkCommentstest technical unicode boring charset utf8 encoding

Back From Vegas

2009 Feb 28, 2:21

Penn and Teller StageSarah and I met up with Jon, Scott, Jesse, and Grib in Las Vegas last weekend and we had a fun time.

PermalinkCommentspersonal2 monorail vegas penn-and-teller

Vegas Security Guard on Segway

2009 Feb 28, 1:55

sequelguy posted a photo:

Vegas Security Guard on Segway

Why do security guards love Segway's so much?

PermalinkCommentsvegas securityguard nevada segway

Penn and Teller Stage

2009 Feb 28, 1:54

sequelguy posted a photo:

Penn and Teller Stage

Penn and Teller's stage before their Las Vegas show

PermalinkCommentsvegas rio nevada pennandteller

Scott, Jesse, and Jon in Vegas

2009 Feb 28, 1:53

sequelguy posted a photo:

Scott, Jesse, and Jon in Vegas

On the bridge in front of Treasure Island just before the first show of 'Sirens of TI' that day.

PermalinkCommentsvegas friends beer nevada collegefriends

Las Vegas Street Crowd

2009 Feb 28, 1:52

sequelguy posted a photo:

Las Vegas Street Crowd

PermalinkCommentsstreet vegas nevada crowd

YouTube - VMware demo showing two operating systems running on one phone

2009 Feb 27, 10:49Finally, you can play solitare on your phone while waiting for Android to boot with VMWare's mobile phone OS: "VMware has demoed its mobile virtualisation platform, which could potentially let users simultaneously run two different operating systems."PermalinkCommentsvideo vmware mobile phone cellphone os android google microsoft windows windows-ce

Royksopp on Vimeo

2009 Feb 26, 4:26Royksopp official music videos on VimeoPermalinkCommentsmusic video royksopp

Why the Music Industry Hates Guitar Hero

2009 Feb 26, 11:41"Aerosmith has reportedly earned more from 'Guitar Hero : Aerosmith' than from any single album in the band's history." Games are usually more expensive than albums but still impressive stat.PermalinkCommentsvia:ethan_t_hein music guitar-hero videogames copyright art media rock-band ip riaa

android-vnc-viewer - Google Code

2009 Feb 23, 6:00"A VNC viewer for Android platform. android-vnc-viewer is forked from tightVNC viewer. This project is still under development. ... When android-vnc-viewer is more stable, it will be available on Android Market. In the meantime you can install the development builds."PermalinkCommentsandroid vnc client viewer phone cellphone google remote g1 open-source

Semantic Search the US Library of Congress

2009 Feb 23, 10:31"This is an experimental service that makes the Library of Congress Subject Headings available as linked-data using the SKOS vocabulary. The goal of lcsh.info is to encourage experimentation and use of LCSH on the web with the hopes of informing a similar effort at the Library of Congress to make a continually updated version available. More information about the Linked Data effort can be found on the W3C Wiki."PermalinkCommentslibrary-of-congress loc semanticweb web rdf metadata library api

One Bus Away

2009 Feb 17, 1:56Track real time bus info in a manner more convenient than what's provided by King County's bus website.PermalinkCommentsbus traffic washington seattle redmond map

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify your canonical

2009 Feb 14, 5:41"Now, you can simply add this link tag to specify your preferred version... and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well."PermalinkCommentsvia:mattb google link html url uri canonical canonicalization web

Keepers of Lists - Top 278 Star Wars Lines Improved By Replacing A Word With Pants

2009 Feb 13, 9:29"I have altered the pants, pray that I don't alter them further."PermalinkCommentshumor pants starwars quote scifi geek

MyFonts Blog - Blog Archive - Introducing WhatTheFont for iPhone!

2009 Feb 11, 10:05"With the iPhone version of WhatTheFont you can use the phone's built-in camera to photograph the text in question (or choose an existing image from your photo albums)... After confirming which characters are used in the image, the app provides a list of possible matching fonts."PermalinkCommentsfont iphone camera typography
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