2009 Feb 10, 6:34Real time stats on folks cursing on Twitter. Shows percentage change in usage by curse word.
twitter humor language swearing mashup 2009 Feb 5, 8:47Copy of the Netscape Navigator document (the original's long gone) describing the Proxy Auto-Config (PAC) file format and mime-type. Its a javascript file with at least one well known function that,
given a host, returns a string describing which methods are appropriate for a web browser to connect to that host.
javascript pac proxy http reference netscape navigator 2009 Feb 4, 4:30New URN schemes with no central minting authority. duri allows you to name a resource that was identified by the specified URI at the specified date (e.g. refers to the IETF's homepage at the end of
the year 2001). tdb allows you to name a physical object or entity that was described by a resource that was identified by a specified URI at the specified date (e.g. refers to IETF the orginization
as referenced by their homepage at the end of the year 2001). Date format is concise but I'd prefer RFC3339 rather than roping in another date format.
duri tdb uri url scheme reference ietf date datetime rfc 2009 Feb 4, 4:16From Sorting it all Out wrt the weather gadget in Vista's sidebar, this link to China's laws on weather forecast: "Article 22 The State applies a unified system for the issue of public meteorological
forecast and severe weather warning... No other organizations or individuals may issue to the community such forecast or warning." "Article 25 When the media, including radio, television, newspaper
and telecommunication, issue to the community public meteorological forecast or severe weather warning, they shall use the latest meteorological information provided by a meteorological office...
Part of the revenues from the distribution of meteorological information shall be drawn to support the development of meteorological service." Whether an application is legally allowed to provide a
weather forecast is not an attribute I would have imagined necessary for a localization API.
via:michael-kaplan china law legal politics weather forecast localization 2009 Jan 31, 1:47Music from the SNES game EarthBound. Time for new ringtones...
earthbound music mp3 mother2 videogame 2009 Jan 30, 5:21
Over the previous weekend Sarah and I got engaged. I had a limo pick us up and take us to a park that has a beautiful view of the Seattle
skyline where I proposed, then out for dinner and drinks including a bottle of wine for the ride back. What's the point of a limo ride if you don't drink while being driven around? It was a nice
night and only had a hint of rain when we came home. We don't yet have a date set.
engagement personal nontechnical 2009 Jan 27, 10:41I just noticed that Google's Feeling Lucky doesn't work if your query contains a 'site:...' entry unless the HTTP request has a referer header pointing to Google. This person noticed too and wrote a
Google App that acts like Feeling Lucky without this restriction. "It appears that Google has some secret threshold to decide when to get in the way of your destination like an angry ceiling cat
catapulting itself onto your face."
google im-feeling-lucky search http referer http-header app 2009 Jan 26, 2:12Mark Pilgrim's series of articles and slides from a corresponding talk on video encoding.
mark-pilgrim video encoding audio reference codec 2009 Jan 25, 5:39
Microsoft isn't completely shielded from our economies issues but I still have a job and
still get free soda. While that's all still the case, I decided to test Sarah's claimed ability to differentiate between Pepsi, Coke, and their diet counterparts by taste alone. I poured the four
sodas into marked cups and Sarah and I each took two runs through the cups with the following guesses.
Soda Identification Challenge Results
|
Drink
|
Sarah
|
Dave
|
|
Guess 1
|
Guess 2
|
Guess 1
|
Guess 2
|
|
Coke
|
Coke
|
Coke
|
Pepsi
|
Diet Pepsi
|
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Coke
|
|
Pepsi
|
Pepsi
|
Pepsi
|
Coke
|
Coke
|
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Diet Coke
|
Diet Pepsi
|
Pepsi
|
|
Total (out of 8)
|
6
|
3
|
As you can see from the results, Sarah's claimed ability to identify Coke and Pepsi by taste is confirmed. The first run through she got completely correct and on the second run only mistook Diet
Pepsi for Diet Coke. Her excuse for the error on the second run was a tainted palate from the first run. I on the other hand was mostly incorrect. Surprisingly though my incorrect answers were
mostly consistent between run one and two. For instance I thought Pepsi was Coke in both runs.
coke microsoft waste of soda pepsi waste of time soda 2009 Jan 23, 1:47"When you experiment with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, it feels like magic. ... Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it
cost for someone to reveal their face?"
privacy research amazon mechanicalturk internet photo experiment social 2009 Jan 20, 2:25"Pro Pants, now in its second year, is a counter-movement to Improv Everywhere's annual No Pants! Subway Ride. The Pro Pants mission is to inform pantsless riders about the joys and advantages of
pants and to persuade them to accept pants into their lives." Don't you hate pants?
humor pants subway improv-everywhere 2009 Jan 20, 11:40"But, when police searched his computer, they found Google searches from a couple days after the accident like, "auto parts, auto dealers out-of-state; auto glass, Las Vegas; auto glass reporting
requirements to law enforcement, auto theft," according to the prosecutor. The coup de grace? He searched for "hit-and-run," which he followed to a page about the hit-and-run he committed."
privacy google internet crime 2009 Jan 20, 11:19Its Tetris done in those cross your eyes 3D stereogram things.
tetris 3d stereogram art game flash via:swannman 2009 Jan 19, 3:18"Perth street art production group Ololo approached the construction manager of an inner-city skyscraper when they heard he hated the grey walls of the recently built Condor Tower five-storey car
park. The three creative friends - Hurben, Shensing and Griv proposed a far more whimsical and creative solution to the bare walls, by allowing the group and their friends to embellish the interior
with street art-inspired murals."
graffiti streetart art cultural-disobediance 2009 Jan 19, 3:14Humorous webcomic on the topic of captchas
humor comic captcha 2009 Jan 15, 6:02Projecting giant images onto buildings that appear to interact with their surface. Lovely video. "We have posted quite a few times now about using projectors in the city to beam images onto
Architecture and the screengrab above is one from one the best examples we have seen so far."
video graffiti cultural-disobediance art technology projector light 2009 Jan 15, 10:28Thanks to Matt, for the first time I can see myself using Twitter. Twitter app on my phone notifies me when something's posted so my build process can let me know when its done, or when sync finally
finishes, etc. I'd been meaning to setup a mini-notification system with a command line tool to my phone (w/o paying per text msg) but I didn't think of Twitter.
via:swannman api internet curl cli twitter 2009 Jan 15, 9:21"My friend Amanda had never seen a whole Star Wars film. When I asked her if she wanted to watch the original trilogy she said that she would, but that she already knew what happens. So I took out my
voice recorder and asked her to start from the top. I then created some very basic animation in Final Cut to go along with her narration."
via:boingboing humor video starwars 2009 Jan 13, 12:30A swarm of robots drag a child across the floor. The future is now! "In the meantime, the video below shows that an army of swarmbots belonging to researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de
Lausanne in Switzerland can work together to pull off quite a feat - transporting a small girl across the floor."
video humor robot robots drag 2009 Jan 8, 5:06"But low-tech ways to harness the Sun's energy can have big impacts too, as these two new simple solar gadgets for use in poor areas of the world show: a solar-powered fridge and a drinking water
steriliser, without a single moving part between them."
solar solar-power news science drinking-water water
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