2008 Feb 3, 11:01FTA: "Like Klein, EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston had spent much of the previous December reading press accounts of the administration's secret surveillance program. "It was all I thought
about over the holiday," he remembers. In fact, at his bos
via:boingboing eff article law privacy government history 2007 Dec 26, 5:45Miscellaneous thoughts I had that would have been relevant many months ago:
- A History Channel program had a reenactment of a 1920's archaeologist discovering a stone tablet, sending the tablet to a warehouse, etc. all behind the voice over giving the dry facts. The
reenactor hammed it up a bit and I would have rather had clips from Indiana Jones in the background. If they're already not showing me the archaeologist who discovered the tablet, they may as well
show me one who will be entertaining.
- There are many parodies of the Get a Mac ads and so when I saw a UK Get a Mac ad I payed attention to see what the joke was. I was
disappointed by the 'parody' because it was a conventional Get a Mac ad with different actors. Apple localized their Get a Mac ad campaign in this fashion in the UK and in Japan. I've got a
playlist of the US, UK, and Japan's version of the Piechart ad. Ranking the lovable bumblingness of the PC I give the order
UK, Japan, then US and ranking the sumgness of the Mac I give the order UK, US, then Japan. But don't take my word for it, view
the ads for yourself.
-
Yahoo Pipes lets users generate an RSS feed altering service that runs on Yahoo's server using a GUI. This is very different from Microsoft's Popfly which allows users to component-ize and share javascript utilities that run client side on a webbrowser. Both have the awesome power of buzzword associations
like 'Web 2.0' and 'Mashup' but in my mind Yahoo Pipes is for server side RSS feed modification and Popfly is about client side javascript webpages. And neither will allow me to run an arbitrary
XSLT =).
popfly apple personal history-channel indiana-jones pipes mac technical microsoft mashup yahoo nontechnical 2007 Nov 26, 12:32Guerrilla clockmakers fix famous Paris clock. Andrew says: "It seems a team of clockmakers broke into the Pantheon in Paris in September 2005 and spent a year fixing the historic and neglected clock,
which had been abandoned by the authorities. They were
clock culture history humor paris france via:boingboing cultural-disobediance 2007 Nov 15, 4:03Colossus set to compete against modern PC in decrypting Nazi messages in promotion of museum.
bbc article computer cryptography encryption hardware history turing 2007 Nov 12, 4:28Excerpts and brief history of Army Man a zine by one of the original Simpson's writers from before The Simpsons. I like 'An Amusing Anecdote' and the Bride's heckling.
humor culture history simpsons blog article via:boingboing 2007 Nov 6, 7:34Humorous TED talk based losely on the topic of 4AM.
humor video ted conspiracy history politics 2007 Oct 17, 5:55Diego Doval expresses my thoughts on this topic very well and also likely well before I even had thoughts on this topic.
blog article history robustness-principle jon-postel internet tcp 2007 Oct 17, 5:17History of the various versions of Postel's Law or the Robustness Principle which paraphrased says: "In general, an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its
receiving behavior. That is, it should be careful to send
blog article history robustness-principle jon-postel internet tcp 2007 Oct 3, 11:29University of Michigan's collection 'Traditions of Magic'.
magic history research michigan 2007 Oct 3, 10:21Tim Berners-Lee writes about principles for new technology in the context of the evolution of HTML and the development of namespaces and XML.
architecture article tim-berners-lee w3c internet history evolution html namespace xml web mmm multimedia-mesh humor test-of-independent-invention 2007 Sep 27, 2:17Starting on a new simple project I wanted to get the history of my Delicious links. Delicious has an export tool available via the settings section so I thought I'd try that. However, the links
aren't exported in XML not even in XHTML but rather in HTML. Shocking. An example:
"Don't Tase Me, Bro!" (UF Student Tasered Remix)
Remix of the 'Don't tase me, bro!' guy getting tasered.At this point I'm already not going to use this file because its in HTML but I'm even more disgusted by those date time values.
Raymond Chen of the Old New Thing posted about recognizing timestamps and timestamp sentinel values. From the first blog post and with the use of a calculator for base conversion one can tell that
those are UNIX style timestamps counting the number of seconds since 1970.
It reminds me of my hatred for the MIME date time format I developed working on my webpage's server side parsing of atom and RSS. Atom is
of course my favorite as Atom uses the Internet date time format described in the following documents. Here's an example of one
2007-09-27T020:50:00.000-08:00
On the other hand the evil and villainous RSS uses the MIME date time format now described in the more
recent IETF MIME standard. Here's an example Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:50:00 -0800
The Internet date time format has the advantage of being so easy to sort. An alphabetic sort with normal C-style collation rules of strings containing Internet date times will also sort them
chronologically. This is not the case for the MIME date time due to the preceding day of the week and the spelled out month name. This also means that when producing these you have to figure out
the day of the week and when parsing them you have to match month names rather than just parsing out numbers. Anyway now days if I see mention of a date time in a new proposed standard or spec I be
sure to point out the numerous advantages of the Internet date time format.
date xml html feed time technical date-time code atom rss 2007 Sep 19, 6:14The story of the first smiley emoticon.
history humor computer culture web internet emoticon smiley 2007 Sep 12, 1:06As close to the Cryptonomicon as you'll be able to find. The first few chapters of a rare 17th century work on cryptography.
book history crypto cryptography 2007 Aug 15, 3:24From the article: "... a scan of a brochure from the Kelsey-Hayes Company, Detroit, MI for their pre-fabricated fallout shelters, circa 1963." Very cool.
culture design flickr history images photo photography photos retro via:swannman 2007 Aug 13, 2:05From : "Rarely do we think of mathematicians as glamorous. But during the 1980s, the rising importance of cryptography injected a certain amount of glitz into the discipline.
math article history cryptography 2007 Aug 7, 12:28Paul Graham's essay on the roots of the programming language Lisp.
lisp essay language programming software article history paul-graham 2007 Jul 11, 2:21Would real world trojan horses work today?
video humor youtube history trojan-horse the-chaser 2007 Jul 4, 11:21Photos of a giant high voltage installation
photos steampunk architecture electricity history science technology weird 2007 Jun 5, 12:30Interesting past predictions of the future. Lots of cool retro visions of the future.
future humor predictions history scifi archive blog monthly
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