2009 Apr 9, 8:56Someone implemented the Ironic Sans artificial sundial clock concept! "Last year David Friedman published on his blog Ironic Sans an interesting design concept for something that he called The
Bulbdial Clock. That's like a sundial, but with better resolution-- not just an hour hand, but a minute and second hand as well, each given as a shadow from moving artificial light sources (bulbs).
We've recently put together a working bulbdial clock, with an implementation somewhat different from that of the original concept."
howto diy clock led sundial via:swannman 2009 Apr 7, 11:58
This past week I finished Anathem and despite the intimidating physical size of the book (difficult to take and read on the bus) I became very engrossed and was able to finish it in several orders of
magnitude less time than
what I spent on the Baroque
Cycle. Whereas reading the Baroque Cycle you can imagine Neal Stephenson sifting through giant economic tomes (or at least that's where my mind went whenever the characters began to explain
macro-economics to one another), in Anathem you can see Neal Stephenson staying up late
pouring over philosophy of mathematics. When not
exploring philosophy, Anathem has an appropriate amount of humor, love interests, nuclear bombs, etc. as you might hope from reading Snow Crash or Diamond Age. I thoroughly enjoyed Anathem.
On the topic of made up words: I get made up words for made up things, but there's already a name for cell-phone in English: its "cell-phone". The narrator notes that the book has been translated
into English so I guess I'll blame the fictional translator. Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the made up words nearly as much as some folk. Its a good thing I'm long
out of college because I can easily imagine confusing the names of actual concepts and people with those from the book, like Hemn space for Hamming distance. Towards the beginning, the description
of slines and the post-post-apocalyptic setting reminded me briefly of Idiocracy.
Recently, I've been reading everything of Charles Stross that I can, including about a month ago, The Jennifer Morgue from the surprisingly awesome amalgamation genre of spy thriller and Lovecraft
horror. Its the second in a series set in a universe in which magic exists as a form of mathematics and follows Bob Howard programmer/hacker, cube dweller, and begrudging spy who works for a
government agency tasked to suppress this knowledge and protect the world from its use. For a taste, try a short story from the series that's freely available on Tor's website, Down on the Farm.
Coincidentally, both Anathem and the Bob Howard series take an interest in the world of Platonic ideals. In the case of Anathem (without spoiling anything) the universe of Platonic ideals, under a
different name of course, is debated by the characters to be either just a concept or an actual separate universe and later becomes the underpinning of major events in the book. In the Bob Howard
series, magic is applied mathematics that through particular proofs or computations awakens/disturbs/provokes unnamed horrors in the universe of Platonic ideals to produce some desired effect in
Bob's universe.
atrocity archives neal stephenson jennifer morgue plato bob howard anathem 2009 Apr 1, 6:19"The first four parameters to a function are passed in rcx, rdx, r8 and r9. Any further parameters are pushed on the stack. Furthermore, space for the register parameters is reserved on the stack, in
case the called function wants to spill them; this is important if the function is variadic."
amd64 calling-convention debug x64 msdn raymond-chen assembly 2009 Apr 1, 9:48"For our latest mission, 30 Improv Everywhere agents found a random funeral in the obituary section of the newspaper and turned it into the best funeral ever... The family, especially the older
couple in the middle, were seriously mourning. They seemed to be focusing on the priest and mostly ignoring us. Still, we had to be as serious as we possibly could. If anyone cracked a smile or
giggled we would completely ruin the funeral for the family."
humor parody video improv-everywhere 2009 Mar 20, 4:51
Working on Internet Explorer extensions in C++ & COM, I had to relearn or rediscover how to do several totally basic and important things. To save myself and possibly others trouble in the
future, here's some pertinent links and tips.
First you must choose your IE extensibility point. Here's a very short list of the few I've used:
Once you've created your COM object that implements IObjectWithSite and whatever other interfaces your extensibility point requires as described in the above links you'll see your SetSite method
get called by IE. You might want to know how to get the top level browser object from the IUnknown site object passed in via that method.
After that you may also want to listen for some events from the browser. To do this you'll need to:
- Implement the dispinterface that has the event you want. For instance DWebBrowserEvents2, or HTMLDocumentEvents, or HTMLWindowEvents2. You'll have
to search around in that area of the documentation to find the event you're looking for.
- Register for events using AtlAdvise. The object you need to subscribe to depends on the events you want. For example, DWebBrowserEvents2 come from the webbrowser object, HTMLDocumentEvents come
from the document object assuming its an HTML document (I obtained via get_Document method on the webbrowser), and
HTMLWindowEvents2 come from the window object (which oddly I obtained via calling the get_script method on the document object).
Note that depending on when your SetSite method is called the document may not exist yet. For my extension I signed up for browser events immediately and then listened for events like NavigateComplete before signing up for document and window events.
- Implement IDispatch. The Invoke method will get called with event notifications from the dispinterfaces you sign up for in AtlAdvise. Implementing Invoke manually is a slight pain as all the
parameters come in as VARIANTs and are in reverse order. There's some ATL macros that may make this easier but I didn't bother.
- Call AtlUnadvise at some point -- at the latest when SetSite is called again and your site object changes.
If you want to check if an IHTMLElement is not visible on screen due how the page is scrolled, try comparing the Body or
Document Element's client height and width,
which appears to be the dimensions of the visible document area, to the element's bounding client rect which appears to be
its position relative to the upper left corner of the visible document area. I've found this to be working for me so far, but I'm not positive that frames, iframes, zooming, editable document
areas, etc won't mess this up.
Be sure to use pointers you get from the IWebBrowser/IHTMLDocument/etc. only on the thread on which you obtained the pointer or correctly marshal the pointers to other threads to avoid weird crashes and hangs.
Obtaining the HTML document of a subframe is slightly more complicated then you might hope. On the other hand this might
be resolved by the new to IE8 method IHTMLFrameElement3::get_contentDocument
Check out Eric's IE blog post on IE extensibility which has some great links on this topic as well.
technical boring internet explorer com c++ ihtmlelement extension 2009 Mar 12, 2:17
I've made an extension for Internet Explorer 8, FormToAccelerator which turns HTML forms on a web page into either an accelerator or a search
provider. In the design of the accelerators format we intentionally had HTML forms in mind so that it would be easy to create accelerators for existing web services. Consequently, creating an
accelerator from an HTML form is a natural concept and an extension I've been meaning to finish for many months now.
This is similar in concept to the Opera feature that lets you add a form as a search provider. The user experience is very rough and requires some knowledge of accelerator variables. If I can come
up with a better interaction model I may update this in the future, but at the moment all the designs I can come up with require way too much effort. Install IE8 RC1 and then try out FormToAccelerator.
activity html accelerator ie8 internet-explorer activities formtoaccelerator extension 2009 Mar 12, 12:04Google's chart API can generate QR codes. Just specify in the URL the chart type as 'qr', and the data you want encoded and the returned resource is a QR code image for that data. Just installed a QR
code reader on my phone.
qr barcode google api chart mobile web cellphone qrcode 2009 Feb 27, 11:00Raymond Chen has a years worth of blog content written and scheduled! "To give you an idea of how far in advance I write my blog entries, I wrote this particular entry on February 13, 2008. ... this
particular entry ended up on February 27, 2009 because that was the next available open day. ... Now, with a buffer of over a year, I do have quite a bit of leeway in choosing when any particular
article is published." Humorous commentor John writes in response: "If you were to disappear off the face of the Earth, how long would it be before we knew?"
blog raymond-chen writing humor 2009 Feb 7, 10:39
On my laptop at work I often get mail with attached files the application for which I only have installed on my main computer. Tired of having to save the file on the laptop and then find it on the
network via my other computer, I wrote remoteopen two nights ago. With this I open the file on my laptop and remoteopen sends it to be opened on
my main computer. Overkill for this issue but it felt good to write a quick tool that solves my problem.
technical boring remoteopen tool 2009 Jan 24, 2:42"PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once
we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken."
politics news government obama election president tracking 2009 Jan 22, 9:57'Dubbed the "Light Car," the concept car is designed to communicate with other drivers using a system of OLED lights, which rest on the some part of the body of the car including the front and rear
light, in the form of an OLED display panel.'
car led communication sign signal 2009 Jan 16, 2:10A graph showing how many people use the word Khan spelled with varying number of 'A's.
humor via:boingboing graph data startrek khan google 2009 Jan 15, 4:57Lovely travel visualization: "We've generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It's a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that
we're delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we'd show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who's had a very busy
2008 - President Elect Barack Obama."
via:mattb visualization blog dopplr obama travel statistics map 2009 Jan 13, 6:20"So we've progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each
machine, to one that's encrypted - really more just obfuscated - to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads."
security privacy adware malware advertising ie browser scheme interview bho via:li 2008 Dec 29, 11:04
Another use for my new phone is as a replacement for my grocery
card, those little plastic cards with a bar code on them that the grocery store gives you to track your purchasing habits. I've previously gone to great lengths to increase space in my pockets by
removing infrequently used keys and reducing my wallet to the essentials. So I was glad to get rid of the QFC card and replace it with a photo of its bar code on my phone. Since the important part
of the QFC card is the bar code which is just an image of black lines, if your phone has a camera and a screen with a reasonable resolution you can take a photo of the bar code and later display it
to a reader. I've so far been able to try it once and successfully at a normal checkout line, but the reaction from the checkout lady was enough that I may in the future just keep a card in my car.
She was very excited, asked me what kind of phone I had, called over another checkout person and generally made a large fuss. Also the checkout people generally don't mind giving me a new card if I
don't have one with me.
technical boring barcode phone 2008 Dec 29, 2:20"But the most accurate account of the bomb's inner workings-an unnervingly detailed reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents-has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from
Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree."
via:swannman bomb atom-bomb atomic-bomb history goverment nuclear physics security research science 2008 Dec 29, 12:06Too bad I missed these before Christmas: "Why buy a stupid Elmo when you can permanently disturb that young mind with a cute knitted plush rabbit killed with a giant carrot? Or a beautiful tiger
eating some human remains? I love these."
humor death macabre stuffed-animals toy gizmodo via:jen-johnston gift 2008 Dec 14, 4:59
Sarah and I are back from Munich, Germany as of Thursday and I've just about recovered. The trip there via Air France we watched many movies and
it was much better than the trip back in which the entertainment system failed and I had a cold. When we arrived, Jon met us at the airport, helped us with the subway system, we played Guitar Hero,
ate at a Bavarian pub, and then later at an Australian bar.
The following day we met up with Jon and three of his friends, one of
whom was visiting from England and we all took a train to Neuschwanstein Castle. Apparently its the 'Disney' castle in that Disney's castle's are based upon it. The castle is filled with images and
statues of swans in homage to the Swan Knight. We ate in the town at a cafe with traditional Bavarian food before taking the train back and getting all you can eat fajitas for dinner.
germany personal vacation nontechnical 2008 Nov 20, 10:58I, like Matt, am a bit incredulous but this is still funny. "Check, cash or money order are acceptable forms of payment when the bill collector comes knocking (or e-mailing), not a picture you
doodled of a spider."
via:swannman humor art spider money 2008 Nov 17, 4:20"...he said that The Roots were retiring from touring in order to become the house band for Jimmy Fallon when he takes over Conan O'Brien's late night show next year. But that video was quickly
pulled, so everyone has been scrambling to find out whether this apocalyptic... thing is actually true. NBC has no official comment, but we hear that it probably is. Essaywhuman?!!!??! This is one of
those things that proves you're getting old."
via:ethan_t_hein tv the-roots music
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