2007 May 11, 7:48
After
Carissa and Elijah's wedding Sarah and I went to San Francisco. We drove in, well Sarah drove anyway, still in
the PT Cruiser Sunday morning and checked into our hotel,
Hotel Diva. I was originally concerned that I wouldn't fit in as I don't really consider myself a
diva, however the hotel was cool. They have Internet rooms setup in various themes, the front desk is always staffed, our room had a very modern look, and when we entered the flat-screen over the
front desk was playing an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
We walked around a bit before going to the
SF Museum of Modern Art. There was a Picasso exhibit at the time
which we could see for only $3 more. It felt kind of wrong like my ticket was super-sized. I think the most memorable piece I saw was
three white
panels which consisted of three blank panels. Art. Sure. After that Sarah wanted to see the giant Hello Kitty store she had heard of from her sister. We ended up going to the Westfield Shopping
center which has a disappointingly average sized Hello Kitty store. Apparently the giant one is gone. That night we went to
First Crush for dinner. I had a
flight of wine which consists of three one-third sized glasses of various but complimentary wines. It was a great restaurant in terms of food, drink, atmosphere and service.
The next morning we were even more the tourists when we went down to Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39. We visited the famous wax museum and purchased multiple
pounds of taffy. On the way back to the Oakland airport we got to experience a little traffic as part of
the
580 freeway had collapsed the morning we arrived and was still under repair on our way out. We survived of course and I think the trip went rather well.
sanfrancisco personal california sfmoma nontechnical 2007 May 10, 12:17The XPointer specification describing the fragment used with text/xml documents.
w3c xml xpath xpointer reference uri fragment 2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (
the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named
Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable
pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no
coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.
By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of
navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by
malicious software to hijack
"about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.
Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.
- Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
- The user should be able to modify its content.
- Show links that the user uses.
- Show thumbnails of those links
- Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.
Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an
RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing
about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing
but hey, I said this was ugly.
In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's
Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could
be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...
browser technical hack 2007 Apr 16, 3:33An overlooked point of IE extensibility. Attach behaviors to elements in your document via style sheets. Essentially this lets you override the normal behavior of document elements with your own
code. The article tells you all about it.
msdn microsoft ie browser code programming css article howto extension behavior 2007 Apr 11, 5:23Tips on getting the size of your wallet down including pointers to smaller cool wallets you can buy.
howto shopping wallet via:incredulous 2007 Apr 8, 11:30Matt's domain that points to his website.
boldlog swannman matt-swann photos microsoft friend 2007 Apr 2, 12:04Bear McCreary creates the soundtrack for Battlestar Galactica. In this blog entry he talks about creating the cool piece for the season 3 finale. (Spoilers in the article)
bear-mccreary blog article bsg music scifi battlestargalactica battlestar 2007 Mar 29, 5:51Windows will use the localized digit shapes instead of the European 0, 1, ... 9 if preceded by the Unicode codepoint U+206E.
microsoft msdn windows unicode digit U+206E U+206F 2007 Mar 29, 5:40A Wiki about Unicode codepoints. Add notes concerning your favorite character.
unicode wiki social 2007 Mar 13, 8:16Over the weekend I went with Jon and Sarah to see
Zach Galifianakis perform at
The Moore who was awesome of
course. I hadn't been to The Moore before but it was very cool. The space is very vertical with two levels of balconies making it seem small in the other dimensions. We were on the middle level so
when Zach climbed off the stage to talk to the audience we couldn't see him.
Before the show we ate at
The Steelhead Diner. I enjoyed my chicken sandwhich but the place seemed a little full of itself with salt and pepper that had
been infused with this and that. At any rate it had a nice atmosphere and good food which I suppose is the point.
The opening act for Zach was another comedian whose name I don't recall. He was pretty funny but seemed to do just a tad too much pandering to the Seattle audience. "The administration should do
something different than what they're doing currently!" *Audience Cheers* is sort of equivalent to "Its great to be here in... Seattle!" *Audience Cheers*.
personal seattle nontechnical 2007 Mar 13, 7:57I had a few thoughts after reading about
OpenID. However, after doing only a very small amount of digging I can see these aren't new thoughts.
-
Anonymous OpenID
-
Have an OpenID that anyone can use because it performs no authorization. You'd specify a URI like http://deletethis.net/anonymousopenid/yournamehere and you'd immediately get an anonymous OpenID
associated with that URI. This has already been implemented by Jayant Gandhi.
-
Group OpenID
-
Have an OpenID that consists of a group of member OpenIDs. To login as the Group OpenID you need to login with any of the member OpenIDs. This is discussed more by Dmitry Shechtman on his blog.
-
OpenID Normalization
-
I find that I already have a couple of OpenIDs without even trying due to AOL giving out OpenIDs. I'd like for all of my
OpenIDs to point to one canonical OpenID. It looks like this may already be possible by the OpenID
specification.
I guess I'm a little late to the scene.
technical stolen-thoughts openid 2007 Feb 22, 10:44The standard for URI fragments for identifying portions of an XML document. I've been looking for this...
xml xpointer w3c specification standards xpath uri fragment 2006 Nov 27, 11:23Fiddler2 is a free tool that lets you view and fiddle with HTTP and now HTTPS traffic! Supports automated modification of traffic using javascript as well as manual modification using breakpoints.
Very cool tool.
eric-lawrence tool tools free internet http debugger debug fiddler fiddler2 microsoft proxy 2006 Nov 15, 12:10Share your collections and view other's collections of mapped places via Microsoft's Live Maps.
blog microsoft map search web2.0 travel poi collections place social 2006 Nov 3, 3:02I'm updating my
homepage to include a sorted list of
my livejournal blog entries and
my del.icio.us bookmarks. I'm using
BadgerFish to convert the XML of the RSS feeds of the two into JavaScript objects. At
that point I can do fun stuff like sorting them into lists on my page. Neat. This is how I spend my free time... OK.
xml badgerfish feed rss script livejournal delicious homepage 2005 Dec 29, 3:37Linus says Slashdot is "big public wanking session": "I don't tend to bother about slashdot, because quite frankly, the whole _point_ of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with
people getting together and making their own "insightful
slashdot linus humor linux trademark 2005 Oct 25, 3:41Tool that displays information on Unicode Code Points.
development reference search tools unicode utf8 web language 2004 Sep 10, 12:04I got my driver's license today. Imagine that. I lost all of the points that I could on the parallel parking portion of the test. You know in California they don't test you on parallel parking
ability. With my new license my functional impairment level has moved from minor to non-existent. Hoo-raw. Incidentally if you search for the phrase "stealth geriatrics" on google, the first link is
to a power point presentation entitled "stealth geriatrics." I just thought that was a funny phrase.
2004 May 10, 10:37Looking around the Microsoft campus it was easy to tell people who were there for an interview from the programmers who worked there. All of the people who were dressed formally, a suit or tie was an
obvious sign, were there for an interview. I spent my time between interviews talking to other over dressed people between interviews. The usual topics of conversation included name, city of origin,
computer science background, and the crazy problems our interviewers had asked us. Going through these topics with one such person, who incidentally was the only woman I saw interviewing, I asked
what school she was attending. She told me she was just finishing her Masters in Computer Science at
[some college] and I told her where I was from. She then asked me, "You have your
Doctorate in Computer Science?" "No," I said, "My Bachelors... I'm working on my Bachelors." "Oh," she said, "Well you look very mature." I'm fairly certain that's a first for me -- being told I look
"very mature" that is. Unfortunately, at that point my tram showed up and I had to travel to a different building. Now I'm left wondering what made me look mature. It could have been the gel or the
slacks or the tucked in shirt. The day previous while dressed casually, hanging out with my friend Jeannie, some of her friends thought I was her age, about eight years older. The common element
between my two appearances were my new black dressy-ish shoes. Maybe its just that easy.
Some rights reserved