2010 Apr 21, 6:47"After years of secrecy (and the occasional leak), a draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty has finally been released by negotiators. We've delved deep into the treaty,
highlighting its numerous problems. Indeed, there's a lot not to like about the treaty: Internet disconnections, anticircumvention prohibitions, and even the ability for rightsholders to get
injunctions if they can show infringement is imminent."
arstechnica acta privacy internet todo government politics piracy technical 2010 Apr 11, 3:55Humour infographic backlash infographic.
information infographics humor technical 2010 Apr 4, 2:02
I've just updated Encode-O-Matic with a Guess Input Encoding feature. When you start Encode-O-Matic or when you use the 'Guess
Input Encoding' menu item from the 'Tools' menu, Encode-O-Matic will try out various combinations of encodings and guess at which set seem to apply to your input. For instance given the following
text, Encode-O-Matic will correctly guess that it is percent encoded, base64 encoded, deflate compressed text:
S%2BWqUEhLLMoFUulFpXnZQLogMa%2BkmCuPqxzILk%2FMyeHK4QIA
It should work fairly well for simple things but I did pick 'Guess' for the name of the feature to intentionally lower
expectations. It doesn't currently apply to character encodings but that may be something to consider in the future.
technical encodeomatic tool encoding 2010 Apr 1, 2:42Its like a better version of what I was doing with my Web Frotz Interpreter. Its all client side javascript, HTML, & CSS to play Z-machine based interactive fiction games. They even do the saved
game in a URL piece.
if interactive-fiction game web browser webapp 2010 Mar 25, 3:53Spike Jonze short film "I'm Here" released.
spike-jonze video film robot 2010 Mar 12, 1:28
It was relatively easy, although still more difficult than I would have guessed, to hook my bespoke website's Atom feed up to Google Buzz. I already have a Google email account and associated
profile so Buzz just showed up in my Gmail interface. Setting it up it offered to connect to my YouTube account or my Google
Chat account but I didn't see an option to connect to an arbitrary RSS or Atom feed like I expected.
But of course hooking up an arbitrary Atom or RSS feed is documented. You hook it up in the same manner you
claim a website as your own via the Google Profile (for some reason they want to ensure you own the feed connected to your Buzz account). You do this via Google's social graph API which uses XFN or
FOAF. I used XFN by simply adding a link to my feed to my Google profile (And be sure to check the 'This is a profile page about me' which ensures that a rel="me" tag is added to the HTML on your
profile. This is how XFN works.) And by adding a corresponding link in my feed back to my Google profile page with the following:
atom:link rel="me" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/david.risney"
I used this
Google tool to check my XFN
connections and when I checked back the next day my feed showed up in Google Buzz's configuration dialog.
So more difficult than I would have expected (more difficult than just an 'Add your feed' button and textbox) but not super difficult. And yet after reading this Buzz from DeWitt Clinton I feel better about opting-in to Google's Social API.
technical atom google buzz rss social 2010 Mar 12, 11:11"All of the sculpted noses on the planet Viltvodle VI were fashioned after Douglas Adams' own. The creators used a 3D model he had created for the game Starship Titanic." The noses mentioned in the
previous sentence were depicted in the movie in a church. The religion of this church maintains that the universe was created by their god sneezing out the universe and so they have statues of their
god's nose throughout the church. Of course this is intended to seem absurd, however based on the previous sentence -- that the nose belonged to Douglas Adams -- then they really were worshping the
nose of their creator.
douglas-adams book hhgttg movie religion nose 2010 Mar 11, 3:33"The headers and captions on http://diveintohtml5.org/ use an open source font called "Essays 1743." The creator of that font was looking for a tutorial on HTML5, came across my site, and was
pleasantly surprised to see his own work on prominent display. He now wants to update his font to include stylistically appropriate Unicode arrows, which I will then use with my captions.
The internet is awesome. It's so wonderfully intertwingled."
html html5 mark-pilgrim font technical 2010 Mar 10, 5:21The lifecycle of an Android application. How to gracefully handle getting paused, stopped, etc.
android activity application technical programming lifecycle 2010 Mar 3, 4:07
tv dvd max-headroom 2010 Feb 27, 10:17Weave syncs web browser user data. Its an open platform using JSON data, RESTful URL based APIs, with basic auth over HTTPS.
weave firefox web browser mozilla development technical reference 2010 Feb 26, 10:12Interesting stuff about Google determining synonyms based on folks changing their search queries.
google search synonym machine-learning english language technical 2010 Feb 26, 8:50Did I read this already on Paleo-Future? Anyway still an awesome 1995 rant on why the Internet will fail. "Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for
great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an
afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of
capitalism: salespeople."
humor internet fail article history 2010 Feb 26, 8:40
I'm making a switch from the IE team to the Windows team where I'll be working on the next version of Windows. As a going away surprise Jen and Nick added me to my gallery of Bill Gates (discussed previously). Here's a close up of the photoshopped cover.
Before:
After:
microsoft bill gates photoshop windows 2010 Feb 24, 12:42Apparently Washington State uses an algorithm to generate drivers license numbers. Unless someone else has the same name and birth date your license number is based entirely on your name and birth
date.
math identity washington reference 2010 Feb 23, 9:38Think you're a bad ass having installed some obscure and difficult to use Linux distro, then prove how hardcore of a Linux nerd you are with '...Suicide Linux, where any unrecognized command is
parsed as "rm -rf /"...'
humor geek linux bash technical 2010 Feb 22, 3:55Hilarious Internet illiteracy generates tons of confused comments on RWW: '... We've determined by looking at our traffic stats that people are doing Google searches for "facebook login" and coming
upon RWW. They see the FB Connect button and assume that RWW is the "new Facebook." Sigh. The Internet Is Hard.'
via:kottke facebook internet identity openid 2010 Feb 5, 8:00Font stats on Mac and PC respectively.
font statistics html css web design typography via:kris.kowal 2010 Jan 28, 4:20Graph of encodings used by documents on the web. Unicode based encodings are thankfully on the rise.
unicode encoding web internationalization localization utf8 text html technical 2010 Jan 20, 5:05Shower tiles that change based on heat. Neat!
shower shower-tile wishlist house design
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