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The Roots: The Roots To Be Jimmy Fallon's Band; We Are Old And Sad

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."PermalinkCommentsvia:ethan_t_hein tv the-roots music

Sonja Eddings Brown is Rather Unpleasant - The Rehabilitated Student

2008 Nov 16, 10:13"Imagine my mild surprise when I discovered that the woman who terrorized me in my final days in high school is the face of Proposition 8. Sonja Eddings Brown is everything you would expect a Proposition 8 supporter to be: someone with misplaced values and a knack for being a big bully. Yes, a middle-aged mother of three went out of her way to threaten to kick a high school senior out of her valedictory speaking position simply because the student refused to have (strange) words placed her mouth and to be used as a propagandistic advertising vehicle."PermalinkCommentspolitics education california sonja-eddings-brown high-school via:kris.kowal

G1 Android Phone

2008 Nov 9, 11:29

T-Mobile G1 Wallpapers by romainguy
I finally replaced my old regular cell-phone which was literally being held together by a rubber band with a fancy new G1, my first Internet accessible phone.

I had to call the T-Mobile support line to get data added to my plan and the person helping me was disconcertingly friendly. She asked about my weekend plans and so I felt compelled to ask her the same. Her plans involved replacing her video card so she could get back to World of Warcraft and do I enjoy computer gaming? I couldn't tell if she was genuine or if she was signing me up for magazines.

I was with Sarah in her new car, trying out the phone's GPS functionality via Google Maps while she drove. I switched to Street View and happened to find my car. It was a weird feeling, kind of like those Google conspiracy videos.

The phone runs Google's open source OS and I really enjoy the application API. Its all in Java and URIs and mime-types are sort of basics. Rather than invoking the builtin item picker control directly you invoke an 'intent' specifying the URI of your list of items, a mime-type describing the type of items in the list, and an action 'PICK' and whatever is registered as the picker on the system pops up and lets the user pick from that list. The same goes if you want to 'EDIT' an image, or 'VIEW' an mp3.

I wanted to replace the Google search box gadget that appears on the home screen with my own search box widget that uses OpenSearch descriptors but apparently in the current API you can't make home screen gadgets without changing parts of the OS. My other desired application is something to replace this GPS photo tracker device by recording my location to a file and an additional program on my computer to apply those locations to photos.

PermalinkCommentstmobile personal api phone technical g1 android google

XSLT Meddler Script

2008 Nov 9, 11:25

I've made an XSLT Meddler script in my continued XSLT adventures. Meddler is a simple and easy web server that runs whatever JScript.NET code you give it. I wrote a script that takes an indicated XSLT on the server, downloads an indicated XML from the Internet and returns the result of running that XML through the XSLT. This is useful when you want to work with something like the Zune software or IE7's feed platform which only reads feeds over the HTTP protocol. I'll give more interesting and specific examples of how this could be useful in the future.

PermalinkCommentsmeddler technical xml script xslt

I Voted

2008 Nov 9, 11:18

I Voted 2008 - Farewell to Polls by RedRaspusThis past Tuesday I voted in my first presidential election. Of course I was eligible twice before so don't tell my social studies teacher. I read about folks who stood in line for twelve hours waiting to vote but I personally had no issues. I found the voting location around 10am and it seemed appropriately busy: There were people voting but no lines. I came in and looked confused until an elderly lady gave me a paper to bubble in. The voting booth was more like a fold out voting table at a very awkward height and in the end my back ached. It feels better to vote in person and have a back ache after. Its more like I've accomplished something.

PermalinkCommentspersonal voting

Pong: Interactive Pong May be Most Fun You Can Have With a Whiteboard

2008 Nov 7, 4:06'A live "drawing on whiteboard" version [of pong], mixing electronics with the joy of drawing on, wiping off and repositioning your playing bat. Check it out, thrill to the high-speed action and grin at the ultimate use of a whiteboard: so much better than the usual business drivel that gets drawn on them.'PermalinkCommentshumor video interactive whiteboard pong game

2008 Election Maps

2008 Nov 6, 6:24Comparison of various website's US presidential election maps: "Most media outlets covering the 2008 US Presidential Election used the familar red/blue map to track the progress of the race as results from the polls rolled in Tueday evening. Here are several of those maps, in some ways as similar to each other as they are varied."PermalinkCommentsmap visualization geography president election vote voting politics

The igraph library for complex network research

2008 Nov 5, 3:55A graphing library which includes variaous graph visualization algorithms. GNU licensed. "igraph is a free software package for creating and manipulating undirected and directed graphs. It includes implementations for classic graph theory problems like minimum spanning trees and network flow, and also implements algorithms for some recent network analysis methods, like community structure search."PermalinkCommentsreference free development programming visualization graph math library opensource c++ igraph graphviz via:mattb

FeedSync

2008 Nov 5, 3:51This site has example implementations for feedsync: "The FeedSync Specification is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. Microsoft encourages developers to create independent implementations of the FeedSync specification. See the Developer page for more information on how to write a FeedSync enabled application, and the Implementations page to see how people are using FeedSync already."PermalinkCommentsfree software development feedsync feed microsoft live windows rss sse

Halloween and Gas Park Weekend

2008 Nov 4, 10:14

Gas Works Park, SeattleGas Works Park, SeattleThe weekend before last Sarah and I went down to Gas Works Park in Seattle. Gas Works Park is a former Seattle Gas Light Company gasification plant now turned into a park with the machinery kept intact and found right on the shore of Lake Union. There's a large hill right next to the plant with an embedded art installation from which you get an excellent view of the park and the lake. Anyway a very cool place. Afer, we ate at Julia's of Wallingford where I stereotypically had the Santa Cruz omelet. Good food, nice place, nice neighborhood.

Trick-or-Treat at MSFT by Matt SwannThis past weekend was Halloween weekend. On Halloween at Microsoft parents bring their kids around the office buildings and collect candy from those who have candy in their office. See Matt's photo of one such hallway at Microsoft. The next day Sarah and I went to two birthday parties the second of which required costume. I went as House (from the television show House) by putting on a suit jacket and carrying a cane. Sarah wore scrubs to lend cred. to my lazy costume. Oh yeah and on Sunday Sarah bought a new car.

PermalinkCommentsgas works park halloween personal sarah

Google 2008 Elections Map

2008 Nov 4, 8:33"Watch as real-time election results come in on Tuesday, November 4th. Select a state to see county-by-county results and view House and Senate races by using the dropdown toolbar."PermalinkCommentsgoogle map politics visualization elections mashup president

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Locksmiths

2008 Nov 3, 2:01Software that can produce the design for a key from a photo of a key. "Scenes from one of the proof-of-concept telephoto experiments using a new software program from UC San Diego that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key."PermalinkCommentssecurity photo software research paranoia key

Microsoft takes touchscreens to the next dimension - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist

2008 Oct 29, 3:09Video showing some more interesting touch screen ideas from Microsoft Research. A touch sensitive sphere that can accomodate multiple users and a table which projects one image onto itself and another image onto objects beyond itself: "But hold another piece of a translucent glass in the air above the table, and it catches a second ghostly image. This trick is in the tabletop glass, which electronically flickers between translucent and transparent 60 times per second, faster than the eye can notice."PermalinkCommentsresearch microsoft video touchscreen table

Word Wrapping IE's Plain Text

2008 Oct 28, 11:23

If you view a plain text document in Internet Explorer 8, for instance the plain text version of Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother and press F12 to bring up the developer toolbar, you can see that IE simply takes the plain text, sticks it inside a

 tag, and renders it.  This means that word wrapping isn't supplied and the only line breaks that appear are those in the document.  However, since the text document is converted to HTML it means I can implement word wrap myself using a bookmarklet:
javascript:function ww() { var preTag = document.getElementsByTagName('pre')[0]; preTag.style.fontFamily="arial"; preTag.style.wordWrap='break-word'; }; ww();
After adding a favorite and setting the favorite's URL to the previous, I can view plain text documents, and select my Word Wrap favorite to apply word wrap and non-fixed width font.
PermalinkCommentsbrowser technical ie wordwrap

Signs of Fall Tree

2008 Oct 28, 9:01

sequelguy posted a photo:

Signs of Fall Tree

Immediately after Sarah took this photo, a truck pulled into the empty parking spot and the driver jumped out to apologize for messing up the photo. The driver was a zombie.

PermalinkCommentsseattle tree nature gasworkspark sarahtookthisphoto

Gas Works Park, Seattle

2008 Oct 28, 9:28

sequelguy posted a photo:

Gas Works Park, Seattle

PermalinkCommentsseattle graffiti washington gasworkspark

Gas Works Park, Seattle

2008 Oct 28, 9:27

sequelguy posted a photo:

Gas Works Park, Seattle

PermalinkCommentsseattle washington gasworkspark

Gas Works Park, Seattle

2008 Oct 28, 9:27

sequelguy posted a photo:

Gas Works Park, Seattle

PermalinkCommentsseattle sign graffiti washington neat gasworkspark

Gas Works Park, Seattle

2008 Oct 28, 9:19

sequelguy posted a photo:

Gas Works Park, Seattle

PermalinkCommentsseattle washington gasworkspark

Gas Works Park, Seattle

2008 Oct 28, 9:18

sequelguy posted a photo:

Gas Works Park, Seattle

PermalinkCommentsseattle washington gasworkspark
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