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Signs against Clouds

2008 Sep 1, 9:34

sequelguy posted a photo:

Signs against Clouds

PermalinkCommentsseattle washington alki watersign

Do Not Feed the Birds over Water

2008 Sep 1, 9:34

sequelguy posted a photo:

Do Not Feed the Birds over Water

PermalinkCommentsseattle washington alki watersign

Space Needle Against Clouds

2008 Sep 1, 9:33

sequelguy posted a photo:

Space Needle Against Clouds

PermalinkCommentsseattle washington alki waterspaceneedle

Fish and Chips Pier

2008 Sep 1, 9:33

sequelguy posted a photo:

Fish and Chips Pier

PermalinkCommentsseattle water washington alki

Seattle Skyline

2008 Sep 1, 9:33

sequelguy posted a photo:

Seattle Skyline

PermalinkCommentsseattle washington alki waterspaceneedle

Cadbury Hits Fireplace Shovel

2008 Sep 1, 4:45
Cadbury jumps out of her toy box hitting the fireplace shovel, and does a few other cute things.
From: David Risney
Views: 76
1 ratings
Time: 00:44 More in Pets & Animals
PermalinkCommentsvideo

Cadbury Nibbles Toy Box

2008 Sep 1, 4:17
Cadbury sits in and eats her box of toys. She enjoys eating her toy box more often than playing with any of the toys.
From: David Risney
Views: 343
2 ratings
Time: 00:16 More in Pets & Animals
PermalinkCommentsvideo

INTOURIST Soviet Union Russia Labels - a set on Flickr

2008 Aug 29, 10:44Cool 30's Soviet Union tourist brochure logos and designs. "Intourist was renowned as the official state travel agency of the Soviet Union. It was founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin and was responsible for managing the great majority of foreigners' access to, and travel within, the Soviet Union. It grew into one of the largest tourism organizations in the world, with a network embracing banks, hotels, and money exchanges. Some of the best Intourist labels and brochures produced during the 1930's were designed by A. Selensky. Some of the labels in this set are signed by him, including a rare constructivist style travel brochure I have included as well."PermalinkCommentsflickr photo propaganda graphic russia history design

Patenting reincarnation - Knowledge Jolt with Jack

2008 Aug 28, 10:58"The patent is really bad, which is all part of the fun: Abstract: The invention consists of the process of reincarnation or rebirth resulting in immortality. Description: [0001] This invention resulted from my combining Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Newton's Second Law of Physics. [0002] Reincarnation is defined in Webster's Third New Inernational Dictionary as "rebith". Thus my invention is a process of rebirth or in other words immortality."PermalinkCommentshumor patent via:kris.kowal reincarnation

IE8 Beta2 Shipped

2008 Aug 27, 11:36

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is now available! Some of the new features from this release that I really enjoy are Tab Grouping, the new address-bar, and InPrivate Subscriptions.

Tab Grouping groups tabs that are opened from the same page. For example, on a Google search results page if you open the first two links the two new tabs will be grouped with the Google search results page. If you close one of the tabs in that group focus goes to another tab in that group. Its small, but I really enjoy this feature and without knowing exactly what I wanted while using IE7 and FF2 I knew I wanted something like this. Plus the colors for the tab groups are pretty!

The new address bar and search box makes life much easier by searching through my browsing history for whatever I'm typing in. Other things are searched besides history but since I ignore favorites and use Delicious I mostly care about history. At any rate its one of the things that makes it impossible for me to go machines running IE7.

InPrivate Subscriptions allows you to subscribe to a feed of URLs from which IE should not download content. This is intended for avoiding sites that track you across websites and could sell or share your personal information, but this feature could be used for anything where the goal is to avoid a set of URLs. For example, phishing, malware sites, ad blocking, etc. etc. I think there's some interesting uses for this feature that we have yet to see.

Anyway, we're another release closer to the final IE8 and I can relax a little more.

PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft browser technical ie8 ie

rec.arts.sf.science qdFAQ

2008 Aug 26, 3:42Links to write ups on how much energy it would take to destroy the Earth or at least make it inhabitable in various fashions: "Destroying the Earth, It is often asked what it would take to shatter the Earth into little pieces. Erik Max Francis gives a rough answer. A less drastic measure would be to sterilise it by heating the outside. Brian Davis does the arithmetic, but I think he should have calculated what it would take to boil the oceans, which is a few thousand times more by my BotEC. Occasionally it is asked what would happen if you shot a fast-moving projectile at the Earth; I've written something up."PermalinkCommentsscifi science math

Photosynth of my Office

2008 Aug 26, 11:08

I've had a little fun messing around with Photosynth, a Microsoft research project turned into a Live service. You upload a bunch of photos from around the same area and it makes a 3D panorama out of them. For instance, here's National Geographic's photosynth of the sphinx and pyramids in Egypt. Messing around with this I've made one of half a vase of roses, and a larger photosynth of my office.

PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft photosynth photo office nontechnical

Network notary system thwarts man-in-the-middle attacks

2008 Aug 26, 10:03"A new system devised by Carnegie Mellon University researchers aims to thwart man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks by providing a way to verify the authenticity of self-signed certificates. The system, which is called Perspectives, uses a distributed network of "notary" servers to evaluate the public key of a target destination so that its validity can be ascertained."PermalinkCommentssecurity ssl pki certificate man-in-the-middle

Flickr: Seattle Municipal Archives

2008 Aug 25, 11:39"The Seattle Municipal Archives documents the history, development, and activities of the agencies and elected officials of the City of Seattle. Strengths of the records include those documenting engineering, parks, urban planning, the legislative process and elected officials. Holdings include over 6,000 cubic feet of textual records; 3,000 maps and drawings, 3,000 audiotapes; hundreds of hours of motion picture film; and over 1.5 million photographic images of City projects and personnel."PermalinkCommentsvia:swannman photo flickr seattle history public-domain

Microsoft launches 3D wonder Photosynth for consumers | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone - CNET

2008 Aug 22, 5:35Photosynth now available and easy to use: "Photosynth, a technology demo from Microsoft Live Labs, has graduated from its "ooh, that's pretty" status to being a viable Web service for consumers. The technology, which takes a grouping of photographs and stitches them into a faux 3D environment, can now be implemented with photos you've taken on your digital camera or mobile phone, and converted right on your computer. Previously, the process of stitching these photos together took weeks of processing on specially configured server arrays. With its latest version, Microsoft has managed to shrink that into around the time it takes to upload your photos."PermalinkCommentsvia:felix42 photosynth photos photography 3d microsoft free tool

YouTube - CHAINSAW MAID

2008 Aug 21, 7:55Zombie claymation video featuring a maid and also a chainsaw. So much gore. Also its quite awesome. "THEY are coming for your FLESH and BLOOD! Now the last hope of the family rests on a sexy faithful MAID! The most brutal clay-animation you've ever seen!"PermalinkCommentschainsaw zombie youtube claymation video maid

Deriving a Non-Recursive Fibonacci Function Using Linear Algebra

2008 Aug 20, 10:51

In my Intro to Algorithms course in college the Fibonacci sequence was used as the example algorithm to which various types of algorithm creation methods were applied. As the course went on we made better and better performing algorithms to find the nth Fibonacci number. In another course we were told about a matrix that when multiplied successively produced Fibonacci numbers. In my linear algebra courses I realized I could diagonalize the matrix to find a non-recursive Fibonacci function. To my surprise this worked and I found a function.
The Nth Fibonacci value is (1 + sqrt(5))^N - (1 - sqrt(5))^N all over sqrt(5) * 2^N
Looking online I found that of course this same function was already well known. Mostly I was irritated that after all the algorithms we created for faster and faster Fibonacci functions we were never told about a constant time function like this.

I recently found my paper depicting this and thought it would be a good thing to use to try out MathML, a markup language for displaying math. I went to the MathML implementations page and installed a plugin for IE to display MathML and then began writing up my paper in MathML. I wrote the MathML by hand and must say that's not how its intended to be created. The language is very verbose and it took me a long time to get the page of equations transcribed.

MathML has presentation elements and content elements that can be used separately or together. I stuck to content elements and while it looked great in IE with my extension when I tried it in FireFox which has builtin MathML support it didn't render. As it turns out FireFox doesn't support MathML content elements. I had already finished creating this page by hand and wasn't about to switch to content elements. Also, in order to get IE to render a MathML document, the document needs directives at the top for specific IE extensions which is a pain. Thankfully, the W3C has a MathML cross platform stylesheet. You just include this XSL at the top of your XHTML page and it turns content elements into appropriate presentation elements, and inserts all the known IE extension goo required for you. So now my page can look lovely and all the ickiness to get it to render is contained in the W3C's XSL.

PermalinkCommentstechnical mathml fibonacci math

Security Assessment of the Internet Protocol

2008 Aug 20, 4:29A description of IP with implementation guidance to avoid historical security issues.PermalinkCommentsreference ietf ip tcp network protocol security internet

[whatwg] Web Applications 1.0 Draft

2008 Aug 20, 9:48Apple will or will not license the canvas tag? 'Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple") believes it has intellectual property rights ("IP Rights") relative to WHATWG's Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, Section 10.1, entitled "Graphics: The bitmap canvas". At this time, Apple reserves all rights in its IP Rights and makes no representations as to Apple's willingness or unwillingness to license these IP Rights. However, in the event that the Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, becomes part of a formalized draft standard at W3C or IETF, for example, Apple is prepared to address the disclosure/licensing rules of such organizations.'PermalinkCommentsapple patent html ip html5 canvas whatwg browser browser-war

YouTube - Norm MacDonald - Bob Saget roast

2008 Aug 18, 4:06Norm MacDonald performs at the roast of Bob Saget. Must be viewed with context of entire roast in mind in which roasters spout profane offensive insult humor. Norm does a sort of un-roast consisting of jokes from the back of milk cartons or cracker jack boxes. Not at all offensive. Funny conceptually and of course since its Norm MacDonald its hilarious in practice. Later described by Jim Norton: "Watching your set, was like watching Henry Fonda pick blueberries."PermalinkCommentsnorm-macdonald bob-saget roast comedy-central humor video youtube
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