2008 Jan 18, 7:00Overview article on the functionings of GPS.
gps reference wikipedia article electronics radio 2008 Jan 14, 10:16Stephen Toub implements closed captioning searching of videos recorded with Windows Media Center through Windows Desktop Search as an IFilter. I wanted to do the same thing after reading the related
Ars Technica article. Other interesting things in the
.net mce programming reference video caption dvr-ms howto ifilter development com software microsoft msdn blog article 2008 Jan 10, 6:49A satirical blog of one NYC citizen reporting odd behavior to the authorities.
blog article comedy satire paranoia security humor nyc 2008 Jan 2, 2:13FTA: "Seems that a number of villages in the English countryside are being overrun by errant trans-European trucks which are regularly misdirected by their GPS satnav systems onto roads that were
better suited for horse-drawn carriages than big, long-dist
gps humor article metadata blog england 2007 Dec 27, 3:36Mark Liberman suggests the paper on which recent articles like "Humor Develops From Aggression Caused By Male Hormones, Professor Says" was a joke. The paper is based on determitologist's notes on
reactions to his unicycle riding.
article blog language language-log mark-liberman sam-shuster science unicycle humor bad-science 2007 Dec 24, 12:41These days it seems like there's a social sharing website for everything representable as bits. Like
Scribd for (mostly legal) documents,
SciVee for scientific research videos,
Wordie for words, and
Kuler for color themes. Kuler seems
like a ridiculous website (overkill) but I had been meaning to update my homepage's color design and Kuler has an
RSS based REST API.
The API lets you obtain things like the most recently added color themes or the most popular or all themes containing the color dark red, etc... So of course rather than update my website's design I
hooked up my css to the color themes coming out of Kuler. Select my main page's color theme from a
list of random Kuler themes. As I'm sure
the regular readers can guess I use
an xslt and blah blah blah... It looks OK with
Silver Surfer and
Happy Hipo but in general
changing the colors this way doesn't produce something pretty.
When reading about Kuler I found that they may have stolen the whole idea wholeslae from
ColourLovers. They discuss
the thievery in an article on their blog. I would have switched over to ColourLovers out of principle but
they don't have an easily accessible API.
colourlovers color xslt theme homepage technical kuler design 2007 Dec 23, 8:48Banksy article and interview in Wired.
art article banksy graffiti hack humor wired streetart interview 2007 Dec 23, 8:46Banksy replaces Paris Hilton CDs with his own satirical music and cover art in stores.
art article culture graffiti hack humor music parody prank streetart paris-hilton bbc 2007 Dec 23, 8:44Banksy adds his own pieces to NY's museums.
art article culture graffiti hack humor museum nyc painting prank streetart banksy 2007 Dec 21, 11:46My saving of this article does not necessarily reflect anything on my team or company.
article internet standards web 2007 Dec 19, 3:39Article on REST vs WS webservices archs. Can be a starting point.
david-chappell article blog rest web webservices architecture soap ws 2007 Dec 19, 11:06Article about striking similarities between COLOURlovers and Adobe's Kuler.
article blog color design web social kuler colourlovers 2007 Dec 12, 9:21Article on amateur atomic clock enthusiasts
clock time wired geek technology science atomic-clock article via:boingboing 2007 Nov 28, 1:23One of the new Zune features that had me the most excited was the claimed improved Windows Media Center integration which unfortunately turned out to simply mean support for the Win MCE video format
(
with an exception for HD). I wanted to be able to pick shows recorded by my Win MCE and have the Zune automatically sync up the
latest episodes. However, with the improved podcast support in the Zune software one can easily create a ridiculous hack to accomplish this.
The new Zune software has podcast support which does everything I'd want to do with a
Win MCE recorded TV series so the goal is to shoehorn a TV series into a Zune podcast. An overview of the steps: Create an XSLT that converts Win MCE data to a podcast, run the XSLT as a scheduled
task every few hours per TV series, setup a Web server pointed at the resulting podcasts and the Win MCE Recorded TV directory, and subscribe to the resulting podcasts in the Zune software.
- Reading through the Win MCE data stored as an XML file in "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml" and the spec for podcasts I created an XSLT to convert a series from Win MCE data to a podcast.
- I added a new task to the Scheduled Tasks to run my XSLT using my xsltproc.js script. The task runs a handful of commands that look something like the following:
C:\windows\system32\wscript.exe C:\users\dave\bin\xsltproc.js C:\Users\Dave\Documents\trunk\development\mce-zune\mce-to-podcast.xslt
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml --param title "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" --param max 4 --param baseURI "http://groucho/" --param thisRelURI "tds.xml" -o
"D:\recorded tv\tds.xml"
For each TV series I run a command like the above and that outputs a podcast for that series into my "D:\Recorded TV\" directory.
- Zune only allows http URIs for its podcasts so I installed a web server on my Win MCE server. I'm running Vista Ultimate so it was quick and easy for me to install IIS7 but any Web server will do. Then I pointed it at "D:\Recorded TV\".
- Once all the above was done I just subscribed to the resulting podcasts via my Web server and viola! Since I'm forced to use a Web server I can even run the Zune software on a machine other
than my Win MCE server. You can see a screen-shot above of my Zune software showing my Colbert Report podcast.
technical xml mce hack windows media center zune windows xslt podcast 2007 Nov 27, 7:42Images of products similar to but not 'I can't believe its not butter.'
food humor cooking article blog butter images 2007 Nov 27, 6:13Analysis of Verizon's new open platform announcement wrt the 700 MHz auction, Google, and other stuff.
blog article verizon network network-neutrality government cellphone 2007 Nov 15, 4:03Colossus set to compete against modern PC in decrypting Nazi messages in promotion of museum.
bbc article computer cryptography encryption hardware history turing 2007 Nov 15, 4:01I too was disappointed by the Media Center integration but for other reasons...
article zune mp3 tv music video 2007 Nov 15, 12:27Article on encrypted email company Hushmail giving email up to The Man. Includes interview with Hushmail CTO Brian Smith.
encryption article cryptography crypto anonymity anonymous email government privacy webmail mail legal security
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