2009 Apr 7, 1:30I really dislike how IE deals with non-US-ASCII in URLs. I should write up a post on what exactly IE does with non-US-ASCII characters in URLs. "Just like IRIs the URL is mapped to a URI using UTF-8.
Except for the query component of the URL (the bit after the question mark). Here for legacy reasons the encoding of the document is used instead. Except if the encoding of the document is UTF-16, in
which case UTF-8 is used. Effectively, using non-ASCII characters in URLs in documents not encoded as UTF-8 or UTF-16 will give you surprising results, to say the least. Yay for browsers!"
http encoding html5 url uri unicode iri 2009 Apr 7, 12:12HTML5's registerProtocolHandler seems to come from a cool FireFox 3 feature: "With web protocol handlers, the web application can register the specific protocol it wants to handle. Firefox will then
prompt the user to choose which of the registered applications (web or desktop) it should use to handle the action. Any protocol, real or imaginary, can be used - mailto: is only one example,
webcal:, tel: and fax: are others."
firefox uri scheme protocol mozilla html5 registerProtocolHandler 2009 Apr 7, 11:58
This past week I finished Anathem and despite the intimidating physical size of the book (difficult to take and read on the bus) I became very engrossed and was able to finish it in several orders of
magnitude less time than
what I spent on the Baroque
Cycle. Whereas reading the Baroque Cycle you can imagine Neal Stephenson sifting through giant economic tomes (or at least that's where my mind went whenever the characters began to explain
macro-economics to one another), in Anathem you can see Neal Stephenson staying up late
pouring over philosophy of mathematics. When not
exploring philosophy, Anathem has an appropriate amount of humor, love interests, nuclear bombs, etc. as you might hope from reading Snow Crash or Diamond Age. I thoroughly enjoyed Anathem.
On the topic of made up words: I get made up words for made up things, but there's already a name for cell-phone in English: its "cell-phone". The narrator notes that the book has been translated
into English so I guess I'll blame the fictional translator. Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the made up words nearly as much as some folk. Its a good thing I'm long
out of college because I can easily imagine confusing the names of actual concepts and people with those from the book, like Hemn space for Hamming distance. Towards the beginning, the description
of slines and the post-post-apocalyptic setting reminded me briefly of Idiocracy.
Recently, I've been reading everything of Charles Stross that I can, including about a month ago, The Jennifer Morgue from the surprisingly awesome amalgamation genre of spy thriller and Lovecraft
horror. Its the second in a series set in a universe in which magic exists as a form of mathematics and follows Bob Howard programmer/hacker, cube dweller, and begrudging spy who works for a
government agency tasked to suppress this knowledge and protect the world from its use. For a taste, try a short story from the series that's freely available on Tor's website, Down on the Farm.
Coincidentally, both Anathem and the Bob Howard series take an interest in the world of Platonic ideals. In the case of Anathem (without spoiling anything) the universe of Platonic ideals, under a
different name of course, is debated by the characters to be either just a concept or an actual separate universe and later becomes the underpinning of major events in the book. In the Bob Howard
series, magic is applied mathematics that through particular proofs or computations awakens/disturbs/provokes unnamed horrors in the universe of Platonic ideals to produce some desired effect in
Bob's universe.
atrocity archives neal stephenson jennifer morgue plato bob howard anathem 2009 Apr 6, 10:47"It's 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing - and the Earth is flat. It's been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all
wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like
ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped."
charles-stross scifi read fiction free literature 2009 Apr 1, 1:22Is it still a _real-time_ strategy game if you travel through time? "If another player is attempting to adversely change the past, players will sometimes keep racing back to out-undo each other.
Anything that must travel back in time in order to maintain the current state of causality is denoted to the player, which helps manage paradoxes."
video videogame time-travel strategy rts game 2009 Mar 26, 2:24"Yesterday's remix challenge -- to mock the ridiculous new "anti-terrorism" posters the London police have put up that tell you to spy on your neighbors -- was a smashing success. I've collected the
25 or so that came in to date below". I enjoyed: "A bomb won't go off here because people tend to be quite nice really." "Terribly convenient, isn't it? Incriminating evidence left right out where
you'll spot it and call it in..." "A bomb won't go off here because the true likelihood of you being the victim of a terror attack is really very low, especially when compared to other causes of
death or injury."
humor politics poster paranoia security via:boingboing.comments photoshop privacy 2009 Mar 23, 11:06The HTML5 spec tells us how it is in the real world for URLs: "This specification defines various algorithms for dealing with Web addresses intended for use by HTML user agents. For historical
reaons, in order to be compatible with existing Web content HTML user agents need to implement a number of processes not defined by the URI and IRI specifications [RFC3986], [RFC3987]."
html html5 url uri reference w3c 2009 Mar 23, 9:41"So heres my trip to Chernobyl in pictures." Nice photo of the tree growing through the floor next to the chair. The whole set is like Fallout 3 but there's plants. Didn't realize plants could do
well in such a situation.
via:swannman photo history science nuclear russia chernobyl 2009 Mar 23, 8:13
I've made another extension for IE8,
Outline View, which gives you a side bar in IE that displays an outline of the current page and lets you make intrapage bookmarks.
The outline is generated based on the heading tags in the document (e.g. h1, h2, etc), kind of like what W3C's Semantic data extractor
tool displays for an outline. So if the page doesn't use heading tags the way the HTML spec intended or just sticks img tags in them, then the outline doesn't look so hot. On a page that does
use headings as intended though it looks really good. For instance a section from the HTML 4 spec shows up quite nicely and I find its
actually useful to be able to jump around to the different sections. Actually, I've been surprised going to various blogs how well the outline view is actually working -- I thought a lot more
webdevs would be abusing their heading tags.
I've also added intrapage bookmarks. When you make a text selection and clear it, that selected text is added as a temporary intrapage bookmark which shows up in the correct place in the outline.
You can navigate to the bookmark or right click to make it permanent. Right now I'm storing the permanent intrapage bookmarks in IE8's new per-domain DOM storage because I wanted to avoid writing
code to synchronize a cross process store of bookmarks, it allowed me to play with the DOM storage a bit, and the bookmarks will get cleared appropriately when the user clears their history via the
control panel.
technical intrapage bookmark boring html ie8 ie extension 2009 Mar 20, 6:18
IE8, the software I've been working on for some time now, has finally been released at MIX09.
As I mentioned previously, I worked on
accelerators (previously named
Activities) in IE8. Looking at the
kinds of things I blog about on the IE Blog, you might also
correctly guess that I work on the networking stack. Ask me about what else I worked on during IE8 development. The past few months were very busy for me and I'm happy this is finally out.
technical internet explorer ie8 2009 Mar 12, 2:17
I've made an extension for Internet Explorer 8, FormToAccelerator which turns HTML forms on a web page into either an accelerator or a search
provider. In the design of the accelerators format we intentionally had HTML forms in mind so that it would be easy to create accelerators for existing web services. Consequently, creating an
accelerator from an HTML form is a natural concept and an extension I've been meaning to finish for many months now.
This is similar in concept to the Opera feature that lets you add a form as a search provider. The user experience is very rough and requires some knowledge of accelerator variables. If I can come
up with a better interaction model I may update this in the future, but at the moment all the designs I can come up with require way too much effort. Install IE8 RC1 and then try out FormToAccelerator.
activity html accelerator ie8 internet-explorer activities formtoaccelerator extension 2009 Mar 11, 1:24Penn & Teller's unreleased videogame included a minigame 'Desert Bus': 'The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of
45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.'
desert-bus penn-and-teller videogame humor wikipedia 2009 Feb 17, 1:56Track real time bus info in a manner more convenient than what's provided by King County's bus website.
bus traffic washington seattle redmond map 2009 Feb 10, 6:34Real time stats on folks cursing on Twitter. Shows percentage change in usage by curse word.
twitter humor language swearing mashup 2009 Jan 20, 2:20"Because the G1 has a compass inside, nru presents its data as a sonar-like spinning map when held parallel to the ground, but presents a snazzy augmented reality overlay when tipped up towards the
horizon. It's easier to grok when you can see it in motion; there's a video up above."
g1 phone cellphone compass geolocation video android 2009 Jan 13, 6:20"So we've progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each
machine, to one that's encrypted - really more just obfuscated - to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads."
security privacy adware malware advertising ie browser scheme interview bho via:li 2008 Dec 30, 2:29
Sarah and I are back from a short Christmas visit to California. We spent the days around Christmas with much of my
extended family in Sacramento many of whom I had not seen in quite a while. It was nice to see everybody again. I ended up taking a few pictures on Christmas in order to add to the digital photo
frame I gave Grandma.
We flew in and out of San Francisco on Virgin America which was really nice. The staff is trying their best to be hip
but accessible, the safety instructional video is entertaining, there's mood lighting, and all seats have entertainment systems as well as
power outlets and USB ports to charge your electronic devices. They don't have many flights which appears to mean shorter lines. And it was cheaper to fly with them and then rent a car and drive to
Sacramento then to fly in to Sacramento. I'll for sure be flying with them again given the opportunity. Before flying back Sarah and I spent a day in San Francisco, where we decided that if we
don't go back to Fisherman's Wharf again in this lifetime that would be acceptable, saw the Golden Gate Park and met up with my friend Jake who I haven't seen in at least four years. Next up, happy
new year!
christmas virgin america family personal san francisco 2008 Dec 29, 1:48"That's that sorted then. No more "alternate reality" bullshit. We can use the word "fiction" or "story" instead, so normal people can understand us."
humor fiction arg story presentation slideshow talk marketing game via:mattb 2008 Dec 29, 12:22"This wasn't my fault. Anyone could have dropped his stupid iPod in the toilet. It's really the government here. I mean, at this point the building contained six customs officials, an army of
policemen, people from various security agencies, a bomb squad, and a couple of detectives."
ipod toilet humor airplane plane security terrorism wow
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