2016 Feb 10, 4:57 2016 Jan 30, 8:30 2015 Nov 19, 8:36 2015 Feb 12, 8:35 2015 Feb 5, 9:34 2012 Jan 30, 8:47history photo 3d 2011 Jun 20, 2:25I knew it was a game but still felt bad war-dialing and otherwise messing around in there. What if I accidentally find a way out? "Telehack is the most interesting game I've played in the last
year... a game that most users won't realize is a game at all. It's a tour de force hack — an interactive pastiche of 1980s computer history, tying together public archives of Usenet
newsgroups, BBS textfiles, software archives, and historical computer networks into a multiplayer adventure game." Also, see all the accounts of people finding their teenage selves in the game.
internet technical development hack telnet wardial game 2011 Apr 30, 4:33"The HTTP-based Memento framework bridges the present and past Web by interlinking current resources with resources that encapsulate their past. It facilitates obtaining representations of prior
states of a resource, available from archival resources in Web archives or version resources in content management systems, by leveraging the resource's URI and a preferred datetime. To this
end, the framework introduces datetime negotiation (a variation on content negotiation), and new Relation Types for the HTTP Link header aimed at interlinking resources with their archival/version
resources. It also introduces various discovery mechanisms that further support briding the present and past Web."
technical rfc reference http header time memento archive 2009 Dec 4, 5:06"If you want to watch videos from the National Archives today, they try to talk you into buying a DVD from the official government partner, Amazon.Com...To demonstrate to the Congress that if we
liberated this wonderful content people would really care, I forked over $251 for 20 DVDs and posted them on-line."
video history politics government public-domain internet-archive 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 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."
via:swannman photo flickr seattle history public-domain 2008 May 4, 10:35Video archives of DEFCON presentations.
via:swannman security video feed defcon conference hack monthly 2008 Feb 18, 1:34
I got a FlickrMail from Emma J. Williams a bit ago saying that they wanted to
use two of my photos in their Schmap San Francisco Guide online travel guide. So now you can see two of my vacation photos on the Westfield San Francisco Shopping Center Schmap page and the Hotel Diva Schmap page.
I think its wonderful that digital cameras are at
the point where I really don't have to know much about their workings to produce a photo that's reasonable looking. And its thanks to Flickr and searchable tags that Schmap could find my photos.
Since my photos on Flickr are all licensed under a Creative Commons license named Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works
2.0 Generic which only applies to non-commercial uses, Schmap, which is advertisement supported, kindly asked me if they could use my photos. I agreed to their license which was human readable
and included wonderful stuff like I get in place attribution and the license is only applicable while Schmap makes their guide freely available online.
Previously I've only heard of folks having their flickr photos used without their permission so I'm glad to know that's not always the case. Or
perhaps this is just Schmap's clever method of getting me to blog about them.
me photos creative-commons shcmap flickr 2007 Sep 11, 2:55There's been
some news recently on some guy hating on FireFox for its ad-blocking.
On a similar note here's a fun tip for IE7 users I got from Eric. You can get decent ad-blocking in IE7 by putting ad servers in the restricted zone. By default script inclusion is blocked between
different zones so you can put domains that serve up ads in your restricted zone after which, normal internet zone sites won't be able to include script from them. This covers most of the ads I run
into these days.
I use
Fiddler to figure out the domains that are serving up ads which incidentally also has an ad-blocking^H^H^H^H general purpose content blocking plugin. Here's
a screenshot of Slashdot and ArsTechnica from my browser. Notice the large blank areas in the screenshots:
ad-blocking personal ad ie7 technical browser tip ie