2012 Sep 26, 6:40
Megabox is an ad-replacer - replacing ads on the web as you browse with its own. Ignoring security concerns, I hope this doesn’t result in over prescriptive laws that endanger things like
Greasemonkey.
To listen to songs through Megabox, users will have two options—purchasing the music through the service, or installing “Megakey” software onto their computer to listen for free. The Megakey
software, as Dotcom explained to Torrentfreak, acts like ad-blocking software—except that it isn’t. Megakey allows most advertisements to appear, but replaces about 15 percent of the ads served
up by websites with ads hosted by Megabox.
technical music ad mega megadotcom megabox 2011 Dec 3, 6:46
Cool and (relatively) new methods on the JavaScript Array object are here in the most recent versions of your
favorite browser! More about them on ECMAScript5, MSDN, the IE blog, or Mozilla's documentation. Here's the list that's got me excited:
-
some & every
-
Does your callback function return true for any (some) or all (every) of the array's elements?
-
filter
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Filters out elements for which your callback function returns false (in a new copy of the Array).
-
map
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Each element is replaced with the result of it run through your callback function (in a new copy of the Array).
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reduce & reduceRight
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Your callback is called on each element in the array in sequence (from start to finish in reduce and from finish to start in reduceRight) with the result of the previous callback call passed to
the next. Reduce your array to a single value aggregated in any manner you like via your callback function.
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forEach
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Simply calls your callback passing in each element of your array in turn. I have vague performance concerns as compared to using a normal for loop.
-
indexOf & lastIndexOf
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Finds the first or last (respectively) element in the array that matches the provided value via strict equality operator and returns the index of that element or -1 if there is no such element.
Surprisingly, no custom comparison callback method mechanism is provided.
-
javascript array technical programming 2011 Apr 27, 2:22"Larry Lessig gave a new talk at CERN last week about copyright and how it has affected open access to academic or scientific information"
The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from lessig on Vimeo.
copyright science lawrence-lessig video talk 2011 Apr 6, 3:52Humorous quote from the doc: "While we readily agree that the naming of IPv6 address parts is not the most pressing concern the Internet is facing today, a common nomenclature is important for
efficient communication."
humor technical ipv6 name documentation ietf rfc 2010 Jul 1, 10:51"Sometimes it’s hard to judge whether an engineering effort has been successful or not. It can take years for an idea to catch on, to go from being the butt of jokes to becoming an international
imperative (IPv6). Uniform Resource Names (URNs), which are part of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) family, are conceptually at least as old as IPv6. While not figuring in international
directives for deployment, they-and the technology engineered to resolve them-are still going concerns."
ietf urn uri history technical internet url 2010 Apr 6, 11:17A thread on HTTPBIS concerning about how one might standardize hotels and other such proxies that inject redirects to their own payment or T&C agreement sites.
http httpbis reference ietf network 2009 Nov 17, 6:52"What if there was a backwards compatible way to transfer all of the resources that are used on every single page in your site — CSS, JS, images, anything else — in a single HTTP request at the start
of the first visit to the page? This is what Resource Package support in browsers will let you do." Another resource packaging implementation but this suggests they'll actually implement this in
FireFox. One issue with all of these is you can't use the resources from the package in any context that didn't ask to use the package for fear of security issues which means you can't stick the
packaged resources in your HTTP cache. The package itself could go in the cache which would mean multiple packages per page or all your page's resources in one package. Of course the same security
issues are a concern for all of the packaging proposals if a site has any way to inject into the source the request for the package. It'd be a similar vector to the UTF7 XSS issues but much worse
attack.
security web browser http zip firefox resource technical via:kris.kowal 2009 Apr 7, 10:04Aggregation of feeds concerning HTML5 including Ian Hickson's, Planet Mozilla, Planet WebKit, the IE Blog, the WHATWG blog, etc etc.
w3c html5 html blog feed daily 2008 Sep 9, 8:36"You'd better read this today, because it's possible the world will end tomorrow. Strictly speaking, the probability of doomsday isn't any higher than it is on any normal Wednesday, but there's been
a fair bit of kerfuffle and hullabaloo over the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and whether it will create a black hole that will destroy the entire planet."
lhc cern humor wired technology science blog physics apocalypse 2008 Sep 9, 8:33Wired's excellent and awesome photos from CERN's LHC. "On November 27, 2006, the final superconducting main magnet was delivered to CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- the most ambitious physics
experiment ever created."
wired photos lhc cern science photo 2008 Sep 9, 8:31Cory Doctorow's Flickr set of photos from various data centers (like CERN's LHC data center).
photos flickr data storage history internet cory-doctorow cern internet-archive lhc 2008 Sep 9, 8:29Article on the data centers that backup the Internet Archive and handle CERN's LHC's data. "CERN embodies borderlessness. The Swiss-French border is a drainage ditch running to one side of the
cafeteria; it was shifted a few metres to allow that excellent establishment to trade the finicky French health codes for the more laissez-fair Swiss jurisdiction. And in the data sphere it is
utterly global."
lhc history internet cory-doctorow nature physics network hardware library science cern internet-archive 2008 Jun 24, 9:57
sequelguy posted a photo:
A WWII poster proclaims: "Save to beat the devil! Buy vicotry bonds" depicting a stylized Hitler as the devil looking concerned.
canada art poster hitler wwii victoria devil royalbritishcolumbiamuseum 2008 Jun 24, 9:52
sequelguy posted a photo:
Posts concerning two Ska Fests and a Dodge Ball After Party posted on a light pole.
canada sign bills victoria 2008 May 18, 6:45
While re-reading Cryptonomicon I thought
about what kind of information I'm leaking by posting links on Delicious. At work I don't post any Intranet websites for fear of revealing anything but I wondered if not posting would reveal
anything. For instance, if I'm particularly busy at work might I post less indicating something about the state of the things I work on? I got an archive of my Delicious posts via the Delicious API
and then ran it through a tool I made to create a couple of tables which I've graphed on Many Eyes
I've graphed my posts per week and with red lines I've marked IE7 and IE8 releases as stated by Wikipedia. As you can see, there doesn't seem to be much of a pattern so I suppose my concerns
we're unfounded. I use it for both work and non-work purposes and my use of Delicious isn't that consistent so I don't think it would be easy to find a pattern like I was thinking about. Perhaps if
many people from my project used Delicious and that data could be compared together it might be easier.
For fun I looked at my
posts per day of week which starts off strong on Mondays and decreases as the
week goes on, and my
posts per hour of day. It looks like I mostly post around lunch and on the extremes I've
only posted very late at night twice at 4am:
converting media for the Zune, and
Penn's archive of articles. In the morning at 7am I've posted only once:
document
introducing SGML.
manyeyes graph cryptonomicon delicious 2008 May 5, 11:19The Baudboys, a Microsoft a cappella group sings 'Gonna Make You Happy Tonight' concerning video games very funny. Saw them perform a couple of years ago (in that same place) and I've been looking
for a video.
video videogame music microsoft xbox humor baudboys 2008 Apr 22, 4:33Reaction to Phrack's howto on GPS jammer. Sounds like the article wants to make it into a bigger issue than it is: "Information in the article that appears in the current issue of the online hacker
magazine Phrack potentially puts at risk GPS devices use
gps gps-jamming phrack government 2008 Apr 7, 10:09
More of my thoughts have been stolen: In my
previous job the customer wanted a progress bar displayed while information was copied off of proprietary hardware, during which the software didn't get any indication of progress until the copy
was finished. I joked (mostly) that we could display a progress bar that continuously slows down and never quite reaches the end until we know we're done getting info from the hardware. The amount
of progress would be a function of time where as time approaches infinity, progress approaches a value of at most 100 percent.
This is similar to Zeno's Paradox which says you can't cross a room because to do so first you must cross half the room, then you must
cross half the remaining distance, then half the remaining again, and so on which means you must take an infinite number of steps. There's also an old joke inspired by Zeno's Paradox. The joke is the prototypical engineering vs sciences joke and is moderately humorous, but I think
the fact that Wolfram has an interactive applet demonstrating the joke is funnier than the joke itself.
I recently found Lou Franco's blog post "Using Zeno's Paradox For Progress Bars" which covers the same
concept as Zeno's Progress Bar but with real code. Apparently Lou wasn't making a joke and actually used this progress bar in an application. A progress bar that doesn't accurately represent
progress seems dishonest. In cases like the Vista Defrag
where the software can't make a reasonable guess about how long a process will take the software shouldn't display a progress bar.
Similarly a paper by Chris Harrison "Rethinking the Progress Bar" suggests that if a progress bar speeds up towards the end
the user will perceive the operation as taking less time. The paper is interesting, but as in the previous case, I'd rather have progress accurately represented even if it means the user doesn't
perceive the operation as being as fast.
Update: I should be clearer about Lou's post. He was actually making a practical and implementable suggestion as to how to handle the case of displaying progress when you have some idea of how long
it will take but no indications of progress, whereas my suggestion is impractical and more of a joke concerning displaying progress with no indication of progress nor a general idea of how long it
will take.
zenos paradox technical stolen-thoughts boring progress zeno software math 2007 Jun 11, 2:46Humorous and interesting exchange on the Unicode mailing list concerning the velocity of Unicode character additions and the ability to accomidate alien (as in e.t.) writing systems.
blog humor unicode language microsoft article alien et
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