colbert - Dave's Blog

Search
My timeline on Mastodon

Photo

2012 Jun 30, 8:19








PermalinkCommentshumor news stephen-colbert politics

Out-of-Character Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil Degrasse Tyson

2011 Nov 28, 9:24PermalinkCommentshumor science neil-degrasse-tyson stephen-colbert video

Mash me the head of Stephen Colbert - Boing Boing

2011 Jun 12, 3:46PermalinkCommentsstephen-colbert 3d 3d-printer mashup technical

C-SPAN Video Player - House Judiciary Subcmte. Hearing on Immigration and Farm Labor

2010 Sep 24, 8:38"Comedian Stephen Colbert joined the panel of witnesses at a House hearing on immigrant farm workers. Mr. Colbert has partnered with United Farm Workers and their campaign calling on unemployed Americans to take jobs in the agriculture sector. The organization's president, Arturo Rodriguez, also testified at the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security hearing chaired by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).
Washington, DC : 2 hr. 10 min."PermalinkCommentshumor video stephen-colbert politics immigration farm labor house

Cindy Cohn of Electronic Frontier Foundation on The Colbert Report

2010 Jul 8, 8:59
PermalinkCommentshumor colbert-report eff cindy-cohn law

Videos tagged with Neil deGrasse Tyson | Colbertnation.com | The Colbert Report | Comedy Central

2009 Jan 7, 7:02All the appearances Neil deGrasse Tyson has made on The Colbert Report. Especially good are the ep from 08/17/2006 containing planetary trashtalk and 02/13/2008 where Stephen learns how to become an astrophysicist.PermalinkCommentsneil-degrasse-tyson colbert-report stephen-colbert science video humor tv astronomy

YouTube - Stars & Stripes FOREVER! (Muppets Variation)

2008 Jul 9, 10:11"I, Sam the Eagle, present a musical salute to America." Seems appropriate for Colbert Report.PermalinkCommentsvia:kris.kowal humor muppets video youtube parody

Not My Job: Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: NPR

2008 Jun 12, 2:33NPR show 'Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!' talks to Neil Tyson about Pluto, impending asteroid impact, and then quizes him on the "long-delayed Guns and Roses album, Chinese Democracy". Did you see him on TDS or Colbert Report? He does fun interviews!PermalinkCommentsnpr audio quiz guns-and-roses neil-degrasse-tyson astrophysicist pluto asteroid humor

YouTube - Daily Show & Colbert Report Writers in Mock WGA Debate

2008 Jan 26, 12:32Another hilarious Internet video generated from the writer strike. Yay for the strike!PermalinkCommentsvia:boingboing wga writing writers-strike video youtube tv daily-show colbert-report

Windows Media Center and Zune Integration Hack

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.
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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\".
  4. 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.
PermalinkCommentstechnical xml mce hack windows media center zune windows xslt podcast

Wikipedia Tools

2007 Sep 12, 6:54I'm visiting Wikipedia more and more recently but I always find myself reading the referenced webpages to get the full context of quotes and for more info. Basically I use Wikipedia as an introduction and a place to look for links. For times when I'm looking for opinions rather than facts I like to use Everything2. No need to check references there.

There's the much hyped WikiScanner tool which reports who has been making anonymous (thought to be anonymous at the time anyway) edits to Wikipedia. Its humorous and interesting in a few cases, but in general I think its stretching to say that because an IP address range is owned by a corporation and someone edited Wikipedia on an IP in that range that you can attribute that edit to that corporation. If I edited Wikipedia I'd probably do a bit of that during my lunch break, but that wouldn't mean that Microsoft wants the Wikipedia pages for Weird Al, Dave Risney, URIs, or whatever else I would edit on Wikipedia changed.

Also, via Everything Is Miscellaneous I found the tool Wiki Dashboard. Wiki Dashboard proxies Wikipedia and on each page shows a timeline view at the top with who made edits and when. Its nice to see a gentle curve down from an initial spike at the beginning for topics you don't imagine to be controversial. As the canonical test page for this service I looked up 'Elephant' the Wikipedia page Stephen Colbert suggested folks vandalize on his show on 2006 July 31st. If you look at the Wiki Dashboard Elephant page you can see a very large spike in edits on that date. That's all I need to see.

As a side note, for the link on Stephen Colbert suggesting folks vandalize Wikipedia I linked to a Wikipedia article. Is it inappropriate to provide info about Wikipedia being vandalized and thus incorrect via a link to a Wikipedia article?PermalinkCommentswikidashboard stephen-colbert wikality wikipedia wikiscanner colbert-report

The Colbert Report - Colbert Report: Fireplace Portrait Poster

2007 Mar 24, 1:18A poster of the portrait above Stephen Colbert's fireplace on the Colbert Report.PermalinkCommentscolbert shopping poster stephen-colbert humor

Hockey team ensures 'Stephen Colbert Day' - NHL - MSNBC.com

2007 Jan 29, 11:08Stephen Colbert accepts Mayor's bet and wins. Stephen Colbert Day now declared in that town on the Mayor's birthday. How does the Mayor like the taste of the Truth?PermalinkCommentsarticle humor stephen-colbert colbert hockey eagle birthday

Crooks and Liars: Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondants' Dinner

2006 May 2, 2:29PermalinkCommentspolitics humor video tv news blog colbert stephen-colbert
Older Entries Creative Commons License Some rights reserved.