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Tweet from David Risney

2016 Nov 20, 2:47
Just fun: draw a sketch and see how fast a Google neural net takes to figure out what it is https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/# 
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Retweet of codinghorror

2015 Mar 18, 12:02
it is so much faster to find things on the internet than it is to find things on my local computer. Has been for years
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Retweet of DougBenson

2015 Mar 4, 7:13
@peteholmes I hope the next one is called FAST AND INFURI-8-TED.
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Moving PowerShell data into Excel

2013 Aug 15, 10:04
PowerShell nicely includes ConvertTo-CSV and ConvertFrom-CSV which allow you to serialize and deserialize your PowerShell objects to and from CSV. Unfortunately the CSV produced by ConvertTo-CSV is not easily opened by Excel which expects by default different sets of delimiters and such. Looking online you'll find folks who recommend using automation via COM to create a new Excel instance and copy over the data in that fashion. This turns out to be very slow and impractical if you have large sets of data. However you can use automation to open CSV files with not the default set of delimiters. So the following isn't the best but it gets Excel to open a CSV file produced via ConvertTo-CSV and is faster than the other options:
Param([Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$Path);

$excel = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application

$xlWindows=2
$xlDelimited=1 # 1 = delimited, 2 = fixed width
$xlTextQualifierDoubleQuote=1 # 1= doublt quote, -4142 = no delim, 2 = single quote
$consequitiveDelim = $False;
$tabDelim = $False;
$semicolonDelim = $False;
$commaDelim = $True;
$StartRow=1
$Semicolon=$True

$excel.visible=$true
$excel.workbooks.OpenText($Path,$xlWindows,$StartRow,$xlDelimited,$xlTextQualifierDoubleQuote,$consequitiveDelim,$tabDelim,$semicolonDelim, $commaDelim);
See Workbooks.OpenText documentation for more information.
PermalinkCommentscsv excel powershell programming technical

Words with Hints Windows 8 App Development Notes

2013 Jul 4, 1:00

My second completed app for the Windows Store was Words with Hints a companion to Words with Friends or other Scrabble like games that gives you *ahem* hints. You provide your tiles and optionally letters placed in a line on the board and Words with Hints gives you word options.

I wrote this the first time by building a regular expression to check against my dictionary of words which made for a slow app on the Surface. In subsequent release of the app I now spawn four web workers (one for each of the Surface's cores) each with its own fourth of my dictionary. Each fourth of the dictionary is a trie which makes it easy for me to discard whole chunks of possible combinations of Scrabble letters as I walk the tree of possibilities.

The dictionaries are large and takes a noticeable amount of time to load on the Surface. The best performing mechanism I found to load them is as JavaScript source files that simply define their portion of the dictionary on the global object and synchronously (only on the worker so not blocking the UI thread). Putting them into .js files means they take advantage of bytecode caching making them load faster. However because the data is mostly strings and not code there is a dramatic size increase when the app is installed. The total size of the four dictionary .js files is about 44Mb. The bytecode cache for the dictionary files is about double that 88Mb meaning the dictionary plus the bytecode cache is 132Mb.

To handle the bother of postMessage communication and web workers this was the first app in which I used my promise MessagePort project which I'll discuss more in the future.

This is the first app in which I used the Microsoft Ad SDK. It was difficult to find the install for the SDK and difficult to use their website, but once setup, the Ad SDK was easy to import into VS and easy to use in my app.

PermalinkCommentsdevelopment technical windows windows-store words-with-hints

This might be the strangest release of classic Chicago label...

2013 May 17, 5:43


This might be the strangest release of classic Chicago label Trax yet! The clue’s in the title - it’s Daft Punk brassified. We get four classics by the world’s most famous Gallic robot duo: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” gets turned into a 1940s Dick Tracy-style riff-off with every form of trumpet imaginable, “Around The World” mixes wind instruments with that famous vocal mantra, “Da Funk” features plenty of sassy brass and “One More Time” wraps things up on a swingin’, jazzy high.

PermalinkCommentsSoundCloud Iamjasonalexander Brass Music music cover daft-punk

Zineth Release Trailer (by Russell Honor) This is a student...

2012 Aug 10, 2:24


Zineth Release Trailer (by Russell Honor)

This is a student game. Amazing design and music. A more abstract, massive and fast Jet Set Radio.

PermalinkCommentsgame video-game jet-set-radio free

Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here” - UX Movement

2012 Jun 25, 1:06

I’ve been following this advice for many years now to the extent that I find myself rewriting text to make linking my nouns easier and shorter.

The one I wasn’t following that seems obvious only after I read it is to keep links towards the end of your text to allow users to follow the link once they’re done reading.

links at the end of the sentence allow users to take action faster

PermalinkCommentsweb technical ux html

A New HTTP Status Code for Legally-restricted Resources

2012 Jun 11, 2:00

451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons: The 451 status code is optional; clients cannot rely upon its use. It is imaginable that certain legal authorities may wish to avoid transparency, and not only forbid access to certain resources, but also disclosure that the restriction exists.

That was fast.

PermalinkCommentshttp internet web 451 law legal rfc ietf censorship technical

wired: [via motherjones]: theweekmagazine: Sticking to an...

2012 Jun 7, 3:29


wired:

[via motherjones]:

theweekmagazine:

Sticking to an exercise routine takes dedication, and many fitness junkies swear that a running companion can be a huge help. That’s why researchers have developed “Joggobot,” a quad-rotor helicopter drone designed to motivate joggers by flying in front of them. 

The aerial robot uses its camera to spot a colorful pattern on a T-shirt worn by the jogger, and flies at a safe distance ahead. The runner can control Joggobot using a smartphone: In “companion mode,” the drone simply maintains the jogger’s pace; in “coach mode,” it pushes its human trainee a little faster.

Don’t worry, there’s a video

Science!

Maybe it should chase you instead?

PermalinkCommentshumor exercise robot future video

"Additional Media Type Structured Syntax Suffixes" - Tony Hansen

2012 Apr 26, 3:15

This document defines several Structured Syntax Suffixes for use with media type registrations. In particular, it defines and registers the “+json”, “+ber”, “+der”, “+fastinfoset”, “+wbxml” and “+zip” Structured Syntax Suffixes, and updates the “+xml” Structured Syntax Suffix registration.

PermalinkCommentstechnical json mime ietf rfc standard

JavaScript in JavaScript (js.js): smaller, faster, and with demos (princeton.edu)

2012 Apr 19, 3:36

Unlike Inception, running a JS engine in a JS engine does not make the inner JS engine go faster.

PermalinkCommentstechnical javascript programming interpretter

Blackmail DRM - Stolen Thoughts

2012 Feb 13, 4:00

Most existing DRM attempts to only allow the user to access the DRM'ed content with particular applications or with particular credentials so that if the file is shared it won't be useful to others. A better solution is to encode any of the user's horrible secrets into unique versions of the DRM'ed content so that the user won't want to share it. Entangle the users and the content provider's secrets together in one document and accordingly their interests. I call this Blackmail DRM. For an implementation it is important to point out that the user's horrible secret doesn't need to be verified as accurate, but merely verified as believable.

Apparently I need to get these blog posts written faster because only recently I read about Social DRM which is a light weight version of my idea but with a misleading name. Instead of horrible secrets, they say they'll use personal information like the user's name in the DRM'ed content. More of my thoughts stolen and before I even had a chance to think of it first!

PermalinkCommentsdrm blackmail blackmail-drm technical humor social-drm

Vim anti-patterns (geek.nz)

2012 Feb 7, 11:58

Things you do in VIM but faster with more obscure and specific commands.

PermalinkCommentstechnica vi vim reference howto

ViewText: Enter a URL to view its text

2011 Jun 5, 4:57"ViewText.org is a service provided to make reading content on the web easier, faster, and safer by extracting the main article content from news items, blog posts, RSS feeds, and PDF's." Includes API to extract the article text!PermalinkCommentsinternet web article html text api technical

Conan O’Brien Presents Show Zero – The Fastest Talk Show Ever

2010 Nov 2, 9:16PermalinkCommentsvideo conan-obrien talk-show humor tv

Flowchart: Understanding the Web, for Fans of Charles Dickens | Fast Company

2010 Oct 28, 8:26Time travel, flow charts, and humor.PermalinkCommentsflowchart time-travel humor image

Coding Horror: You're Reading The World's Most Dangerous Programming Blog

2010 Jan 20, 8:28GZip vs Deflate execution speeds. Deflate found to be much faster in particular cases and about the same in the rest.PermalinkCommentsgzip deflate performance technical http compression programming development blog

Making browsers faster: Resource Packages · Alexander Limi

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.PermalinkCommentssecurity web browser http zip firefox resource technical via:kris.kowal

Chromium Blog: A 2x Faster Web

2009 Nov 12, 6:28Google to replace HTTP with SPDY?PermalinkCommentsbrowser web http spdy google chrome technical
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