2015 Sep 25, 12:21 2014 Dec 25, 2:29
As the title suggests, spoilers for The Interview follow.
Towards the end of the movie, after Dave Skylark is shot, he miraculously has a bullet proof vest, blows up Kim Jong-un, finds a random tunnel and is picked up by Seal Team Six. These
are the same details of the unbelievable scenario that Dave Skylark describes to Agent Lacey at the beginning of the movie.
This isn't a coincidence. Everything after Dave is shot is his fantasizing about how things should have gone as he dies in the interview chair. Unsurprisingly his
fantasy closely matches his original ridiculous thoughts about how he would assassinate and escape.
This is similar to movies like Brazil in which the later fourth of the movie is the main character’s romantic fantasy as he is tortured and killed in real life. Or Total Recall where
the end of the movie matches the description of the memories that the main character will have implanted at the beginning.
Its safe to assume that after Dave is killed, Aaron and Sook are captured and also killed.
the-interview 2014 Jun 10, 2:54
Netflix responds to Verizon’s cease & desist letter. Somehow I doubt that Verizon will bite on your offer to work together to increase network transparency Netflix. Nice suggestion though.
technical net-neutrality Verizon Netflix net 2014 Jun 3, 9:36
JS NICE | Software Reliability Lab in ETH
JS NICE has indexed over 10,000 JavaScript projects from GitHub and then probabilistically infers newly suggested names and types for all of the local variables and function parameters of new JS.
technical javascript js coding 2014 Apr 28, 9:39
Internet Archive lets you play one of the earliest computer games Space War! emulated in JavaScript in
the browser.
This entry covers the historical context of Space War!, and instructions for working with our in-browser emulator. The system doesn’t require installed plugins (although a more powerful machine
and recent browser version is suggested).
The JSMESS emulator (a conversion of the larger MESS project) also contains a real-time portrayal of the lights and switches of a Digital PDP-1, as well as
links to documentation and manuals for this $800,000 (2014 dollars) minicomputer.
computer-game game video-game history internet-archive 2012 Oct 1, 6:41
TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that adds interfaces, and type safety and compiles to JavaScript. In VS this means you get much better auto completion suggestions. Watch the
Channel9 video.
technical javascript typescript Microsoft programming programming-language 2012 Jun 20, 5:05
Far-fetched tales ofWest African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density
of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising
marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.
humor security scam 2011 Nov 15, 11:59
Summary of some of the new C++ features with comments and suggested usage. Not sure I agree with the take on auto.
‘“C++11 feels like a new language.” – Bjarne Stroustrup’
technical c++ programming 2011 May 22, 10:36Notes and suggestions for private use fields in protocols and formats.
ietf rfc protocol technical private-use 2010 Dec 7, 2:24"...suggested that I document this fact before history records that we all hated it from the second it was released: we didn’t hate it at all. We loved it."
css history ie6 ie web browser technical 2010 Mar 8, 1:50Paper suggests history stealing to find what popular social networking site groups a visitor to your web site belongs to and stats on how easy it is to then uniquely identify the visitor on the
popular social networking site.
security privacy social social-network paper research web browser css technical system:filetype:pdf system:media:document 2010 Mar 4, 1:15The 'What do you suggest' site lets you explore Google suggestions word by word in a lovely tree view. For instance, apparently folks are terrified of Canadians...
humor google suggest visualization canada 2010 Jan 14, 2:54Wow: "If the report's findings are correct, it suggests that the government of China has been engaged for months in a massive campaign of industrial espionage against US companies."
internet google china security politics privacy 2009 Dec 2, 3:00"These are tough questions, but the horrific problems of the "Victorian Internet" suggest that government overreach isn't the only thing to fear. In 1876, laissez-faire "freedom for all" meant (in
practice) the freedom for Henry Nash Smith to read your telegrams if he didn't like who you supported for President. It meant freedom for Associated Press to block criticism of Western Union, and
even to put potential critics and competitors out of business. And it meant freedom for a scoundrel to hijack the system at his leisure."
net-neutrality internet government politics communication telegraph technical 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 Nov 12, 3:35Presentation comparing the performance of different JavaScript operations on different web browsers. Suggestions cover full range of good to know to common sense to ugly ugly ugly.
via:thefangmonster performance javascript browser web technical tips presentation 2009 Jul 29, 4:40Lists of Google's search suggestions for the starts of various phrases. Sometimes humorous.
humor google search search-suggestions web psychology 2009 Jul 28, 5:07Suggests that local news must provide the raw facts and only in particular cases do a 'story' on top of that -- not everything needs to be a story.
news via:sambrook journalism 2009 Apr 10, 9:48
A while ago I promised to say how an xsltproc Meddler script would be useful and the general answer is
its useful for hooking up a client application that wants data from the web in a particular XML format and the data is available on the web but in another XML format. The specific case for this
post is a Flickr Search service that includes IE8 Visual Search Suggestions. IE8
wants the Visual Search Suggestions XML format and Flickr gives out search data in their Flickr web API XML format.
So I wrote an XSLT to convert from Flickr Search XML to Visual Suggestions XML and used my xsltproc Meddler script to actually
apply this xslt.
After getting this all working I've placed the result in two places: (1) I've updated the xsltproc Meddler script to include this XSLT and an
XML file to install it as a search provider - although you'll need to edit the XML to include your own Flickr API key. (2) I've created a service for this so you can just install the Flickr search provider if you're interested in having the functionality and don't care about the implementation. Additionally, to the
search provider I've added accelerator preview support to show the Flickr slideshow which I think looks snazzy.
Doing a quick search for this it looks like there's at least one other such implementation, but mine has the distinction of being done through XSLT which I provide, updated XML namespaces to work
with the released version of IE8, and I made it so you know its good.
meddler xml ie8 xslt flickr technical boring search suggestions 2009 Apr 7, 9:02
I'm a big fan of the concept of registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5 and in FireFox 3, but not quite the implementation. From a high level, it allows web apps to register themselves as
handlers of an URL scheme so for (the canonical) example, GMail can register for the mailto URL scheme. I like the concept:
- Better integration of web apps with your system.
- Its easy for web apps to do.
- Links to URNs can now take the user to the sites the user prefers for the sort of thing identified by the URN. For example, if I have a physical address in HTML, instead of making that an http
link to Yahoo Maps, I can make the link a geo scheme URI and those who follow the link will get their preferred mapping site that
has registered for that scheme. Actually, looking at the geo scheme's RFC, maybe I'd rather use some other URN scheme to represent the physical location, but you get the point.
However, the way its currently spec'ed out I don't like the following:
- There's no way to know if you are the handler for a particular URL scheme which is an important question for web app URL protocol handler authors.
- There's no way to fallback to an http URL in the case that a particular URL scheme isn't registered. A suggested solution to testing the registration of a scheme is for browsers to provide an additional script method
to check if a scheme is registered. I don't like the idea of writing script that walks over all my page's links and rewrites them based on that method. I'd much rather see a declarative and
backwards compatible fallback mechanism, although I don't know what that would look like.
- There's no way to register for a namespace within the urn scheme URI, the info scheme URI, or the tag scheme URI. I want to register
info:lccn/... (Library of Congress Card Number identifiers) to LibraryThing or Amazon and I want to register urn:duri:... (dated URIs) to the Web Archive, among other things.
- Will this result in a proliferation of unregistered URL schemes with clashing namespaces? The ESW Wiki notes why this would be bad.
- And last, although this is nitpickier than the rest, I don't like the '%s' syntax used in the registration method. I'd much rather pass in an URL template, like the URL template used
in OpenSearch. If an URL template is used for matching rather than registering against a particular URL scheme, this could also allow for registering a namespace within a URN. For example
something along the lines of:
registerProtocolHandler("info:lccn/{lccnID}", "htttp://www.librarything.com/search_works.php?q={lccnID}", "LibraryThing LCCN")
url template registerprotocolhandler firefox technical url scheme protocol boring html5 uri urn