February 2009

"I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like."

"When Professor and media researcher Roger Wallis left the stand yesterday, the court asked whether he wanted to be reimbursed for his appearance. “You are welcome to send some flowers to my wife,” he responded. In the hours that followed, many Pirate Bay supporters took this suggestion to hand."

"Glass blown, floor standing lights combining the skills of the glassworker and the playfulness of clowns and children’s entertainers. If only glass were as pliable as balloons!"

"PHP_CodeSniffer tokenises PHP, JavaScript and CSS files and detects violations of a defined set of coding standards."

"he has eaten the pancake ... truly this is our blackest hour"

"In response to the stunning public embrace of the warm and cuddly Snuggie™, the SnuggiePubCrawl.com Team is hosting the first-ever Snuggie™ Pub Crawl in San Francisco, CA. Even though it's just a blanket with sleeves, we're sure that you'll enjoy a winter evening spent drinking with friends and the Snuggie™."

"At Berkman we're studying weblogs, how they're used, and what they are. Rather than saying "I know it when I see it" I wanted to list all the known features of weblog software, but more important, get to the heart of what a weblog is, and how a weblog is different from a Wiki, or a news site managed with software like Vignette or Interwoven. I draw from my experience developing and using weblog software (Manila, Radio UserLand) and using competitive products such as Blogger and Movable Type."

"FlickrEdit is a Java Desktop application that allows you to display and edit your photos in a variety of ways. It also allows you to download/backup or upload your photos to and from Flickr. FlickrEdit is written in Java and it uses flickrj framework to access Flickr."

"The essence of REST is to make the states of the protocol explicit and addressible by URIs. The current state of the protocol state machine is represented by the URI you just operated on and the state representation you retrieved. You change state by operating on the URI of the state you're moving to, making that your new state. A state's representation includes the links (arcs in the graph) to the other states that you can move to from the current state. This is exactly how browser based apps work, and there is no reason that your app's protocol can't work that way too."

"The Star-Telegram has a report on the tight security surrounding George W. and Laura Bush’s move into their Dallas home. Police officers have been turning away vehicles trying to enter the Preston Hollow neighborhood, “explaining that it is closed to the general public.”"

"The attack, which occurred during a photo shoot for Premiere magazine at the landmark Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, serves as a reminder that, despite their beautiful appearance, celebrities are both dangerous and unpredictable."

"The idea of this game ( if it's OK for me to get pretentious for a minute Smiley ) was to kind of imagine this platonic form of the generic "really old platformer"*, like from the age of the 2600 and the Apple //, and then to try to take the world that these games described sort of "at face value". All those old games (for hardware reasons, of course) seemed to kind of take place in a world of floating neon blocks where faceless creatures slide endlessly back and forth for no reason. I wanted to imagine a world that was really just built that way."

"We hear your words. Why another JavaScript framework?! When development of PhoneGap was under way we noticed slow load times for modern JavaScript frameworks (such as Prototype, MooTools, YUI, Ext and (yes) even jQuery. A big reason why these libraries are so big is because is mostly they contain a great deal of cross browser compatibility code. The mobile space has less browser implementations (so far) and different needs. Thus XUI."

"House Republicans, as a group, may take great pride in the goose egg they offered President Obama's stimulus package. But now the unanimous opposition is struggling to bring that money home. "

"A presentation about tricks and best practice ideas of how to use JavaScript given in our office in India as part of an internal training."

Twitter's two cultures: Retweeters vs Favrders (RWx-short)

I hope not. Google's not a monopoly - it's got plenty of lesser competitors. They just happen to be really successful. It's easier to live Google free than MSFT free. "Obama's pick to head the Justice Department's antitrust unit, Christine Varney, believes that Google has a monopoly in search and will soon have a monopoly in cloud computing and that the government should act aggressively to prevent monopolies. So will she try to break Google up?"

Honest look at what happened to ma.gnolia. Painful, but honest. In a nutshell: Make sure your backups are recoverable, and prove it regularly. Someday, something *will* go boom. It'll really hurt when the data loss is over half-a-terabyte. "This week Chris and Larry discuss the Ma.gnolia's data loss, what is has meant for the service and in the community, and what may be coming in the future."

"Providing search services that span a number of disparate websites is a challenging problem that in the past has been left to the big-boys such as Google. However Amazon's OpenSearch RSS format is changing this reality and providing a means for effective multiple website search to be deployed at low cost by small development teams. "

I think this guy's just a psycho, but certainly he didn't reach his stated goal. "He launched Bridges TV, billed as the first English-language cable channel targeting Muslims inside the United States, in 2004. At the time, Hassan said he hoped the network would balance negative portrayals of Muslims following the attacks of September 11, 2001."

"Ecto Cooler was the Hi-C tangerine and orange flavored drink featuring a picture of Slimer plastered on each box or can. Unfortunately, it’s long since ceased production, or at least ceased to exist under the Ecto Cooler brand. But the reminiscing of all drinks got me thinking, why not profile some of the hits, or more accurately misses, of the drink world? Good or bad, sometimes remembering such things can be fun. So this is a great look back on some of the sodas and soft drinks of years past:"

""I know it's silly, but I think Mr. Patterson is kind of sexy," continued Hodgson, blushing with embarrassment and not nearly as frightened as she might be upon discovering that her teacher has a well-worn copy of her yearbook photo next to his bed."

" Back to the deploy process, nine minutes have elapsed and a commit has been greenlit for the website. The programmer runs the imvu_push script. The code is rsync’d out to the hundreds of machines in our cluster. Load average, cpu usage, php errors and dies and more are sampled by the push script, as a basis line. A symlink is switched on a small subset of the machines throwing the code live to its first few customers. A minute later the push script again samples data across the cluster and if there has been a statistically significant regression then the revision is automatically rolled back. If not, then it gets pushed to 100% of the cluster and monitored in the same way for another five minutes. The code is now live and fully pushed. This whole process is simple enough that it’s implemented by a handfull of shell scripts. "

"Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems - is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain"

"Fallen rap stars MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice are to team up for a concert in Utah. The 90s stars will perform a one-night-only joint show, called Hammer Pants and Ice, at the McKay Events Center in Orem on February 27."

"Here's an easy way to see if a song uses the Sensitive Female Chord Progression: Just sing Joan Osborne's lyric's: 'What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us?' over the suspect four chords."

I was seriously worried this video would crash the visual centers of my brain. "NORMAL QUALITY LOOKS LIKE BUNK. clink on "WATCH IN HD" to WATCH IN HD!!! HD stands for "HOLY DATAMOSH," which is what G-D bestowed upon us in the form of a MASSIVE COMPUTER GLITCH that eats up INDIE MUSIC VIDEOS and turns them into INTERNET GOLD."

"In its most fundamental form, the BBS was simply a computer connected via a modem to a phone line. On the computer was software that, when it detected that someone was calling the modem, would pick up, connect, and then provide the calling person with a menu. From this menu you could post and read messages from other users, send or receive files, or play games. What happened to BBSes, especially as it looked like they’d be around in some form forever, was multi-threaded connection to the Internet, especially Trumpet Winsock, a program that allowed PPP (Point to Point Protocol) on Windows systems."

"Web 2.0 is where you have to read TechCrunch every morning to know if you'll be able to get your files that day. "

I thought "muzak" was a generic term - never realized there was an actual company! "Muzak, the company that put pop, string-filled arrangements of rock songs in your elevator, filed bankruptcy papers Tuesday after it missed a $105 million payment to creditors."

"Palm CEO Ed Colligan just pulled the plug on Palm OS, destroying the hopes and dreams of millions of Palm lovers around the world. As a former Palm programmer, let me tell you that this news saddens yet cheers me: Palm OS is in a better place now. "

I guess I missed a few updates on Adium Xtras. My copy was pinging every 15 seconds. "* 120 seconds between updates to be nicer to twitter"

"This visualization is a concept for the LizardFeeder and it’s built with jQuery and SVG plugin. Code is a mess, so I’ll post only some (retouched) screenshots."

"One of the things that I did when I wrapping up at Yahoo! was to begin to take a look at the current state of web frameworks. I ended up picking Django, but I have to say, I was disappointed with the state of what’s out there. Friends will have heard me bemoaning this sad state of affairs - that while Rails and Django might make CRUD easier, that the ORMs weren’t suitable for scaling beyond “toy” sizes, and that more importantly, they didn’t seem to address almost any of the pain points of building and maintaining a modern website."

If you're locked out of Twitter, try checking out this API method with HTTP Basic Auth using your Twitter credentials. It reports on limit, remaining hits to limit, and time until reset. I'm locked out, and it reports my remaining hits at 0 with about a 1/2-hour until counter reset.

"If you haven't been listening to pop radio in the past few months, you've missed the rise of two seemingly opposing trends. In a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound great. Better than great: note- and pitch-perfect, as if there's been an unspoken tightening of standards at record labels or an evolutionary leap in the development of vocal cords. At the other extreme are a few hip-hop singers who also hit their notes but with a precision so exaggerated that on first listen, their songs sound comically artificial, like a chorus of '50s robots singing Motown."

"The Instant Outline Tool for the OPML Editor allows a group of people to communicate using an outline to reflect each person's status. You have two windows -- one where you edit your outline, and the other where you view the outlines of all your buddies, the members of your workgroup."

"A room for testing the first Instant Outliner release."

"We've temporarily locked your account after too many failed attempts to sign in. Please chillax for a few, then try again."

"rate your most favourite bookmarks on delicious.com with an awesome star-rater. Rated bookmarks will be highlighted within the bookmarks list for easy recognition. The rating is processed with star-tags (★)."

"Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they're done."

"Sharkify is the #1 shark service worldwide, giving websites fear around the world."

"After receiving the device intended to alert him when his family's table at the Cheesecake Factory was ready, local father Timothy Reardon traversed the parking lots of adjacent businesses with the pager Tuesday to determine its range. "I'll bet I can get all the way behind the Barnes & Noble, no problem," said Reardon, who has performed similar experiments with cordless telephones. "I don't want to take it too close to the Best Buy, though, because all that electronic stuff in there might screw it up." At press time, Reardon's wife and children were finishing their appetizers while Reardon was still trying to find a way to get off the roof of an Old Navy a quarter of a mile away."

"A fired-up Barack Obama ditched his TelePrompter to rally House Democrats and rip Republican opponents of his recovery package Thursday night – at one point openly mocking the GOP for failing to follow through on promises of bipartisanship. "

"Cornify is the #1 unicorn and rainbow service worldwide, giving websites sparkle around the world."

"Pay attention to what Craig says, and don't store anything on anyone else's server unless you know how you're going to get it off when you need to. Even better, don't store the original on someone else's server, keep that in your space and share a pointer to the data."

"Often you don't need the exact time in hours, minutes and seconds. A more human readable style like "five past ten" makes more sense. For that, you can now use FuzzyClock. FuzzyClock is a menubar clock which displays the current time in a "fuzzy" style."

"This post is meant to be a Michigan brewing 101. See here is a list of great ways to get to know the Michigan beer scene. I hope that people that like beer but mibeer11don’t know much about the Michigan Beer will read it"

"For our second a2geeks movie night, we'd like to host a showing of Jason Scott's BBS Documentary (I already have the DVDs), followed by a tech swap meet / vintage tech fair in the CSE Atrium (in the shadow of the original ENIAC!)."

"With a nod to the era of 8-bit computer graphics, the face of this watch is shaped like a computer icon. Made of an ABS and stainless steel body with a polyurethane band."

"In a nutshell, our thesis is that AMO is an incubator for innovation, and our goal is to help developers on our platforms succeed. We can provide the audience, support, and data that can help users and developers get the best possible experience."