September 2009

"If you're going to make fun of Castlevania, you can focus on one of two things: tiny shorts or whips. This clip from a recent Robot Chicken episode has made its call."

"An important step of developing a web application or creating web content is making sure that it can be localized. Listed below are good practices and recommendations that should be followed in order to make your content easily localizable."

It's the HTML 5 outline algorithm in JavaScript. "javascript:(function(s){ s.src = 'http://amachang.sakura.ne.jp/misc/outline/check.js'; document.body.appendChild(s) })(document.createElement('script')) "

"Here's a lovely interview with an alumnus of the Shippensburg Adventure Game Camp, a residential D&D camp for 10-17 year olds held at Shippensburg College (now Shippensburg University) in Pennsylvania. Campers played a series of rotating adventures in aged-grouped parties, with the councillors comparing notes behind the scenes to keep all the groups in synch and to ensure maximum fun and mayhem for all the players."

"justniffer is a tcp packet sniffer. It can log network traffic in a 'standard' (web server like) or in a customized way. It can also log response times, useful for tracking network services performances (e.g. web server, application server, etc.)."

"37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1."

"I decided: why not ignore the fact that my first computer and my latest computer are 27 years apart? Why not stack them on top of each other, take some silly photos, and put up a chart comparing how many kilo-whatsits of X the Atari had to how many giga-whosits the Dell had. So you have it... a brief comparison of the classic and short-lived Atari 1200XL to the modern and also short-lived Dell Inspiron 1525."

"After 26 long years, I can finally rest easy. Twenty-six years I spent standing in front of a camera, gritting my teeth, and shilling the latest works of every hack children's book author imaginable. For 26 years, I've told kids they could open a magical door to another world just by reading a book, when the only door it ever opened for me led to a soul-sucking career in the horrifying abyss of public television. But now, at last, it is over. I don't have to lie anymore. I don't have to live that nightmare."

"Anyway, when it comes to Twisted vs. Tornado for a Python web framework, I use Django. Why? Because it works, and my time is valuable."

"Microsoft learning it can get away with charging $60 for $30 worth of new content"

"We're happy to announce support for the OpenID OAuth Hybrid Protocol, which combines OpenID authentication (sign in) with OAuth authorization (access control) in a single interface. The Hybrid Protocol makes it easy for the hundreds of millions of Yahoo! users to sign into websites with a Yahoo! account, and to enable two-way data sharing of their Profile, Contacts, and Updates, without having to register a new site-specific account or share their Yahoo! password."

"Last night, I checked in some more work from Mark Steele (who's focusing on the Firefox WebGL implementation), and along with that, enabled WebGL in trunk nightlies. (Finally!)"

I always wanted one of these. I remember playing with one in a computer store with infocom titles on the shelves. "HERO (Heathkit Educational RObot) is the name of several educational robots sold by Heathkit during the 1980s. The Heath Company began the HERO 1 project in October 1979. The first units were available in 1982. Models included the HERO 1, HERO Jr., and HERO 2000. All three were available as kits, or for more money, prebuilt by Heathkit. Currently, the 1980's models are considered collectors items, due to their apparent rarity. For the most part, they cannot perform practical tasks, but are more geared toward entertainment and education above all."

"I would modify Graham’s claim by saying that recognizable and predictable brevity is an indicator of programming-language power."

"And when I saw this film earlier this week, I had my answer. Yes, my memories were real. And they'd done it because they wanted stand behind a one-way mirror and laugh at me. Grown-ups are dicks."

"M3InstallController is a class that will warn users if they are running your application from a disk image and offer to install the application in their Applications folder."

"The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it wasn’t for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.” Yet the very fact he wrote an epilogue seems to indicate that he trusted his words would someday find the right audience."

In case it's not clear: These nutters are complaining that government services weren't expansive enough to accommodate their protest of expansive government services. "Rep. Kevin Brady asked for an explanation of why the government-run subway system didn’t, in his view, adequately prepare for this past weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services. Seriously."

Sounds interesting. Too bad it's in .NET. "Doloto is an AJAX application optimization tool, especially useful for large and complex Web 2.0 applications that contain a lot of code, such as Bing Maps, Hotmail, etc. Doloto analyzes AJAX application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications. After being processed by Doloto, an application will initially transfer only the portion of code necessary for application initialization. The rest of the application’s code is replaced by short stubs—their actual function code is transferred lazily in the background or, at the latest, on-demand on first execution. Since code download is interleaved with application execution, users can start interacting with the Web application much sooner, without waiting for the code that implements extra, unused features."

"A photo essay featuring some hardware you may remember, some you may have only heard of, and a few things that you were probably never aware existed. One thing we learned: the older a computer is, the more likely it is to be blue."

I want some Illithid Brain Juice or Bigby's Crushing Thirst Destroyer

"Now look at how iTunes Extras are built: while distributed as a single file, the item is really a bundle (a folder that Mac OS X treats as a file) that amounts to a self-contained web site. It acts as a container for folders of standard PNG and JPEG graphics, AAC audio, and H.264 video content together with HTML and CSS presentation and JavaScript code.The index.html page contained in iTunes Extra bundles references TuneKit Core, a JavaScripts framework that presents a foundation for working with basic TuneKit objects. TuneKit Views present additional code for building a user interface and event handling, such as keyboard navigation and mouse input. Controllers define what is displayed in the user interface and how. The whole ball of wax is built within the TK namespace."

"The iTunes LP experience is accomplished with HTML 4.01, CSS and JS. The interface feels very Flash-like, but there is no trace of it. The CSS animations are elaborate and smooth. ... As a music fan, and as a web developer, I couldn’t be more pleased with the new iTunes LP offering. If your audience is significantly Apple-oriented (e.g. a site about Mac rumors or a popular iPhone app) this proves that you can provide an incredible experience using only JavaScript and some proposed CSS3 properties."

"Now, more than ever, science and reason must prevail. The scale of the challenge is hard to overstate, but New Scientist is optimistic that we can succeed: our boundless doomsaying is more than matched by our boundless creativity and our ability to, eventually, do the right thing."

"my point here is to discuss whether WordPress can be extended to accommodate most conventions found in scholarly publishing and where it is lacking, to identify the development work required to meet the needs of most academic who wish to write on and publish to the web"

"Yes, you read correctly: An accessible touch screen device! This morning, I went to a retail store carrying mostly Apple products and had a look at the new iPhone 3G S that was released in Germany on Friday. "

"People who are interested in interactive fiction but who haven’t played much or any of it ask me for suggestions from time to time — not as often as I’d like, of course, but, luckily, once in a while. I’ve had a page of recommendations up on my site since 2005. The games on that list remain good ones, but I’m now updating those recommendations to take into account games from recent years. I’m posting the new recommendations here. Note that many of the people who ask me about IF are of a literary bent, as am I, and my suggestions reflect that."

Did sharp rocks warp our brains? Did cooking warp our brains? Did speech warp our brains? Did writing warp our brains? The net is the sharpest, hottest, chattiest, wordiest thing to hit since all the above.

"If the mainstream of "college teaching" becomes a set of atomistic, underpaid adjuncts, we'll lose a precious academic tradition that is not easily replaced."

"A woman in China has found a snake with a single leg and a clawed foot crawling across her bedroom wall."

"The problem is that this person’s problem-solving technique is to ask for the solution. Not to seek advice on how to approach the task, or ask for the names of likely classes to look into, or a link to an example – but to just ask for the code, fully formed and ready to go. This is not problem solving, and software engineering is entirely about problem solving."

"A hypocorism, or hypochorisma (noun): hypocoristic (adj.) (from Greek ὑποκορίζεσθαι hypokorizesthai, "to use child-talk"[1]) is a lesser form of the given name used in more intimate situations as a nickname, term of endearment, or pet name"

Totally pointless, but cool. "Since the Palm Pre is based on Linux, I figured that you could probably run a Wordpress blog on the Palm Pre. Well, after about 3 hours of research, I found a way to run a wordpress blog using Optware Lighttpd and MySQL server."

"This cat successfully figures out the least efficient way to drink from a faucet."

"I was actually one of the most well-known cheaters in PSO. A few friends and I disassembled the game and figured out how various parts worked, making GameShark cheat codes in the process. I had a serial cable between my PC and Dreamcast that let me dump memory and target-debug PSO."

"Whoever supplies the pink "thank you" bags to Chinatown must do good business. How about a new color? "

"Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature - really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand."

I had no idea these existed. I so totally would have had a full set of Starmaster patches. "To obtain any of the coveted Activision patches, a player would need to play a particular game, reach a pre-determined score, and mail a photograph prooving the accomplishment to Activision. Weeks later the Activision patch would arrive in your mailbox compliments of Activision, accompanied by a nice letter from the company congratulating you on your game-playing skills and welcoming you to the club."

"Part of the reason why the Linux command line is so POWERFUL!"

This is very annoying for Palm webOS, where WebKit is basically the top-level OS and not a browser. Might be a problem for ChromeOS too? Apps can't set their own User-Agent headers: "For security reasons, these steps should be terminated if header is an ASCII case-insensitive match for one of the following headers: ... User-Agent"