October 2009

Still don't quite see a use for Google Wave, but I wonder if this would be fun?

"git cherry-pick -n $SHA What this will do is stage the changes but not commit. Now I can git-commit myself and remove the git-svn-id line."

Damn - I had this idea for use on my own work, if I ever got around to self-publishing. "Amazon's newly-patented System and Method for Marking Content, which calls for 'programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content,' including 'books, short stories, product reviews, book or movie reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. "

"Scott Adams is not only a manager now, he has always been one by training: he was an economics major, not any kind of scientist or engineer, and he got an MBA before he worked with his first geek. He is extraordinarily observant (especially for an MBA, I add snarkily) and he actually does grasp how geeks think, but despite appearances he basically sees them from the outside. When I discovered this, the shock was so great that I started to see him as an outsider mocking my culture rather than an insider mocking its excesses (though to be sure Dilbert is harder on suits than on nerds), and I lost interest in the strip completely."

...and until you figure out that "somehow", you're just going to do it again and keep on doing it. "Bartz admitted that "we had kind of lost your respect" over the past few years. "We are a 14-year-old Internet company that somehow got boring.""

"One problem with the MySQL command line client is that queries with lots of columns tend to wrap crazily based on your terminal size. To overcome this, you can get a vertical output by terminating your queries with \G instead of ;. I find this format extremely helpful in cases where I know only one row will be returned. "

"Underscore is a utility-belt library for Javascript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in Javascript objects. It's the tie to go along with jQuery's tux."

"A cardboard box, sliced to pieces, taped together, fastened to a pair of work goggles, and capped off with an HTC Magic: this is what DIY augmented reality looks like, right now."

"Yu-Ying Wu, a graduate student in industrial design at a Taiwanese university, created a foam block that turns into a chair when compressed. The holes in the block aren’t random — they’re carefully shaped and selected to fold into a specific pattern when the user sits on the chair"

"For most of the special, however, MacFarlane and Borstein made typical "Family Guy"-style jokes, including riffs on deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest. Such material was apparently a bit much for Microsoft."

"Atlus U.S.A., Inc. today broke from its supposed practice of undersupplying the retail channel and guffawing as fans desperately scramble to find one of only dozens of copies of a game"

"As readers, we consume. As authors, we create. Our society is changing from consumers to creators."

"A parallel implementation of gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines"

"So, I have a good twitter friend, Gwen Hayes. She’s a total sweetheart, and the kind of writer I strive to be. Earlier today she got into a little twitter battle with Scott Baio."

"This, it turns out, is the real problem. My whole life I've been unable to pick up on the scent that is so overwhelmingly good for cilantro lovers that it trumps any possible bad. I come to a disappointing realization: I am not an X-Man with superkeen sensory abilities. I am a sensory dud who's missing the true nature of cilantro."

"My name is E. Foley and I'm a d20-rolling geek girl. I've been involved in the online dating industry, first as a client and then as a professional, for a little over a decade. I've been there, done that, gotten the t-shirt. So when I started my business in 2008, my goal was to use my online dating experience and my Creative Writing major to help my fellow geeks create amazing dating profiles that show off their finer qualities. Got questions before you buy? Click for more About Me, About Our Services, our FAQ, and our totally free Geek's Guide to Online Dating."

"On this page you can listen to and control a short-wave receiver located at the amateur radio club ETGD at the University of Twente. In contrast to other web-controlled receivers, this receiver can be tuned by multiple users simultaneously, thanks to the use of Software-Defined Radio."

"Vehicular cycling (VC) is the practice of driving bicycles on roads in a manner that is visible, predictable, and in accordance with the principles for driving a vehicle in traffic. The phrase was coined by John Forester in the early 1970s to differentiate the assertive traffic cycling style and practices that he learned in the United Kingdom from the deferential cycling style and practices that he found to be typical in the United States."

"A key step in literate programming, in our view at least, is publishing. It means tidying up and properly explaining code, and is a process much like writing up roughly-correct ideas for journal publication. The main aim of the Inform project since autumn 2007 has been to publish the whole work. Each web, as it is published, becomes open-source under the Artistic License 2.0, and eventually the whole work will be complete. We believe it will then be the largest literate program ever published."

"Several arcade game manufacturers decided it would be a good idea to put a battery on their game boards that, when they die (and they will die), disable the game. Why they did this isn't exactly clear. Usually the way suicide batteries work is, the batteries supply power to a bit of RAM that holds a decryption table. This table is the key to decrypting the encrypted program stored in the board's ROMs. When the battery dies, this table goes away and the program code can no longer be decrypted. The CPU no longer has valid code to execute. The board stops working."

"An attack has been launched on Matt and Renee of Rock Art brewery SEptember 14 , 2009 an energy drink issues a cease and desist order on : THE VERMONSTER the energy drink Claims that consumers will likely be confused with the two products. I have Input from 5 Trademark lawyers In various states saying: No infringement issue."

"I asked a bunch of people on Twitter and Facebook to suggest a single word for a One Word comic. This word was suggested by Matthew Frederick."

"This article is about controlling a car wash with the help of a Commodore C64."

"We wanted to show off all the hard work the good folks at Blendtec have put into their machines!"

"Hi, Ellis— Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and I’ve been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books."

"You are never more alive, more awake, more conscious, than when in excruciating conflict with yourself. If self-awareness is the hallmark of humanity, then Sophie’s Choice may be its most mind-expanding exemplar."

"In an industry where popular magazines are dying or fighting to stay alive, it's exciting to see a fresh new independent magazine aimed at fellow designers and the crafty-alike (with every issue selling out so far). I'm currently enjoying a copy of issue 2, which is 100 colorful pages full of articles ranging from the world of Pantone color to scissor collecting, along with a creative postcard project that encourages you to get involved in the process."

More "Under Construction" animgifs than you can handle.

"When it comes to template languages in PHP, many people will tell you that PHP itself is a template language. But even if PHP started its life as a template language, it did not evolve like one in the recent years. As a matter of fact, it doesn't support many features modern template languages should have nowadays"

"So, you think PHP is a templating engine? So did I... for a very long time. But recently, I changed my mind. Even if PHP can be used as a templating engine, the syntax is just plain ugly as a template language."

"Their wedding was unique in SO many ways~! Which is what every wedding should be, but they really made it their own. Chris is an illustrator for Star Wars and Julie is a creative director for an ad agency, so needless to say, they are creative. Their were two VERY VERY unique (unique like we will never ever see them again at a wedding) items at this wedding. The first being the 2 actual Stormtroopers. The 2 Stormtroopers greeted guests as they arrived at the museum and mingled with them at the cocktail hour. Amazing. The second was the grooms cake, which you’ll see later in this post."

"It is specifically geared towards people that demand total control of their OpenID identity without depending on another web application framework."

"Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We've filled in profiles, uploaded photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. The Ident Engine uses semantic web API’s to bring together these web footprints."

I'd actually like to make this! "Held the last weekend every July, the Gilroy Garlic Festival serves up garlic ice cream every year. Here's their recipe"

"Fox wants to make sure you flee Dollhouse's "glamor and dehumanization" premise. The show's new widget, which puts a flirty Eliza Dushku on your desktop, helpfully explains "this show is for creepy teenage masturbators." Good job, Fox!"

It's not a dead badger, but it'll do. "Kasey McMahon decided to combine an interest in taxidermy with her PC. Fearing that the natural world is being replaced by technology, the artist installed a working computer inside of an idle beaver."

"Maybe a stupid question, but is that bull *supposed* to be propelled by a massive fart? Because that's what it looks like, and if so, that's even more hilarious. "

"Coming in two weeks, the documentary Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown explores what inspired H.P. Lovecraft to invent the tentacular Cthulhu mythos - and why his work continues to inspire horror and science fiction creators today. The film focuses mostly on Lovecraft's influence, and includes interviews with luminaries like Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter, Caitlin Kiernan, Stuart Gordon, Ramsey Campbell, and Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi."

"Republican leaders chose not to draft their own comprehensive bill, focusing instead on attacking Democrats' plans as too costly and bureaucratic. Some prominent Republicans now fear they are getting tagged as the "party of no," and they want the GOP to offer more solutions to the nation's health care problems."