November 2009

"Do you contribute something worthwhile to the marketplace of ideas, or are you just a noisy asshat? Here’s one way to tell: how do you act when you are proven wrong about something? Do you learn from the experience and admit you were wrong — or do you double down?"

"If we succeed in doing it, it's going to look nothing like the Starship Enterprise. Or even New Horizons. The whole reference frame we instinctively assume when we hear the word "ship" is just so wrong it's beyond wrong-ness: it's on a par with Baron Munchausen's lunar exploits as seen in light of the Apollo Program. We need a new handle for discussing and analyzing such a venture. And the sooner we consign the "-ship" suffix to the dustbin of failed ideas, the better."

"many choices At its atomic level, a cyoa book is a collection of numbered pages of a few different types. Most pages tell a portion of the story, then finish by telling you to jump to another page. A smaller number of pages tell a conclusion to the story and represent an endpoint with no further jumps. We can subdivide these ‘narrative’ and ‘endings’ groups further based on the number of choices offered or the goodness of the ending. To visualize this, imagine color-coding every page in the book and then laying the pages out next to each other"

"It's a hefty wave to catch, but our browser has already been Atlas for five years - the IGB is perched atop a custom-written HTML parsing and rendering system. While a noble technical endeavor, this leaves to us the tasks of upgrading and extending the IGB to match the ever-shifting currents of the HTML standard. Hardly the best way for us to serve you, the player! But, like Atlas, we now have two Pillars upon which to rest these burdens. The first, and undoubtedly greatest, is the Heraclidean support provided by Awesomium and its Prince of Code. This library harnesses the raw strength of the Chromium browser toolkit - the muscles, knit from Webkit, that writhe cobra-like beneath the skin of Google's Chrome - and hand-delivers rendered HTML pages to us as nice 3D surfaces, which we can then readily display in our own Trinity engine."

"In plain English, what developers want to be able to do is be able to design assertions that can accept application models that implement the Resource or Role interface, and be able to apply some dynamic or custom logic to assess whether or not the given role has access to the given resource. ... For the purposes of this example, we’ll take a simple concept: a user needs to be able to only edit their own blog post. The user in this case, would be our applications model for users. The actual class will implement the Zend_Acl_Role_Interface. We will also have a BlogPost model which will serve as the resource in question, thus implementing the Zend_Acl_Resource_Interface"

"A JetPack for rsstodolist is available to add current URL by a single click. To use it, first, install JetPack, then, come back on that page and click on the upper-right "install" button. You should then have a new item in your status bar (at bottom) allowing you to type your feed name and use the "add url" button to add the current url to your feed."

"If you host your own WordPress blog, it’s probably on Apache. That all fine and good. For most sites Apache works wonderfully, especially as it’s so easy to find information on it, on mod_rewrite and everything else that everyone else uses. One of the alternatives is Nginx, a really fast webserver that streaks ahead of Apache in terms of performance, but isn’t quite as easy to use. That’s partly because Apache is the default webserver on most Linux distributions and hosts. Want to try Nginx? Here’s how."

"As lambics go, Lindemans’ products tend to be less sour, more sweet, more mainstream (compared with Boon or Cantillon, for example) and thus more approachable for the amateur homebrewer. "

"Traditional kefir was made in skin bags that were hung near a doorway; the bag would be knocked by anyone passing through the doorway to help keep the milk and kefir grains well mixed"

"This loot list is dedicated for helping you gear up your mage as best as possible. This list includes items from the Wrath of the Lich King expansion as of patch 3.0, but no raid content or pre-expansion (Classic WoW or Burning Crusade) loot."

"This week, we'll hit the rest of the new expansion's reputation rewards and highlight those that you'll want to start grinding for now, if you haven't already started."

"This week, we'll go over about half of the new factions and the Mage-centric rewards they offer. Then sure enough, next week we'll deal with the other half. Here at Arcane Brilliance, we're nothing if not predictable. "

"pasted code is dead code - real living code changes, and short of going back and repasting, the code on the web quickly becomes out of date. So this is a little snippet I whipped up to dynamically (by the wonders of cross-site ajax) load code from a github branch. This means, when you update the git branch and repush, the code will update."

"Nobody believed me, so I had to record it."

"A rare parasite which burrows into host fish before eating and replacing their tongues with itself has been found off the Jersey coast."

"While Microsoft drifts aimlessly with Windows Mobile trying to play a fruitless game of cat and mouse with Apple, and while Google – the defender of all things open and web – invests in Java with Android, one company has come out of left field with a solid vision to embrace open web technologies for its mobile platform. That company is Palm and its platform is called WebOS. And you should stand up and take notice because it is one of the most important developments in the mobile world today."

"Tuten will explain how these digestively related tales date back before medieval times and talk of how monastic authors used these undignified deaths to connect sin, divine vengeance, greed and bowel afflictions as examples of the gruesome fate awaiting sinners and the perceived enemies of the monastery."

"As a homebrewer who also happens to be obsessed with coffee, I found that too many of the coffee or espresso flavored stout recipes I found seemed to consider coffee more of an afterthought than an important factor in the success of the beverage. I have always found it odd that brewers would take so much time to pick out just the right hops, yeast and perfect water chemistry, only to say something so general as, "Add a pound of cracked coffee to the brew pot." Lightly cracking coffee is supposed to compensate for the longer extraction time in the brew, but overextracted coffee is as undesirable in the beer as it would be on its own. Some homebrewer recipes even go as far as advising instant coffee as an ingredient. This is intolerable advice. Over a few years, I have tried several methods, and the one I most enjoyed is the one that I am about to share. "

"Your writing, notes, and to-do lists online. SimpleText.ws stores your text and keeps it synced between your work, home, and devices like the iPhone. Unlike manual syncing, SimpleText.ws merges your changes so you'll never lose data."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh, wait, that's not The Onion. "Imagine for a moment that this trend continues – might Detroit become some sort of independent city-state, a mildly anarchic rough-and-ready town where the price of freedom is a willingness to work hard for yourself and with your neighbours?"

"Adventures in Homebrewing offers a full line of home brew recipe kits designed with BEER in mind. Often, homebrew kits are designed to stay in an acceptable price range. How can a cream ale cost the same as an IPA...It cannot. We do not allow the price of our brews to influence ingredients, the ingredients influence our brews. After one batch, you will see the light!"

"Brewer's Best™ Equipment Kit Contains: * 6.5 Gallon "Ale Pail" Primary Fermenter with Drilled & Grommeted Lid * 6.5 Gallon "Ale Pail" Bottling Bucket with Bottling SpigotEasy Clean No-Rinse Cleanser * Airlock * Siphon & Bottling Set-up * Home Beermaking Text * Hydrometer * Bottle Brush * Twin Lever Capper * Liquid Crystal Thermometer * Bucket Clip * Equipment Instructions"

"Evented I/O for V8 javascript. "

So... The Palm Pre gets totally slammed on battery life, but the Droid gets a pass saying we just need to change our habits? Sheesh. "Until battery technology changes to double or triple capacity, you will have to change your charging habits to fit the needs of the smartphone. Instead of charging it every few days, or only charging it overnight, you need to charge the phone basically whenever it isn't being used. Driving in your car--charge the phone. Sitting at your desk--charge the phone. Sleeping at night--charge the phone."

"The best things in life are often silly, and in this case gloriously retro. Blocktronics, a collective of the best textmode artists around the world, have released their second art pack entitled “Codename Chris Wirth” in homage to the legendary ANSI artist RaD Man. No, it’s not 1995, and yes, this kind of art is still being produced in stunning fashion. "

What? "The OpenOfficeMouse is one of the first computer mice to incorporate an analog joystick and the first to permit the use of the joystick as a keyboard. In the three joystick-as-keyboard modes, the user can assign up to sixteen different keys or macros to the joystick, which provides for easy movement regardless of whether the user is flying through the cells of a large spreadsheet in Calc or on the back of an epic flying mount in World of Warcraft. It is also the first hardware to be permitted to make use of the OpenOffice.org brand in the nine-year history of the OpenOffice.org Community."

"To show off the power of Ares, Palm had an engineer code up a Flickr search tool -- in front of a live audience -- using the drag and drop tools to create the various widgets and form necessary for the app."

"Although the specs for the Weave server are available, it may take someone new a while to wrap their head around the whole scheme. I’m going to attempt explaining what crypto operations we do and why we do it in this blog post."

Must be a slow day on the OS X malware front. This is really reaching... "What’s interesting is that the author of this “game” flat-out says what it does on his Web site. Reading through the author’s description, it seems that he has created this game/threat as some sort of artistic project. The aliens are your files and there are consequences for “killing” them."

"I recently published a novel, and now it’s time to get back to work. If you’re anything like me, figuring out what to write next can be a real hassle. A flashy and experimental brain-bender, or a pointillist examination of the dissolution of a typical American family? ­Generation-spanning door-stopper or claustrophobic psychological sketch? Buncha novellas with a minor character in common? To make things easier, I modified my dartboard a few years ago. Now, when I’m overwhelmed by the untold stories out there, I head down to the basement, throw a dart and see where it lands. Try it for yourself!"

"Boffins in America are working on biodegradable, flexible electronic devices printed on silk, which could be implanted in the human body and would decay naturally over time. Applications could include LED displays inlaid beneath the skin, or direct nerve-controlled interfaces."

"Resque is our Redis-backed library for creating background jobs, placing those jobs on multiple queues, and processing them later."

"I would think that Ann Arbor would be a little embarrassed that it doesn't provide an open and affordable arts and cultural center for its citizens. Even Ypsilanti, which is one fifth our size has managed to create the Riverside Arts Center, which has both a gallery and theater for public use."

"Where Mojo.Test diverges from the usual xUnit-type framework is in support for testing components that depend on asynchronous callbacks. Mojo.Test provides a callback function for results that can be used at the end of a chain of any number of callbacks from the component under test. It also maintains a test timer, which will cause the failure of any test that doesn't report a result within a configurable time limit. "

"Tuesday, I did this."

Yes.

"Getting into the holiday spirit, Alyson Hannigan and her husband Alexis Denisof toook baby Satyana out for her first Halloween in Santa Monica on Saturday (October 31). The happy family dressed in matching kangaroo outfits, strolling about the city streets in search of a bagful of sweet treats for their baby girl."

"The new precision farmers are hacking together a way of making food in which the virtual and physical worlds are so tightly bound that having his tractor steered by GPS-guidance with inch-level accuracy is ho-hum. "