it took quite a while, but having found a link to brainbench i was committed to taking a test or two. as a result, after about two hours, i'm now certified as a master in both html and web programming. fun, took a lot of time to do (it's comprehensive, but no too hard with references handy).
ah, cool, more people latching onto copyright defenders' use of newspeak.
Spoof! An Insiders Guide to Short Film Success on ifilm. interesting to note that william sherak, one of the writer/directors is son of fox exec tom sherak. also interesting is the guy that play the writer is drew mcweeny, aka moriarty on aicn.
hmm, just noticed that lucas in love is on mediatrip.com now. filmed on location, btw.
life after star trek ds9.
alt.usage.english faq. a fun filled cornucopia on the english language.
Slowly, surely, without anyone noticing, the Web is bieng transformed right under the world's collective noses. the increasing loss of platform independence on the being able to browse the web seems to defeat the web's original purpose, being able to interchange data without having to switch platforms!
wow, wish i was at the san diego comicon today. of course deciding whether to be sitting in on the kevin smith or the dune miniseries talk would be painful, but in a good way.
the atlantis teaser is online. sort of neat. not quite as neat as the final fantasy teaser, however.
sometimes, i remain impressed by /.
the wasp is wrong to be slamming mozilla. it's just plain ignorant. mozillazine and /. for context.
i noticed that a lot of people have been bandying about apple's (silly) claims on g4 performance, so i decided to find out what was going on. jc has a xplatform comparison which summarizes the performance specs that have been published thus far. one important thing to note is that the specbench numbers for the g4 (450) are about half or the latest athlon/cumine chips. this number is also published by motorola (pdf). now, according to the specbench:
The G4-450 gets 21.4 20.4
The P3-866 gets 41.7 41.5
The Athlon-1000 gets 42.9 42.9
how then to explain the g4 numbers posted by apple? well, the answer lies in the little link that they give you. the numbers give by intel are for representative performance for programs calling the intel signal processing library, quite different from writing your own optimized routines to accomplish a task. assembly routines vs c/c++ called library performance. big difference. apple and oranges one might say. (granted altivec simd is cool, and works great for ffts)
now, there are good reasons for getting a mac, or a mac cube even, but frankly, performance or price, or price/performance are not among them. note, that while the former may not necessarily apply to the pc, the latter two most definitely do.
in my searching, i also came across a slightly dated (and slightly suspect), but very interesting architectural comparison of ppc vs x86.
funky palms ;)
final fantasy trailer aka eye candy
for some reason, i found this example given on binding keys in emacs to be lol funny.
(defun loser ()
(interactive "*")
(insert "You go to hell. You go to hell and you die."))
(global-set-key "\M-\-" 'loser)
the kama sutra of pooh. as the subtitle says, it's just wrong, but darn funny.
Webcasting 101: RealAudio Vs. Windows Media Audio Vs. SHOUTcast and a whole bunch of other interesting stuff at radiospy.
Unlike security, privacy entails a basic respect for other people. The absence of that basic respect is the primary cause of the current erosion of our rights. Bad laws and bad company policies are, in this case, just an epiphenomenon. more talk, including good arguments against the transparent society on /.
i do believe that michael moore is right on mark.
oh yeah, did anyone mention that the record companies are fuckin morons? perhaps they should have attended last month's mp3 summit. or they can watch the webcast... i'll summarize: people are not going to pay money for stuff that is annoying and inconvenient. people will pay for a value add of convenience.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
digital paper using mems. can't wait.
if you go to the iridigm site, under the applications > independence submenu, the leftmost inset picture is of someone browsing /. on a palmtop...
really cool hubble space telscope photos. the latest one of the crescent nebula is great.
information filtering, point and counterpoint. incidental fun quote:
"Most Internet entrepreneurs treat the users' attention as a Third World country to be strip-mined," said Jakob Nielsen...
man, intel really shot themselves in the foot w/ their rambus dealings.
a useful list of free ssh programs. (free as in beer)
grr... more spyware
cam is right. living.com's dhtml furniture viewer is darn spiffy.
While more than 70% of the people the NSF surveyed knew that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, and that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist, only 16% could define the Internet and only 13% could accurately describe a molecule. At least those numbers are going up, the report's authors noted diplomatically--five years ago, only 11% could define the Internet and only 9% could describe a molecule. Well-Informed Citizens Increasingly Rare in Information Age">whoa.
hackers demo "social" skills in ny ;)
jorn makes some interesting proposal for content-centered web design. this would integrate well w/ semi-structured db entries (for adding metadata, content-tagging, and appending comments / elaborating on relations as time went on). also, the dead links problem is actually addressed by many available crawlers (with automatic link deactivation or demotion when linkrot sets in) - also, if it's all db backed, you get all kinds of neat options like reordering data based on activity of the page (store last updates based on crawls), popularity (store clickthroughs), or if you want to get ambitious, integrating such things into your community and collaborative filtering systems. ooh, sounds like a project.
interesting article on conflation of terms across creative and technical disciplines. i think the best way to avoid it is to not use an ambiguous words like architecture/design alone. visual design, user experience design, information architecture, system design, systems architecture all come in handy.
heh, i remember back in 1995 when i was quite a bit of internet based research for a nanotechnology research paper, which was not very common. I remember having to track down the MLA standards on citing web sources, using the examples they had for SIRS and gopher servers. now it seems that internet research has all but taken over.
jimmy iovine has a good grip on things, even if the current execution is a lacking.
variety calls the x-men b.o. "stupefying" and an "extreme mutation."
cool! bbs nostalgia.
the the vs the corporate monster
xplane has finally discovered the wonder that is explodingdog
the electronica primer. don't remember reading through this before.
(are(languages(These), nice)
(Easy(to_write(code(bug_free))))
(If(can(read(you, them)))))
interesting programming talk on /. (set your filter to 2). some related stuff here. this eventually led me to Bruce MacLennan's research page on emergent computing and connectionist epistemology, which is darn interesting.
so, i just home from massive attack and showered, so the pigpen layer of dust has been washed off (raver snots and loogeys remain despite the mud i managed to blow out, as do blisters). dusty is an understatemtn. i thought my car was spraying out dusty air too, and it wasn't until i was halfway home that i realized it was just my glasses being all uh, dusty. although i things weren't great in the beginning (delay getting in, and another delay because all the sets started late) - also, the actual ground was pretty gnarly (dusty with lots of wood stuff stuck into it), but things picked up later in the night, i met a bunch of people, got to tromp around for a while. what really made the night worth it was the righteous colette vs angel alanis 2x4 set. i caught almost all of that set close up, in front and then behind em. mysteriously, the terry mulan vs halo 2x4 didn't got skipped (i'm guessing that it got moved up a lot earlier...). deepfeel, a local texas dj went on though and played an great (but unfortunately short because of the late start) house set (using up to 3 of the turntables), so i'm not complaining too much.
oh yeah, and i got to see the moon set and the sun rise, which was pretty darn cool.