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Buffalo buffalo buffalo
I just saw this story in Chinese in which every syllable is pronounced /shi/. There are some similar constructions in English. Apparently this is a valid sentence: James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher. [Wikipedia link] And: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo [...]
Bypass iPhone Lock Screen
In case you haven’t seen it yet, a recent bug was discovered that allows you to bypass the iphone lock screen. You can only get to the phone features – dialer, contacts, voicemail, etc. Still, it’s rather uncool. Link: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/ios-41-flaw-lets-you-bypass-iphones-lock-screen-make-calls-50001297/
Build your own face
Here’s a fun diversion, especially if you enjoyed Mr Potato head — Veer’s Unusual Suspects has a face builder with some odd features.
at the rate of
Trivia of the day – one funny thing you might find as you share data verbally across cultural boundaries is that names for bits of punctuation aren’t as universal as names for letters. Heck, even with letters I remember my British physics Mech Engineering teacher referring to “z” as “zed” (“zed zed 9 plural zed [...]
Meet Emily
It’s intriguing to see how far CG animation has come.
Finally – A New Track from Telefon Tel Aviv
Why is it that most of the people making music that I like tend to disappear for long periods of time? Well anyway, Telefon Tel Aviv have finally released something new – a preview track off their new album for their new label – German producer Ellen Allien’s BPitch Control. The first beat had me [...]
Visualizations
I’ve been experimenting for a while with Flash, Processing, and Ruby-Processing – making particle systems and various interactions and animations. I started a new page to collect these experiments – visuals.
UI PSA: Do not do this
I’m generally annoyed by the precautions designers take against shoulder surfing (Windows WEP key entry, anyone?), but this is clearly a mistake: Really, there’s no need to protect a CAPTCHA from shoulder surfing.
Chronotext – the text time curvature
From Ariel Malka, this typewriter visualization allows the rendering of the text path to be affected by the act of typing – inter-keystroke timing affects the curvature of the path. [text time curvature]
When not to listen to your users, from Livejournal
While it’s important to listen and respond to user feedback, it’s often a mistake to treat arbitrary or isolated instances as a roadmap for enhancements. This post about lessons from Livejournal reinforces this. The idea is not new (see Jakob Nielsen, for example), but it’s useful to be reminded from time to time. Users are [...]
Ruby’s Kernel#rand for random numbers within an interval
As part of some Ruby-Processing work I’m doing, I needed a random number within a specified range. Processing has its own random function, but I wanted to use Ruby. I needed a random number in the interval (-range, range). I immediately thought, “specify the max value range*2 as a param to rand, and then subtract [...]
Thomas Keller’s Midnight Snack
I keep forgetting where this is. It’s Thomas Keller of the French Laundry, Bouchon, and Per Se. The voice-over inflates the sandwich (world’s greatest?), but it does look mighty tasty.
Body Navigation – Play Pong, get Fit!
I’m a big fan of Processing, and who can complain about a project involving dancers, a choreographer, and a programmer? I love the pong part. I gotta defrost my projector sometime and see what I can do with it. Body Navigation by Recoil Performance Group from ole kristensen on Vimeo.
That’s not XTC! iTunes Store Feature Suggestion
I use the iTunes Store as a way to find and preview music, and I’ve purchased quite a bit of music and TV shows through it. I’ve seen several cases where music has been mis-labeled or mis-categorized. For example, the last two albums on this page for the UK band XTC: I’m not the only [...]
Batch Compiling with Aquamacs Emacs
I needed to batch compile some files recently, and I had to lookup how to do this with Aquamacs. It’s pretty simple. If Aquamacs is at /Applications/Aquamacs, then this will work: /Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs\ Emacs -nw -batch -f batch-byte-compile /path/to/elisp-file.el
Confusion Over Triple Equals (===)
Doesn’t everyone have concepts that they can’t keep organized in their heads? I frequently get values for certain keys mixed up in my head, especially ones that I don’t use very often. At the Lone Star Ruby Conference, Greg and I were talking about the triple equals operator in Ruby recently (===), and I confused my notion [...]
Emacs Lisp – Block Commenting Ruby Code
These days I’m working to become proficient in Emacs (I’ve recently switched from Vim, as Greg mentioned on his blog). With that comes all kinds of things like org-mode, yasnippet, and lots of keyboard combinations. A part of this current effort I’m learning Emacs Lisp right now. There’s probably a better way to do block comment [...]
Bomomo for a bit of fun
If you’re in need of some doodling, try out Bomomo. I like the mass transit map feel that some of the drawing tools have. And you can save your drawings too.
A Little Cluetrain Reminder
I was in a local Target the other day and I saw this improvised product review: Isn’t it fairly clear that the Cluetrain people have a point? People are going to talk about your products, your company, your reputation. Corporations can’t stop that, and technology further empowers these kinds of exchanges. Corporations should work to [...]
Life Imitates Video Games?
As the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia has unfolded, faint but distinct memories of mine were triggered. Russia invades Georgia in 2008? Fighting in Tbilisi? Wait a minute—I know this! It’s eerily (well, vaguely) close to the storyline of the original Ghost Recon, even the year.
VMware Fusion and Cisco VPN on Mac OS X – Fixing a Hiccup
I’m using a Cisco VPN Client (4.9.01) on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.4). Yesterday I installed VMware Fusion (1.1.3), and today I noticed that my VPN wasn’t working anymore. The error: “Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem. Please make sure that you have at least one network interface that is currently active [...]
Adobe Error Messages
I can identify with the conditions (complexity, time constraints, etc) that would give rise to these errors. But when you step back, it’s quite humorous. From an ideal perspective, messages like these shouldn’t really happen.
Animated John Lennon Interview
Great visualizations in this interview conducted by a 14 year old who snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in 1969. Via Infosthetics.
Ruby code to convert MySQL XML to CSV
This very simple code will take a file saved by mysql –xml and convert it to CSV format, with a header. I know there’s a MySQL option to save a file as a CSV or TSV, but I needed this for my situation. The code uses Hpricot (by Why the Lucky Stiff) for XML parsing. require [...]