Initial thoughts on the Palin nomination (Scripting News) (10)
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Scripting News (755)
9 hours, 9 minutes
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1. It certainly was creative and thought-stimulating. 2. However... it shows McCain thought he was losing to Obama and needed to do something bold that would stir things up. And he certainly did that. 3. However... no matter how well they vetted her, even if nothing terrible shows up, she has no experience in the world, and virtually no experience in the United States. What does she know about American cities? Our industries and businesses? ...
What’s SUP?: FriendFeed’s Modest RSS Proposal (21)
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Scott Loganbill (236)
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webmonkey (546)
2 days, 7 hours
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The RSS wizards at FriendFeed (a social news aggregation site) are proposing a new way to distribute and fetch RSS feeds faster. The proposal is a simple one: publishers provide a centralized RSS to inform readers which feeds have been been updated since their last visit. The benefit? Your news fast. FriendFeed’s Gary Burd and Paul Buchheit (both former Googlers) want to download your RSS feeds as rapidly as they can without taking down your ...
Newspapers Beginning To Ditch The Associated Press? (4)
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Michael Masnick (1853)
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Techdirt (2187)
2 days, 10 hours
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The Associated Press has been having a hard time keeping up with the times. While there was the highly publicized situation where it threatened some bloggers with its own, highly questionable definition of fair use, a much bigger deal is that it's increasingly competing with its own member newspapers by doing things like cutting deals with Google that take traffic away from those member papers' own sites. Apparently, some of those newspapers are paying attention. ...
Simon Willison: Django snippets: Sign a string using SHA1, then shrink it using url-safe base65 (3)
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The Django community aggregator (211)
2 days, 10 hours
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Django snippets: Sign a string using SHA1, then shrink it using url-safe base65. I needed a way to create tamper-proof URLs and cookies by signing them, but didn’t want the overhead of a full 40 character SHA1 hash. After some experimentation, it turns out you can knock a 40 char hash down to 27 characters by encoding it using a custom base65 encoding which only uses URL-safe characters.
Did Daddy Yankee Offer To Endorse Obama? (1)
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The Washington Post (12)
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The Trail (15)
2 days, 10 hours
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By J. Freedom du Lac Democratic Party sources say yes. Daddy Yankee's camp says no. Over the past couple of days, Democrats in Denver have been floating the story to reporters from The Washington Post and other media outlets that before Daddy Yankee endorsed John McCain, his reps contacted Barack Obama's campaign -- and that reggaeton star's offer to back Obama was spurned after the campaign began looking into his background. Didn't like what they...Please ...
More Adventures in Amazon EC2 (and EBS) (4)
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m0j0 (15)
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unofficial planet python (301)
2 days, 15 hours
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Short Version: You can find a fantastic video here about bundling customized AMIs and registering them with Amazon so that you can launch as many instances of your new AMI as you want. The video is so good that I don’t bother writing out the steps to do the bundling (it would be pretty darn long). These are some notes about launching an AMI, customizing it, and mounting an EBS volume to it (the video ...
When Not to Suggest Social Media as a Marketing Tool. | Take It Face To Face (1)
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2 days, 16 hours
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I was reading Duct Tape Marketing this morning and I ran across a great article on how business can use Facebook as a professional tool. The article is of great
And What Would Happen If Commercial Aviation Was Simply Impossible To Do Profitably? (11)
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Michael Masnick (1853)
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Techdirt (2187)
2 days, 19 hours
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I tend to be something of an innovation optimist, believing that most resource constraint problems are eventually solved through ingenuity and innovation, but there can be some hiccups in the process along the way. Here's an article looking at the airline industry, and trying to spin some scenarios of what would happen if it simply turns out that the commercial airline business is completely unsupportable. Obviously, with fuel costs so high, it's become more and ...
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Greg said:
Is it the government's job to support unsustainable business models? No.
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Nick said:
I'm really curious by this, for a while.
Bolt’s 100M record breaks expected statistical curve of human performance (3)
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m1k3y (65)
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grinding.be (157)
2 days, 19 hours
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The Olympics are over! But they are not gone yet; it is now time for the post-analysis; in particular of Usain Bolt’s incredible new world record. From Wired.com: As astonishing as Usain Bolt’s record-breaking 100-meter sprint was, his time of 9.69 seconds is nowhere near what biostatisticians predict is the natural limit for the human body. … Statisticians have used a lower limit for 100-meter times of about 9.45 seconds…The exponential curve seen above — ...
The Internet Gets a New Command Line With Firefox's Ubiquity (29)
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Michael Calore (88)
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webmonkey (546)
3 days, 7 hours
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Mozilla launched a new experimental browser plug-in Tuesday that has the power to change the way people interact with the dozens of web services they use every day. The project, called Ubiquity, is an open-source extension to the Firefox web browser. To start testing it out, grab the prototype add-on, a free download for all platforms, from Mozilla Labs. Ubiquity is basically an attempt to build an easy-to-grasp user interface for the open web at ...
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Ross said:
to-read
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Nichol said:
amazing!
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mrkvm said:
nifty.
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Ryan Cahoon said:
I guess this might be more useful if you're more into the web services than i am
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sumidiot said:
Looking forward to trying this when I get home.
Social Networks: The Case for a "Pause" Button (25)
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Merlin Mann (2069)
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Merlin Mann's blog (75)
3 days, 16 hours
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PauseJason Kottke (via Rex, via TechCrunch) points to a new feature on FriendFeed that allows users to “fake follow” people: That means you can friend someone but you don’t see their updates. That way, it appears that
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Ross said:
ha, "specially on a site like FriendFeed, which has quickly become the platform of choice for the web’s least interesting narcissists — and the slow-witted woodland creatures who enjoy grooming their fur — this is a major breakthrough in the makebelieve friendship space."
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Mark R said:
Oh Merlin Mann, you never cease delighting me with your commentary.
iPhone Update Crushes OpenClip’s Copy-and-Paste Dreams (2)
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Scott Gilbertson (648)
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webmonkey (546)
3 days, 18 hours
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File under: that didn’t take long. OpenClip, an effort to bring copy-and-paste features to the iPhone, has shutdown. As we mentioned last week, the developers of OpenClip discovered a loophole that allowed iPhone apps to shared clipboard data, as long as all applications used the OpenClip framework. Unfortunately the loophole is something Apple decided to close off with the iPhone 2.1 software update. Apps using OpenClip will still work and you can copy and paste ...
How does NASA destroy its rockets? (1)
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Nina Shen Rastogi (17)
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Slate Magazine - Explainer (6)
4 days, 8 hours
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Early Friday morning, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration terminated an experimental rocket soon after it launched from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The rocket had veered off course and was in danger of landing in a populated area. How does NASA torpedo a rocket?[more ...]
Ruckingenur II: Reverse engineering video game (6)
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Caleb Kraft (129)
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Hack a Day (1293)
4 days, 9 hours
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Filed under: misc hacks, daily, security hacks[Zach Barth] has released Ruckingenur II, the game of reverse engineering. The latest in his Games for Engineers series, it is a full game with multiple levels and live action cut scenes. Set with a military theme, the goal is to reverse engineer enemy items. Pictured above is a lock to a weapons cache.The pixelized style is consistent throughout. Even the cut scenes have the effect. The reverse engineering ...
World Of Warcraft on a treadmill (9)
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Caleb Kraft (129)
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Hack a Day (1293)
4 days, 11 hours
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Filed under: misc hacks, peripherals hacks[Aaron Rasmussen] and his friend [Eli] slapped together this setup to see what it would be like to run as much as their World of Warcraft characters. They used a couple old treadmills to spin some tires with makeshift mouse sensors on them. As their speed increased, so did their character. There was a decent amount of math done to figure the average speed of a World of Warcraft character, ...
Red Light Cameras Don't Work (30)
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schneier (1161)
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Schneier on Security (1240)
4 days, 14 hours
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Interesting: the solution to one problem causes another. "The rigorous studies clearly show red-light cameras don't work," said lead author Barbara Langland-Orban, professor and chair of health policy and management at the USF College of Public Health. "Instead, they increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop at camera intersections." Comprehensive studies from North Carolina, Virginia, and Ontario have all reported cameras are associated with increases in crashes. The study by the Virginia ...
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Wolfger said:
Gotta love capitalism, eh? Screw public safety! Let's make us some money!
