Anyone got a weekend free? There's a small project on rentacoder that you might want to look at. Hehehehe.. I do love the requirements. I wonder how serious they are, or if they're just slightly clueless about what "new operating system" means... (or "must run all windows applications" means).
Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?
Good points.....
Funny post from Robert McLaws about If The British Royal Navy Ran Windows Vista (it's a visual one).
Kinda funny until you remember that not that many years ago a navy ship was rendered dead in the water from a windows crash (if I remember the story right.... can't find it right now, I remember it was on slashdot maybe two or three years ago?).
I've never heard of The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster before. Basically it's a blog written from the point of view of Anakin Skywalker and his ascension to being Darth Vader from Episode I to VI. It's stopped being written now, but it looks like it's still a really good chunk of writing to go through.
Why don't you people tell me about these things! :)
Another link from Darren is Things I Desperately Wish Women Would Say to Me on First Dates.
"Tell me again about the hidden minus world in Super Mario Bros."
Darren pointed me to I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? which is just a collection of kitten pictures in the same vein as these.
Pictures of some Incomprehensible Intersections. My favorite is this one in Russia, where you look like you have to go an extra couple of km just to turn left!
Forever geek reveals a very nice looking New Image from the upcoming Babylon 5 Movie. Wait a minute, there's an upcoming Bab5 movie? Cool!
How about saying that for your career you're cardstacker?
Fantastic links from Boing Boing.... Pulp Fiction as typography. Points to two videos. Basically the "What does Marcellus Wallace look like?" scene from Pulp Fiction animated as just text. Very hard to describe and very cool to view.
Very funny song about the PS3... "how you killed your brand". Lets just say it wasn't done by fans :) (I'm going to guess the XBox team had a hand in it, but that's just a theory)
Hamad published a a collection of pics he took for Vista wallpapers that didn't make the cut. Some good stuff in there.
Robert pointed me to The Amazing Art of Jim Warren, who has some great stuff. Thing MC Escher meets Walt Disney.
Following up on my post from last year on OpenID, my buddy Fozbaca linked to Simon Willison's Six cool things you can build with OpenID which includes some cool slides from the Future of Webapps talk that Simon gave.
It's a interesting and cool idea, that has great potential, assuming that a) not much evilness is involved, and b) it gets to the critical mass needed to maintain new technology.
Macenstein has an interesting look at how it appears that Using Safari can slow your system down as much as 76% vs Firefox. Interesting analysis, wonder if there is a conspiracy theory, or this is something to do with the HTML / Javascript rendering system being deeply embedded in the operating system. It'd be interesting to see a similar study of IE vs Firefox on Windows, and sites with heaving javascript / flash vs static HTML.
Dang it, another funny comic to start reading. Don't these people know I have to work during the day! Especially since it was my boss who sent it to me!
This strip also gives some good relationship advice. :)
A neat story from reddit on going fast in Japan.
“Right. Skylines are built for speed. That’s why I love them. Actually… why don’t I show you a bit of speed now? Is that ok?”
Ever gone over 200km/h? This guy has...... by a long shot.
Personally my limit in a car was a wimpy 160km/h by comparison, and that was at night on a deserted stretch of highway, completely paranoid the entire time that an animal was going to jump in front of me, or I'd pass a speed trap and get that "special" attention from the police officer that you get when you get caught doing something exceptionally stupid :)
I completely missed the Oscars last night, and the early showing of "Heroes" for that matter, which sucks, because Al Gore’s big announcement looks absolutely hilarious (a bit long, hang in there till the end though).
Digg pointed to funny fruit pics. The screaming orange is my favorite.
A great collection of SNL ads, very fun... back from the days when SNL was good too :)
Here's an interesting look at some of the insides of the latest kernel from Microsoft. In Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 2 there's some fascinating stuff on readyboost, superfetch, and their other superhero friends.
A great post entitled chalain: So Beautiful, So Disturbing looking at Vista as something slightly different than an OS. Very funny and close to life :)
She looks into cupboard seven. "You are using Gateway Widescreen LCD monitor and Norwood Micro LCD. I have set best resolutions for them. Would you like breakfast?"
Stefan Didak's Home Office. Wow. I want. Rather, I want mine to be that clean. Make sure you check out the FAQ as well :) The comments are great as well:
UNHOLLY BALLS OF SATAN!!!!....I just wet myself.
Hilarious parody of "Heroes".... Zeroes. Ordinary People, with relatively ordinary abilities.....
Another great worth1000.... this time the subject is penguins!
If you're going to get a geeky tattoo, here's a good idea.... a nifty math equation. If you're not a math / science geek he has some other ideas as well:
I've got plenty of ideas for other tattoos -- the "Jono" kanji, the "Aikido" kanji, the Enso logo, maybe some Python code... my body shall be a medium for expressing my ideas.
Personally I'm wondering if I should get DeCSS in perl tattooed on my butt?
I told you there would be drama! Apparently ESR and Fedora have had an interesting relationship.
Last year you noted that our infrastructure by FC5 was great. Yum was
doing upgrades well and we no longer suffered from "egregious fuckups."
But now you say it's a huge problem again in the current email by noting
our "incompetent repository maintenance" and our non-statically linked
rpm. So what is the problem? Is it user incompetence or are you
actually aware of the infrastructure changes that take place or are
taking place? Reading your message, my guess is you are just
misinformed and that frustrates you.
I believe that one could say this is a lot of snow. Wow. When they bring out the army to help with the snow, it's bad. When they bring in the army and excavators, then you know it's really bad.
Linux.com reports on the big story (hehe) that ESR gives up on Fedora. Sounds like he discovered what I found years ago.... that RPM sucks is sub-optimal for my own personal use. Wonder if this'll throw the linux community into a tizzy?
Darren shot me a link to a video from Jimmy Kimmel where Jimmy Kimmel Tim Hardaway and George Takei answer to Tim Hardaway (Tim being the basketball player who said he hates gay people and George Takae being a gay person). Very funny. Funnier more if you have heard George in his stint on the Howard Stern show as the announcer.
For my own future reference, here's a good story on the much underused lsof and a nice cheatsheet for its various incantations (before I only really did an 'lsof -n | grep processname' or a 'lsof -p pid').
Oh man, I don't know what I'd answer if asked this question. Maybe it's a trick question? Dang funny though :)
Whoah, I guess Everything I Know About Disks Is Wrong! At least with my constant battles with hardware here on the good 'ol UFies box (all still good touch wood) I know that MTBF (mean time before failure) is more like MTBIARITTF (mean time before it's a really inconvenient time to fail) :) Good abstract of this paper from this slashdot article.
This guy is a machine, coding a raytracer over 48 hours on a weekend... he called it PixelMachine and has a full log (with pretty pictures) of progress starting Saturday the 17th and ending Sunday the 18th.....
Any Lost fans out there (I'm not one... too much on TV to watch already) or Heroes fans (I am one) subscribe to the theory that LOST and HEROES are connected after last night? Definitely an interesting thought....
Here's the youtube link in question.
I don't think this is supposed to be really a "connection", more of a nod from one show to the other.
Another great photoshop contest at Worth1000.com, this time on demotivational posters.
Youtube has the series of videos from Jono Bacon on Herding Cats. Jono is part of the Ubuntu team. Interesting stuff, totally about 50 minutes in length.
In my continued quest to flood UFies with Lightroom stories, I bring you the review from Ars which is a nice in depth look at the software, including a comparison with Aperture. Until I have a mac I'm sort of stuck with Lightroom (not that that's a bad thing).
Man I love the comic xkcd.... especially this one on open source.
The Lightroom Blog was the first one I saw to break where to download the trial version of Lightroom: Lightroom that is available. Wh00t!
A great photoshop contest over at Worth1000.com.... a mashup of cartoon characters and renaissance paintings. Great stuff.
A demo video for Star Wars: Force Unleashed has some really freaky AI technology built in. Watch the video and check it out. Wonder if this'd constitute rights for AI?
Cool article on How much control should our users have? Hehee.... "canyon of pain". A nice relation (with pretty graphs) to demonstrate the cost/payoff of things from iMovie to hotel faucets.
A cool photo story on the Online Photographer.... The Second-Worst Photographic Mistake I Ever Made.
[...] "be-prepared" photography says don't use that last frame of film. It's for that once-in-a-lifetime photo. Christ might decide to make a Second Coming at the press conference, and wouldn't you hate to be out of film?
Osama Team Hunger Force video at college humor.com. Freakin hilarious, poking fun at the whole fiasco a couple of weeks ago.
A great, though no doubt bored, video editor created a video of Gollum and Smeagol singing to Barry White. Great stuff.
Update: Gollum Noodles, found from my bud Dana.
Slashdot reports that a NASA World Wind 1.4 Released With Trailer. World Wide Wind is a application similar to Google Earth, but it's fully free and have different goals to GE. Also includes the ability to explore the moon, mars, jupiter and venus. Some sexy new effects and addons, check out the what's new page for full details.
Now this is exciting for me.... Forever Geek dug up that JJ Abrams to direct King's Dark Tower. The Dark Tower is a fantastic seven book series from Stephen King that has been on my own internal version of the 10 best movies never made.
It's also scary to me, because unless this is a 30 or 40 hour movie they are never going to capture the book properly. Stephen King's It was an OK attempt to make a movie of one of King's best loved horror stories and it was 192 minutes.... 3.2 hours! Now remember that the dark tower series is a full seven stories of incrediable depth written over a period of over thirty years! So based on that this movie would have to be over 22 hours long :)
Guess we'll see what happens...
The title of this video is Microsoft Vista Speech Recognition Gone Bad, but really, it's more of an hilarious lesson on where speech recognition and the real world don't mix. No slight to Vista here, but I'd say that no one should do programming (much less perl) using speech recognition. Truely a display in the supreme patience of the programmer doing it.
A fun game (for men) for if you have some spare time. You can play F*, Marry, Kill at either Frank's marry, shag, kill quiz or F, Marry, Kill on Ning.
Well guys.... we geeks are underpaid and the big V-Day is just a marketing ploy to make things more complicated. However, if you're lucky enough to have someone to love make sure you show her today. Flowers, chocolate, a card, a car, an iPod vibrator ("tune in and turn on winkwink), or dinner out (according to the paper this morning two thirds more ladies appreciate the dinner out) or even just a hug and kiss to tell them you appreciate them.
If you don't have a significant other, call up mom or dad and let them know you love them. Everyone appreciates random acts of kindness and appreciation.
Heck, just making sure you remember the day will go a long way!
Have a good one folks!
Oh man this is hilarious.... Samuel L. Jackson coaching junior hockey as the character from his Pulp Fiction portrayal of Jules Winnfield. Where it came from I have no idea, but holy crap it's funny.
So sue me, I've never been to The Onion Store before. Some really great t-shirts and slogans there, I need to get a few of 'em :)
Speaking of Vista, here's a link to a OS Security Features Chart over on Matasano Chargen's blog. Interesting, though I wonder how targeted this was at Vista. I'd like to see something similar for Linux (ie: grsec, selinux, and friends).
Taken of course with a grain of sale (this is slashdot you know), this commenters story of the most frustrating 10 minutes in front of a computer sounds eerily familiar to the "spoof" switch ad that Dana talked about the other day.
I'm told that after you have everything configured and setup, you never see the UAC prompts again, which is good, unless you're like me and enjoy trying new software and mucking around with the system, which may mean the best alternative for people like me is to disable UAC, which means that you end up with the situation in the ad of "then he doesn't warn me at all".
Interesting to see some of the reaction to Vista now that it is actually real and out there and people are able to use the final version and not base reactions on previews, marketing literature, etc.
Holy crap! Video passed on from $boss at work of more Top Gear love... the Bugatti Veyron at top speed. The top speed by the way, is 407 km/h. Wow.
Can someone tell me where to apply for this guys job please?
8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers. Title says it all. Video included.
An hilarious episode of Britain's Top Gear finds out what happens when you mess with the south. An experiment to see how decorating each others cars can draw the most attention, well, draws a lot of attention.
In the form of hillbillies with rocks.
"People have started to mate with vegetables"
Update: And a response from James May.
What's 3 Feet long, 5,000 pieces and $499? How about a Lego Millennium Falcon.
My ex-coworker pointed me to a very cute TigerCam at the Toronto Zoo.
Funny stuff from forgetfoo on how to screw with the minds of your fellow airline passengers. Coursee, doing this will no doubt get you ejected at 30,000 feet...
Reddit found some hugely adorable pics of a Dog Hugging a baby. Too cute. Worth of Cute Overload.
Found on reddit, here's some Embarrassing Medical Exams:
2. At the beginning of my shift I placed a stethoscope on an elderly and slightly deaf female patient's anterior chest wall. "Big breaths," I instructed. "Yes, they used to be," replied the patient.
It's apparently almost oscar time, and the pirates are out in full effect at Oscartorrents.com. They even have a legal note:
To those worried about downloading in case they get sued: by our calculations, your chances of getting nailed are way less than your chances of winning the lottery. Don't think twice about it.
In addition to torrents for all the movies in all the oscar categories, so you can play along at home!
Found this one on LifeHacker.... a nifty portable app for your ipod (works fine on a USB key though) called DemocraKey.
Imagine carrying a portable security suite with you wherever you go. Walk up to any computer, quickly scan it for viruses, and then defeat any internet access blocks to view any website you want anonymously. It’s here, and the DemocraKey 2.0 Lite let’s you have it on your iPod.
Found on reddit is a nice article from Coding Horror on how Non-Native UI Sucks.
Safari is, of course, a completely competent browser that stands on its technical merits, very much unlike IE6. But if you ask Mac users why they chose Safari, and if you keep pressing them, you'll probably find the deciding factor was that Safari feels like a native Mac app.
Very cool video on 3D morphable model face animation.
Found via Fake Steve Jobs' Blog is what looks like one of the meanest review of Vista I've seen so far.
Windows Mail is a mild reworking of Outlook Express whose big new feature is a spam filter that in my tests flagged nonspam as spam and vice versa an unacceptable 10% of the time. The bare-bones word processor WordPad used to be able to open Microsoft Word files. No more. What possible rationale could there be for "fixing" that, except to force users to shell out for the real thing?
The rest of it has some similar ranting, and not all unjustified in my opinion. I've been watching what Vista is shaping up to be, and some things, like games running slower under Vista than XP, are a bit disturbing. Aren't things supposed to get faster as new versions are released not slower? Maybe it's the driver manufacturers fault, maybe the architecture.
Personally I have a odd desire to run Vista, but I'm honestly a bit scared to move all my setup to a new OS just to find a deal breaker. I'm sure I will eventually though. Anyway, read through the review and make up your mind (and take it with a grain of salt).
Yesterday Yahoo released Yahoo Pipes, a very cool, yet hard to explain, new site and idea. Who says innovation is dead!?
Pipes uses the 30+ year old concept of Unix Pipes to combine various different informational sources, mangle them, and output information. The uniqueness in my opinion, is that the combination is (mostly) completely arbitrary so that users can combine whatever they want without restrictions put on them by the application.
The way the system works is the user can create a new pipe through a visual editor which allows you to click and drag sources (ie: flickr, google, yahoo, news, etc) filters (ie: parse out location, combine one string with another) and then output the resulting mashup of information (with an RSS feed of course).
You can browse some Pipes, or create your own (with a yahoo account anyway). Some cool examples:
It'll be interesting to see if this a) catches on and b) what comes out of it as far as combining data. This seems like something from the future (a bit), a la Snow Crash or something.
What sort of data combinations would you want to do? Get naked pictures of people from news headlines? Pictures of breaking news in my area? A map of local sex offenders? News stories from nearby people on my RSS feed? Lots of possibilities out there....
What happens when you get 500 MacBook Pros delivered? You make a movie of course!
Reading an interview Heroes Execs (the great TV show that's on Mondays) has confirmed that one of my greatest fears about the show being another Lost or Prison Break will not happen, and the season will have a proper conclusion.
The creators compared Heroes more to 24 than to LOST, and said that each season will conclude in a way. “The first season will come to a conclusion,” Co-executive producer and comic book guru Jeph Loeb told the audience. “Next season will be a brand new adventure.”
Seth points to a site called indexed, which proves that sometimes a picture is worth 1000 words. Some cool stuff :)
Darren threw me a video of a Rocket Fuel Plant Explosion. Wow, check out the ripple effects.
Looking to do some gaming under Linux? Here's a nice blog entry with screenshots and setup details to get these all going nicely.
A nice writeup on Coding Horror on The Economics of Bandwidth, including some lovely statistics for upload and download on various connections. Can be handy to find out how fast that torrent could possibly finish....
Holy crap! This video of MUSHIHIMESAMA FUTARI Ver.1.5 stage 5 boss[ultra] shows how insane game developers can get if left to their own means.
For anyone out there that has a web forum, here's some Lessons Learned About Managing an Online Forum.
Someone with a lot of time on their hands set up a page on Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow (this coming from a convo at work here this morning).
Another in the 'I'm in ur xxx, yyying your zzz" series is Dunecat!
Lifehacker has a nice article on how to get good with Google Reader. Some nice stuff there that I didn't know about (hint: hit 'g' then 'u' then type in the feed name you want to find). Wh00t!
Forgetfoo points to a video of Web 2.0 Explained.
First of all a new site for lightroom news has appeared and it comes to you with a nice list of changes in Adobe Lightroom from Beta 4.1 to version 1.0. Lightroom is an Aperture-like professional photo management software solution from Adobe (released to the wild on Feb 19th).
Wow.... you think your car is beefed up? Your car sucks next to this suped up muscle car with the engine replaced with a WWII era sherman tank engine.
Here's a link to the original forum post.
UFie-Superb Kethryvis posted a link to some hot Hot Library Smut for those so inclined with a fetish for old books and majestic libraries... perverts! This is totally different than other hardware porn I've posted :)
Cool video from a couple of days ago that I just got around to watching. It nicely answers the age-old question that I know I've asked myself many times, but never have answered..... are grapes microwavable, and what cool light show will they create :)
The Celler's image of the day for a few days ago is of a moose who came home to stay. Very cute, not sure if my cats would get along with one though.
An interesting and cautionary tale on using Microsoft Vista. I'm sure there will be more like this in the future, as some of the less obvious features and bugs start appearing now that Vista is out in the wild.
Curiously, when i looked at the files in the folder, it didn’t look like the time stamp had changed. I figured i’d just modified the wrong one of several different versions, so i retraced my steps: nope, that was the right file. This is weird, i thought, so i re-opened the file from the folder, and all my content was there. I saved it again … no changes to the directory listing.
Even non-Java folks will get a laugh or groan from String Optimizations in Java on the Daily WTF. Java folks (which I'm pretty sure that two of my four readers are) will get even more of a laugh or groan.
Oh wow, I didn't realize that Kevin Smith has a blog! Cool stuff, and great name too. Actually has content too, unlike this one, with his Top Ten Films of 2006 picks.
Very cool stuff, the Black Mesa Mod is:
Black Mesa is a complete reimagining of Half-Life utilizing the full capabilities of Source. "The real Half-Life: Source" in short. Also available for download is a new 59-second teaser-trailer for the mod.
The most hilarious comic PvP is now an animated series. Whoop!
If you are a student and interested in photography, you'll qualify for the super-super discounted price of $95.95 in the Photoshop Lightroom student pricing page.
Via the buddy Darren..... Mad TV Steve Jobs iPhone spoof. Hilarious!
