In recent decades, children of Indian (or perhaps South Asian) origin have become to the spelling bee what Kenyans are to the marathon, albeit on a smaller, slightly less dominating scale.
Category: Legacy
notlong is a new short url service (TinyURL, EvilURL that packs in some clever features. Short URLS are generated as subdomains and also generating a password to both edit the long URL and view some click-through stats. The author also hosts an overview of various url forwarders .
Speaking of cleverness, Dan Kaminsky‘s talk at LayerOne this weekend was very much so. It was mostly about very ways to (ab)use DNS, using distributed recursive lookups as a communications channel, for file transfers, radio broadcasts. Also, a 3D-plotting tool for visualization, and communicating via third party DNS servers via last-lookup bit leakage.
- A Proposal of User Centric Profile Aggregation, Integration and Utilization
- Congrats!
- Thanks for the Memories – a Flash retrospective on Saddam Hussein, which includes a short history and also made some allegations with respects to the original Gulf War which seem to be… 100% true. Apparently, Saddam asked for approval and was given a green-light by the US to invade. Jeez, how many percent of the American public do you think knows about that? (f’in Bush’s)
Seymour Hersh gave a belated address at the University of Chicago last week. Brad DeLong has some scattered notes from Rick Pearlstein on the talk. Gripping stuff. I dropped a line to the UChicago contact, but was informed that Hersh requested that no public transcripts be made available.
(too bad, would love to hear all he said).
- Granted Sony’s new linux-based 3D map navigation is cool, but I’m not convince how useful it’d be in day to day life (vs having a more removed, maybe 3/4 view). Also, unless these things have real-time traffic data, I refuse to be impressed
- The Undead Zone – Clive Thompson writes about the uncanny valley and video games on Slate
- UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries – the University Libraries at UMN is using Movable Type to provide blogs for every student, faculty, and staff member
- Lots of good stuff at urlgreyhot (Drupal Usability):
To catch up on:
- The W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents – read position papers, presentations; see also Hixie’s notes
- Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group – so far most of the discussion seems to be on chrome (Web Forms 2.0) and not on piping. Also, I agree w/ ppk
- WHAT’s going on? – Simon’s summary
- Server Sent Events 1.0 – unified event model, good idea; based on dom events, probably not so good
So, I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, but event attachment is pretty damn slow in JavaScript once you get up there in items. On an application I’m writing, for 2000 items, it takes about 46 seconds to attach keypress functions onto them (43 seconds if you pass a function reference instead of using listeners) in IE. It takes over 10 seconds just to loop through the elements!
Suffice to say, if you’re not attaching events, unless you absolutely have to, it’s probably best to use inline attachment. (the attachment appears to scale linearly, it’s just slow [using sa’s addEvent, but difference is marginal]). Here’s a testcase (stripped of cruft). Mozilla takes longer to render the input fields, but is much (~100x) faster at attaching listeners. It also scales linearly. IE loads the inputs very quickly, but attaching listeners increases at a greater than linear rate (and deadlocks browser while loading). Inline attachment is O(1), as you would expect:
Hey, Anil has made it to the top of the nigritude ultramarine pile. A little late for the iPod Mini, but, take that SEOs! Anil’s wrapup.
- BBC: Is the world’s oil running out fast?
- Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn’t Bind Bush – interesting discussion
The NYT articles says Ashcroft stated that “Bush ‘made no order that would require or direct the violation’ of either international treaties or domestic laws prohibiting torture.” However, POTUS’s lawyers say that torturing prisoners is not a violation of such laws. So, Ashcroft didn’t really say that Bush did not order torture.
- Bush to the US Constitution: Drop Dead
- Reflections on Witty: Analyzing the Attacker
- JavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language
- Tom’s notes from NotCon
- Monolith – way cool, by the ever-prolific Jason Rohrer
Things get interesting when you apply Monolith to copyrighted files. For example, munging two copyrighted files will produce a completely new file that, in most cases, contains no information from either file. In other words, the resulting Mono file is not “owned” by the original copyright holders (if owned at all, it would be owned by the person who did the munging). Given that the Mono file can be combined with either of the original, copyrighted files to reconstruct the other copyrighted file, this lack of Mono ownership may be seem hard to believe.
Consider this simple fact: for a given Element file and any other file of the same length (call it fileA), it is possible to choose a Basis file that, when munged with the Element, will produce fileA as the resulting Mono file. Therefore, if a copyright holder claims that she owns the information in all Mono files that are munged from her work, she is also claiming copyright over all possible binary files that are the same length as her work. For example, suppose that fileA is an MP3 of a Beatles song, and the Element file is an MP3 of a Britney Spears song copyrighted by Jive Records. It is possible to find a Basis file that, when munged with the Spears song, will produce the Beatles song as the Mono file. Jive Records certainly cannot claim copyright over the Beatles song (which is copyrighted by Apple Records), nor can they claim copyright over any other Mono files munged from MP3s of their songs.
(every type of digital file is an arbitrary encoding however; it’s a mind-twister)
- Excerpts From “War Against War!” – fighting propaganda
- Eclipse RegEx Tester
- The Irresponsible Investor
Of the roughly $19 trillion in American investment capital, in other words, $17 trillion or so is invested with the implicit instruction: ”Just give me back as much money as possible. Gouge consumers, cheat employees, poison the environment, lie to the public markets — just do it all sufficiently artfully that it doesn’t dent my portfolio.” Then, when the market falls and one of the people on the receiving end of their beastly demands is caught behaving badly, investors collapse to the floor in disbelief and bay for their money back. It is at that moment — and not a minute before — that they discover the novel idea that businessmen in possession of other people’s capital should be held to the highest ethical standards.
Some travel this month and next. I went and read up on the TSA’s air travel guidelines (hey, clippers are ok, also, lighters and matches are ok (for carry-on, but not check-in) — interesting).
- June 19-23, Denver, JA-SIG Conference
- July 8-11, New York, HOPE 5
- July 13-15, San Fransisco, Advanced uPortal Training
- July 25-31, Portland, OSCON 2004