Neatorama � Blog Archive � How To Make Giant Soap Bubbles

Neatorama � Blog Archive � How To Make Giant Soap Bubbles: "Those bubbles are BIG! This video contains the recipe for super-tough bubble formula."

ACM Queue - Languages, Levels, Libraries, and Longevity: New programming languages are born every day. Why do some succeed and some fail?

ACM Queue - Languages, Levels, Libraries, and Longevity: New programming languages are born every day. Why do some succeed and some fail?

We can gather insights from the last 50 years of programming systems to the current time. For the far future, Vernor Vinge’s fine science-fiction novel, A Deepness in the Sky, rings all too true. The young protagonist, Pham, has joined a starship crew and is learning the high-value vocation of “programmer archaeologist,” as the crew’s safety depends on the ability to find needed code, use it, and modify it without breaking something. He is initially appalled at the code he finds:

The programs were crap…Programming went back to the beginning of time…There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it…these programs still worked…down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems…

“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.

“It’s been done,” said Sura.

“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret…“You and a thousand friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it… And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then…”

“The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’”

Steve Souders: "High Performance Web Sites: 14 Rules for Faster Pages"--video - O'Reilly FYI

Steve Souders: "High Performance Web Sites: 14 Rules for Faster Pages"--video - O'Reilly FYI: "See O’Reilly author and Yahoo!’s performance expert, Steve Souders talk about his rules for revving up websites."

The Facebook revolution - Los Angeles Times

The Facebook revolution - Los Angeles Times: "It all sounds way too complicated for mortals to understand until you hear Zuckerberg explain it. Boiled down, it goes like this: Humans get their information from two places -- from mainstream media or some other centralized organization such as a church, and from their network of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. We've already digitized the first. Almost every news organization has a website now. What Zuckerberg is trying to do with Facebook is digitize the second. "

Soaring on Ridgelift: Facebook – Business as a database?

Soaring on Ridgelift: Facebook – Business as a database?: "Unless you live in Los Angeles you probably won't have seen Fred Vogelstein's article 'The Facebook revolution' in today's Los Angeles Times. Fred is a great journalist and always thinks outside the box – the premise of his article is that another way to look at Facebook is as a huge database of interactions between friends, neighbors and colleagues – a digital version of word of mouth information distribution."

7 Life Lessons I Learned Playing Halo | PickTheBrain

7 Life Lessons I Learned Playing Halo | PickTheBrain: "In retrospect, I even learned some important life lessons that have helped me succeed."

Chill out. - washingtonpost.com

Chill out. - washingtonpost.com: "I point this out not to challenge the reality of global warming or the fact that it's caused in large part by humans, but because the discussion about climate change has turned into a nasty dustup, with one side arguing that we're headed for catastrophe and the other maintaining that it's all a hoax. I say that neither is right. It's wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we're causing it. But that's not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don't stack up. We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn't ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits."

Cheat on the Need to Sleep / Wired How To's

Cheat on the Need to Sleep / Wired How To's: "Scientists say that a successful midday nap depends on two things: timing and (no kidding) caffeine consumption. Experiments performed at Loughborough University in the UK showed that the sleep-deprived need only a cup of coffee and 15 minutes of shut-eye to feel amazingly refreshed. 1. Right before you crash, down a cup of java. The caffeine has to travel through your gastro-intestinal tract, giving you time to nap before it kicks in. 2. Close your eyes and relax. Even if you only doze, you’ll get what’s known as effective microsleep, or momentary lapses of wakefulness. 3. Limit your nap to 15 minutes. A half hour can lead to sleep inertia, or the spinning down of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which handles functions like judgment. This gray matter can take 30 minutes to reboot."

United States Congress - Senators and Representatives share their Favorite Recipes

United States Congress - Senators and Representatives share their Favorite Recipes: "Our elected officials share some of their favorite recipes, many featuring foods special to the part of the country they so proudly represent. You can find interesting recipes from soups to desserts, award winning recipes and family favorites.... from sea to shining sea."

Math Trek: A Prayer for Archimedes, Science News Online, Oct. 6, 2007

Math Trek: A Prayer for Archimedes, Science News Online, Oct. 6, 2007: "Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s. Reviel Netz, an historian of mathematics at Stanford University who transcribed the text, says that the examination of Archimedes' work has revealed 'a new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics.' In The Method, Archimedes was working out a way to compute the areas and volumes of objects with curved surfaces, which was also one of the problems that motivated Newton and Leibniz. Ancient mathematicians had long struggled to 'square the circle' by calculating its exact area. That problem turned out to be impossible using only a straightedge and compass, the only tools the ancient Greeks allowed themselves. Nevertheless, Archimedes worked out ways of computing the areas of many other curved regions."

ENIAC simulation: simulation

ENIAC simulation: simulation: "If you are looking for documentation, you might be interested in A Java Simulator for the ENIAC, an 11 pages article about the ENIAC simulation. For further details, you can download the author's diploma thesis Simulating the ENIAC as a Java applet in PDF or in PostScript format. The thesis contains an introduction to the applet from the user's point of view, a brief chapter about the ENIAC's history and software engineering details. As well the slides of a talk about the simulation are available as PDF and as gzipped PostScript (both German language)."

BBC NEWS | Europe | Vatican book on Templars' demise

BBC NEWS | Europe | Vatican book on Templars' demise: "The Vatican is to publish a book which is expected to shed light on the demise of the Knights Templar, a Christian military order from the Middle Ages. The book is based on a document known as the Chinon parchment, found in the Vatican Secret Archives six years ago after years of being incorrectly filed."

Chill out. - washingtonpost.com

Chill out. - washingtonpost.com: "Stop fighting over global warming -- here's the smart way to attack it. By Bjorn Lomborg"

glTail.rb - realtime logfile visualization

glTail.rb - realtime logfile visualization: "View real-time data and statistics from any logfile on any server you have SSH access to, in an intuitive and entertaining way. FEATURES * Multiple logfiles on multiple servers (via SSH & tail) * Configurable layout * Multiple logfile parsers (Apache Combined, Rails, IIS & Postfix included) * Show only data you're interested in * Custom events * Show rate, total or average * If you can 'tail' it, you can visualize it * Written in Ruby using net-ssh & libopengl-ruby * Free! (GPLv2)"

BBC Radio 4 - Comedy - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Home Page

BBC Radio 4 - Comedy - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Home Page: "Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently comes to Radio 4 Wednesdays at 6.30pm, from 3rd October 2007"

Google Holiday Logos

Google Holiday Logos: "We have a variety of logos commemorating holidays and events. We've put them in this online museum for your amusement. Please do not use them elsewhere."

:: Munseys : Over 20,000 rare and hard to find titles in 10 formats!

:: Munseys : Over 20,000 rare and hard to find titles in 10 formats!
"Free ebooks"

nanoHUB - nanoHUB Home

nanoHUB - nanoHUB Home: "A resource for nanoscience and technology, the nanoHUB was created by the NSF-funded NCN and its development is driven by research themes in: * Nanoelectronics * NEMS/Nanofluidics * Nano-Bio Devices"

Toad World > Community > Experts' Blog - Team Coding???

Toad World > Community > Experts' Blog - Team Coding???: "Toad, it seems that the one universal feature that eludes most users is the Team Coding feature. ... Let’s take a quick look at Team Coding together, and maybe I can convince you it’s worth a 2nd or 3rd look. John POcknell has already dedicated a blog to Team Coding, but I wanted to take a step back and look at it from a slightly different perspective."

Amazon's Dynamo - All Things Distributed

Amazon's Dynamo - All Things Distributed: "Reliability at massive scale is one of the biggest challenges we face at Amazon.com, one of the largest e-commerce operations in the world; even the slightest outage has significant financial consequences and impacts customer trust. The Amazon.com platform, which provides services for many web sites worldwide, is implemented on top of an infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers and network components located in many datacenters around the world. At this scale, small and large components fail continuously and the way persistent state is managed in the face of these failures drives the reliability and scalability of the software systems. This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, a highly available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services use to provide an “always-on” experience. To achieve this level of availability, Dynamo sacrifices consistency under certain failure scenarios. It makes extensive use of object versioning and application-assisted conflict resolution in a manner that provides a novel interface for developers to use."

Justin Quinnell - Pinhole photography

Justin Quinnell - Pinhole photography
Put your photo where your mouth is.

ShareBrained Technology � The Chronulator

ShareBrained Technology � The Chronulator: "The Chronulator starts life as a clock, showing the hours and minutes on two old-school analog panel meters. Dress it up to look like old test equipment, audio VU meters, or motorcycle gauges. Mount it in a picture frame, shadow box, computer case, plush toy, pumpkin… Customize the code and hardware to make the meters indicate something other than time — network traffic/lag, outside temperature, freeway congestion, terror threat level, stress level, whatever! Let your imagination run free."

Historical Anatomies on the Web: Browse Titles

Historical Anatomies on the Web: Browse Titles: "Images have been selected from the following anatomical atlases in the National Library of Medicine's collection. Each atlas is linked to a brief Author & Title Description, which offers an historical discussion of the work, its author, the artists, and the illustration technique. The Bibliographic Information link provides a bibliographical description of the atlas, so users will know which edition was scanned and if there are any characteristics special to the Library's copy."

Dimitri Gielis Blog: Changing WE8ISO8859P1 to UTF8 with ALTER DATABASE CHARACTERSET!

Dimitri Gielis Blog: Changing WE8ISO8859P1 to UTF8 with ALTER DATABASE CHARACTERSET!: "Today I did something 'tricky' with the Oracle database... I went from one character set to another although it was not a superset/subset of each other."

Journal of Smylers (2592)

Journal of Smylers (2592): "If you're using MySQL, or considering using it, here are some things you probably should be aware of. Dealing with Invalid Data MySQL lets you specify restict what can be stored in fields, for example the number of characters in a string. If you try to insert data that doesn't meet the restrictions then MySQL tries really hard to insert someting anyway -- such as by truncating the string"

LiveLeak.com - The Human LCD - Amazing

LiveLeak.com - The Human LCD - Amazing: "South korea: boys cheering for their soccer teams. the most amazing thing is that they do this with their CLOTHES (not holding up cards). they have a jacket that is one color on the back, one on the front, and that they can open or close to show a third color shirt on the inside. One school has also figured out how to use their pants to make shading. "

Engcom

Engcom: "Virtual Slide Rule See how calculations used to be done before the days of electronic calculators. Find out about an important piece of engineering history. All pieces of the slide rule are draggable."

On McIlroy

On McIlroy: "Doug McIlroy doesn't have an Erdos number; Erdos has a McIlroy number."

Mondrian Code Review On The Web

Mondrian Code Review On The Web -- Guido Von Rossum

How Google does web-based code reviews with Mondrian � Internet Duct Tape

How Google does web-based code reviews with Mondrian � Internet Duct Tape: "Niall has a good post describing an internal Google tool for web-based code reviews built by the same guy who brought us Python. Anything beats sitting in a conference room looking at printed out code."

Coppola says robbery cost years of data - Yahoo! News

Coppola says robbery cost years of data - Yahoo! News: "The director of 'The Godfather' said the backup that rested on the floor in his offices at the Zoetrope Argentina studio was just 'a little thing ... but the information is (worth) much time.' 'If I could get the backup back, it would save me years — all the photographs of my family, all my writing.'"

特别报道：全国各地惊现纸馅月饼

特别报道：全国各地惊现纸馅月饼: "近日，本市名人marhar从超市里买了盒某著名品牌月饼，回到家打开吃，刚吃了一口，感觉有点不对劲，发现嘴里好象有个纸团，拿出来一看，上面还写着一行字。对，就下面这个，您看准咯:

tufte-latex - Google Code

tufte-latex - Google Code: "As discussed in the Book Design thread of Edward Tufte's Ask E.T Forum, this is beginning of a Tufte-inspired LaTeX layout to produce handouts and scientific notes"

Huashan Video � Electric Pretzels

Huashan Video � Electric Pretzels: "I shot this using Lauren’s digital camera from the gusty top of Huashan’s “Plank Path”."

Catalog Views / Data Dictionary Views

Catalog Views / Data Dictionary Views: "The data dictionary views, also known as catalog views, let you monitor the state of the database in real time: * The USER, ALL, and DBA views show information about schema objects that are accessible to you, at different levels of privilege. * The V$ views show performance-related information. * The _PRIVS views show privilege information for different combinations of users, roles, and objects. "

Veggie-Art-July07

Veggie-Art-July07: "Food artists create colorful animals from vegetables. Can you identify the veggies? m 'Eat Your Green Stuff' "

Official Google Blog: Our feature presentation

Official Google Blog: Our feature presentation: "In April we announced that we were working to bring presentations to Google Docs. (Astute readers may recall learning about this even earlier, which caused a bit of excitement around here.) And today we're unveiling the new Google Docs presentations feature and invite you to try it at documents.google.com. Maybe more than any other type of document, presentations are created to be shared. But assembling slide decks by emailing them around is as frustrating as it is time-consuming. The new presentations feature of Google Docs helps you to easily organize, share, present, and collaborate on presentations, using only a web browser."

"Silk market rules" : Photos taken by lloydthyen - Travellerspoint Travel Photography

"Silk market rules" : Photos taken by lloydthyen - Travellerspoint Travel Photography

Where can I find textures and background images? | Graphics

Where can I find textures and background images? | Graphics: "Below you’ll find a hand-picked selection of some useful resources related to textures and background images. We tried to pick the best ones which offer quality and professional content without annoying advertisement."

FOXNews.com - Smiley-Face Emoticon Turning 25 - Technology News | News On Technology

FOXNews.com - Smiley-Face Emoticon Turning 25 - Technology News | News On Technology: "

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.

[...]

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly."I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."'

the evangelical outpost: The Gospel in 6 Minutes

the evangelical outpost: The Gospel in 6 Minutes: "A few days ago Tim Challies wrote: What if there was a ten minute video clip (with transcript) of John Piper sharing the gospel? Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if [this] could be promoted to the front page [of social media sites] and be seen by thousands or tens of thousands? In response, Desiring God ministries provided this resource, John Piper on The Gospel in 6 Minutes :"

Thing Fish - LAIKA Open Source Software - Trac

Thing Fish - LAIKA Open Source Software - Trac:

"ThingFish is a network-accessable, searchable, extensible datastore. It can be used to store chunks of data on the network in an application-independent way, associate the chunks with other chunks through metadata, and then search for the chunk you need later and fetch it again, all through a REST API over HTTP.

The system should, in its most basic form, only do two things: 1. Store files via a network interface. 2. Store metadata about the files and provide a search facility for finding files via their associated metadata."

Children's Painting Competition On the Environment /Home

Children's Painting Competition On the Environment /Home

The UN continues its mission of spreading optimism and hope and hope for the future in the world's children.

Loading.Ready.Run. - How to Talk like a Pirate

Loading.Ready.Run. - How to Talk like a Pirate: "'In honour of Talk like a Pirate Day, we present this informational video for the less nautically inclined among us. After all, you don't want to look stupid.' "

web zen: arrgh! 'tis pirate zen 2007 - Boing Boing

web zen: arrgh! 'tis pirate zen 2007 - Boing Boing

Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism - New York Times

Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism - New York Times

“Some of our customers don’t know the name, though after they meet us, they want to read the book,” she went on. “Our sales reps have a problem, however. New clients usually ask: ‘Hey, where is John Galt? How come I’m not important enough to rate a visit from John Galt?’ ”

NerdTests.com Fun Tests - The Nerd Test, Version 2.0

NerdTests.com Fun Tests - The Nerd Test, Version 2.0

Homer Simpson's Rhetoric - Figures of Speech from Springfield's Master Rhetorician

Homer Simpson's Rhetoric - Figures of Speech from Springfield's Master Rhetorician: "n this article, we consider some of the ways in which Homeric rhetoric has traveled from The Odyssey to The Idiocy by way of America's second-favorite cartoon character of all time. (According to TV Guide, Bugs Bunny is still number one.) Let's journey to Springfield to review 20 classic figures of speech."

oracle: how to defragment a table

ALTER TABLE emp ENABLE ROW MOVEMENT;
ALTER TABLE emp SHRINK SPACE COMPACT;
ALTER TABLE emp SHRINK SPACE;

MS-DOS 5 Upgrade Video - CollegeHumor video

MS-DOS 5 Upgrade Video - CollegeHumor video: "The blue screen was invented the day before Windows made this instructional video."

AsiaInfo Wins Exclusive Contract with China Mobile Pakistan to Deliver Telecom Billing and CRM Software Solutions

AsiaInfo Wins Exclusive Contract with China Mobile Pakistan to Deliver Telecom Billing and CRM Software Solutions: "Under the terms of the contract, AsiaInfo will provide its OpenBilling On- line Charging System (OCS), and OpenCRM customer relationship management system to CMPak. The system, designed to support 10 million subscribers, provides real time, convergent billing and unified customer service."

Office Ultimate 2007: Just $60! (for students) � InsideMicrosoft � part of the Blog News Channel

Office Ultimate 2007: Just $60! (for students) � InsideMicrosoft � part of the Blog News Channel: "Starting in 59 minutes, 35 seconds, Microsoft will begin offering Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for students for the amazing price of just sixty dollars. This special offer for students only represents a $620 discount off the retail price of $680, a 91% savings."

Catching Kids Doing Good

Catching Kids Doing Good: "The newspaper reported that we won the meet. I don't believe winning made all of the above happen. I believe all of the above made winning happen. I believe teens will show responsibility because they want to be treated like adults. I believe in catching kids doing good and telling on them."

Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries (Curious Expeditions)

Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries (Curious Expeditions): "Shocked into a library induced euphoria, Curious Expeditions has attempted to gather together the world's most beautiful libraries for you starting with our own pictures of Strahov. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do."

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 10,000 Melons Explode

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 10,000 Melons Explode
Impressive.

YouTube - Lake Peigneur (disappearing lake) History Channel footage

YouTube - Lake Peigneur (disappearing lake) History Channel footage: "Lake Peigneur (disappearing lake) History Channel footage"

巴蜀早期儿童趣玩/雷瑞之/L/人物/巴蜀网 Phoer.net

巴蜀早期儿童趣玩/雷瑞之/L/人物/巴蜀网 Phoer.net
Lovely Chinese watercolors.

Internet Archive: Details: Quiet Please

Internet Archive: Details: Quiet Please: "Quiet Pleast - 1947 through 1949. The comple thoughts of Willis Cooper, as remembered as of April 7th, 2006. Quiet Please was Quiet, but remembered. This series is remembered here. This item is part of the collection: Old Time Radio"

memcached: a distributed memory object caching system

memcached: a distributed memory object caching system: "memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load."

Scaling with memcached � SlideShare

Scaling with memcached � SlideShare: "memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system used by LiveJournal, Facebook, Bloglines and others. Find out how memcached works, how to it set up and how you can scale your website. Presented at YAPC::Europe 2007 by Leon Brocard."

lgf: rebooting mac in safe mode to clear system caches

lgf: there are mischiefs to be cured: "And here’s a tech tip for any graphics geeks who work on a daily basis with Adobe’s CS3 suite of design applications. I was using Fireworks CS3, my main tool for doing everyday graphics chores like cropping, resizing, etc. when suddenly I got the spinning beach ball of death; a ‘busy’ cursor that wouldn’t go away, and a frozen application that needed to be forcibly quit. And we all know how painful that can be. What’s more, the same thing happened in every one of the CS3 apps. Restarting didn’t fix it. Repairing permissions didn’t fix it. Deleting preferences files didn’t fix it. Searching the web yielded nothing. Oh noooo. The solution in this case, and something worth trying on a Mac OS machine whenever you have this kind of weird problem, was to boot up in ‘Safe’ mode, while holding the Shift key. It turns out that this not only does a Unix ‘fsck’ command and fixes any disk problems, it also flushes all of the system caches. It takes forever to start up, because it checks the whole startup disk, but after finishing the startup and logging in, if you then restart in normal mode—voila! Your pilikia is all pau."

Top 10 Incredible Recordings - The List Universe

Top 10 Incredible Recordings - The List Universe: "Before I start on the list, I feel that I should advise that a couple of the items here are quite horrific and I would recommend that those who are weak of heart or who have a nervous disposition avoid them. The items I am referring to are marked in the text. The items are not in any particular order as it is very hard to rate the historical importance versus the just plain weird value."

� 5 Pen Tricks from Japan — Uh oh…

� 5 Pen Tricks from Japan — Uh oh…: "The Japanese, Taiwanese, and Koreans — none of them can hold pens still for a second. Now you won’t be able to either. Here are the different moves I’ll show (and name) here. The higher the number, the harder it is: The Helicopter (2) The Pincher (4) The Wheel (1) The Drummer (3) The Flip (5)"

At Rapleaf, your personals are public | CNET News.com

Rapleaf, based in San Francisco, is building a business on that premise. The privately held start-up, whose investors include Facebook-backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, runs two consumer Web sites: Rapleaf.com, a people search engine that lets you retrieve the name, age and social-network affiliations of anyone, as long as you have his or her e-mail address; and Upscoop.com, a similar site to discover, en masse, which social networks to which the people in your contact list belong.

How to become another user in sqlplus

How to become another user in sqlplus: "A DBA frequently needs to become another user to test something or verify a problem. Short of having to gain acess to that users password, we are asked can I su to that account, sort of like root does on unix. This is an 'su.sql' script I use: "

Ask Tom "connecting as another user without their..."

Ask Tom "connecting as another user without their...":

"So, this is still 'valid', but there are other ways in the year 2007. proxy users for example, consider: ops$tkyte%ORA10GR2> alter user scott grant connect through ops$tkyte; User altered. ops$tkyte%ORA10GR2> connect ops$tkyte[scott]/foobar; Connected. scott%ORA10GR2> select user from dual; USER ------------------------------ SCOTT scott%ORA10GR2> connect scott/foobar; ERROR: ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied Warning: You are no longer connected to ORACLE. scott%ORA10GR2> connect ops$tkyte/foobar; Connected. ops$tkyte%ORA10GR2> "

The SIMH Altair 8800 Z80 simulator

The SIMH Altair 8800 Z80 simulator: "The Altair 8800 simulator is part of the SIMH family of simulators currently at version 3.7-2. Unlike a real Altair 8800 it features several enhancements: * Choice of processor (8080 CPU or Z80 CPU) * Optional banked memory (8 banks with 64 Kbyte) * Optional hard drive support for additional storage capacity * Networking support via TCP/IP for client/server systems * Support for up to 4 consoles * Timer generated interrupts * Ability to set the clock speed for 'real-time' simulation (useful for games)"

blueprintcss - Google Code

blueprintcss - Google Code: "Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing."

Anarchaia: A tumblelog by Christian Neukirchen

Anarchaia: A tumblelog by Christian Neukirchen: "Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)"

YouTube - How to light a grill in 2 seconds

YouTube - How to light a grill in 2 seconds: "Web classic (circa 1995) of engineers lighting a grill [really fast] with liquid oxygen."

Quote of the Day — on Law School | Through a Glass Darkly

Quote of the Day — on Law School | Through a Glass Darkly:

"“Law school taught me one thing: how to take two situations that are exactly the same and show how they are different.” – Hart Pomerantz"

The Fishbowl: The Only Flowchart You'll Ever Need

The Fishbowl: The Only Flowchart You'll Ever Need: "Do I want to do this? Will it end in disaster? Will it make a good story anyway?"

vm4all.com

vm4all.com: "VMware's virtualization technology has become the industry standard for virtualization in the enterprise. More and more people are writing software based on the SDK and created a lot of little handy tools. On the other side there are some larger company’s who also created all kinds of applications to support VMware ESX server and Virtual Center. The vm4all.com website provides a complete list of all these tools and applications. "

xtravirt.com - Downloads

xtravirt.com - Downloads: "This stunning pack contains 70 individual handcrafted Visio objects to represent VMware VI3 environments."

Economist's View: "The Naive Pay All the Fees"

Economist's View: "The Naive Pay All the Fees": "The smartest strategy, they say, is for the sophisticated consumer to choose the service with the most hidden charges and highest add-on prices, but then avoid paying those added costs. “The sophisticated consumer takes advantage of that,” Mr. Gabaix said. “The na�ve pay all the fees.”"

YouTube - Ben Stein Talks Retirement -- Part 1

YouTube - Ben Stein Talks Retirement -- Part 1: "Retirement Planning: Getting Started (Part 1) First video in a three-part series on retirement planning, Ben Stein outlines basic steps to begin the retirement planning process, from the use of retirement planning calculators to tips on finding a financial advisor. "

IMAO: Special Harry Potter Edition Fred Thompson Facts

IMAO: Special Harry Potter Edition Fred Thompson Facts: "* Fred Thompson's glare has the same effect as a Cruciatus Curse. * Dumbledore was the only wizard Voldemort ever feared. Why? Because Dumbledore was friends with Fred Thompson. * Fred Thompson can transform into the most powerful Animagus form of all: Fred Thompson. * If you call Fred Thompson a Muggle, he'll cast a spell on you where you spit out all your teeth. He uses his fist to cast the spell. * A Quidditch game ends when either the Golden Snitch is caught or Fred Thompson becomes bored. * Fred Thompson has killed more Death Eaters than any Auror... and that was just this morning. * Even an Imperius Curse can't make you vote against Fred Thompson. * SPOILER!!! At the end of Deathly Hallows, Fred Thompson kills Voldemort. With a ping pong paddle. "

CFT I - CHICAGO URBAN EXPLORATION

CFT I - CHICAGO URBAN EXPLORATION: "We entered into a loading room, filled with pipes and pumps. We explored for a bit and discovered another set of ladders going down another 50 ft., this being a guess because it was filled with water (the plunge test gave no answers...next time, we're bringing a rope). Two explorers went as far as they could go, but didn't feel like getting wet (little did we know what was in store for us). "

libapr(apache portable runtime) programming tutorial

libapr(apache portable runtime) programming tutorial: "This is a tutorial on how to use libapr(apache portable runtime)."

RFC 2183 - Content Disposition

RFC 2183 - Content Disposition:
"disposition := 'Content-Disposition' ':' disposition-type *(';' disposition-parm)

disposition-type := 'inline' / 'attachment' / extension-token ;

disposition-parm := filename-parm / creation-date-parm / modification-date-parm / read-date-parm / size-parm / parameter"

404 Error Pages: Reloaded | Design Showcase

404 Error Pages: Reloaded | Design Showcase: "Three weeks ago we’ve showcased some of the most beautiful, creative and user-friendly 404 Error Pages; we’ve collected some interesting ideas one can use to help out the visitors once they got lost ony your page. We’ve also asked our readers to design their own 404 pages and promised to present the best solutions afterwards. "

How to Speed up Firefox page loading

How to Speed up Firefox page loading: "Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up: 1.Type about:config into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries: network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading. 2. Alter the entries as follows: Set network.http.pipelining to true Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once. 3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to 0 (zero). This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves. If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now! "

HTTP/1.1 Pipelining FAQ

HTTP/1.1 Pipelining FAQ: "HTTP/1.1 Pipelining FAQ What is HTTP pipelining? Normally, HTTP requests are issued sequentially, with the next request being issued only after the response to the current request has been completely received. Depending on network latencies and bandwidth limitations, this can result in a significant delay before the next request is seen by the server. HTTP/1.1 allows multiple HTTP requests to be written out to a socket together without waiting for the corresponding responses. The requestor then waits for the responses to arrive in the order in which they were requested. The act of pipelining the requests can result in a dramatic improvement in page loading times, especially over high latency connections."

Optimizing Page Load Time - die.net

Optimizing Page Load Time - die.net: "It is widely accepted that fast-loading pages improve the user experience. In recent years, many sites have started using AJAX techniques to reduce latency. Rather than round-trip through the server retrieving a completely new page with every click, often the browser can either alter the layout of the page instantly or fetch a small amount of HTML, XML, or javascript from the server and alter the existing page. In either case, this significantly decreases the amount of time between a user click and the browser finishing rendering the new content. However, for many sites that reference dozens of external objects, the majority of the page load time is spent in separate HTTP requests for images, javascript, and stylesheets. AJAX probably could help, but speeding up or eliminating these separate HTTP requests might help more, yet there isn't a common body of knowledge about how to do so. While working on optimizing page load times for a high-profile AJAX application, I had a chance to investigate how much I could reduce latency due to external objects. Specifically, I looked into how the HTTP client implementation in common browsers and characteristics of common Internet connections affect page load time for pages with many small objects."

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive � Optimizing Page Load Time (and a little about the Debug menu)

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive � Optimizing Page Load Time (and a little about the Debug menu): "Another tip you might find handy as a web developer is the “Show Page Load Test Window” option in the Safari Debug menu. You can turn on the Debug menu by typing defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu YES at a shell prompt, and then restarting Safari. This menu includes a number of rough debugging tools that we created mainly for browser testing, but you may find some of them handy for web development. The page load test in particular is interesting because it measures page load time in a more precise way than either onload timing or just using a stopwatch. If you change the “Suite” pop-up menu to “URL”, you can type the URL of your choice and get a fairly precise time for loading it. If you empty the cache first, you can get an uncached time."

PubCon Publishers Search and Marketing Conferences 2007

PubCon Publishers Search and Marketing Conferences 2007: "PubCon Street Tips: Giving a Kick Ass Presentation"

Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC

Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC: "Send a self-addressed stamped envelope, your IP address and password to: 2245 N. Green Valley Parkway Suite 411 Henderson, NV 89014"

Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC

Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC: "Send a self-addressed stamped envelope"

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches | Graphics

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches | Graphics: "However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years. So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approaches to present data in ways we’ve never thought before? Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools."

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Jerz. Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky

Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky

"Accordingly, this paper analyzes previously unpublished files recovered from a backup of Woods's student account at Stanford, and documents an excursion to the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky in 2005. In addition, new interviews with Crowther, Woods, and their associates (particularly members of Crowther's family) provide new insights on the precise nature of Woods's significant contributions. Real locations in the cave and several artifacts (such as an iron rod and an axe head) correspond to their representation in Crowther's version; however, by May of 1977, Woods had expanded the game to include numerous locations that he invented, along with significant technical innovations (such as scorekeeping and a player inventory). Sources that incorrectly date Crowther's original to 1972 or 1974, or that identify it as a cartographic data file with no game or fantasy elements, are sourced thinly if at all. The new evidence establishes that Crowther wrote the game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in early 1976. The original game employed magic, humor, simple combat, and basic puzzles, all of which Woods greatly expanded. While Crowther remained largely faithful to the geography of the real cave, his original did introduce subtle changes to the environment in order to improve the gameplay."

Apache API notes

Apache API notes:
"Special considerations for response handlers

Handlers for most phases do their work by simply setting a few fields in the request_rec structure (or, in the case of access checkers, simply by returning the correct error code). However, response handlers have to actually send a request back to the client.

They should begin by sending an HTTP response header, using the function send_http_header. (You don't have to do anything special to skip sending the header for HTTP/0.9 requests; the function figures out on its own that it shouldn't do anything). If the request is marked header_only, that's all they should do; they should return after that, without attempting any further output.

Otherwise, they should produce a request body which responds to the client as appropriate. The primitives for this are rputc and rprintf, for internally generated output, and send_fd, to copy the contents of some FILE * straight to the client."

Quicktext - Hesslow Extensions

Quicktext - Hesslow Extensions: "Quicktext is an extension for Thunderbird that lets you create templates that can be easily inserted into your own emails. Using Thunderbird, Quicktext is the perfect tool to help you quickly answer routine, repetitive emails. Quicktext performs both simple and complex tasks. The program can insert different signatures into your emails depending on whom you are sending the email to."

Regular Expressions in Oracle Database 10g

Regular Expressions in Oracle Database 10g: "To harness the power of regular expressions, you can exploit the newly introduced Oracle SQL REGEXP_LIKE operator and the REGEXP_INSTR, REGEXP_SUBSTR, and REGEXP_REPLACE functions."

Seriously Good: Okra

Seriously Good: Okra:

"So before rejecting okra, try it in it's best light. Here, then is the numinous fried okra.

Fried Okra

1/2 lb okra
1 c cornmeal
1 tbsp salt
2 tsp ground black pepper
1 c buttermilk
vegetable oil

Choose okra that is an even green color and 2' - 4' long. Trim stem ends from okra and cut into 3/4' lengths. Soak in buttermilk for 15 minutes.

Mix cornmeal, salt, and pepper in a plastic bag. Add okra and toss to coat.

Heat 1/2' oil in a 10' skillet (cast iron is traditional) over medium high heat. When oil begins to shimmer, sift excess cornmeal mixture from okra and add to skillet. Cook, turning occasionally, until golden brown. (Stir gently to avoid losing coating.) Drain on paper towels and salt again if needed."

14 Numbers Your Cell Phone Can't Live Without � The Cranking Widgets Blog

14 Numbers Your Cell Phone Can't Live Without � The Cranking Widgets Blog: "So, if your cell phone has no other numbers stored in its memory, make sure it has these numbers:"

Glanzer: Picking the wrong fight

Glanzer: Picking the wrong fight:

"If he did, he might realize that although God may not be mentioned, messages consistent with Christianity and even a sprinkling of Christian symbolism abound (especially in the seventh book, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows').

In fact, Christians should actually see J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series as fantasy tales in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Rowling's series reinforces a core Christian belief that good and evil are not just socially constructed."

Townhall.com::Harry Potter and the Fire breathing Fundamentalists::By Jerry Bowyer

Townhall.com::Harry Potter and the Fire breathing Fundamentalists::By Jerry Bowyer:

"When I left the theatre, I knew two things: first, that I had been an ignorant blow-hard. This wasn’t Wiccan propaganda: it was standard-issue fairy tale magic like Cinderella and The Wizard of Oz. Second, that Joanne Rowling had spent a great deal of time immersed in The Greats – the long line of literary masterpieces that range from The Lord of the Rings and Narnia back through Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare, the Arthurian Legends, the Church Fathers, the Scriptures themselves, and into the best of the pre-Christian Greek classics. In other words, Rowling was one of us."

Christian themes abound in Potter tales - 08/04/2007 - MiamiHerald.com

Christian themes abound in Potter tales - 08/04/2007 - MiamiHerald.com

'J.K. Rowling gets the last laugh on the dwindling number of conservative Christians who have attacked her Harry Potter saga over the past decade: The most important plot point of the seventh and final book is unambiguously Christian.

Rowling cleverly scattered so many red herrings among the loaves and fishes in the previous books that she made it difficult to see the trail clearly except in retrospect. The Potter story is not a linear Christian allegory. And Harry's World is insistently devoid of explicit religion, right through the final chapter.

But Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows finally reveals plainly what the author had said for many years: that her Christian faith undergirds her fictional creation.'

YouTube Architecture | High Scalability

YouTube Architecture | High Scalability

Serving Thumbnails

* Surprisingly difficult to do efficiently.
* There are a like 4 thumbnails for each video so there are a lot more thumbnails than videos.
* Thumbnails are hosted on just a few machines.
* Saw problems associated with serving a lot of small objects:

How To Design The Perfect Nap - lifehack.org

How To Design The Perfect Nap - lifehack.org: "A correctly performed nap can give you a great boost in energy, focus, and concentration, but a poorly executed nap can leave you groggy and more tired than when you started."