As javascript engines increase in speed and efficiency, it is becoming feasible to write compilers and interpreters in javascript to allow webpages to run alternative programming languages not normally supported by browsers. See processing.js, for instance: A graphics library that runs a Java-like language in the browser.
An initial hurdle [...]
The "system beep" (or "system bell") can be quite annoying. Instead of disabling it altogether, you may be able to change it to something a little less irritating. Some operating systems will allow you to change it to a visual alert or a sound file of your choice. Today, I'll' [...]
It is my last day in the Bahamas, for now. After breakfast I have just enough time to walk out to the North Point, where I hear tell there might be some San Salvador rock iguanas, a critically endangered subspecies. It seems that some of them may have swum across [...]
In the morning, my dad picks up Mr. Forbes from his house and drives him back to GRC. Just as they arrive, the power cuts out, so Mr. Forbes can't sharpen his machete. Too bad, 'cause we're gonna be in the bush again today.
We walk down past the water' [...]
My companions go off to interview Erma Pratt after breakfast, but I'm too tired from the previous night, so I stay in and catch up on photos, blogging, and communication with the outside world. It's a hard decision: Erma's grandmother Sophia was one of the last midwives on the island,' [...]
Another interview this morning! Mary Allen invites us to breakfast on her balcony, heaping our plates with potatoes, omelette, and buttered toast. After breakfast, my dad and Kathleen follow her inside to conduct the interview (and afterwards attend a church service), while I wander on the beach. The beach is [...]
Today I help with interviews. The first one (with Eulese Storr) is indoors, and consists mainly of talking. I take a couple of photos of the woman and her great-grandchildren. The second interview of the morning is just down the road from the first. Susalee Anderson shows us some bush [...]
After breakfast I take a quick walk around the grounds, photographing some plants that were hard to see in the evening light last night. My wandering comes to stop when I find a fallen coconut. "Jackpot!", I think.
15 minutes later I am still struggling with the inch-thick fibrous husk that [...]
Today we wake at 7:30, for we must get to the airport by 9:30 in time for our 11:00 flight. (I'm a bit groggy having stayed up to midnight tagging all my photos. That was likely the last night of the trip where I'll be caught up to my photos.) [...]
I wake at 4:00, and we are out of the driveway by 4:30. Joining my father and I is the third member of the expedition, Kathleen Maier, an herbalist.
On the approach to Nassau, I get my first glimpse of the turquoise blue waters of the Bahamas. Islands and cays ("keys") [...]
Practice mallow
I spend my last day in Charlottesville putting the final touches on my luggage, then wandering down the road to take in the spring and summer flora and fauna. There are far more insects here than in the city of Boston, so I rarely walk [...]
Today is a day for shopping and packing. Our itinerary takes us from Charlottesville, VA to Charlotte, NC by US Airways, then to Nassau, BS. We'll stay overnight, and then catch a little Bahamasair plane out to San Salvador Island. On that final leg, we'll have a 50 lb weight [...]
I take Amtrak down from Boston, MA to Charlottesville, VA with a short stop in Washington, D.C. Train is a wonderful way to travel, when you have the option. It's slower for sure, but totally relaxing: Security hassle is limited to one or two ticket checks over the course of [...]
Here's some of the travel I've done and will be doing this summer:
Pink ladyslipper orchidThis past weekend my girlfriend and I went on a bike-and-train trip up to New Hampshire where we stayed overnight at a friend's farm. I saw my first pink ladyslipper' [...]
Hey, what good is a blog if it doesn't get used? For the past few years I've been keeping the posts here limited to things that I think will be interesting or useful to strangers on the internet, and avoiding the sort of posts that will only be interesting to [...]
I've sometimes watched the fully blind navigate city sidewalks and wondered how they manage to avoid obstacles and find destinations. The canes they sweep back and forth certainly provides textural and landscape information, but it can't tell them where they are. Furthermore, I've watched them avoid obstacles and follow sidewalks' [...]
Today I was struck by the realization that every von Neumann universal computer (e.g. your laptop) is an interpreter.
In the olden days of computing, logic gates were connected by wires to form custom electronic programs. If you connect them together this way you get a calculator. If you connect them [...]
If I fed you the same diet of (let's say) rice, lentils, carrots, broccoli, and cheese for every meal, every day, you'd soon get sick of it. You might start dreading mealtimes, knowing that the food will be the same. It's not that you specifically crave something else; you just' [...]
I've been on an International Phonetic Alphabet kick lately (thanks to the linguistics class I'm taking) and have been contemplating the possibility of IPA Scrabble. As far as I know, it's never been done officially (by Hasbro or whatever.) Want to help make it happen?
Unofficial, of courseI don't expect [...]
So today I talked with the Facilities guy who was installing mouse traps in the apartment. He explained what he was doing as he worked:
I set up my S5 on a tripod next to a mockingbird nest and left for 15 minutes. The camera captured one of the parents feeding them a mealworm (perhaps?) and a berry, as well as disposing of a fecal sac.
There is a volleyball game ongoing not 20 feet away, [...]
Update: Found one!
I'm in the market for a new laptop, but I can't seem to find one with a decent keyboard. I'm a programmer so these are keys that must be easy to hit without looking:
Most laptop keyboards, unfortunately, have one of the [...]
I've successfully embedded Google Static Maps in an RSS feed that I'm working on, and it displays great in standalone feed readers. Unfortunately, if someone tries to subscribe to my feed using a web-based reader/aggregator (such as Google Reader), my images don't show up. Presumably, the referer of the [...]
With my fancy new Powershot S5 I've been taking some pretty awesome closeups. I've been going back and photographing all the flowers and insects that I've shot before, since I can ridiculously closer [...]
When my approx. 4-year-old Canon Powershot S1 IS started displaying an image sensor malfunction, I thought I was going to have to drop a cool $400 on a new camera. But Canon's website had a service notice stating that this was a known defect, and that they would repair [...]
As you may be aware, Facebook only provides a way to temporarily deactivate your account, not delete it. Less well-known is an innocuous little form buried deep within their site where you can submit a deletion request. Below I include the link, as well as a sample letter.
The [...]
Did you know that flickers travel in packs? Me neither! Found about 7 hanging out in the yard this morning.
Actually, this post is just an excuse to play around with my new personal photo gallery website:
I've written a web app that can read [...]
WordPress recently released 2.3.3 as an urgent security fix for 2.3.2. Rather than wiping all non-configured files from my development site, extracting the replacement files from the tarball, and re-uploading said files by FTP, I used the fast and precise approach: Only upload changed files.
This assumes that you're only updating [...]
While Alex was in town for the weekend, we used my camera's intervalometer to record tracks in my gravel driveway. I'm still playing with the images, but I've got a pretty sweet sample uploaded to BoF Labs.
I set up the camera on a tripod and told it to take 1 [...]
Many sites require email verification to prevent impersonation by spammers (and to ensure that a user can retrieve their password, should they forget it.) Since this practice is a bit of a hassle for the user and does not require any thought on the user's part (sign into email, see [...]
When a GET hits your server, your RESTful webapp should not alter the database. Why not enforce this at the permissions level?
GET should only be able to SELECT rows, and POST should be able to SELECT, UPDATE, and INSERT. (DELETE is up to your discretion. I prefer to flag rows [...]
In my quest to bring the features of Livejournal (and other proprietary social networks) to the open, public internet, I'm stuck on how to properly implements friend groups. Friend groups determine which users are allowed to see your more sensitive blog entries. I've pulled together a description of several alternative [...]
People are getting pissed at SixApart for their stupid modifications to LiveJournal, apparently in the name of cracking down on child porn. (They're doing it wrong.) The problem is that people want to move away from LJ to [...]
The five-second rule surely owes its existence to the popularization of germ theory. People who abide by the rule must believe (at some level) that pathogenic microbes are tiny little beasties crawling about on the ground, with nothing better to do than to clamber onto dropped potato chips.
The [...]
In Chemistry class today we talked about forms of energy. I've always been a little irked by the notion that there are two main forms of energy, kinetic and potential, but it's never been annoying enough to grab my focus. Today, however, I formed a definition of kinetic energy that [...]
Due to a lawsuit by Eolas against Microsoft, Internet Explorer (both 6 and 7) is not allowed to auto-load movies, flash, and other plugins. The effect is that users must click an empty area with a gray outline to load the content or start interacting with it. The standard approach [...]
Star Simpson, the 19-year-old arrested at Logan airport for having a "hoax device", is just another living, breathing, hoping, dreaming human, like you. Essentially, she was arrested for being an idealist, for not understanding that the people with the guns and the power see "different" as "dangerous".
The following was written [...]
I thought I was being so clever when I put a content-negotiated API into TradeUps.net, my web development playground. To put it simply, a page can return the same information in different formats, depending upon the HTTP Accept: header. For example, this profile page (view only in Firefox for [...]
Four days ago, a group calling itself the "MediaDefender-Defenders" released a torrent pointing to 700 megabytes of corporate emails from MediaDefender, a company providing "BitTorrent protection services" to record labels and movie studios. The emails expose company strategy, confidential contracts, passwords and login information, lists of servers and [...]
If you feel like being a little bit silly today, you might check out some code I wrote to generate BMP images right in the browser, using javascript. For maximum compatibility, I'm using the v3 header and uncompressed 24-bit color.
All mine does so far is generate a quasi-random bitmap. [...]
The TinyURL.com service allows you to instantly generate short URLs from long ones. For example, a link to a long URL at Wikimedia Commons becomes [tinyurl.com]. Each new URL submission is added to a database, and the next free alphanumeric string is set as an identifier.
Naturally, I had [...]
I am writing a web app that hides much of its inner workings, as any good web app should. (Why? future-proofing, security, simplicity of user experience, etc.) I chose to route all requests that involve server-side scripting through a single file, capture.php. But somewhere along the way, form POSTs [...]
Two armies are preparing to attack a city from opposite sides. The General of army A is orchestrating the attack, and has decided that they must attack simultaneously at noon on March 3rd to succeed. He sends a sealed, encrypted letter by messenger across the valley to the General of [...]
I'm having difficulty deciding what is the best approach to returning from a POST request to one's web app. I'd like to deliver messages to the user about the results of the request, I want to avoid some nasty POST-related browser behavior, and proper bookmarking would be sweet, too. Unfortunately, [...]
The existing comment-tracking systems that I know of just aren't enough. CoComment is buggy and fails to properly parse out comments for a number of blogs, and is missing a number of important features. (Float unread to top of list, for example, or track a URL without visiting it.) Co.mments.com [...]
My local paper, the Daily Progress, ran a story today about a proposal to install 30 security cameras on the Downtown Mall. I think there's a wrong way to do this, and a right way. I'll explain why the wrong way is wrong, and suggest a scheme that could [...]
The events of the recent LiveJournal mass deletion highlight an oft-overlooked aspect of community-driven websites: Form overrides function.
Background: LJ Strikethrough '07LiveJournal (LJ) is a SixApart-owned site that provides an individual and communal blogging environment. Of interest here are 1) the communities and 2) the "interests" section of users' profiles. [...]
In a potentially revolutionary study, researchers at Yeshiva University have announced that three species of fungi taken from the Chernobyl Power Plant in the Ukraine can feed off of radiation in their environment. (via National Geographic News)
These three species all use [...]
When I switched to Linux a couple of years ago, I was able to find excellent replacements for most of the software I used on Windows. In a couple cases I had to use Wine to run my favorite Windows-only programs until I was more comfortable with the replacements, but [...]
I have finally joined the ranks of bloggers who have designed their own blog themes. Wheee.
At some point I'd like to go for membership in the My Blog Actually Looks Nice club, but that could be a little ways off.
Edit: Thanks [...]
I just completed the easiest operating system upgrade I've ever experienced: Ubuntu Edgy Eft to Feisty Fawn. I directed the entire process over VNC, and did not have to leave the GUI at any time. Only a single restart was required, I did not have to edit any config files, [...]
Underspecified CSS is the name I am giving this sort of code:
h2 span
{
color: black;
}
I'll show you why this code is the bane of large sites.
Embedded emailsCSS in email is a completely different ballgame from standard web design, but provides an excellent example for today's discussion. My company sends out a [...]
WordPress is nice, but some of the plugins I've installed really boost the user experience (and mine!) I thought I'd share what I've gathered.
The following are essential to the functioning of my blog:
Akismet Akismet is an anti-spam service provided by the same folks who run WordPress.com, and you have to [...]
