04/12/08

What's the play count on your most played song in your iTunes library? My top five are: Emerge by Fischerspooner, 97 plays Alpha Beta Gaga by Air, 76 plays A Dream by Cut Copy, 68 plays Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand (Daft Punk mix), 68 plays Around ...

Long rumination on the use of slo-mo in movies, particularly in Standard Operating Procedure. Being a slo-mo fan myself (especially when wielded by Wes Anderson or by NBC Sports during football games), I enjoyed this description of it: Slo-mo can be ...

Good advice about whining: Whining should be telling you something. Whining is the white smoke in your tailpipe that lets you know you're burning mental oil. It means you're unconsciously devoting cycles to something that you can't, won't, or should ...

Ernest Hemingway on how he approached symbolism in his stories: "No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in," says Hemingway. "That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin brea ...

There Will Be Blood is out on DVD already. And so are the other four Oscar nominees for best picture (well, ok, Juno is out early next week). (link)

Jeremy Zawodny : Scalr - Scalable Web Sites with EC2 - Scalr - Scalable Web Sites with EC2: forgot to note this earlier--very cool Tags : links

Jeremy Zawodny : Replication, caching, and partitioning - Replication, caching, and partitioning: greg mostly agrees wit brian but not completely Tags : links

Jeremy Zawodny : Zoombak GPS - Zoombak GPS: "Auto & Vehicle Tracker, Dog & Pet Tracking, Car Security Device" Tags : links

Jeremy Zawodny : How to use a notebook: 7 quick tips - How to use a notebook: 7 quick tips: some goof tips from matt Tags : links

Jeremy Zawodny : The Death of Read Replication - The Death of Read Replication: some food for thought... Tags : links

forgot to note this earlier--very cool

"Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon's EC2."

some goof tips from matt

some food for thought...

greg mostly agrees wit brian but not completely

The Sorting Algorithm Demo (495)

Easy Photo Wall on a Shoestringwire Budget » Curbly | DIY Design Community « Keywords: photos, home, decoration, wall (226)

Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide (221)

Donating $5,000 to .NET Open Source: Last year, Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror promised to done some money from his advertising to open-source projects. He followed through on that today with a $5,000 check to the ScrewTurn Wiki project. This is ...

Can Improve Reader Comments?: The Freakonomics blog tackles a question that we’ve talked about before: does paying for something mean you’ll take better care of it? The discussion here is comments, and the comparison is MetaFilter ($5 to ...

It's one of the easiest ways to shock a movie audience and to knock off a character. But did you know opening-scene car crashes follow a set of unwritten rules? Slate's Josh Levin decodes them for you.

One of the biggest surprises this April Fool's day was GameTap's release of Captain McGrandpa - Memory of the Forgotten. You download the game and when you go to play it, a launcher appears. You click on Play Game and your redirected to a thread on t ...

An anonymous reader writes to mention that New Scientist has a quick round-up of what they consider to be the ten weirdest types of computers. The list includes everything from quantum computers, to slime molds, to pails of water. "Perhaps the most u ...

J. Dzhugashvili writes "Is Nvidia worried about the advent of both CPUs with graphics processor cores and Larrabee, Intel's future discrete graphics processor? Judging by the tone adopted by Nvidia's CEO during a financial analyst conference yesterda ...

Cutie Pi writes "Katherine Seidel, mother of an autistic child and an avid blogger has been subpoenaed for her "family's bank records, tax returns, autism-related medical and educational records, and every communication concerning all of the issues t ...

Linux.com has a quick look back at the social web browser Flock, now that it has passed the 1.0 hurdle. The main complaint seems to be sensory overload, but there are definitely some interesting tidbits in there. "Version 1.1 really shines in its enh ...

Techdirt is reporting that there has been a rash of reports indicating that red light cameras are being used to generate revenue rather than to promote safety. "Time and time again studies have shown that if cities really wanted to make traffic cross ...

Presto Vivace notes a report from the RSA conference on the cybercrime economy, and it's not an optimistic one. Part of the problem is that in many places cybercrime pays much better than legitimate work, including security research. "As the panelist ...

Iranian support for militias in Iraq has grown, top U.S. defense leaders said Friday, asserting that recent battles in Basra gave the Iraqis an eye-opening view of Iran's increased negative role there. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. wil ...

Gunmen assassinated a top aide of anti-American leader Muqtada al-Sadr on Friday, sharpening a Shiite power struggle that has already triggered fighting between the cleric's followers and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government.

The federal tax bill for President Bush and his wife: $221,635. That's how much the Bushes owed on their adjusted gross income of $923,807 for the year 2007, according to a joint return released Friday. The Bushes have paid $203,894 so far, which mea ...

CBS Corp. executives took an unusual risk last fall before its series debut of "Big Bang Theory" — it offered the entire episode online despite the chance it would sap viewership for the TV premiere.

Eight Florida teenagers charged with beating another teen so they could post the "animalistic" attack on YouTube got exactly what they had wanted — worldwide exposure.

Former President Clinton has added to the falsehoods surrounding his wife's tale of her trip to Bosnia 12 years ago. In Indiana on Thursday, Bill Clinton defended his wife's mistake in claiming that she landed under sniper fire in Bosnia, accusing th ...

LiveScience.com - You're pounding the keyboard, double-clicking away, sighing and grumbling, but to no avail: That devilish little hourglass icon refuses to give way to the Web site you're trying to reach. Most Internet users have encountered trouble ...

For a fugitive riding public transportation, it didn't pay to be cheap. A North Carolina bank robbery suspect is in custody after he was caught taking a free ride on Baltimore's light rail.

Traffic was backed up and police were called to control the crowd after a Wilmington gas station accidentally set the pump price at 35 cents a gallon.

INDIANAPOLIS (Reuters) - Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama denounced huge pay packages for U.S. corporate chiefs on Friday in a drive to convert middle-class anger about the U.S. economy into votes.

This article describes harassment and barrage of assaults I have been experiencing on my body during the past five months.   I am an American citizen, an immigrant of Middle Eastern origin.  I have been living in the US for 35 years; I am n ...

Zimbabwean police ban political rallies "with immediate effect", amid tension over the disputed presidential election.

I’m delighted to say that online bookstores are shipping copies of Here Comes Everybody today, and that it has gotten several terrific notices in the blogosphere: Cory Doctorow:Clay’s book makes sense of the way that groups are using the ...

Sex on the Beach is a really horrible drink that owes its popularity solely to the fact that people like to talk about having sex on the beach regardless of whether or not they've actually had it. As anyone who's ever been there knows, however, it is ...

Anthony Klan at The Australian writes: Google Australia is expected within months to launch an application that will publish highly detailed, street-level photos of much of Australia, in a move that has drawn strong criticism from privacy advocate ...

The deep web is a term referring to all the kinds of pages that are live on the web, but not indexed in search engines for some reason or other. For instance, traditionally search engines mostly follow links in HTML, but from what we know they don't ...

What's the play count on your most played song in your iTunes library? My top five are: Emerge by Fischerspooner, 97 plays Alpha Beta Gaga by Air, 76 plays A Dream by Cut Copy, 68 plays Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand (Daft Punk mix), 68 plays Around ...

This insane montage of every instance of "What?" from the LOST series started me thinking about this genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/ action/ cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favor ...

The pop music industry has sadly come to depend on "heritage acts" – wrinkled, dyed-hair, aging stars – to pack houses and make money. — — "Whatever a future superstar act will be, it won't be as ubiquitous as the acts from t ...

Lolgrues

Gizmo (wiki) is a placeholder name for any small technological item. Other similar names are gadget, widget, thingamajig, blobject, etc.. In general, a Gizmo is completely useless in practical terms. GIZMO! is a documentary about odd inventions that ...

So anyway, here's a walrus dancing to Smooth Criminal.

I actually have no idea if this is normal and appropriate or not.

enjoy

Something Awful eschews humor in this week's Comedy Goldmine for gibbering madness. "I know you were coming here expecting to laugh at the Comedy Goldmine this week. Well, you're screwed....

"It's the Bizaro Ethel Merman." "She's like a garbage bag full of fighting Muppets back from the dentist." "It's like the little exorcist girl stung by bees." "The first time...

A short film in which a Paris Hilton-esque socialite is revealed to be the architect of her own loopy attempts at notoriety, and who will go as far as she...

The prototype app for any development environment is Hello World, a program that starts up, displays the text Hello World and then exits. That's the first thing they show you how to do in any development environment, and it's often the hardest step b ...

I want to work my way through the AppEngine tutorial on google.com. I've got a sub-folder set up in my Documents folder that contains the Helloworld app, per the instructions. But I get an error from dev_appserver.py that indicates (I think) that it' ...

....Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter....

.... see more crazy cat pics ....

“If the flight attendants on the JAL 747 from Tokyo I'm on right now were to, in a remarkable lapse of Japanese standards of service, throw me off the plane with a parachute, I could do a pretty nice roll when I hit the ground.” From my ...

You're about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It'll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmother's and wrapped the Must ...

This insane montage of every instance of "What?" from the LOST series started me thinking about this genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/ action/ cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favor ...

spoiler: Filo wins!  

the original video, if you missed it  

YouTube doesn't provide any subscription feeds, but this works perfectly  

it's worth noting that the NYT is cultivating a high level of discourse in their own blog comments  

like always, incredible quality from the vibrant community  

I thought this was a joke, but I verified it; JJ Abrams has a potty mouth  

Johnny Lee, who wrote an article for MAKE 01 on making a $14 video camera stabilizer, demonstrated his awesome Wii remote hacks at the TED 2008 conference. Link...

The Rules of Thumb website, created by Rules of Thumb author Tom Parker, is off and running, with thousand of user-submitted rules of thumb. Some are more useful than others, but they are almost always interesting. DIRECTION CONVEYS TIME AND EMOTION ...

Erik says: "The Bush administration is planning to move its primary foot-and-mouth research lab to the continental United States. Foot-and-Mouth, you will recall, is incredibly contagious and has several times led to enormous livestock extermination ...

Hot off the press... Creative Commons Announces New Leadership, New Funding San Francisco, CA, USA -- April 1, 2008 Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to expand the body of creative work available to the public for legal sharing ...

A librarians' group is meeting today at the Berkman Center to talk about the future of libraries. Gene Koo, Jake Shapiro, and Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, all of the Berkman. I'm supposed to give a discussion-opener later this afternoon. Here are the ...

As we head inevitably toward the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar's information tap seems to have been opened wide. Today, along with the new multiplayer modes, the developers have dropped these two, short, but still funny videos. They seem to ...

Microsoft's group manager for the XNA platform, Chris Satchell, wants you to know that user-generated content can lead to bad things. Like cooties.I think there's a potential risk on any platform where you're allowing...where you're running in what w ...

Red, yellow and blue cars are on their way in a hurry to the Brooklyn side of the bridge.

AFP

These days you hear a lot about the world financial crisis. But there's another world crisis under way - and it's hurting a lot more people. I'm talking about the food crisis. Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic fo ...

PARIS (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's oil minister on Thursday slammed biofuels, saying they did not protect the environment or help supply security, but added solar power had to be considered one of the best clean energy sources. "Let's be realistic, et ...

Desperate scientists built a shockingly geeky shrine to lasers, but we want you to send Wired.com your even nerdier monuments to the science gods.