The Japanese Ministry of Defense has come up with an amazingly cool looking flying machine. Story available on diginfo.tv.
It’s basically a hovering, flying sphere.
Wild.
Feb
20
Wiggly things and strong things.
The girls and I worked through a Guided Participatory Lesson for Children around building strong shapes. We built tetrahedrons, wiggly cubes and solid trusses, culminating in the awkward to assemble but rewarding icosahedron.
Later they asked me to come back and help them “stabilize” their creation — it’s too wiggly Unkie.
#win.
Apr
16
Source Repository Visualization
I rendered a quick animation of the reSIProcate project’s development history using the wonderful ‘gource‘ tool.
You can see it here if you like, in 720p/H.264. I love the flurries of activity that pop up over time.
Props to Adam H for pointing me at this tool.
Jan
20
Quote of the Day: It’s the yaks.
I know, three posts in one day is really too many; but this quote really tickles my funny bone while being a solid reminder why we need some humility and introspection powers.
While discussing the requirements or principles that might guide the development of a new mail application for Mac OS X; Brent manages to use “Let yaks prowl the grounds unshaven.” in a document. Excellent.
Follow along here for more.
Jan
20
Very cute inspirational Lego short.
For my two blog readers that do not also read Gizmodo, this little short is truly wonderful:
Lego Short Film Makes Me Want to Play With Legos Immediately [Lego]:
“
CL!CK is a short film made by Lego about how Legos can inspire you to come up with great ideas. It’s a fancy ad, to be sure, but a truly lovely one. [YouTube via NotCot]
(Via Gizmodo.)
Jan
20
Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees
Schneier points out that Facebook is a privacy train wreck waiting to happen; something I have long believed. People need to take heed and be careful about what they reveal to whom. We are only at the very earliest of stages with our automated privacy specification and/or features. Life and personal privacy is going to get a lot worse before it gets better:
Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees:
“I don’t know if this is real, but it seems perfectly reasonable that all of Facebook is stored in a huge database that someone with the proper permissions can access and modify. And it also makes sense that developers and others would need the ability to assume anyone’s identity.
Click through to Schneier’s site for a reference to the original material.
(Via Schneier on Security.)
Nov
19
A compelling replacement for make
SCons
Having lived with
make for over 20 years; I’ve decided that something has to be better. Turns out, there is something better.I’ve been enjoying getting to know both Python and
scons together for the last few months.
What a wonderful tool for building. There is a ton of information online, so I won’t add to the mélé with my opinions.
Check it out : scons.org.
Nov
17
Web developers outsmarting users (or not). Design assumptions that hurt.
Website #FAILs.
Lately I’ve noticed a lot of websites make crazy assumptions about my location. I was thinking it was geolocation gone wrong, but it appears that in general they are doing something completely illogical: they are using my language preference list to guess where I am.
This amounts to assuming that all French speaking people are in France, that all English speaking people are in England and so on.
What does RFC 2616 have to say about this?
14.4 Accept-Language
The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but
restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a
response to the request. Language tags are defined in section 3.10.
…
Nothing there about location? This is a classic assumption / layer violation in a design.
The worst offenders here are, by in large, financial institutions. When I visit ING Direct, they redirect me immediately to the Canadian login screen. Trouble is — I don’t have a Canadian account. Worse — there is no button to override their error the button to fix the problem is buried and two layers deep. Outsmarted by not too clever web developers.
Ouch. That hurts.
Wonder what would happen if I visited with a language preference set to en_DE or en_FR?
Oct
20
VMware Fusion linux guest os and host file sharing.
I managed to install vmware tools into my guest OS (CentOS 5.2) using the manual install method, mounting the ISO image and then running the perl installer. So far, so good.
However, the files are all mounted with the host OS uid/gid. There is likely a better solution, but given that the guest is a single user (effectively) environment, I just mapped the host fs to my guest OS uid/gid by editing the /etc/fstab file.
# Beginning of the block added by the VMware software
.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5 0 0
# End of the block added by the VMware software
Changes to :
# Beginning of the block added by the VMware software
.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5, uid=500,gid=500 0 0
# End of the block added by the VMware software
The 500/500 comes from my id on the linux guest OS, NOT the host OS.
Good luck!
Oct
15
Amusing NNW Badge
Some of you will find this amusing; others will not. What matters is that I did.
