- Flames of Arnor Home – GuildPortal Guild Hosting »
- vanilla-gallery »
- Booksthatmakeyoudumb »
- startdrawing.org » the asia drawing portal
- I Love Typography » devoted to fonts, typefaces and all things typographical.
- ::AREA-56:: » art – 3d and 2d – much of it robot themed
- The helmet that could turn back the symptoms of Alzheimer’s | the Daily Mail » The strange-looking headgear – which has to be worn for ten minutes every day – bathes the brain with infra-red light and stimulates the growth of brain cells. Its creators believe it could reverse the symptoms of dementia – such as memory loss and anxiet
- eSATA and USB HDD Stage Rack »
- themes4xp – Theme XP »
- VIA’s New Centaur Designed Isaiah CPU Architecture » If you would have told me last year that I would be able to sit down and play Crysis on a VIA low power CPU, well, I think I would have to had called BS on that, but I did just that yesterday. That get your attention?
- Johnny Chung Lee – Human Computer Interaction Research »
- Lord of the Rings Online Database – MMO DB »
- Bubblegum Sequencer » Making Music With Candy
- Sterling Order of Knights »
- IP Address Is Personal Info » IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union’s group of data privacy regulators said Monday.
- Wi-Fi music polling device takes heat off the DJ » Ever had a party ruined by your host’s atrocious taste in music? Then you might welcome a system that polls the musical preferences of party-goers and creates a playlist to keep everyone happy.
- Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing » This algorithm alters the dimensions of an image not by scaling or cropping, but rather by intelligently removing pixels from (or adding pixels to) the image that carry little importance.
- Commodore Gaming: High Performance PCs » This is what happened to the Commodore name???
- Scientology associated deaths » Scientology Kills
Archive for January, 2008
extrinsic
Jan 28
extrinsic
Jan 21
- BBC NEWS | Technology | Nasa investigates virtual space » The US space agency is exploring the possibility of developing a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game.
- Library of Congress Taps Web 2.0 for User Photo Expertise » As part of an effort to expand access to its photograph collections and tap the collective knowledge of user-generated content, the Library of Congress Wednesday launched a pilot project with photo-sharing site Flickr to publish some 3,000 photos. – New Y
- The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science »
- GeForce 9600GT Benchmarked Out in the Wild » NVIDIA’s upcoming 9600GT graphics card lives up to the company’s performance claims
- Discount Electronics »
- LITTER KWITTER » The Original Cat Toilet Training System.
- CIA: Hackers Shook Up Power Grids (Updated) | Danger Room from Wired.com » Hackers have tried to extort money from overseas utility companies. At least in one case, the Washington Post reports, the online attackers messed with an electrical grid, disrupting ing power in several cities.
- America’s Army game player saves real life » with no previous medical training, except from the game
- Rendering Games with Raytracing Will Revolutionize Graphics »
- RoboPult » Robot catapult hurls flaming fireballs
- Super Nightvision Headset Hack! » turn an old VHS camcorder into a nightvision scope.
- ‘Darkest ever’ material created » The material was created from carbon nanotubes – sheets of carbon just one atom thick rolled up into cylinders. Researchers say it is the closest thing yet to the ideal black material, which absorbs light perfectly at all angles and over all wavelengths.
- Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision » Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.
- Chris Oliver’s Weblog : Weblog »
- JavaFX »
- In-Desk Dock for iPod » Belkin
- In-Desk USB Hub » Belkin
- Aggression: As Good as Food or Sex? »
- Create Quick Linker Widget » Amazon
Applewhite is back
Jan 18
I think we all knew it would happen, or at least ‘horns like me thought about it enough that it almost seemed a memory. Major Applewhite, one of the most loved and decorated quarterbacks in University of Texas history, has come home and joined the University of Texas coaching staff.
The boy-man that filled the turn of the decade with brilliant on-the-fly calls, and snatching us from sure defeat so many times. Racking up a ton of school records even though he shared quarterback time with Chris Simms. The beautiful teamwork with Ricky Williams. Man, I loved those seasons. I loved watching him cool as Eastwood while the pocket would collapse around him.
Anyways, enough nostalgia, we’ll have plenty of time for that, as we’ll see him on the sidelines on every game now, just not in the same uniform. He’ll be taking over the vacant running back coach position… which is a fantastic timing, as we are the top pick of the top pick high school running back: Darrell Scott.
“I don’t know who that is, but it doesn’t matter,” said Scott
Oh, you’ll know! Scott is stunning to watch and I am excited about him possibly donning the orange, especially after we lost Jamaal Charles to the NFL a bit early. But hearing that Applewhite was coming back eclipsed all my excitement for Scott. Unfortunately I wont be getting student tickets for free after I graduate in May, but that doesn’t matter.
“He does everything right,” Coach Mack Brown said. “He’s got class, he’s smart, he’s got great faith. He competed his tail off.”
He also is being given the title of Assistant Head Coach.
Awesome.
One of the best ways to link off of a site, is to link to the site that has everything: Amazon.
Amazon has had an associates program since the dark ages. They promoted it heavily and after some years it became a huge directed draw of buyer inflow for them. You’d think with such a cash cow, they would have a more active, dedicated, and interactive group of developers for this project. drzy has used the amazon associates for a few years, where I’ve tried to make it as non-intrusive and yet useful as possible. But the hardest hurdle in that struggle is the Amazon Associates program itself.
Only recently have they made it easy to just “post a link” to something. In the years past, it really seemed like they were actively fighting such a mechanic. Initially you could just put your referral code at the end of a link and it would work and you would get credit. Then they changed it subtly, and when people started seeing their links not working they adjusted. Repeat that a half-dozen more times until they made it be this long complicated link with a session ID and only some pages could be successfully linked to (and still get credit).
Well, they “revamped” the program a few months ago, and I was eager to see the improvements. Turns out all they really did was improve the look of the Associates site. They did add a blog widget and a wishlist widget, and something to show previews for their new video sales. Whoopee.
The one thing that I find both most-useful and least-useful are the in-line context links. And this is possibly the most broken of all their features. To put it simply, Amazon context linking cannot handle dynamic pages. And, seriously, who doesn’t have dynamic pages? This means that whenever a person goes to the front page, they will never see a Amazon generated context link, because the front page changes (almost) daily. The individual pages of articles fare better, because they do not change much beyond the sidebar content. But even those hardly ever get a link attached. There a bunch of businesses out there that offer context links exclusively, and handle dynamic pages just fine, but I really don’t like their intrusiveness. But they’ve got the whole “search page for products; link to products” thing down cold.
I check the Amazon Associates forums for answers to this, but I never see a response or even a hint of acknowledgment from an Amazon developer or employee. I’ll save you the trouble of checking, and just take my word that there a hundreds of posts on the subject and I have never seen a response. I’ve sent emails to the appropriate Amazon entities, and just get a form letter back.
So this rant is over and my story is done. But I wrote this in the hope that others out there using Amazon Associates will not feel lost in the black hole of response from Amazon, and who, like me, just manually create links when, you know, Amazon doesn’t completely change the process, or they aren’t having a root canal or something.
extrinsic
Jan 14
- Upgraded Hubble telescope to be 90 times as powerful »
- Reversal Of Alzheimer’s Symptoms Within Minutes In Human Study » An extraordinary new scientific study, which for the first time documents marked improvement in Alzheimer’s disease within minutes of administration of a therapeutic molecule, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.
- Gibson Robot Guitar »
- FURminator »
- GSM-Forum »
This guitar’s features didn’t really sound all that impressive at first, but that’s because the first news article I read didn’t really explain very well. Just watch this Gibson video below that shows a how-to on operation of the guitar. Anyone who plays will drool, especially if you love alternate tunings.
This is officially part of the Les Paul line. First off, this thing will tune the guitar for you, on the fly. Not with some helpful tones that help you tune by ear, but with actual servos on each key that turns and tunes the guitar for you. It will also automatically change to any alternate tuning programmed into it on the fly. And to top it off, it takes most of the work out of stringing the instrument. All of this combines with a MSRP of $2499, which actually was much lower than I was expecting, due to the fact that many Les Paul’s already cost about that much. 
Intel may be in trouble
Jan 11
New York State is doing what AMD wanted to do many years ago, but gave up… nail Intel with Antitrust proceedings.
I remember in the mid-90′s when AMD was just about to spring the Athlon chip that nudged them ahead of Intel in performance for the first time in, well, ever. For years before this, AMD would publicly decry Intel’s business tactics… trying to shove them out of the market. Exclusive deals with Microsoft, shady dealings with review sites and benchmark tools, and weird clock performance ratings. AMD shouted about these things early and often. But nothing ever came of it. Either their legal team was inept, or Intel’s was just that good. After many years of this, AMD seemed to give up. I haven’t read a peep of anti-Intel whining out of them in years.
Now, out of the blue New York wants to do the dirty work. This was prompted by similar suits/investigations by the European Union and other countries. (I believe Microsoft is getting a bunch of similar scrutiny and attention).
This couldn’t come at a better time for AMD, as they were trounced by the great performance leap of the Intel Core2 proc, and are now struggling to show they can compete. Even I, as a long time buyer of AMD, had to switch… after over a decade of using AMD chips in my gaming rigs. I mean, the Core2′s are so fast and so cheap, and left me with a great upgrade path.
AMD also is feigning ignorance in the matter, and was subpoenaed themselves in the case.
This is going to get interesting.
I have no idea what’s going on here. I either haven’t been getting enough info on the future Soul Calibur IV game, or this was just a crazy broadside at CES. Just watch this if you have any interest whatsoever, I don’t wish to spoil the surprise:
Yes, somehow Soul Calibur will have Yoda and Vader. I checked the calender, and it’s not April 1st. So, yeah, I dunno. Soul Calibur 2 is still one of my all time favorite console games, and I’m sure I’ll play a bunch of IV. All I can think of is they are competing with the yet-to-be-released Super Smash Bros. Brawl from Nintendo, with its mishmash of characters in a fighting game.
I’m pretty confident both are still going to be a blast.
pool. power strip. flip-flops. smiling drunks.
what could possibly go wrong?
extrinsic
Jan 7
- Siemens retreats over Nazi name ‘Zyklon’ » Siemens wanted to trademark it’s old buddy ‘Zyklon’; the gas they invented to kill millions in concentration camps.
- Koders » Open Source Code Search Engine
- DZone Snippets » Store, sort and share source code, with tags
- Google Code Search »
24 – if it were in 1994
Jan 5
The hell if I ever used AOL, but man I sometimes forget how much has changed.
I miss BBS’s though.
