January 2011
30 posts
Facebook is the new Internet
I want to talk about a disturbing trend I’ve been seeing lately. “www.somesite.com” is being replaced by “facebook.com/somesite”. A few examples I’ve seen are the mX newspaper, some news programs (I think 7 News), and some movies official sites are now all Facebook pages (I’ll find more links later). They probably have traditional websites too, but that...
We built the Tower of Babel
An interesting comment on BoingBoing made parallels between the Tower of Babel, which pissed off God, and what we built, the Internet, which is pissing off the politicians.
In Genesis, mankind was united and free to communicate with a single language, and started building a tower to heaven. Apparently our ability to communicate freely and act as one pissed off the almighty so much that he split...
Chrome sends random DNS requests on startup to... →
Interesting discussion about this behaviour, and a nasty side-effect of DNS hijacking I hadn’t thought about: when you do a single-word query in a modern browser’s address bar, it first checks the DNS to see if it resolves, and if not, it does a web search for the term (usually Google). This useful feature is thwarted by ISPs which hijack DNS lookup failures, serving ads — you...
This Week in Google’s discussion of H.264 →
My discussion of TWiG’s second more sympathetic yet confusing analysis of the ongoing H.264 debacle.
Wolfenstein 1-D →
The game that changed everything, converted into a one-pixel line.
Courtesy Shani
“We work on a plan how to create some buzz around those games without pissing off...”
– GOG.com interview (no perma-link)
Sharks seen swimming in Australian streets →
Wow.
Also I love the way sources are apparently verified in regional Australia: “Yeah, mate, ‘e’s a good bloke, an’ if ‘e says ‘e saw a shark, ‘e saw a shark.”
Google: H.264 Stifles Innovation →
“As Asa Dotzler put it, “if H.264 had been a browser requirement in 2003-2004, Firefox could not have happened. We’re thinking about the next Firefox.”“
People OK with murdering Assange →
A collection of names and quotes by people calling for the assassination of Julian Assange. (With a bit of a shit presentation, sorry guys. I’d prefer a list instead of this clicking nonsense.) If you have any more, you can email peopleokwithmurderingassange@gmail.com.
Will MPEG-LA change their minds in 2015? →
Another article by myself, this time questioning the legal weight of MPEG-LA’s patent promise.
Mozilla WebGL demo →
Impressive demo of WebGL combined with some other HTML5 technologies by Mozilla.
Unfortunately, Tumblr “doesn’t recognize that video service. Please use their embed code instead.” So old school.
Now how can I actually turn on WebGL? None of the demos actually work for me. But if they work for you, the link to the demo is here.
Edit: Ah! about:config...
Chrome H.264 video decision a vaccination against... →
A person on the Internet with a brain, and a good writing style.
A response to criticism over the Chrome H.264... →
My response to the furore over Google’s decision to drop H.264 video support from Chrome.
Julian Assange sued by illiterate man for... →
Why not just read the three-page complaint? This legal document filed with the Florida Southern District Court reads more like an angry blog post by someone who can’t spell or make logical inferences — in particular, it is a civil suit which mostly consists of allegations of criminal behaviour.
Assange is being sued for $150,000,000 (one hundred and fifty million dollars) ($100M in...
“The Catholic Church shut down Galileo for a hundred years. I think we can shut...”
– Unfortunately, an unnamed “senior frontbencher in Federal Parliament”. Would be nice to have a name — take this with the grain of salt it comes with.
Can’t hide love for WikiLeaks
First look at Ubuntu Unity
I tweeted the other day, “In the spirit of “don’t knock it until you try it”, today I will be using Unity http://unity.ubuntu.com/, the default WM in Ubuntu 11.04 :/” Having previously knocked it, I decided to try it. So here is my small review after a full day of using Unity.
Bear in mind that Unity is currently in pre-release. Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook switched over to...
“I refuse to let anyone tell me what to do, especially past-me. Who does that...”
– Slashdot user ‘spun’
Google yanking H.264 video out of Chrome →
Woohoo! Now the gears of the open web might start turning for video.
Courtesy David
University of Melbourne switching to Gmail
Hooray and all that, I think they made a good decision. But take a look at this migration plan (summarised by me from an email):
Email addresses will change from @ugrad or @pgrad.unimelb.edu.au to @student.unimelb.edu.au. (The old addresses will be forwarded automatically.)
There will be a five-day migration period before your old inbox data arrives in your Gmail account. (The email suggests...
1-block MD5 collision found →
(December 24, 2010)
I’m not sure what the significance is — there are already known collision attacks on MD5 and no known preimage attacks. The significance seems to be that the two documents are both exactly 512 bits; previous collisions have been longer.
Anyway, they are expressed in the PDF as a sequence of 16 32-bit words, which is quite hard to hash. You can’t just...
First-class functions vs empty parens
Friend: I think the Ruby guys say that the lack of first-class functions is the price you pay for being able to call nullary functions without empty parens.
Me: Well a Python guy might say that having to use empty parens to call nullary functions is the price you pay for not having shit semantics.