Commodore PET 2001The Commodore PET (Wikipedia) first came onto the scene in 1977. Why is that interesting? As with most disciplines and careers, programmers like to engage in pissing contests to determine who’s suffered the most under the least expressive language under the most oppressive OS on the most restrictive hardware. One of the most important markers of experience is the “first machine I ever programmed on” metric. Many cut their teeth on BASIC on the Commodore 64; I cut mine on the machine to the left.

Until... [More]

Though he spent years on the Daily Show and has been on the air with his own show since last September, Stephen Colbert first leapt into the national spotlight when he as named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people and when he handed George Bush his ass at the Correspondent’s dinner a few weeks ago[1]. There are always a lot of videos of his show online; the following few from the last week are particularly good:

Phone Calls: Wiretapping

Stephen takes to the phones to ease people’s... [More]

Louis C.K. has a new show on HBO and Jon Stewart’s interview with is hilarious. Jon makes the mistake of asking him about his family and he tells him about his two daughters—but with a slightly different take than most proud fathers.

Louis: The one-year-old I don’t have an opinion about … she’s kind of boring. The other one is four years old and I love her very much, but she’s kind of a fucking asshole.
Jon: Does she watch the show?
Louis: I don’t care, she can kiss my ass.
Jon:... [More]

Sternest Meanings features an anagram robot, which is kind of fun. Anagrams derived from the names of our fearless leaders in Washington are succinct peeks into their very souls:

• Donald Rumsfeld = Muddler of lands
• Paul Wolfowitz = Foul zap low wit
• Richard Perle = Pedlar[1], richer

The most fearless leader of all has two interesting variations: the first tells us what we already know, whereas the second reveals a side he has not yet revealed publicly.

• George Walker Bush = Blush, war geek[2]... [More]

The US and Italy squared off tonight in match that started off with a strong American side attacking into an Italian defense that was simply absorbing everything. The Italy that played Ghana using the midfield was gone and the classic counter-attacking Azurri style was back. Though the Americans controlled the run of the play for the first 20 minutes, Italy capitalized on a perfectly executed set play to hammer a headball past star goalkeeper Casey Keller. The US deflated slightly after that,... [More]

Angola vs. MexicoThough there’s been some supremely good football in the first week of the world cup, there has also been some disappointing football. And then there’s the Angola-Mexico match. Now that was so bad, it was funny. The Angolans outclassed the Mexicans throughout most of the match, mostly due to their ability to string two whole passes together where the Mexicans were managing at most one. Mexico must have gotten the mistaken notion that they were good just because they consistently beat the USA.... [More]

WikiMatrix Home PageWikiMatrix doesn’t look especially amazing, but it has quite a few neat tricks that make it a very nice web application. It allows you to select multiple Wikis and compare them; this is a comparison of MediaWiki vs. Moin Moin. The chart is very nicely laid out and includes custom tooltips and a nice hover effect allowing you to follow along and compare many wikis at once. There is also the flagged feature on the left that makes it easier to show only the features that are interesting (it would... [More]

Cork’d is a web application for wine afficionados. Users build add to the global wine database, create lists of their reserves, their favorites and their buddies. It’s a classic web 2.0 collaborative social web site by Dan Benjamin (of HiveLogic and A List Apart) and Dan Cederholm (of SimpleBits). The colors evoke a bottle of red, and the simple decorations, like the filigrees used a separators provide a dash of style. The colors and graphics are flat and simple (it’s the web! 2.0! get it?) and... [More]

earthli.com tag graphThe article Websites as graphs introduces an online tool for creating art out of HTML code. The online version of the grapher accepts a URL and then retrieves and processes the page, tag by tag, building a graph, which displays the connections and nesting. The graph is built in real-time, but deliberately slowly[1], so that it starts with a few large nodes, then seems to zoom out as more nodes are added. As new branches lead to more and more clusters of nodes, the branches “wave” around to get out... [More]

Lance ArmstrongThe article Armstong cleared of doping charges (Sports Illustrated) brings a sigh of relief to anyone still biting their nails over whether Lance cheated when he won his first Tour de France. The conclusion of this latest bout of shipping 7–year-old samples of Lance’s urine around Europe comes not with exoneration of any wrongdoing, but of the inapplicability of the given evidence. Since it cannot be proved that the samples were not tampered with, they cannot be used as evidence. Furthermore, any results of tests... [More]

The gap left by Dan Brown’s writer’s block needs to be filled by something as you lie on a beach this summer. There are only so many different versions of Digital Fortress under various names and publishers you’re going to read until you notice that they’re all the same book and that he hasn’t magically written a new novel you haven’t heard about. In steps Playboy with its 25 sexiest novels ever written, which is chock full of books to take the beach with friends and family. It’s a pretty... [More]

Looking for all the comforts of living on a naval vessel while you’re confined to dry land? 28 Ways to simulate being in the Navy is here to help.[1] Some of the more helpful items are listed below:

1. Unplug all radios and TVs to completely cut yourself off from the outside world. Have a neighbour bring you a Time, Newsweek, or Proceedings from five years ago to keep you abreast of current events.
2. Cut a twin mattress in half and enclose three sides of your bed. Add a roof that prevents you from... [More]

The following video, Death Star (YouTube), is a hilarious deleted scene that George Lucas intended as the opening scene for The Empire Strikes Back. When Mark Hamill crashed up his bike and scarred his face, he added the whole “Ice Planet Hoth” thing instead.

Truly hilarious and well worth watching!

“When in doubt, assume my tongue is in my cheek.”

While the Europeans are actually talking to Iran, as discussed in the article Iran nuclear talks continue (Guardian Unlimited), the US is deeply involved with an issue of similar earth-shattering import: the official language of the United States. To whit, they’ve decided that English is ‘national language’ (Indianapolis Star). So, while the Europeans are once again taking the pussy’s way out, the Americans are navel-gazing and pandering to the lowest common denominator while they wait for the bombs to start dropping.

Way to go... [More]

The next version of Microsoft Office looks to be quite a bit different from the last several releases, which were, on the whole, rather disappointing evolutions of the base products. Each version introduced more features without giving users any way of coping with “featuritis”—a term coined to describe Office. At one point, the menus started hiding unused features in an effort to appear smaller, but commands were still hidden in menus and the notorious nested dialog chains that hampered... [More]

The article Bush Tells West Point Graduates Terror War Is in Early Stages (Bloomberg) covers Bush’s commencement speech this year, in which he lifted everyone’s spirits with zingers like the one about how the Global War on Terror “will rival the Cold War in its length and difficulty”. It sound like his customary wit must have had them all in stitches. In a rare show of honesty, Bush acknowledged his tendency to not finish what he started by noting further that “[t]he war began on my watch, but it’s going to... [More]”

The State Department recently said that it “was concerned about the reports on a special clothing rule for Iranian minorities”. This was in reference to a recent report in the Canadian National Post about a new law proposed by the “conservative-dominated parliament” in Iran. The Post, seemingly lacking either an Arabic translator, journalistic ethics or both, made up the details of the story from whole cloth. The law would require:

“Iran’s roughly 25,000 Jews…to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the... [More]”

Google and Yahoo are tripping all over themselves to help those us of with less time on our hands create reliable, usable web applications. They take different approaches, with Yahoo providing cross-platform JavaScript code and Google providing a new way of building web front-ends.

Yahoo!

Yahoo kicked it off with the initial release of their JavaScript Libraries (earthli News), following up with a second release called AutoComplete, Windowing, Menu and More. The library looks really well-organized, has... [More]

Megatextured Pine ForestA recent article about Quake Wars: Enemy Territory mentioned that it was using the latest and greatest of rendering technologies from id Software, called Megatexturing. This Q&A with John Carmack includes more details on the development, timeline and features of this technology. He sees Megatexturing as a natural extension of texture memory management into the virtual space, as is already done for graphics memory and system memory. He’s quick to note that there is nothing groundbreaking about... [More]

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently made a very public attempt to officially open diplomatic channels with the United States after a lapse of almost 30 years. Response in the US has ranged from complete dismissal to lukewarm acknowledgement to braying laughter. Why the Iranians will be Rebuffed by William Blum (CounterPunch) provides a summary of similar efforts from the last century when leaders noticed that their sovereignty was in danger of being shoveled into the slavering maw of American empire.

These include the... [More]

Press This! No News is Good News by Ben Tripp (Counterpunch) idly ponders the complete and utter failure of the fourth estate. As proof, he offers a long—but woefully incomplete—list of scandals currently flitting from loose lip to loose lip in Washington. It could be argued that the collapse of the press is not complete, else we wouldn’t know of the scandals in the first place. That is purely wishful thinking, however, as it is far easier to report these obvious scandals but not press the issue to conclusion than it... [More]

Bush's Approval Ratings since 2001Professor Poolkatz’s Pool of Polls is a decidedly fanatical approach to making sense of polling data—specifically, the polls associated with Bush’s approval ratings. The one to the left is a straight representation with standard deviation; note the spikes at 9/11, the start of the 2003 attack on Iraq, and the 2004 elections—all followed by steady downward trends, indicating how artificial the support was. Flush Bush offers another interesting look at the same numbers. For those whose... [More]

It’s been how long? (Uggabugga) reports on a recent column, Would Bush Rather Be Fishing? by Daniel Froomkin (Washington Post) that covered a recent, short question and answer session with George Bush. Right near the beginning, he writes:

“Remember when he was asked to name his biggest mistake and what he’d learned from it—and he couldn’t name any? (He hasn’t held a prime-time press conference since.)”

The DeciderThat president Bush falls somewhat shy of the average number of press conferences for sitting presidents is pretty well-known[1]. He’s not so... [More]

In a hectic world filled with pressing issues, most people don’t have the time to examine issues and come to their own conclusions about them. Or so they’re told. To that end, mass media is only too happy to further impart the opinions that were imparted on them. With the aforementioned public already pressed for time and, most likely, attention span, what better way to get a point across than through the magic of pictures? Cartoonists are only too happy to fill this void. The samples below... [More]

“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!”

The Electronic Entertainment Expo—E3 for short—is taking place right now and is producing the expected wave of hype, “in-game” movies and “screenshots”. Check out the E3 insider or the IGN site for all the latest effusive marketing/reporting. Games that want to sell these days have to look good; to that end, publishers use high-quality screenshots and ridiculously good-looking in-game movies to draw in their audience. Recent years have seen an escalation in these types of tricks, with Sony... [More]

Stephen Colbert

The Finished Product!This is the simplest possible tutorial for creating convincing OS X–style Aqua effects using only vector graphics. The Ultimate Aqua Button takes a designer step-by-step through Fireworks to create a simple oval button. Here are the advantages listed in the tutorial:

• It takes the fewest number of steps (for a technique that doesn’t leave out any design elements)
• It uses fewer objects to complete the design
• All the elements of the button remain fully editable
• The final button is made entirely... [More]

Boot Camp is the newest product recently released with the OS X 10.4.6 update. With it, Mac users can resize their hard drive, create a new partition and install Windows XP on it. It burns a CD with all the necessary drivers prior to Windows installation. Windows XP is not included.

In order for Boot Camp to do what it does, Apple adjusted its EFI-only firmware to be able to emulate an old-style BIOS so that Windows recognizes it. They also built an initial set of Windows drivers for their... [More]