Bluetooth devices detected towards each end of London Bridge will appear as coloured pixels on the corresponding end of the Tower Bridge upper walkway, and if they are subsequently detected at the other end, the pixel will move across at a speed proportional to the speed of movement (walking/running/driving etc.). The colour and initial position is derived from the Bluetooth address, and so will always be the same for any given device.
Tsudohnimh wrote: I clicked a link for hot judicial action and I got 0wn3d. I'd like to thank the academy, my parents for warping me, Tom and Nick for letting me do this, and my hero Acidus.
OK, let me explain what the story is with this. Its possible to embed a link in a MemeStreams page to /recommend. When people who are logged in click on it, it will automatically post a message to their MemeStream, and then redirect them back to the page they were looking at. Ironically, this tends to result in lots of clicking, as it seems like the browser has done something wrong. If Acidus had really wanted to be nasty he could have included a redundant link in the posts he was adding to your pages to that people who read your MemeStreams would also spread the post. Its like a meme worm.
This is actually a problem that Rattle and I anticipated when we first built this website. We used to have protection in place that prevented this. It worked by checking to make sure that when you submitted a post the referer header in your http request came from /recommend and not some other page. Unfortunately, we ran into trouble with this feature. Some Internet privacy software screens referer headers out of http requests, and so people who used such software were unable to post. After struggling through the process of explaining to a few users how to fix this problem we decided to disable the security feature for /recommend until we had time to revisit the problem. The security feature is still present in /delete and /edit, because we decided that a self propagating MemeStreams Meme was only a bit of an annoyance, but if someone wrote a javascript that wiped out your whole blog that would be a serious problem. This explains why a few of you have trouble editing or deleting posts sometimes.
We have a fix for this problem which is unlikely to cause problems for people running Internet privacy software. Its checked into subversion. However, we haven't shipped it yet because it is boiled in with a bunch of other changes to the UI that aren't quite ready for release yet. We decided it might be fun to go ahead and let Acidus propagate one of these Memes as he uncovered this issue a few weeks back and advised us on how to implement a better fix. I'd like to say that we're shipping this weekend, but I don't think its going to happen. I'm skiing and Rattle is attending Outerz0ne. Acidus is actually giving a talk at Outerz0ne which includes a discussion of this issue, so its not out of the question that you might see a few more people screwing around with it. Fortunately I don't think you can do anything terribly malicious with this. Its all in good fun.
This video makes fun of modern newbie computer users. It's from a show called Oystein & Meg (Oystein & I) produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting television channel (NRK) in 2001. The spoken language is Norwegian
I clicked a link for hot judicial action and I got 0wn3d. I'd like to thank the academy, my parents for warping me, Tom and Nick for letting me do this, and my hero Acidus.
Boing Boing: Will Steve Jobs drop iTunes DRM in a heartbeat?
Topic: Technology
10:31 am EST, Feb 7, 2007
This is a big day -- a huge day. If Steve Jobs comes through with his promise to offer DRM-free music from artists who will allow it, we're at the beginning of the end of the DRM wars.
Ha! I don't think Jobs predicted that some artists would respond to his essay by insisting that they undrm their music on the iTunes Store. He may have offered more than he bargained for.
I got a call from GoDaddy a few minutes ago in response to the formal complaint I filed with them on Friday. They thanked me for my feedback and for being a customer, and said that they were looking at the issue. They couldn't say anything else. I'm not sure how to consider that. I'm glad that they are paying attention, but actions speak louder.
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service provides you with the ability to execute your applications in Amazon's computing environment.
To use Amazon EC2 you simply:
1. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing all your software, including your operating system and associated configuration settings, applications, libraries, etc. Think of this as zipping up the contents of your hard drive. We provide all the necessary tools to create and package your AMI.
2. Upload this AMI to the Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) service. This gives us reliable, secure access to your AMI.
3. Register your AMI with Amazon EC2. This allows us to verify that your AMI has been uploaded correctly and to allocate a unique identifier for it.
4. Use this AMI ID and the Amazon EC2 web service APIs to run, monitor, and terminate as many instances of this AMI as required. Currently, we provide command line tools and Java libraries, and you may also directly access our SOAP or Query based APIs.
We're looking at moving MemeStreams into this. The biggest challenge is that if your instance shuts down for some reason you loose all of your data.
