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Facebook Beacon: Perfect for self-centered pricks.

Facebook Beacon is a new effort announced by Facebook to allow users to share their buying preferences. A few lines of javascript allows a website to post to facebook what items you purchased, games you played, movies you saw etc. Hell attach the three lines of code to your toilet so you can alert your emo friends when you drop a deuce.

Seriously, are we that vain of a country that we need to tell everyone in the world we bought a DVD. I don’t care who you are I don’t give a toss if you bought friends volume 1 on DVD on overstock.com. If you think everyone does, you’re an ass.

Tagged as: Facebook, Internet, Privacy, Semantic Web | No Comments »

Zune 2: Bigger Faster Stronger

Simply put the new version of the Zune software is amazing. Microsoft took all the suck out of the last version and released something that rivals iTunes. Its podcast support is awesome now. Simple and to the point with an excellent browsing interface. The social actually is social now. Please note the new zune social card under my xbox live gamercard. Wow so sweet. Thanks zunenuze for the code to embed the zune social card. Most important update though. Wireless sync.

Tagged as: Music, Zune | 1 Comment »

Steam = Everything wrong with DRM

Oh well I do beg your pardon Steam. How absurd of me to attempt to play a game I purchased. Please accept my apology for bothering you while you were doing other, much more important things. I’ll try back later when its more convenient for you.

Tagged as: Games, Steam | No Comments »

T-Mobile trademarks magenta

Apparently one can trademark colors now. Gizmodo reports (via a long chain of sources) T-Mobile, in their copyright and trademark statements has managed to state that:

T-MOBILE, the T-MOBILE logo, T-ZONES, the T-ZONES design, the HOTSPOT design, T-MOBILE MDA, T-MOBILE SDA, T-MOBILEWEB, the WORLDCLASS logo, the “digits” design, the T-MOBILE acoustic logo, and the color magenta are registered and/or unregistered trademarks of Deutsche Telekom AG in the US and/or other countries.

Amazing. Consider mauve officially mine. I trademark mauve. Its mine. Use it, I’ll fucking sue you then kick you in the shin.

Via: Gizmodo

Tagged as: Cellphones, T-Mobile | No Comments »

Why Java applets are obsolete.

Recently I took a test where I had to write a Java Applet. I realized something while I was writing it. Java Applets are obsolete and deprecated. Anything they can do, faster newer technologies can do better. Lets look at the two main purposes of a Java Applet: animation and robust GUI development.

In terms of animation Applets fall short… way short. Writing a program to animate something is as painful as drawing a picture with LOGO. Applets lack the ability to draw and animate as effectively as alternatives like flash and silverlight. Flash gives the user simple easy ways to import media or draw vector (or raster) images and animate them using keyframes. Need advanced animation or programatic animation? Flash actionscript has you covered. It can animate as well as provide an event driven program.

Java Applets however have none of this. Each frame must be drawn programatically and requires a blanking in between. While this isn’t a huge inconvenience it shows Java applets are not intended to be powerful animation tools.

Additionally Java applets are supposed to provide a robust GUI experience. In actuality Java applets provide for a clunky slow loading experience frequently resulting in a large ominous gray box in the center of a browser.

When Java originated (early 90’s) applets were a very powerful tool allowing for robust GUI development. Java applets were leaps and bounds ahead of any early version HTML controls. This utility however diminished as HTML became less of a presentation markup and more of an interaction markup. My realization that java applets are obsolete was concreted by AJAX, asynchronous Javascript and XML. This technology fixed the primary problem still plaguing HTML: The HTTP protocol.
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Tagged as: Applets, Computers, Java, Programming | No Comments »

Child’s Play 2007 Starts

Just letting all my 3 readers know that Child’s Play 2007 has started. Child’s play is a charity created by Penny Arcade to give video games to children’s hospitals. Contributors can directly contribute by purchasing items on a local children’s hospital’s Amazon.com gift list. This way you can ensure that the children will get good games like “Beautiful Katamari” instead of “Cars” and other games they think they’ll like. They historically have a very low overhead so please contribute and give the kids who really need it video games (instead of buying yourself games just to get out of doing work by saying “well I really should beat halo 3 on Legendary before anything else”)

Tagged as: Charity, Games | No Comments »

Oh Snap! Jimmy Carter Tells Dick Cheney.

BBC Television recently interviewed Jimmy Carter about Dick Cheney. In it Carter calls Cheney “overly persuasive to George Bush” and “a disaster for our country”. Funny stuff… Well except for the fact it’s true. I guess that’s a bit scary. Here’s the video.

Think Progress – Carter: Cheney is ‘a disaster for our country

Tagged as: Politics, Snap | No Comments »

Halo 3: More addicting than cigarettes and WoW

Wow halo 3 is good looking. So much better than the beta. Anyways its fun and addicting too. Attached please find sweet screenshot of Tony and I pwning some blue forces in a neutral bomb game. The first is us in an ATV me on the back ready to set us up teh bomb. The other is the last thing one of the blues saw before he blew apart. Complete game details here.

Tagged as: Halo 3, Xbox | No Comments »

Adding microformats to Facebook with Greasemonkey

Why not tag facebook with microformats. Its already got the data there. So in an attempt to learn javascript namely the DOM I created a greasemonkey script which will tag a profile for a microformat reader. This works great in operator. I can visit a facebook site and up top i now have an option to save to my yahoo contacts or my outlook (as a vcard). Anyways it’s nowhere near complete but check it out.

There’s a few issues. One being that facebook doesn’t actually give emails in text. Facebook converts emails to images for spam prevention purposes. This is a bit of a problem as thats a pretty important thing to tag. Anyways. Check it out if you’re bored.

GreaseMonkey Microformats in Facebook

Tagged as: Facebook, firefox, greasemonkey, microformats | No Comments »

I caved!

XBOX

Tagged as: Halo 3, Xbox | No Comments »