March 2006

March 25, 2006


March 22, 2006

Great templates for Textpattern

The winners of Textplates’s Textpattern template competition have been announced. There’s some nice ones in there. My favorites are Serene and White and Wild.

Ilya

March 20, 2006

An entertaining juggling clip—and only three balls, no less!

I’ve never seen a juggling performance that’s been so tightly and well synchronized to music. (Generally, I avoid blogging video clips, but this one made me think of Elexa and all her juggling nerd friends, so I couldn’t resist.) Via Reddit.

Ilya

March 16, 2006

Wetpaint makes some nice looking wikis

Wikis tend to fall into the same layout/design pit as many open source CMS systems: they all look drab and alike. Usability-wise this could, of course, be considered somewhat beneficial. However, the feature-driven functionality of these prototypical designs aren’t actually all that easy or obvious in the first place, so this doesn’t come near compensating their drawbacks. This is why I was quite impressed with what Wetpaint has done with their wiki templates.

Ilya

March 13, 2006


March 10, 2006


March 9, 2006

She’ll get it right this year

What was your boyfriend's age again?A birthday card for me (today’s not my birthday, by the way).

The card reads, in Finnish:

“What was your boyfriend’s age again?”

“Um, 25?”

Now I’m not even wrong any more. Congratulations!

Ilya

March 7, 2006

  • Yay for Infogami, now being developed in public!
  • A comprehensive FAQ on cross site scripting (XSS).
  • Said of Ruby on Rails core developers: “Pity you have to look like a pouting artsy wanker to contribute.”

March 6, 2006

What Roosa wants for her birthday

What Roosa wants for her birthday. That’s a radiator. Only 3950,00 euros.

Ilya

How to Digitize a Million Books

How to Digitize a Million Books:

“Ultimately, Clancy says, Google would like Book Search to give the same result as someone going to a library, looking in its stacks, and serendipitously finding a book that’s interesting or useful. One way to do this would be to link books to each other by categories and themes, he suggests. The task becomes more complicated, though, when linking works by Virginia Woolf, for instance, to criticisms of her work, works that inspired her, or authors who wrote during the same era. Designing algorithms that can effectively organize all of this new information, Clancy says, is ‘one of the grand challenges and will take many years.’”

“Reddy says CMU researchers are trying to tackle this challenge by using a ‘statistical approach’ to organizing the information. In this approach, Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness sentences, for example, would be analyzed by an algorithm that would find patterns based on sentence length, structure, and punctuation. This technique might find a work by James Joyce, one of Woolf’s influences — or that of an obscure author whose writings might otherwise never have been found.”

Ilya

Mosquito noise

I didn’t know that the “shimmering” compression disturbance around edges in MPEGs is called mosquito noise. Is the mush in highly compressed JPEGs also called mosquito noise?

I expect this and other compression signatures will start showing up as intentional special effects.

Ilya

March 5, 2006

  • Spy Media is a news photo marketplace. A great idea, which has been around for ages. The problem, of course, will be getting it to catch on.

March 1, 2006

Passclicks

Passclicks is an interesting alternative to traditional passwords. Passclicks are made up of a set number spots (“clicks”) in an image. The rationale is that people are better at remembering visual cues than random strings of letters and numbers.

I do wonder though, how “strong” passclicks can be considered? Taking into account the fact that most pictures will have certain focal points that most people will click, it might, statistically speaking, be quite weak.

Ilya

Typing game

This typing game is fun. It reminds me of a ten finger typing trainer program — but unlike those, this one doesn’t care if you hit the wrong characters (and you never have to use the backspace to correct anything). Actually, the game could actually do harm to my typing skills.

I wonder how quickly one would have to hit random keys for it to be a viable strategy in the game.

Ilya