I found this HD webcam overlooking the Miraflores lock on the Panama canal. A fascinating reminder of the ever-turning wheels of trade, and great when you can see a panamax-class vessel go through (the largest that will fit, with less than a metre clearance on each side).
Updates are a little bit less regular than one would like, but it does work. I wonder how long it will be before we commonly see full-motion video of such sites?
I’ve talked about Tokyo trains here quite a bit, so I thought it’s only fair to mention that other great train city of the world – London. Here’s a great blog which covers the world of rails (the other kind of rails) in ol’ Blighty.
And speaking of London, my airline-industry housemate has been telling hilarious stories about what an unmitigated cock-up the Terminal 5 opening at Heathrow has been. Planes forced to take off without any bags at all, mountains of tens of thousands of unsorted luggage sitting in no-mans-land (up to 40,000 at one point). A fleet of trucks driving thousands of suitcases to Milan ad elsewhere to be processed – screening them for air transport being all but impossible. The worldwide luggage forwarding system is a nightmarishly complex, labour-intensive system, and even a single lost item can create hours of work to return to its rightful owner, so a failure on the scale of Terminal 5 is a snowballing disaster which will keep BA staff working late for months. One can’t help but feel sorry for the poor chaps who will have to sort that out.
WOW! I just discovered the best bargain on earth!
This company, Numly, is giving you the chance to receive up to 100 of its special numbers for the tiny price of $4.95 per month! That’s less that 5c per auto-generated number. Plus, you can then display the number on your website!
You can get your numbers by the OSX Dashboard or even a special Firefox plug-in. It’s never been easier – or cheaper – to get numbers. What a deal!
I’m signing up right away.
UPDATE: After careful analysis, I’ve decided to enter competition with Numly. It’s going to be tough, but you, the customer, can only win.
Accordingly, I’m offering not 100, not 200, but 1000 numbers a month for the very same price. In fact, order now, and I’ll throw in another 1000 numbers. Actually, you don’t even need to pay. Just post your email and I’ll fill up your mailbox with billions of fucking numbers.
Long numbers, short numbers, we got all sorts of numbers just waiting to satisfy your every numeric need. Free numbers for all, only on Sho Fukamachi Online!
First thousand FREE numbers after the jump – first come first serve!
(more…)
I’ve been enjoying this blog.
Heard of Microsoft’s new Online Services initiative? Thought you’d check out the site?
You should. It’s at http://www.mosbeta.com/, and it’s one of the worst recent web sites I’ve seen by a large company.
Firstly, the web page is completely invalid. It’s not just a little bit wrong, as many are – hell, this site fails validation, mainly due to a couple of widgets. But the Microsoft site is hopeless. It doesn’t even have a DOCTYPE, the most basic description of what the page is even supposed to be. Publishing a web page without a DOCTYPE is unfathomable in this day and age – this is a point that is hard to overstate, for those of you unfamiliar with web design. There’s no charset, no meta tags whatsoever. It’s utterly, and incomprehensibly, incompetent.
Secondly, the site contains a “navigation bar” consisting of what appear to be links to other parts of the site: “Microsoft® Exchange Online | Microsoft® Office SharePoint Online | Microsoft® Office Live Meeting”. These are not actually links but merely unclickable text. Again, unfathomable – why are they even there? The CSS file contains classes to style these list items if they are links, but they’re not. Elsewhere, CSS is used partially and inconsistently. Very strange.
Thirdly, the site makes heavy use of a non-standard and rare display plugin, “Silverlight”. The viewer is exhorted to install this plug-in not once but twice on the same page. The viewing areas are iframes served from a third party site – again, unfathomable. Why not use a common video format such as flash or quicktime – or at the very least an image preview if the plugin is not installed? This is easy to do. Adding to the strangeness, the div that surrounds the silverlight window is entitled “flashpiece”.
Fourth, the site makes use of rare, non-standard, outdated tags in strange configurations. Take this excerpt from the code:
Forgive yourself if you had to go look up what
and
even were, I had to as well. wbr is an ancient tag meaning “insert break here if needed”, whereas
indicate to the browser that text included inside those tags should not be broken. The most recent documentation I could even find on these archaic tags was from 1999. Adding to the weirdness, I couldn’t find any reference to the notion that
even needs to be closed. XHMTL would require it to be closed – but wbr is not valid in XHTML anyway, not that the page is XHTML regardless, since there’s no freaking DOCTYPE! But there’s the XHTML-style self-closing
in there? Who on earth coded this website?
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Microsoft’s new website about its online services platform – beta, no less, implying that it should at least be recently made – is an incompetently written, strangely archaic, and ugly to boot mishmash of invalid, outdated HTML, obscure plug-ins and links that go nowhere. If this is a taste of what’s to come from MOS, Google, and everyone else, can breathe easy.
Pretty ironic choice of movie, considering most people I know would say you’d have to be a Jackass to consider using SilverLight for anything at all.
From here.
Via my good buddy Hans at Daring Greaseball comes an amazing quote, from this Wired article:
“Apple’s day has finally come, and Apple users are going to get hit hard,” security researcher Gadi Evron said. “OS X is the new Windows 98.”
That is the dumbest fucking quote I ever heard. It basically makes me want to punch Mr Evron right in the gob. I think that if I was standing in front of “Gadi” with a gun when he caused those dumbfoundingly moronic words to be issued from his mouth, I wouldn’t even be conscious of my arm raising and shooting him right in the face – it would just be a natural, normal reflex action for the good of oneself and the world at large.
OSX is the new Windows 98! What a stunning insight, and I wholeheartedly agree. The two systems could not be more alike – if, indeed, they were ever anything other than completely identical in every way. I just don’t know why Mr. Evron didn’t go further – after all, OSX isn’t just the new Windows 98, it *is* Windows 98. Literally. First Edition.
I could read this wonderful update from Hans due to a rare condition I recently experienced on this Mac – a cosmological alignment of sorts, by which through an obscure combination of unseen and likely unknowable factors, a one in a million chance really, I was able to read my RSS subscriptions in Mail.app, along with another couple of email messages that managed to run the gauntlet and make it onto my local machine. However, I’m really hoping that Apple doesn’t act quickly to fix Leopard mail’s utterly broken IMAP implementation – I’ve come to enjoy watching it endlessly, pointlessly attempt to synchronise my inbox over the last three days. No, what I really want is for Apple to update iTunes with new features for iPhones!
UPDATE: that article has even more stupid quotes:
But Carl Howe, an Apple analyst at Blackfriars Communications, disputes the security researchers’ theories. He thinks that OS X’s Linux heritage makes Apple systems less vulnerable to attack than Windows-based platforms.
Oh yes, the much-vaunted Linux heritage. But hang on – now I’m getting confused! Is OSX based on linux, or Windows 98? Or could it be .. both!!!
Oh .. maybe linux is based on Windows 98 .. and OSX is based on linux! OK, now I understand.
“I don’t care if you have to type in your admin password,” Eckelberry said. “If you are asked to install a QuickTime plug-in, you will.”
Yeah, you will if you’re a FUCKING MORON. Seriously, anyone who gets infected with this stupid trojan deserves it. You’d have to be an absolute idiot to download and install – as root! – some unknown program from a free porn site. Good riddance, I say.
But Eckelberry (another LOL name) doesn’t care if you have to type in your admin password. You hear that? He just couldn’t give a shit, and that’s the end of the matter. All through this article I’d been waiting for the word from the Meister – “Yes yes, Windows 98, trojans, Linux .. get to the bit telling us what Eckelberry thinks!” said I. And there you have it – the final word. Eckelberry couldn’t give a flying fuck if you have to type your admin password, so get lost.
I’m amazed at the quality of these quotes. Where do they find these people? Do they specifically seek out the “idiot view”? How can these presumably prominent IT industry people be so ignorant – and the supposedly informed WIRED reporter can’t see it?
This is exactly the kind of website I like. Simple, does exactly what it says it will, with no bullshit – and with RSS support!
It’s taken long enough but I finally have a fan! In a lengthy love letter, Nazi blog “Private Intelligence” thoroughly endorses me, my blog, my comments policy, my comments, my image use and attribution policy, my opinions on WordPress and pretty much everything else, and Hitler. After some quick telepathic communication with the racist owner of “Private Intelligence” I’ve obtained permission to post the entire article right after the jump, translated from its original German. Enjoy!
UPDATE: Due to a DMCA complaint (I am not kidding, the owner of Private Intelligence actually sent one) I’ve removed the translated article. Of course there was no merit whatsoever, but I don’t want to piss off my kind host.
UPDATE 2: Check out my admirer’s new 1700-word essay on this very subject, espeically if you’re having trouble sleeping, right here. Note how the “private intellectual” doesn’t seem quite “intellectual” enough to correctly implement permalinks on his outdated WordPress blog!
If the Wikipedia entry discussing Weird Al Yankovic’s music video for “White and Nerdy” isn’t the height of unwitting self-parody, I don’t know what is. Highlights:
The equation in the background of the chorus is Schrödinger’s wave equation for the hydrogen atom; however, there is an error in that Planck’s constant (denoted h) is displayed in place of Dirac’s constant (denoted ħ).
At the end of the video, Al flashes the Vulcan salute in place of a gang sign; though he uses Surak’s variant from the episode The Savage Curtain rather than the more standard salute.
Jesus H Christ. It reads like an Onion parody.
Look at the mimicry by this baby of adults talking on the phone. He’s got the cadence and general sound of the conversation, the aimless walk pattern, and the phone-holding pose down. He even says “shit!”.
Kind of spooky.
This excellent article in today’s NY Times challenges a lot of what I thought I knew about diet and obesity. From the article:
Dr. Stunkard ended up with 540 adults whose average age was 40. They had been adopted when they were very young — 55 percent had been adopted in the first month of life and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life. His conclusions, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, were unequivocal. The adoptees were as fat as their biological parents, and how fat they were had no relation to how fat their adoptive parents were.
I had no idea that study existed. Everyone has observed the obvious correlation between fat parents and fat children, but I’d always assumed it was environmental.
And while we’re posting medical articles, here’s another one which blew me away:
As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller “How We Die,” the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn’t be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn’t receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can’t be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover.
That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “After one hour,” he says, “we couldn’t see evidence the cells had died. We thought we’d done something wrong.” In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.
Read the whole article to learn how if this research is accurate, resuscitation after cardiopulmonary failure might be possible for hours after bloodflow stops.
Fascinating experiment in user interface at Don’t Click It. Using it for a few minutes you begin to realise .. wow, I really DO miss clicking. Pity it’s flash, although you would have difficulty doing it any other way ..
via TooBiased
Has to be http://monsterpod.us/. Load it up while doing a net/inspect/all in Firebug and giggle as it grinds its way through an incredible 161 requests, totalling 7.28M (!) and taking over two and a half minutes on my 100Mbit connection.
It’s not often these days you come across a gem like this webpage.
Click the “english” link for some delightful information such as:
ad space
GOOD PLACE FOR
ADVERTISEMENT
WOULD YOU LIKE TO
MAKE AD IN THIS SPACE?
PLEASE CONTACT US THE
PRICE OF MAKE AD.
I enjoyed this article immensely:
Not for the first time, I was subjected the other day to a heartfelt diatribe on how Ikea has singlehandedly leached all the vitality and vigor out of the world, shoehorned human creativity into an infinity of barcode-anonymous MDF wall units, and spawned endless cyborg armies of khaki-clad, essentially fungible consumervolk.
You read that right: Ikea.
Reminds me of a few people I know. Worth a read here.
The article also contributed my word of the day: ahistoricity. Although I previously disliked its root word historicity – a contraction of “historical authenticity” – I now like both. Having the compound meaning in just one word makes it more accessible in everyday conversation, and even better is its newfound eligibility for the good old a- prefix – making a single, concise word out of a cumbersome phrase.
If we’re hoping to generally improve the level of dialogue, a good place to start is making complex concepts more generally accessible. Good old ever-changing English.
Hilarious post at Idolising St Anna in which our “blind Parago fan” santos26 travels to Velfarre expecting to see his favourite band, Paradise Go! Go!, but unbeknowst to him has actually bought a ticket to a concert by 62 (!) groups of idol wanna-bes before Parago perform. He sits through 5 HOURS of this and, Tsunku-style, reviews the highlights for our delightment.
Great stuff! Next time, take a camera … 
From Christopher Hitchens writing in the Weekly Standard, a very good article arguing the case for the Iraq war, knowing all we do now, that echoes many of my own sentiments on the matter:
Hitchens doesn’t go into several important aspects in this article, such as the necessity to break the controlling position the Saudis enjoy(ed) in oil, a position which guarantees them a near-impunity to fund radical Islamic movements worldwide. But it’s still a very good article for anyone seeking to cut through some of the ludicrous misinformation and naïve blindness surrounding this important issue.
From Normblog.
UPDATE: with a germane quote:
War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill
Here is a 1998 (H9 = year of the most recent empress’s death, 1989, plus 9 years) Civic 3-door hatchback on auction at Yahoo Japan, with a single bid of 10,000 yen (AUD$120), which has passed its reserve price with 2 days to go. It may well go up, but will almost certainly sell for under AUD$1000.
Unfortunately, 海外発送はしません。(Seller will not ship internationally.）
UPDATE: In case you think this kind of price isn’t normal, see this post from left-wing idiot “Danieru-san” (vomit), who bought his car for GBP£600 – around AUD$1400.
UPDATE 2: Don’t like Japanese cars? No problem. This BMW has also passed reserve – 551,000 円, or AUD$6,430. Get in quick!
One site I’ve been sure to check almost every day has been Greg’s inimitable “Jeremiah Blues”, where he has been doggedly posting a large selection of mp3s from the near-mythical radio program, “The Morgan and Julag Show”.
Many of these recordings are laugh-out-loud funny and handsomely showcase the consumate comedy skill of the producers. Highly recommended if you are open minded about humour.
Find it here.