Many tunnels in Sydney, Australia aren't tall enough to permit tractor trailers to move through safely. This animated gif shows a warning system that informs truck drivers when they're about to crash into a tunnel entrance. When sensors detect a vehicle that is too tall, the system pours water across the entrance to the tunnel and projects a stop sign onto that water curtain.
And everybody’s head exploded cuz they could not withstand the Nexus of Cute Squad.
Via Yahoo News
February 13, 2013 - the day Canada’s Parliament debated the zombie apocalypse. (x)
this is very important
Because Mom said so, that’s why.
Delivered to you by The Daily Mail
Since its release, the $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computer has been hailed as the perfect all-in-one retro game console. Now, it’s easier to do than ever, and it doesn’t take any Linux knowledge whatsoever. Here’s how to make your own retro game console in under 10 minutes.
O Lago Retba, no Senegal, está cor-de-rosa. A coloração é resultado de altos níveis de sal na água, e fica mais visíveis nas estações secas. Em algumas áreas, a concentração de sal chega a 40 %.
Senegaleses navegam diariamente nas águas do Retba, para coletar o mineral, que depois fica amontoado nas margens do lago. Assim como no Mar Morto, é bem fácil flutuar no Retba, por causa da alta concentração salina.
Segundo Michael Danson, microbiologista da Universidade de Bath, na Inglaterra, a cor é produzida por uma microalga, que se adapta e reproduz em meios com alta concentração de sal.
- Elas produzem um pigmento nesse tom que absorve e utiliza a luz solar para criar mais energia, deixando a água em tom rosa – explicou o especialista – Já chegamos a pensar que o Retba e o Mar Morto eram incompatíveis com formas de vida, mas eles são bastante vivos.
Stringed instruments have been played since time immemorial, and naturally as technology improves plenty of people are trying to recreate that kind of sound digitally. Of course, nothing compares to the rich, warm, sensual sound of an actual stringed instrument, and this is something that artist and artisan Jon Jones understands better than most people. That is why he created the Wheelharp, an incredible stringed instrument that manages to sound like the entire string section of an orchestra all on its own.
The beautiful instrument was inspired in 2001 by Jones’ hurdy-gurdy, an ancient stringed instrument that produces tones via a hand-cranked rosined wheel rubbing against strings. As much as Jones enjoyed the hurdy-gurdy, he wanted to know if he could create a full-scale chromatic instrument in which each string could produce a different sound when individually bowed on the rosined wheel. He set out to produce the first Wheelharp.
The result was an instrument of incomparable beauty and charm. Pressing on any of the Wheelharp’s keys moves a string toward the rosined wheel. Of the instrument’s two pedals, the right controls the speed of the motor which turns the wheel. The left pedal controls a damper system that extends across the strings. Although the instrument looks old-timey and low-tech, it also includes an electromagnetic pickup and a piezoelectric pickup, both of which allow the player to control the instrument’s amplification.
It would be impossible to describe the immense beauty and complexity of the music produced by the Wheelharp. It is truly an instrument like no other in the world. It is produced in two versions: a radial version (with the curved keyboard) and a linear model with a more familiar, traditional straight keyboard. Both models produce some of the most breathtaking music ever produced by a single instrument. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the Wheelharp is an object of beauty to look at, either. But if you want to give this incredible invention a try, be ready to pay for it: the least expensive version from Antiquity Music runs nearly $10,000.
    
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Or, as the Parc Zoologique & Botanique de Mulhouse in France would say, “Voila!”, which literally means, jeepers creepers where’d ya get those peepers?
Dimbi, the blue-eyed black lemur, a critically endangered species (boo, hiss), was born on March 8 (yay!) and just recently made his first public appearance.
See for yourself!
Can’t… look… away…
And you can see even more about Dimbi over at Zooborns.
In my previous article, we covered some of HTTP’s basics, such as the URL scheme, status codes and request/response headers. With that as our foundation, we will look at the finer aspects of HTTP, like connection handling, authentication and HTTP caching. These topics are fairly extensive, but we’ll cover the most important bits.
A connection must be established between the client and server before they can communicate with each other, and HTTP uses the reliable TCP transport protocol to make this connection. By default, web traffic uses TCP port 80. A TCP stream is broken into IP packets, and it ensures that those packets always arrive in the correct order without fail. HTTP is an application layer protocol over TCP, which is over IP.
HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP, inserting an additional layer between HTTP and TCP called TLS or SSL (Transport Layer Security or Secure Sockets Layer, respectively). HTTPS communicates over port 443 by default, and we will look at HTTPS later in this article.
An HTTP connection is identified by <source-IP, source-port> and <destination-IP, destination-port>. On a client, an HTTP application is identified by a <IP, port> tuple. Establishing a connection between two endpoints is a multi-step process and involves the following:
The server is responsible for always responding with the correct headers and responses.
In HTTP/1.0, all connections were closed after a single transaction. So, if a client wanted to request three separate images from the same server, it made three separate connections to the remote host. As you can see from the above diagram, this can introduce lot of network delays, resulting in a sub-optimal user experience.
To reduce connection-establishment delays, HTTP/1.1 introduced persistent connections, long-lived connections that stay open until the client closes them. Persistent connections are default in HTTP/1.1, and making a single transaction connection requires the client to set the Connection: close request header. This tells the server to close the connection after sending the response.
In addition to persistent connections, browsers/clients also employ a technique, called parallel connections, to minimize network delays. The age-old concept of parallel connections involves creating a pool of connections (generally capped at six connections). If there are six assets that the client needs to download from a website, the client makes six parallel connections to download those assets, resulting in a faster turnaround. This is a huge improvement over serial connections where the client only downloads an asset after completing the download for a previous asset.
Parallel connections, in combination with persistent connections, is today’s answer to minimizing network delays and creating a smooth experience on the client. For an in-depth treatment of HTTP connections, refer to the Connections section of the HTTP spec.
The server mostly listens for incoming connections and processes them when it receives a request. The operations involve:
Connection: close request header was foundOf course, this is not an exhaustive list of operations. Most applications/websites need to know who makes a request in order to create more customized responses. This is the realm of identification and authentication.
HTTP is an application layer protocol over TCP, which is over IP.
It is almost mandatory to know who connects to a server for tracking an app’s or site’s usage and the general interaction patterns of users. The premise of identification is to tailor the response in order to provide a personalized experience; naturally, the server must know who a user is in order to provide that functionality.
There are a few different ways a server can collect this information, and most websites use a hybrid of these approaches:
From, Referer, User-Agent – We saw these headers in Part 1.Cookies allow the server to attach arbitrary information for outgoing responses via the Set-Cookie response header. A cookie is set with one or more name=value pairs separated by semicolon (;), as in Set-Cookie: session-id=12345ABC; username=nettuts.
A server can also restrict the cookies to a specific domain and path, and it can make them persistent with an expires value. Cookies are automatically sent by the browser for each request made to a server, and the browser ensures that only the domain- and path-specific cookies are sent in the request. The request header Cookie: name=value [; name2=value2] is used to send these cookies to the server.
The best way to identify a user is to require them to sign up and log in, but implementing this feature requires some effort by the developer, as well as the user.
Techniques like OAuth simplify this type of feature, but it still requires user consent in order to work properly. Authentication plays a large role here, and it is probably the only way to identify and verify the user.
HTTP does support a rudimentary form of authentication called Basic Authentication, as well as the more secure Digest Authentication.
In Basic Authentication, the server initially denies the client’s request with a WWW-Authenticate response header and a 401 Unauthorized status code. On seeing this header, the browser displays a login dialog, prompting for a username and password. This information is sent in a base-64 encoded format in the Authentication request header. The server can now validate the request and allow access if the credentials are valid. Some servers might also send an Authentication-Info header containing additional authentication details.
A corollary to Basic-Authentication is Proxy Authentication. Instead of a web server, the authetication challenge is requested by an intermediate proxy. The proxy sends a Proxy-Authenticate header with a 407 Unauthorized status code. In return, the client is supposed to send the credentials via the Proxy-Authorization request header.
Digest Authentication is similar to Basic and uses the same handshake technique with the WWW-Authenticate and Authorization headers, but Digest uses a more secure hashing function to encrypt the username and password (commonly with MD5 or KD digest functions). Although Digest Authentication is supposed to be more secure than Basic, websites typically use Basic Authentication because of its simplicty. To mitigate the security concerns, Basic Auth is used in conjunction with SSL.
The HTTPS protocol provides a secure connection on the web. The easiest way to know if you are using HTTPS is to check the browser’s address bar. HTTPs’ secure component involves inserting a layer of encryption/decryption between HTTP and TCP. This is the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or the improved Transport Layer Security (TLS).
SSL uses a powerful form of encryption using RSA and public-key cryptography. Because secure transactions are so important on the web, a ubiquitous standards-based Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) effort has been underway for quite sometime.
Existing clients/servers do not have to change the way they handle messages because most of the hard work happens in the SSL layer. Thus, you can develop your web application using Basic Authentication and automatially reap the benefits of SSL by switching to the https:// protocol. However, to make the web application work over HTTPS, you need to have a working digital certificate deployed on the server.
Just as you need ID cards to show your identity, a web server needs a digital certificate to identify itself. Certificates (or “certs”) are issued by a Certificate Authority (CA) and vouch for your identity on the web. The CAs are the guardians of the PKI. The most common form of certificates is the X.509 v3 standard, which contains information, such as:
When a client makes a request over HTTPS, it first tries to locate a certificate on the server. If the cert is found, it attempts to verfiy it against its known list of CAs. If its not one of the listed CAs, it might show a dialog to the user warning about the website’s certficate.
Once the certificate is verified, the SSL handshake is complete and secure transmission is in effect.
It is generally agreed that doing the same work twice is wasteful. This is the guiding principle around the concept of HTTP caching, a fundamental pillar of the HTTP Network Infrastructure. Because most of the operations are over a network, a cache helps save time, cost and bandwidth, as well as provide an improved experience on the web.
Caches are used at several places in the network infrastructure, from the browser to the origin server. Depending on where it is located, a cache can be categorized as:
Regardless of where a cache is located, the process of maintaining a cache is quite similar:
Of course, the server is responsible for always responding with the correct headers and responses. If a document hasn’t changed, the server should respond with a 304 Not Modified. If the cached copy has expired, it should generate a new response with updated response headers and return with a 200 OK. If the resource is deleted, it should come back with 404 Not Found. These responses help tune the cache and ensure that stale content is not kept for too long.
Parallel connections, in combination with persistent connections, is today’s answer to minimizing network delays.
Now that we have a sense of how a cache works, it’s time to look at the request and response headers that enable the caching infrastructure. Keeping the content fresh and up-to-date is one of the primary responsibilities of the cache. To keep the cached copy consistent with the server, HTTP provides some simple mechanisms, namely Document Expiration and Server Revalidation.
HTTP allows an origin-server to attach an expiration date to each document using the Cache-Control and Expires response headers. This helps the client and other cache servers know how long a document is valid and fresh. The cache can serve the copy as long as the age of the document is within the expiration date. Once a document expires, the cache must check with the server for a newer copy and update its local copy accordingly.
Expires is an older HTTP/1.0 response header that specifies the value as an absolute date. This is only useful if the server clocks are in sync with the client, which is a terrible assumption to make. This header is less useful compared to the newer Cache-Control: max-age=<s> header introduced in HTTP/1.1. Here, max-age is a relative age, specified in seconds, from the time the response was created. Thus if a document should expire after one day, the expiration header should be Cache-Control: max-age=86400.
Once a cached document expires, the cache must revalidate with the server to check if the document has changed. This is called server revalidation and serves as a querying mechanism for the stale-ness of a document. Just because a cached copy has expired doesn’t mean that the server actually has newer content. Revalidation is just a means of ensuring that the cache stays fresh. Because of the expiration time (as specified in a previous server response), the cache doesn’t have to check with the server for every single request, thus saving bandwidth, time and reducing the network traffic.
The combination of document expiration and server revalidation is a very effective mechanism, it and allows distributed systems to maintain copies with an expiration date.
If the content is known to frequently change, the expiration time can be reduced—allowing the systems to re-sync more frequently.
The revalidation step can be accomplished with two kinds of request-headers: If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match. The former is for date-based validation while the latter uses Entity-Tags (ETags), a hash of the content. These headers use date or ETag values obtained from a previous server response. In case of If-Modified-Since, the Last-Modified response header is used; for If-None-Match, it is the ETag response header.
The validity period for a document should be defined by the server generating the document. If it’s a newspaper website, the homepage should expire after a day (or sometimes even every hour!). HTTP provides the Cache-Control and Expires response headers to set the expiration on documents. As mentioned earlier, Expires is based on absolute dates and not a reliable solution for controlling cache.
The Cache-Control header is far more useful and has a few different values to constrain how clients should be caching the response:
As an aside, if the server does not send any Cache-Control headers, the client is free to use its own heuristic expiration algorithm to determine freshness.
Cachability is not just limited to the server. It can also be specified from the client. This allows the client to impose constraints on what it is willing to accept. This is possible via the same Cache-Control header, albeit with a few different values:
HTTP Caching is actually a very interesting topic, and there are some very sophisticated algorithms to manage cached content. For a deeper look into this topic, refer to the Caching section of the HTTP spec.
Our tour of HTTP began with the foundation of URL schemes, status codes and request/response headers. Building upon those concepts, we looked at some of the finer areas of HTTP, such as connection handling, identification and authentication and caching. I am hopeful that this tour has given you a good taste for the breadth of HTTP and enough pointers to further explore this protocol.
In the background of flurries of punching, kicking, and special moves, fighting games have a long history of taking players on an exotic tour of the world. Reddit user RudeBootie has put together a collection of 125 retro fighting game backdrops depicting locations everywhere from training gyms, to the Serengeti, to hot springs — all as animated GIFs that recreate their bumpy 16-bit animations. The settings are pulled from nine different games, including three titles from the Street Fighter series. Though many of the locales have mystic or ancient vibes, the more modern-day settings are often filled with wonderful details hidden and animated in the background.
Kevin Francis Gray - Ghost Girl
I’ve seen this posted before, but I had never seen the face…!
Talvez vocês não se lembrem, mas no ano passado os franceses da Enodo chamaram a atenção dos gamers ao fechar uma parceria com a Crytek para utilizar a CryEngine 3 na construção de maquetes virtuais. A qualidade da criação dos caras mostrava que eles tinham total domínio sobre a ferramenta e embora não existisse a menor intenção da empresa se aventurar no mundo dos jogos eletrônicos, a primeira demonstração serviu para nos mostrar que seria possível ser criado com o poderoso kit de desenvolvimento.
Então, para deixar claro que os games podem ser utilizados também em outras áreas que não seja a do entretenimento, eles divulgaram outro vídeo muito impressionante que mostra mundos virtuais de tirar o fôlego e dessa vez, além de uma realista cidade ainda somos apresentados a uma savana que mesmo os mais fanáticos por games teriam dificuldade em identificar como sendo uma animação.
Contudo, por mais bonitas que sejam as maquetes criadas pela Enodo, o grande mérito delas é permitir que modificações sejam feitas em tempo real, possibilitando assim que os arquitetos possam mostrar os projetos aos seus clientes de maneira mais dinâmica, isso sem falar na quantidade de possibilidades que se abrem, como por exemplo podermos visitar um apartamento que temos interesse em comprar, mesmo sem precisar viajar metade do planeta para fazer isso.
É verdade que uma belezinha dessas não rodaria na maioria dos computadores, mas bem que eles poderiam disponibilizar essa demonstração para brincarmos um pouco.
[via Polygon]
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“Kairos” animated trailer by La Cachette studio (for the promotion of Ulysse Malassagne’s comic book)
This is pretty cool.
Georg Alexander Pick found a useful way to determine the area of a simple polygon with integer coordinates. If i is the number of lattice points in the interior and b is the number of lattice points on the boundary, then the area is given by
There are 40 lattice points in the interior of the figure above and 12 on the boundary, so its area is 40 + 12/2 – 1 = 45.
(Thanks, Pål.)
Submitted by: ashwait (via Cheezburger iOS Builder)
Tagged: rainbows , wtf , mindwarp Share on Facebook 
Architects Moon Hoon designed a house in Chungcheongbuk-do, South Korea, that uses a staircase as a slide, a library and a room-divider. My goodness, it is lovely.
The basic request of upper and lower spatial organization and the shape of the site promted a long and tin house with fluctuating facade which would allow for more differentiated view. The key was coming up with a multi-functional space which is a large staircase, bookshelves, casual reading space, home cinema, slide and many more…The client was very pleased with the design, and the initial design was accepted and finalized almost instantly, only with minor adjustments. The kitchen and dining space is another important space where family gathers to bond. The TV was pushed away to a smaller living room. The attic is where the best view is possible, it is used as a play room for younger kids. The multi-use stair and slice space brings much active energy to the house, not only children, but also grown ups love the slide staircase…An action filled playful house for all ages…
Panorama House by Moon Hoon (via Neatorama) 
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The web has been abuzz about games with a focus on depression this year, Depression Quest in particular catching everyone's eye. But this very small subcategory of free games goes beyond just that title, and we can take in a true variety of experiences when exploring this space.
I'm going to discuss four such games, evaluating them both as the idiosyncratic games critic that I am and as a person who is depressed. I want to see what these games can teach us about this ubiquitous mental illness that we might otherwise miss in our daily lives, as well as whether gaming can be an effective means of promoting mental health discussions.
This is a bit of a text adventure, and if you're familiar with Choice Of Games you'll feel right at home with the format. This work of fiction, though, is not fantastical. It’s about a regular 20-something guy with a steady girlfriend who works a shitty job and suffers from severe depression.
What follows the introduction to this character is a series of vignettes in which you must make decisions, either healthy or unhealthy or unhealthier. Though this story will likely not perfectly describe your own specific battle with depression, I found that—following the types of choices I made in my own life as I struggled to deal with my illness—this guy came out pretty much the same way I did, albeit in a seemingly more compressed timeline.
A quirk in the listed choices this game gives you that I'm not entirely comfortable with is the appearance of struck-through choices. For example, our hero comes home from work and wants to make some progress on a personal project, but he's feeling quite moody and mentally exhausted. So you'll have options like:
1. Hunker down and get to work
2. Watch some TV for a bit
3. Go to bed
I'm not a fan of including the “normal people” options, because it makes clear what is in truth a very deceptive situation. I'd prefer that if we're not going to be able to choose an option, we shouldn't even know it is an option, because that is the nature of depression. It's a trickster.
Even so, I found Depression Quest to be a laudable effort, and I think it can be an effective tool for teaching folks who don't have to deal with depression what it feels like.
The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab created a very short game called Elude, which is a metaphorical representation of the depression experience. It begins in a dark forest, which is emblematic of the “default” mood of many depression sufferers: lethargic, cloudy, uninterested in the world. As the player character walks forward (this is a 2D experience), he encounters birds (things he enjoys), and he can “resonate” with them in order be able to jump higher than he could otherwise. The goal, then, is to progress upward by jumping on tree branches until you get above the treeline.
At this juncture, the game is basically Doodle Jump, and you'll keep going and going until you goof up, at which point you fall down to a place below where you started, which is painfully bleak and features sinkholes that drop you even further down. Eventually, though, you can pull yourself back up to the dark forest and begin again.
The second time I fell from the sky, however, I found myself on an incline, where trying to climb upward was slow and not particularly fruitful. I was unable to get back onto level ground. So I let myself slide down the hill until I fell into a pit, and that was game over.
The metaphor here is quite clear. A depressed person can pull himself out of the pits sometimes, but the slightest push will drop him down to the emotional depths with which all depressed people are familiar. And falling hard enough can leave you in a hole too deep to climb out of.
This little top-down game looks pretty typical when you first start it up. But about five seconds in you realize it's not at all what it appears to be. In it, you are Evan, a fat guy who hates his life. The present arc of the story has Evan going about his day, but you're constantly shown what's going on inside his mind.
It's all so cleverly written, yes, and creator Will O'Neill is without a doubt an excellent writer with a keen wit. But the text he puts down in the form of story vignettes manages to be self-deprecating to the extreme and features a rather pathetic depiction of a human being.
But in no way is it a far-fetched one. I look at Evan and see a kindred spirit, someone who externally appears pretty normal but inside is full of deep turmoil. And, like me, he tends to be hyper-self-aware without really having any grasp on what's going on around him. He's paranoid. He thinks he has no friends.
But he's wrong and we, as outsiders, can view his circumstances more objectively, which is how it always goes. Depression tells you lies, and you believe them. You need external perspectives, and while Evan is getting some in this game, he's not listening. He thinks what's in his head is right and everyone else is wrong. He's been living with his illness so long that's it may be too ingrained for him to overcome it. But you'll have to play the game to find out if that's really the case.
A quick and dirty flash game, Inner Vision is about you talking to some depressed people who are considering suicide. Your goal is to talk them down. The game is not difficult, and my friend Phil Hornshaw over at Game Front, who pointed me to this game, thought it felt slight because of that. And it does make it seem entirely too easy to deal with somebody who is experiencing a major depressive episode, which Phil has done a few times when I've been in my dark moods.
But I don't think this game is for people who don't have depression. Rather, it's for people who do. In my experience, it's hard for me to find a clear solution to my problems when I'm experiencing a crisis, but if somebody else I know is going through the same thing, I have all the right words for them.
And so in this game, when you see somebody feeling the way you've felt, and you say the things that you know need to be said, and you see them react positively to your input, it can reveal how to deal with your own issues. If you don't have real people with whom you can experience this role reversal, I think Inner Vision can be a decent substitute even if it doesn't explore depression super deeply.
These four games are all interesting in their own ways, and they certainly demonstrate the range of art that can be produced within the parameters of a video game. Playing them is indeed a rewarding experience, whether you're depressed or not. But I think those who are can play these and gain greater context for the things happening in their minds. That's the true power of artistic media.
Phil Owen is a freelance entertainment journalist whose work you might have seen at IGN, GameFront, Appolicious and many, many other places. You can follow him on Twitter at @philrowen.
