firehose

Pictures We Didn’t Take Before Digital Cameras by Twenty Pixels

via Tastefully Offensive

Blow up

“The most fascinating reaction (to Palmer’s TED talk) was that of a trumpet-player friend who decided to include the video in an email he sent to three up-and-coming Chicago big band leaders he works with. His request was not to let the bands’ audiences pay — they were already doing that with a tip jar, after all — but to actually start charging for the shows. He watched a successful musician talk about how she makes money by asking her fans to contribute, looked at his own situation, and instead of going with her plan, he went for the polar opposite. Because her plan does not make logical sense to anyone who doesn’t have her level of fame.”

- Mad Art Lab | Amanda Palmer and the Privilege of Success

How diverse is Silicon Valley? Most tech companies really, really don't want you to know, and the U.S. government isn't helping shed any light on the issue.

Life During Wartime

1 | Coming Soon: A Monotype Exhibit Tracing The Roots Of Modern Typography | Co.Design: business innovation design

SimCity sales top 1.1 million:

nnh

Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza maintained a spreadsheet filled with information from mass killings from the past and further alleges that it's a major sign of how video games influenced the mindset and planning of Lanza's terrible act of lethal violence, according to a front page story in today's New York Daily News.

A law enforcement source who spoke to the Daily News says Lanza's spreadsheet, which allegedly measures 7 feet by 4 feet, contained information on the weapons various killers used and the number of people killed. They say it amounted to a grisly high score list, one that Lanza wanted to wind up on top of:

"They don't believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet," the newspaper's source continued. "This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills. That's what (the Connecticut police) believe."

The existence of the spreadsheet came to light during the International Association of Police Chiefs and Colonels conference, which the News' source had attended. Col. Danny Stebbins from the Connecticut State Police spoke at the law enforcement convention and his presentation talked about how the state's police community are tying together this spreadsheet to Lanza's obsession with video games. The Daily News report named no specific games that Lanza may have played, which is standard in mainstream news reports.

"It really was like he was lost in one of his own sick games," the paper's source went on. "That's what we heard. That he learned something from his game that you learn in (police) school, about how if you're moving from room to room - the way he was in that school - you have to reload before you get to the next room. Maybe he has a 30-round magazine clip, and he's only used half of it. But he's willing to dump 15 rounds and have a new clip before he arrives in the next room."

The source says that Lanza's methods in the shooting were: "Classic police training. Or something you learn playing kill games."

Lanza is described not as a typical gamer but as a deranged one: "They believe that (Lanza) believed that it was the way to pick up the easiest points. It's why he didn't want to be killed by law enforcement. In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points. They believe that's why he killed himself."

***

The impulse many people who love and play video games will be to complain about mainstream media again blaming games for horrible real-world violence. The wake of the Newtown massacre has seen politicians and pundits of every stripe weighing on how best to evaluate the effect video games may have on behavior, especially when it comes to people like Lanza, who was presumably mentally ill.

However, the urge to defend video games and those who play them shouldn't prevent us from considering that, a killer like Lanza may have drawn some sick influence from playing a shooter game.

Lupica: Morbid find suggests murder-obsessed gunman Adam Lanza plotted Newtown, Conn.'s Sandy Hook massacre for years [NY Daily News]

Top pic: Parents leaving a staging era after being reunited with their children following a shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Credit: AP/Jessica Hill

At NewsGator and Sepia Labs I worked with Brian Reischl, one of the server-side guys. Among other things, he worked on NewsGator’s RSS content service, which reads n million feeds once an hour.

(I don’t know if I can say what n is. It surprised me when I heard it. The system is still running, by the way.)

Brian is intimately acquainted with the different ways feeds can be screwed up. So he posted Stupid Feed Tricks on Google Docs.

I quote the entire thing below for people like me who don’t have Google accounts. The below is all by Brian:

Stupid HTTP Tricks

1. When the feed is gone/errored, publisher may still return a 200 OK but send an HTML page instead.
2. Using permanent redirects for temporary errors. In one instance, all the Microsoft blogs had a temporary system error. All the feeds did a permanent redirect to the same system error page, and we updated all 40,000 feeds to point to that one URL. Whoops.
3. Using very slow or overloaded servers. It might take 60 seconds just to connect and send the request, another 60 seconds to first response byte, and so on. This can bog down your content retrieval.
4. Very slow responses, or responses that never actually complete (ie, you hang trying to read data essentially forever)
5. Infinitely long responses. eg, feed server has an error and prints an error message in a infinite loop until something stops it. Hopefully it’s stopped by a check in your system, rather than consuming all the memory on your server.
6. Sending back things that are not XML (eg, videos). It can help to check Content-Type and Content-Length headers, but sometimes they misidentify RSS as something else (eg, text/plain).
7. Returning an HTML page containing HTML/Javascript redirects instead of using HTTP redirects.
8. Infinite redirect loops.
9. Long (but non-infinite) chains of redirects.
10. Responding with 304 Not Modified if you send any If-None-Match/If-Modified-Since header, even if the feed has changed.
11. Throttling your IP address. Some don’t tell you they’re throttling. Some provide Retry-After headers, but the HTTP status code can vary. eg, Twitter used to use their cutesy “420 Enhance Your Calm” response, then switched to “500 Internal Server Error”. Some use “503 Unavailable”. You’re mostly covered if you look for Retry-After headers in every non-success response..
12. Redirecting (perhaps permanently) to a URL that’s already in your system. So now you either have a duplicate feed, or you have to update clients somehow. Note this can sometimes be legitimate, eg consolidating multiple feeds into one.

Stupid XML Tricks

1. Any sort of XML well-formedness error you can think of. Missing closing tags, mismatched tags, bad escaping, not quoting attributes, missing root elements.
2. Including unescaped HTML content inside a tag - which sort of works, except that most HTML isn’t XML-compliant.
3. Putting in characters that are illegal in XML documents (eg, some non-printable characters that should be escaped, but aren’t)
4. Declaring the document as ISO-8859-1 encoding, but actually using UTF-8, with some Arabic characters in it.

Stupid RSS/Atom Tricks

1. Missing any element you can think of.
2. Adding custom elements without namespaces.
3. Using common extension elements without defining the namespaces (eg, using the common “mrss” namespace prefix for MediaRSS elements, without actually specifying that namespace anywhere)
4. Not providing a GUID.
5. Providing the same GUID for every post in the feed (eg, using the feed URL as the GUID)
6. Providing the same GUID for every post, but changing each time you request the feed (eg, using the current date/time)
7. Using a different GUID for each post, changing each time you request the feed (eg, generating an actual GUID each time the feed is requested)
8. Not giving a PubDate
9. Changing the PubDate on every retrieval.
10. Changing the PubDate when a post is edited, rather than using a lastUpdated tag.
11. Putting a tiny number of posts in the feed (sometimes just one). These types then usually publish 10 articles in the space of two minutes, and wonder why you’re missing 9 of them.
12. Putting only one post in the feed, with a GUID that never changes. When there are new posts, just the title and description change. (I believe this was a bunch of Japanese newspaper sites.)
13. Updating post content without changing the lastUpdated date (or not having one)
14. Updating post metadata (eg, enclosures, MediaRSS extensions, etc) with or without changing the lastUpdated date.
15. Treating their feed as append-only, so over time the feed grows without bound. eg, each request might pull back 10,000 posts covering the entire 8 year history of the feed.
16. Specifying dates in whatever their language’s “Date.ToString()” spits out. eg, “Tuesday, March 31st, Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand And Twelve, 4:59 PM”
17. Not specifying timezones for dates (very common. It’s easy to just assume UTC, but note that can yield pubdates in the future).
18. Specifying dates that are far in the past or future (anything up to thousands of years)
19. Having the Link element point to another site. This is actually pretty common (eg, DaringFireball). This can be a problem depending on how you’re identifying individual posts, or if you’re trying to detect duplicates across feeds.

Other Stupid Tricks

1. Updating posts very frequently. Newspapers are very fond of this. In 4 hours they might change a post 12 times, by the end it might have nothing in common with the original article (completely different title, completely different body). Sometimes combined with not using lastUpdated, or just not changing lastUpdate.
2. Publishing updated posts as new posts, so you have 12 versions of the same post in the feed.
3. Occasionally giving you an two-week-old version of the feed for one or two requests. It looked like one server in a cluster had cached an old version and wasn’t updating it. (This was the New York Times back in ~2009. They might’ve fixed it by now.)
4. Adding posts very quickly. This is very common with feeds like the StockTwits stream, Twitter feeds (when that was allowed), the “all news” feeds from news organizations, etc. If you only check the feed every 60 minutes, you could easily miss something.
5. Changing content literally every time you get the feed. eg, a feed that returns the current time in all the timezones, or the current weather for 20 different cities.
6. Putting out private data without requiring authorization of any sort. eg, a feed of all your GMail. This isn’t a problem until you provide search or other feed discoverability, and then people’s private data starts showing up. Then they get very angry.
7. Some places will publish a feed and then get angry that you use it, especially if you have ads in your reader. (name redacted before I get sued) got very bent out of shape over that back in ~2007.
8. Providing feeds, but then also using robots.txt to say you can’t crawl it. So now do you violate the robots.txt, or not let your users subscribe to feeds because the publisher is a dipshit?
9. Providing valid, but limited interest feeds. eg, search feeds (couches for sale in Portland on Craigslist!). Also lots of custom things like combinations from Yahoo Pipes (or whatever equivalent people come up with), bookmark/favorite feeds, etc. Can lead to lots of duplicate (or near duplicate) posts, and lots of feed retrievals that very few people care about.
10. Publishers will routinely have 2-4 copies of the exact same feed. eg, one sourced from their site, and another republished through FeedBurner. Note: FeedBurner includes extension elements that tell you what the source feed and post were.
11. Including malicious Javascript or HTML inside of the content in hopes of hacking your system. There was a test suite for this, unfortunately I don’t have the URL handy just now.

Random Notes

1. You should think hard about canonicalization of URLs. Some parts of the URL can be case-sensitive (path and query) other parts can’t (protocol, host and post). Users (and webmasters) will absolutely use different upper/lower casing in different places.
2. If you build a database index on FeedUrl, consider that 99% of them start with “http://”, which makes for a shitty index. Consider separating the protocol into its own column, and then indexing on the remainder of the URL. Alternatively, you could index on a hashed value of the URL. Theoretically you could have collisions, but in practice there are not that many feeds.

A napping cat accompanies an accordionist by piping in with sleepy meows.

video via placebolikeanart

via Nothing To Do With Arbroath

Internets

Bill

Vlambeer, the team behind confirmed iOS smash hit Ridiculous Fishing, is considering the logistics of porting the game to Android, creator Rami Ismail wrote in a Reddit AMA yesterday. Don't shoot your hopes sky-high just yet, though.

"We're still arguing about an Android release," Ismail said. "There are a lot of things to consider and a lot of things that we just don't know too much about since we've yet to make a game for Android. As soon as we figure all that stuff out, we'll see what we can do."

Ridiculous Fishing costs $3 on the App Store, higher than the accepted average of $0.99 per game, though it offers absolutely no microtransactions. This was a pointed decision: "Developers shouldn't be scared to charge $3 for a game," Ismail said.

"The problem is that at $0.99, you'll need to sell endless amounts of copies to be able to survive as an indie developer. Most games don't even get close to that. A direct result of the whole race-to-the-bottom in prices is the prevalance of free-to-play on iOS - it seems to be a safer bet. But since it's almost impossible to do F2P in a non-evil way and without sacrificing the elegance of your game design, we'll prefer to charge $3."

Vlambeer's Android dreams and why $0.99 makes it hard to be indie originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“

Religious leaders from a variety of faiths, including clergy from Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist and Unitarian churches from more than 70 cities and towns across the state signed the letter opposing the governor’s plan.

Signers included the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana, the bishop of the Louisiana Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church and president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

”

- 250 clergy call Jindal tax plan unfair to poor - Yahoo! News

Welcome to the Working Week

Irrational Games released a new TV ad for their upcoming first person shooter video game BioShock Infinite that takes viewers on a heroic ride through the floating city of Columbia. The ad aired during an episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead on Sunday, March 17, 2013. BioShock Infinite is set to be released on March 26, 2013 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. It is available to pre-order online from the official website, Steam and Amazon.

Watch as Booker DeWitt, with weapons in one hand, and powerful vigors in the other, takes a death defying leap onto the Sky-Line, to rescue Elizabeth from the floating sky-city of Columbia.

music by Nico Vega – “Beast”

video via Irrational Games

via The Awesomer

This is a two player experience, but you can also play it solo. Press R to restart game. Player one: W, A, S, D Player two: UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT – [Author's Description]

[Play online (HTML5)]

Comedy site Funny or Die has announced that it will release iSteve, the “FIRST Steve Jobs biopic,” on April 15, 2013. The 60-minute movie was written and directed by Ryan Perez and stars Justin Long (as Jobs). Perez is quoted on Arts Beat at The New York Times as saying, “In true Internet fashion, it’s not based on very thorough research — essentially a cursory look at the Steve Jobs Wikipedia page…It’s very silly. But it looks at his whole life.” Learn more about the film at The New York Times.

We made a movie! “iSteve” stars @justinlong & will be the FIRST Steve Jobs biopic on April 15th. Read all about it: ow.ly/jaI6Z

— Funny Or Die (@funnyordie) March 18, 2013

image via iClarified

via The New York Time Arts Beat

In the southeastern corner of Europe, the small country of Albania is covered by more than 700,000 bunkers—that’s 1 bunker for every 4 Albanians. The bunkers were built at enormous cost between 1967 and 1985 as part of the paranoid national defense strategy of the country’s longtime communist dictator, Enver Hoxha. Though the bunkers saturate the country from its beaches to its city streets, they were of little military value and were never used during Hoxha’s 40 year rule. Due to the cost and difficulty of removing the bunkers they still remain. They now serve as tourist attractions, homes, make-out spots, but mostly, they’re eyesores.

The photos seen here are by Dutch photographer David Galjaard, who began documenting the bunkers back in 2008. He has assembled his photographs in Concresco, a 2012 photo book.

via Wired

caffeinatedqueer:

thescienceofobsession:

luciawestwick:

are you ok, tumblr?

And that’s all it takes…

I tried to scroll passed without reblogging, but then I 

“

Q. Now that technology plays such a strong role in our dating lives, what’s the biggest mistake single women make today?

Sherrie: Over-sharing, texting back in mere seconds, double-texting on accident, accepting booty calls, not ending chats, calls, or Skype sessions first — as in, letting them go on for hours — or just being too available to men in general. A guy will lose interest if he hears from you too frequently.

Q. What’s the biggest dating mistake that men make today?

Sherrie: Most guys don’t make dating mistakes. They chase the women they want, and ignore the ones they don’t want.

”

- Revising the “Rules” for modern daters

Veteran comics pro Chuck Austen has advise for his fellow Tokypop creators who, like him, have been adversely affected by the publisher's refusal to negotiate for the release of properties they created.

On Saturday, Defense Distributed—America’s best-known group of 3D gunsmiths—announced on Facebook that its founder, Cody Wilson, now has a federal license to be a gun manufacturer and dealer.

PAX East is in a few short days and so are the all-important parties. SideQuesting has put together a mega list of gatherings and get-togethers going on around the convention.

Many of the parties require tickets or RSVPs... er, RSVPing? In many cases you'll have to sign up and say your party monster self is coming.

Remember, it's Boston in March and it's expected to be near or below freezing every night. Dress appropriately if you plan on party hopping. Trust.

[Javier Brosch via Shutterstock]2013

PAX East 2013 party list originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Superfeedr : Introducing a free Superfeedr plan!:

In the various list of Google Reader alternatives, we found out that a lot of indie hackers were either hosting their own reader or even creating one.

These people usually decided to build their own pollers because they could not afford to use Superfeedr for such a low volume of data. That made us sad, so we’re changing it.

If your application gets less than 10,000 notifications from us per month, it’s free (as in beer). This means that you can start using Superfeedr and never have to pay for the notifications you get as long as you receive less than 10,000 notifications monthly.

For those who worry that free is exactly one of the reasons that Google Reader close, we tell that we have plenty of amazing customers who get a lot more notifications and who think our service is worth paying for :)

We have more to come this week for all the people looking for a replacement to the Google Reader API.

Iguazu Falls, on the border of Argentina and Brazil. (Protyreus)

(via headlikeanorange)

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello has submitted his resignation to EA's board of directors. His final day will be March 30, the close of the company's fiscal year.

"The Board will immediately initiate a search and both internal and external candidates will be considered for the CEO position," wrote EA board chairman Larry Probst in a public statement.

"Our business is built on more than a dozen powerful, globally recognized brands," Probst continued. "We are clear leaders in the fastest growing category in games - mobile - and we are positioned to lead on the next generation of consoles. Most importantly we have deep reserves of talent - new faces and industry veterans who form the core of EA's leadership."

Riccitiello's departure letter noted that while the company has made progress in quality and digital products, its financial performance is tracking below set expectations.

The company's public image isn't tracking very well either. We're still in the midst of the SimCity debacle, but that's only the latest in a string of high-profile failures that required great spin by the publisher. The expensive MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic went free-to-play after not catching on, while management issues have caused the company to miss an NBA title three years running. There are too many cases of "a hit missing."

Oh, also, if you're a Vegas bookie, put the Joystiq crew down for $10 on Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore as the heir apparent. Then again, there's always the chance of a Don Mattrick return.

Continue reading EA CEO John Riccitiello resigns

EA CEO John Riccitiello resigns originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ghdos:

pol102:

Via firstbook:

If you work with kids from low-income neighborhoods, First Book can help you get brand-new, high-quality books.

This is how income inequality happens. Read to your kids, people! And donate to First Book, while you’re at it.

SIGNAL BOOOOOOOOST!!!

Yes.

Artist and instrument maker Alex Sobolev built three violins and joined them together to create the “Triolin.” The instrument is quite striking but rather impractical—because the violins are joined at the base, musicians must play them upside down, more like a cello. In addition to making the occasional Frankenstein instrument, Sobolev is working on an intriguing electric violin that will be able to mimic the sounds of rare and antique violins.

via MAKE

A Windows version of Polytron's infinite puzzle dimension portal, Fez, will be released on May 1, as revealed by the game's new Steam page. Like the XBLA version, it's listed as developed by Polytron and published by Trapdoor.

The Steam page does not show any new features, but at the very least it'll be easier to take screenshots of all the beautiful things you'll see, and, for the sake of your own sanity, the occasional screenshot of a glyph you hope to translate later. Patches should be easier too.

If you'd like to start the fun before the release of the game, you can ask creator Phil Fish anything on Reddit right now.

Fez coming to Steam May 1 originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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