Russian Sledges

I’ll let the horror of automation speak for itself. Not that you need further reassurance that there are no “souls” aboard this ship.

Having gotten all my data out of Google Reader, the next step was to do something with it. I wrote a simple tool to dump data given an item ID, which let me do spot checks that the archived data was complete. A more complete browsing UI was needed, but this proved to be slow going. It's not a hard task per se, but the idea of re-implementing something that I worked on for 5 years didn't seem that appealing.

It then occurred to me that Reader is a canonical single page application: once the initial HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. payload is delivered, all other data is loaded via relatively straightforward HTTP calls that return JSON (this made adding basic offline support relatively easy back in 2007). Therefore if I served the archived data in the same JSON format, then I should be able to browse it using Reader's own JavaScript and CSS. Thankfully this all occurred to me the day before the Reader shutdown, thus I had a chance to save a copy of Reader's JavaScript, CSS, images, and basic HTML scaffolding.

zombie_reader is the implementation of that idea. It's available as another tool in my readerisdead.com collection. Once pointed at a directory with an archive generated by reader_archive, it parses it and starts an HTTP server on port 8074. Beyond serving the static resources that were saved from Reader, the server uses web.py to implement a minimal (read-only) subset of Reader's API.

The tool required no modifications to Reader's JavaScript or CSS beyond fixing a few absolute paths¹. Even the alternate header layout (without the Google+ notification bar) is something that was natively supported by Reader (for the cases where the shared notification code couldn't be loaded). It also only uses publicly-served (compressed/obfuscated) resources that had been sent to millions of users for the past 8 years. As the kids say these days, no copyright intended.

A side effect is that I now have a self-contained Reader installation that I'll be able to refer to years from now, when my son asks me how I spent my mid-20s. It also satisfies my own nostalgia kicks, like knowing what my first read item was. In theory I could also use this approach to build a proxy that exposes Reader's API backed by (say) NewsBlur's, and thus keep using the Reader UI to read current feeds. Beyond the technical issues (e.g. impedance mismatches, since NewsBlur doesn't store read or starred state as tags, or has per item tags in general) that seems like an overly backwards-facing option. NewsBlur has its own distinguishing features (e.g. training and "focus" mode)², and forcing it into a semi-functional Reader UI would result in something that is worse than either product.

1. And changing the logo to make it more obvious that this isn't just a stale tab from last week. The font is called Demon Sker.
2. One of the reasons why I picked NewsBlur is that it has been around long enough to develop its own personality and divergent feature set. I'll be the first to admit that Reader had its faults, and it's nice to see a product that tries to remedy them.

Why don’t you just enjoy the fantasy? Games are a special medium, completely separate from our wider culture and any attempt to put them in context is just insulting.

I am tired of all this "sexism in gaming" crap that has come up recently. Reasonable people know that fantasy has nothing to do with reality: believing otherwise infantilises us and treats us as if we cannot distinguish one from the other. People who are outraged about this latest ‘gaming drama’ need a severe reality check: those masculists simply seek out reasons to get upset all the time. The "disembodied bloody crotch in Speedos" outrage went too far, for a start.

A resin model of someone’s disembodied crotch isn’t hurting anyone. It’s simply something to put on one’s mantelpiece and enjoy. People sometimes ask me about mine when I am hosting dinner: and I say, ‘Oh yes, haha. I’m a gamer,’ and that’s the end of the conversation. One of my male friends left dinner early once because of it; his girlfriend apologised for him and said that he’d once been sexually assaulted and that he was just really sensitive about this sort of thing. We both shook our heads about it. “I’m so glad we have freedom of speech,” she said to me, ‘the Nazis wouldn’t have allowed this to be made. He’ll get over it - he’s just really emotional about that stuff."

The males who say they they are not represented by our videogame heroines are merely ignoring the fact that women have all the disposable income. Despite this, they whine and whine about how they would like to see Alex Vance actually do something in his scenes in the game, instead of fawn and flirt with our heroine Freewoman. Can’t they just enjoy the fantasy? It’s no reflection on real life: no women really shoot alien headcrabs in laboratory settings, and neither do males occupy secondary positions in most parts of our society and sit around to gratify our need to become pregnant. That would be absurd. Fantasy is not reality: we go to our games to get away from reality. Why don’t you just enjoy the fantasy? Games are a special medium, completely separate from our wider culture and any attempt to put them in context is just insulting.

Furthermore, reasonable people would see that asking to put male soldiers in the Call of Duty series is simply not do-able. Since the age of the Amazon, women have waged wars, because they have a higher pain threshold than males and have more stamina in every area of war. Who would take a male Battlefield seriously? Including men would simply cloud the matter; when crawling through tunnels, as is often necessary in war, our eyes would fall on the male backside - from then on women would be irreparably compromised.

 

I mean, who would take this guy seriously a soldier?

 

To anyone getting their boxers in a bunch over this, I say: buy the games with the male protagonists. There are at least four of them. They are attractive, virile boy characters with a lot going for them. Show us you mean business by buying those titles. Lawrence Croft is still an icon: that bulging crotch and tight ass, the washboard abs - what more could you want to identify with? He’s everything you aspire to. And those of you who complain we didn’t put any clothes on him - he became an icon because of that lack of clothes! And Lawrence Croft has trousers now, think about that. Women’s interest in a sexy, provocative young male is what gave Lawrence Croft his iconic status. Stop asking for special treatment by the games industry, we are making the best games in whatever way we see fit.

Anyway, you guys wouldn't even have videogames without women. Remember that. With Ada Lovelace at our head, we invented the technology that makes them possible. The majority of the games industry is populated by hardworking, talented women who have been producing the best interactive experiences for 20 years. Why shouldn’t we make videogames where we can look at sinewy, naked males who moan sexually when we toy with them? Why don’t you start your own games industry where you can make your male-led games about football and the colour blue? Perhaps then we will stop making jokes about how you can get back in the kitchen and take the bins out.

It's only men who can't get laid that complain about all this, let's face it. My boyfriend enjoys when I play games where the male character is sexy and capable. Do yourself a favour: stop being so uptight and humourless. Games are a special medium, don’t spoil them by trying to change the way they are made. Separate them from your masculist politics and sit back down on the couch. This ‘sexism’ in technology doesn’t exist.

Cara Ellison is a writer for Rock Paper Shotgun and other sites. She tweets: @carachan1

The National Media Museum in Bradford is asking for Doctor Who fans with interesting anecdotes and memorabilia to contact them for potential inclusion in a new major exhibition planned from November to celebrate their devotion to the television show.

Fifty Years of Doctor Who Fans aims to portray what the programme means to its fans, what makes a fan, and how they demonstrate their affection for the programme.

Exhibition curator Toni Booth said:

The museum would like owners of Doctor Who collectibles, souvenirs, and those with interesting stories relating to the programme to contact them via drwho@nationalmediamuseum.org.uk in order to discuss what they might be able to contribute. The museum stresses not to send anything to them at this time and just to contact them by the email address, as they can't guarantee inclusion or return before they finalise the exhibition items.

Potential submissions need to be made to the museum by 9th August - the exhibition itself will run from 12th November 2013 to 2nd March 2014.

The Roll Neck Crowd, 1978.

Featuring dangerous men in kick-ass glen check jackets

If, like me, you’re unsettled by the recent government(s) snooping you are probably looking for ways to secure your on-line activities. One obvious way is to use SSL/TLS whenever possible. If you use Firefox or Chrome, HTTPS Everywhere can help.

Sadly, even if you believe in the security of SSL/TLS, there is, for most sites, a single point of failure. When the client and server negotiate to agree on an encryption key, the negotiation is encrypted by the site’s static key. That means that if the key is later broken or exposed and, like the NSA, you have saved HTTPS sessions, you can retroactively decrypt them all.

What’s needed is perfect forward secrecy (PFS). That means that if one session is decrypted, the others are still safe. For SSL/TLS, perfect forward secrecy requires you to change the key used to encrypt the session negotiation for each session. All of this is beautifully explained by Michael Horowitz over at Computer World. Because he goes into reasonable detail, the article is a bit long but well worth reading. I urge you to take the time to give it a look.

Netcraft also has an excellent article on PFS that covers much of the same material and gives more information on the support that various browsers provide for it. It explains why some browsers, such as Safari, which support PFS nevertheless fail to apply it for some sites. Definitely worth reading.

As users, of course, there is little we can do except encourage the sites we use to implement it. Currently Google and a few smaller sites do this but most do not. That’s probably because you get a performance hit when you implement perfect forward secrecy. One happy note for the paranoid among us is that DuckDuckGo is now using PFS with all the major browsers.

Those of us who are technologits are in a position to make things better. Whenever we can, we should push to use SSL/TLS with PFS on our Web sites. That may mean making a case to management or beefing up the server if needed. Not easy, of course, but well worth it if it helps secure the Web and keep the Nosy Parkers at bay.

toothpastecomics:

Get away from it all. From Toothpaste For Dinner.

sade:

50 cent is maybe my favourite person in the world

"It hurts me when I see a priest or a nun with the latest model car, you can't do this," he said. "A car is necessary to do a lot of work, but please, choose a more humble one. If you like the fancy one, just think about how many children are dying of hunger in the world," he said.

The attack on the Mahabodhi Temple in eastern India, one of Buddhism’s holiest sites, was quickly labeled an act of terror by officials. Two people were injured in the blasts.

Who drinks most vodka, gin, whisky and rum?

ASIA'S growing middle classes are driving demand in the global spirits market. According to IWSR, a market-research firm, consumption last year grew by 1.6% to 27 billion litres—and China, the world’s biggest market, quaffed 38% of that. The national liquor, baijiu, accounts for a whopping 99.5% of all spirits consumed there, so China does not even feature in rankings of the best-known internationally consumed spirits, below. The most popular of these is vodka, mainly because it is drunk in copious amounts in Russia. Russians downed nearly 2 billion litres of the stuff in 2012, equivalent to 14 litres for every man, woman and child. (Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Russians are among the biggest drinkers in the world, according to the most recent World Health Organisation data.) The Filipinos' taste for gin can be attributed in part to good marketing and to the spirit's long-established toe-hold in the local market. Ginebra San Miguel, a firm that makes the world's two best-selling brands, started operations there in 1834.

Intellect Books have just released Doctor Who and Race, an anthology of essays about, well, the depiction of race in Doctor Who. Blurb: "Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction television series in the world and is regularly watched by millions of people across the globe. While its scores of fans adore the show with cult-like devotion, the fan-contributors to this book argue that there is an uncharted dimension to Doctor Who. Bringing together diverse perspectives on race and its representation in Doctor Who, this anthology offers new understandings of the cultural significance of race in the programme – how the show’s representations of racial diversity, colonialism, nationalism and racism affect our daily lives and change the way we relate to each other. An accessible introduction to critical race theory, postcolonial studies and other race-related academic fields, the 23 contributors deftly combine examples of the popular cultural icon and personal reflections to provide an analysis that is at once approachable but also filled with the intellectual rigor of academic critique." Copies are available for £19.95.

Editor Lindy Orthia has created a blog to talk about the book: it currently features short biographies of the contributors, useful links, and a few articles, including a comment on the pre-publication controversies (the Radio Times piece on the book offering the most neutral explanation on what issues concerned the authors and what the BBC had to say in response. Racialicious strongly defended the book and the Daily Mail strongly defended the BBC, rather uncharacteristically of the tabloid, so that about runs the gamut of reactions.)

Carl Masthay sent in this transcription of tattoos on the arms of a guy he met in a bar last Saturday:

I wrote to some friends asking what they thought the mystery character was. Suggestions received included the tíng 庭 of jiātíng 家庭 (sometimes written as 家廷) ("family; household") and the huo 伙 of jiāhuo 家伙 (sometimes written as 傢伙) ("guy; fellow; chap"). Surprisingly, David Moser and Tom Bishop, separated from each other by half the globe, wrote back to me immediately upon reading my message and within a minute of each other, hazarding that they thought it was the zú 族 of jiāzú 家族 ("clan; household; family"), and I would tend to agree with them.

See the variant forms of the character at the bottom of this page. Unfortunately, none of them match the mystery character very well.

Tom Bishop found slightly similar forms here, though, especially this one:

Many more variants of zú 族 may be found here and here.

All of this brings us squarely into the realm of what are known in Chinese as yìtǐzì 異體字 ("variant characters"). As you can see, the variations are often starkly different from each other and can be extremely numerous, especially for very common and powerful characters. When we get into regional varieties and the intentionally arcane writing of secret societies, cults, the underworld, and other closed groups, the precise identification of certain variants may be next to impossible for outsiders to determine.

We have recently discussed "Weird languages" and stylistic modifications of Chinese characters. In my next post, I'll look into some truly weird characters.

[Thanks to Randy Alexander]

Personal life

On May 6, 2013, Chambliss played golf in a foursome with President Obama, Senator Bob Corker (R–TN), and Senator Mark Udall (D–CO) at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. On the par three 11th hole, Chambliss made a hole in one, choking up on a five iron.^[48]

Link

(Please note this is the entirety of the ‘Personal life’ section]

They come from somewhere in the distant universe--probably some 6 billion to 11 billion light years away. They don't last very long, only about one-thousandth of a second. They happen all the time, up to 10,000 times a day. They create intense bursts of radio emission but nothing else--no light, no x-rays, no other visible evidence. And nobody knows what they are. Until now, nobody was even sure they existed. Astronomers are calling these enigmatic signals "fast radio bursts" or "Lorimer

Chrysanthemum Cocktail (c. 1930, Savoy Cocktail Book). I’d been thinking about this drink all week and decided early today that this would be the one I made as soon as I got home this evening. It’s an elegant, surprisingly light, and low-proof sipper that lends itself to the warmer weather. It’s also perhaps my favorite use of absinthe in any classic cocktail, since it’s used sparingly but the anise notes really help to marry the dry vermouth with the sweet herbaceous Benedictine. And even though a full ounce of the latter liqueur is used, its really not overly sweet, since the dry vermouth balances perfectly. The orange oil garnish is essential here so don’t skip it. One of my favorite drinks, especially with the luxury of a fresh bottle of Dolin, which I’m using tonight: 2 oz Dolin dry vermouth, 1 oz Benedictine, .75 tsp @stgeorgespirits absinthe*, stirred and strained, orange garnish. (*Original recipe calls for “3 dashes" so I went with 3/4 tsp; perhaps a touch conservative since many modern recipes call for a full teaspoon, but my taste is to err conservatively when using absinthe.)

fuckyeahmercury:

Freddie with his partner Jim Hutton and a cat

sherlockisthebest:

x

This Month in Photo of the Day: Animal Pictures

During closing time at the Phillip Island Wildlife Park in July 2012, the roos were together resting and grazing as the winter sun was setting.

This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot. Check out the new and improved website, where you can share and connect with fellow photographers from around the globe.

See pictures of Australia shot by our fans »
Get tips on using available light »

KindMind writes "Sky Deutschland is considering a proposal to use bone conduction to broadcast ads to train riders. The idea is that the riders rest their heads against a part of the train, like the train window, and then bone conduction would broadcast ads directly into their ears."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

acnlcosplayqr:

Utena - uniform

Source; http://twitpic.com/bj8ljd

Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

"That, I think, would be a major tragedy and a major wound," Lebrecht said. "It will be something that Minnesota and Minneapolis will not recover from easily and possibly not for a generation." MPR 07/03/13

nnggghh I love this show so much

Hawk moths may be jamming bat sonar signals by rubbing their genitals.

The behaviour, reported in Biology Letters on 3 July, creates an ultrasonic noise that could be used to scare off an attacking bat and to jam the bat's sonar.

By: Kadhim Shubber, Edited by: Nate Lanxon

Continue reading...

NO

mrgan:

As requested by Dave Hayden