The original video is also
Name pollution
This is one of those nasty javascript quirks that nails me every 5 years or so. See if you can spot it. The first form has a bug in the code, the submit2 button produces an error and doesn't work.
Form1
<form name="f1" action="./"><p> <input type="submit" value="submit1" name="submit"><br/> <input type="button" value="submit2" name="submit2" onclick="javascript: document.f1.submit();" /> </p></form>
Form2
<form name="f2" action="./"><p> <input type='submit' value="submit1" name="submit1"><br/> <input type="button" value="submit1" name="submit2" onclick="javascript: document.f2.submit();" /> </p></form>
An animator's creation takes on a life of its own.
Final lecture
Carnegie Melon University has a tradition where professors deliver their last lecture as if it were their last days on this earth. Randy Pausch, delivered his last lecture in this same tradtion; only, he truly is facing his last days.
- Have fun all the time.
- People vs things.
- Tigger vs Eeyore.
- Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
- Tell the truth, apologize, what can i do to make it better.
- People will show their good side.
Silentmiaow gives a peek at what its like to be autistic.
Freezing time at Grand Central Station
A group called Improv Everywhere freezes time in New York City.
Super Mario Brothers
This is another video of Steve Ward's Tesla coils this time playing another more identifiable tune from Super Mario Brothers.
Commedian
Disappearing car door
JaTech claims to be able to fit your car with disappearing doors. I wonder how much these things cost.
Open CourseWare
If you're you're thinking about going back to school then you might want to look into MIT's OpenCourseWare. The site offers course material for 1800 courses. You can study for free and at your own pace.
YouTube 2008 election
It's heart warming to see the candidates embracing technology they way they are. Never before have I seen so many candidates embracing the web as they have this election. If you're still on the fence deciding who to vote for, consider turning to YouTube, they have a YouChoose section where they've organized a matrix of the candidates and 6 hot issues this election: education, energy, health care, immigration, Iraq and the economy. You can choose a category and see a candidates reaction to that issue.
Read receipt
Have you ever wondered why email clients have you click on something before displaying the images? There are a couple reasons why they do this.
One reason is because the images can take a while to download and delaying the images can make reading the email faster. You can decide at a glance whether you actually want to see the pictures associated with the email. This is a good lesson to anyone writing an email that includes images. It's a good idea to include text that will entice the reader to want to download the associated images.
Another, more sinister reason why images are delayed is because they can actually divulge information about the person who is reading them. When you load the image, it might require a download from a web server. When you connect to the web server you divulge your IP address which can offer some insight as to who you are. Additionally, reference to the image might contain information that was unique to the email that was sent to you. It might contain a unique identifier. In this case simply loading the image will tell the web server that you've read the email, acting as a read receipt.
Consider the following code example for an HTML email. When the sender writes the email, he includes the email address of the person he is sending it to. This can be done in an automatic script. When the recipient loads the image it sends their email back to the web server. This could be tied to a database that is used to track whether an email address is valid or whether to record when the recipient first read the email.
<html> <head></head> <body> <img src="./receipt.php?eml=them@someisp.com" border="1" /> </body> </html>
Super Bowl Commercials
If you missed the Super Bowl commercials, you can find the top five online. They rated the Justin Timberlake one number one (no nipple footage this time). Personally, I thought the Tide one was funnier.
Powering a web server
I recently purchased an upgrade to the web server hosting www.qicboy.com. The old power supply boasted 380W. The new one says it can support 600W. Wow, I thought, that's a whole lot of juice. It's no wonder Google is scrambling to find creative ways of dealing with their power consumption problems. If I leave this thing on over the course of a month, how much power is it going to consume? I'm pretty sure these machines don't use anywhere near as much power as they're rated for but I'm curious what the numbers are in a worst case scenario. In fact, this is a totally hypothetical worst case scenario and is flawed by the simple fact that I don't think I have enough components in the machine to consume the 600W the power supply is able to provide. If I were able to consume the maximum amount of power, the numbers would look something like this.
Sprout2 with a 380W power supply. (0.38 kWh * 24hrs * 30 days) = 274 kWh in one month.
Sprout3 has a 600W power supply. (0.6 kWh * 24hrs * 30 days) = 432 kWh in one month.
I'm not sure where my power comes from exactly, but let's assume the worst, and say that it comes from some power plant that uses fossil fuel. According to treehugger.com, 1KWh produced 1.5 lbs of CO2. Here's what the CO2 consumstion of that new server looks like. That's 648 lbs of CO2 released into the atmosphere if the energy is produced with fossil fuel.
(1.5 lbs * 432 kWh) = 648 lbs of CO2
Again, the estimated power consumption is in my mind, totally unrealistic. That's more power than my house uses in a whole month. My electric company uses a tiered system to charge you for electricity. If you consume below a certain amount they charge you a certain amount per KWh. They call this a baseline. If you exceed the baseline they charge the difference at a different rate. They have various tiers that they charge you at.
baseline amount = (403.2 KWh * $0.11430) = $46.09 101-130% amount = (32 KWh * $0.12989) = $ 4.16 Total monthly cost = $50.25
This whole process has piqued my interest in how much these machines actually use so I'm looking into ordering a Kill-A-Watt gadget from P3 to help me figure that out.
1200 electric shaves (> 3 years), slice 100 breads, dry your hair 15 times, 4 TV evenings, listen to 15 CDs, Use a small refrigerator for 24 hours, 20 microwave meals, drill 250 holes, 4 evenings of light with 60 W incandescent lamps or 20 evening of light with 11 W compact fluorescent light. [ Treehugger]
Dog poop
Some neighbors were tired of people not cleaning up their dog's poop so they took matters into their own hands and stole the alleged offenders' Jesus statue. It's more that a little ironic that he's paying for these people's sins don't you think?