October 2008
Radiohead's Creep sung by 60 Belgian women
Awesome stuff, click play to listen:
Creep - Scala
“User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains”
– http://www.google.com/robots.txt
Obtrusive JavaScript Checker →
Obtrusive JavaScript Checker is a tool to traverse through all elements in a web page, and when it finds a HTML element with inline events (which is bad, JavaScript should be unobtrusive), it highlights it with a red border.
“I’m looking for a frumpy and/or nerdy girl to go as my +1 to the Obama event....”
– Will Trade Sex For Obama Tickets | NBC Chicago
OBAMA RALLY TICKETS FOR SALE!!!!! $10 Trillion... →
Hi, I can’t go to the rally so I am selling my ticket for 10 trillion dollars. Meet me at the Wilson Red Line. The money will be given to cover the United States public debt bill. Thank you.
McCain's Circular Logic Firing Squad →
McCain has long said he would cut defense spending, this is a position he maintains today. Obama has also said he will cut defense spending. But McCain opposses Obama and therefore attacks Obama today for having the same position that he has.
He took down a political machine without raising... →
One of the things I most admire about Barack Obama is that he doesn’t get mad or angry, at least not in public. He’s collected and even if he doesn’t agree with you, he listens and he doesn’t back down. It’s a sign of intelligence as I’ve learned to recognize it in my 28 years dealing with people.
He keeps his voice at a polite level. When everyone was...
Rashid Khalidi →
Assuming, for a moment, that Khalidi is a horrible person (I don’t think he is), we shouldn’t forget that McCain himself has diverted nearly $1,000,000 to Mr. Khalidi’s organization over the past 11 years. What’s wrong with Obama attending a dinner with the guy?
For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after...
"Of Course" She's Not Ready, Republicans line up... →
toot toot
Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush and whose endorsement is often trumpeted by McCain, said on Thursday that the Alaska governor is not only unprepared to take over the job on a moment’s notice but, even after some time in office, would only amount to an “adequate” commander in chief. “And I devoutly hope that [she]...
You don't know Jam: Talking NBA Jam with lead... →
I played so much NBA Jam in the early nineties it wasn’t even funny:
NBA Jam is the crown jewel of coin-op, still holding the world record for most money earned at one location in a single week ($2,468). And while you might have fond memories of the word “Boomshackalacka,” and the sight of secret character Bill Clinton dunking on Blue Edwards, there’s still plenty...
The Economist endorses Obama →
[t]he exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.
Political fire, far from...
A Django Management Command for Amazon S3 →
Rob Hudson has added support for a sync_media_s3 Django management command to the popular Django Commands Extension app. I’ll let Rob explain how it works and what it does:
[i]t copies all the files and directory structure found in your Django project’s MEDIA_ROOT, as defined in the settings.py file, up to the Amazon Simple Storage Service, or simply, Amazon S3. Many people are...
Red State Socialism →
*confirmed* Obama shared sandwich in kindergarten,... →
“I don’t know what’s next. By the end of the week, he’ll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” Obama said.
Girl Talk's Feed the Animals: The Official Sample... →
You’ll remember a few months back, Andy Baio of Waxy.org used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to pay hundreds of individuals a few cents for identifying a sample in Gregg Gillis’s most recent Girl Talk album, Feed The Animals.
Now that the CD is out, Andy has OCR’d the official sample listing and compared it to the crowd-sourced results from Wikipedia:
So how did the fans...
DIY Twitter Kit For Plants →
Help! Cat attack!
This is a double edged sword, since not only you but your friends and family can see the progress of the plant under your care. Once it raises the white flag, the last twit will be “current moisture: 0%.” Too bad it doesn’t twit out messages like “Cat attack! HELP!”
Google Chrome Beta release: 0.3.154.9 →
Google Chrome version 0.3.154.9 has been released. You will automatically get updated in the next few days. You can open About Google Chrome (from the wrench menu) to get the update at any time. This release fixes the top issues we’ve heard about from people using the Beta release, especially with plugins (the programs that show video on sites like YouTube).
“All I see in my neighborhood is McCain signs, and I said, ‘Why do they...”
– Marc Fisher - What’s Real About the Split In Virginia - washingtonpost.com
FiveThirtyEight visits Illinois: What McCain has... →
Very, very little.
[h]e’ll probably carry a dozen or perhaps a couple dozen downstate counties. When we ran Illinois through our similarity score matrix, one of the first states that came up was California. The comparison seems counterintuitive at first, but each state contains a similar mash-up of demographics, of city, suburb, sprawl, and farmlands, and the two states have voted with...
McCain funded Khalidi to the tune of $448,873 →
Orly McCain?
During the 1990s, while he served as chairman of the International Republican Institute (IRI), McCain distributed several grants to the Palestinian research center co-founded by Khalidi, including one worth half a million dollars. A 1998 tax filing for the McCain-led group shows a $448,873 grant to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies for work in the West...
Computer Science friends, lend me your ears (and...
I need to know the formal name for something, I’m hoping there’s a special name for this.
You have list of objects and an associated parameter that defines how these items are sorted in said list (i.e. discrete integers, kind of like an array index).
If you want to insert something into a specific slot of this list, you can. For example say I have a list of 100 items, and I have a...
Adam Smith was a closet-socialist! →
Steve Coll in The New Yorker explains how what Obama meant by “spreading the wealth” (this is what taxes do, people), can be traced back to Adam Smith’s 1776 capitalist opus The Wealth of Nations:
Smith wrote: The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor… . The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a...
Reconstructing Apple’s 2008 Earnings to Reflect... →
Andy M. Zaky parses Apple’s financials and accounts for iPhone sales which are accounted for differently than most other Apple products:
Right away, one ought to notice the staggering growth rate in both revenue and earnings that Apple displayed in 2008. Apple’s real revenue grew 54.5% from $24.637 billion in FYE 2007 to $38.041 billion in FYE 2008 – a full $13.4 billion growth in...
WatchPaula Abdul - Opposites Attract
MTV streaming 22,000 music videos, supports an API →
Not only can you watch all your favorite music videos, like these:
Paula Abdul - Opposites Attract
Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime
T.I. - Whatever you like
but you can mash them up using MTV’s Content API.
Some CSS tips for programmers →
Stefano Mazzocchi gives some good starting points for developers who have to write their own CSS from time to time. Just using a few of these tips will make your interfaces look a million times better.
As with color picking, I think that programmers tend to avoid doing certain things not because they are inherently bad at it, but because they don’t know how to proceed. They find themselves in...
Jury finds Palin's buddy guilty on corruption... →
Bad news for Sarah Palin. Do her supporters know she pals around with corrupt politicians who scheme to conceal illegal gifts from Alaskan oil contractors?
The jury found Stevens guilty of “knowingly and willfully” scheming to conceal on Senate disclosure forms more than $250,000 in home renovations and other gifts from an Alaska-based oil industry contractor.
State by state election rules surrounding... →
Know what your rights are next week, don’t lose your ability to vote because you were ignorant about the law or the position of state election officials when it comes to documenting your voting experience:
In order to protect voters from interference and intimidation, state governments have enacted a complex array of election laws that regulate what activities are permitted at polling...
Palin’s Nightmare →
It’s very sad that Mrs. Palin and Mr. McCain do not understand what Socialism means or is and are using the idea of it to terrorize American citizens. Scott Horton from Harper’s tries to put their minds at ease:
Does Sarah mean a state: That snatches its victims off the street, denies them all form of legal process and whisks them away to secret “blacksites” where they can be...
WatchApologies to my international readers who won’t be able to watch this Hulu video. This is a Lyndon B. Johnson political ad from 1964 where a small girl is pulling petals off a flower and then gets blown up by a nuclear bomb - Hulu - Historic Campaign Ads: “Daisy Ad” Johnson, 1964
Do you know what to do? →
Good post by Dave Winer:
Do you know what to do if someone tells you you’re not on the list?
Don’t just walk away.
Only as a last resort should you accept a provisional ballot
Call 866- OUR-VOTE or go to 866OURVOTE.org to get information on where to vote and the facts on your right to vote. A trained team of advisors is available to help you resolve your problem.
...
“They [the Pentagon] are looking for contractors to provide a “Multi-Robot...”
– Packs of robots will hunt down uncooperative humans - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist — Uh… guys… lets think about this for a moment.
MySQLdb on Leopard →
David Cramer explains the tricky process of getting the MySQLDb python package compiled on 10.5
Palin is "going rogue," according to McCain aide →
McCain sources say Palin has gone off-message several times, and they privately wonder whether the incidents were deliberate. They cited an instance in which she labeled robocalls — recorded messages often used to attack a candidate’s opponent — “irritating” even as the campaign defended their use. Also, they pointed to her telling reporters she disagreed with the...
Robocop by Kanye West. More auto-tune. Not sure...