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good quick overview
All posts by MattK
links for 2007-04-27
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Coyle & Sharpe urge a Kiwi to try growing an ashtray from his body.
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Project from the Design Interactions show I saw at the RCA in London. Discusses using stem cells nutured by one’s body to produce goods.
links for 2007-04-26
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Berkeley DB XML is an open source, embedded XML database created by Sleepycat Software. It’s built on top of Berkeley DB, a “key-value” database which provides record storage and transaction management. Unlike relational databases, which store data in rel
links for 2007-04-24
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free oss – comes with .net libs and single dll embedded version
Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performan -
Lucene.Net is a source code, class-per-class, API-per-API and algorithmatic port of the Java Lucene search engine to the C# and .NET platform utilizing Microsoft .NET Framework.
Joel Spolsky says this is what the excellent lookout was built on top of.
Every Forward Button in the World Should Be Renamed “Snopes First!”
Click through for more funny…
Music: Killer Mike’s “That’s Life”
Killer Mike just killed me with this one. Covers Martha Stewart, Michael Eric Dyson, Oprah, Clinton, Bush, and everything important.
via the CriticalMetrics.com “100 songs we love” playlist.
Books: Will Eisner’s New York
Wednesday night, Sam brought home “Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City” and I’ve been flipping through it. It is a collection of 3 previous books by Eisner about NYC – mostly 1 or 2 page graphic layouts.
It’s a perfect little snapshot of the NYC that used to be. Some of the stories are still true because they are about what happens when so many people are crammed in together in one place. You develop defense mechanisms to save time and trouble. Sam and I were out with some friends last night and a woman came up to beg. While I always am overly polite and listen to the whole spiel before politely refusing, Sam cut the whole thing short.
“I can’t have this conversation right now.”
“Okay,” said the woman, and wandered off. Saved her time and us too.
Life’s full of little gray areas like this. Will Eisner’s New York is full of little gray areas like this. Stories intersect and diverge and intersect again. Eisner’s stories are all little stories of little people, following them through the pathos and heroics that surround us every day.
links for 2007-04-22
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php implementation of 9-block IP address visual display.IP address -> glyph.
perhaps I can make a wordpress plugin for it
Best Screensaver Ever
About a year ago I bought a huge monster flat screen TV. It’s nice for watching movies on and a heck of a lot less trouble than setting up the projector. It sucks a lot of power so I try to leave it turned off most of the time, but I’ve got a great reason to leave it on. That reason is Slickr. It downloads the most interesting pictures from Flickr and gracefully fades them in and out and about on your screen.
If you are staring at it and a really good picture comes up, you can hit “d” on your keyboard to make it your wallpaper. Hit the spacebar to launch the picture behind the scenes in your browser.
DD-WRT Router Slowdown solved
My apartment is wireless. Really wireless. No cable, no phone. But I live in the future, where the internet is involved in anything you do. So my neighbor has a wifi router that we’ve put DD-WRT on. It’s really much better than the original firmware that comes with your router, for a number of reasons. We’d been noticing a slowdown though. The router would, over the course of a few days, get slower and slower. The key symptom was that DNS lookups would be really spotty.
Turns out that bittorrent clients open up a lot of ports, especially if they are using dynamic hash tracking (DHT). The limited number of ports the router was allocating were being filled up by DHT and not released.
Router slowdown solution, from the dd-wrt wiki: increase the max number of ports and then decrease the timeout delay for those ports. I put this solution in on Tuesday night, and it’s been fine since then.