Very busy this week on birthday-related activities. Regular schedule to resume soon. In the meantime, here are a couple of cool simulations to play with, since that seems to be something I’m interested in this week. First, a physics tool to simulate cloth as a grid of constrained points. Second, a quite cool fire simulation–I especially like making words and images out of wood and then setting them ablaze.
Tag: web tools
Rambling about passwords
What you’re looking at there is a list of the 32 most common passwords from among the set of more than 32 million users of RockYou. The top item, ‘123456’ was used by more than 300,000 users. We don’t normally get to look at actual user data in sets this large, but one benefit of the recent privacy breach at… Read more →
Aside
Aside
Yes, I am aware that the asides are not currently rendering as asides. The upgrade to WordPress 2.8 broke the plugin I use to manage that, and I’m giving the author a little time to get it sorted before I toss out the plugin and do it myself. At some point these will look correct again, one way or another.
Aside
Still so busy that it hurts. However, not too busy to have a laugh reading some entries in the “Simple English” Wikipedia.
Excuses, Excuses
And that really says all that needs to be said on the subject without risk of boring you with my job-talk, except perhaps to say that this week isn’t looking likely to be any better.. Bless the bus slogan generator for encouraging brevity in cliched posts. Before I leave though, I can’t resist one more: Read more →
Observational Items
I believe that it is not hyperbole to say that the existence, even in conceptual form, of the Chompr is the final clear sign that Western society has slipped completely into decadence. First of all, if you can’t hold a sandwich in your hand, you shouldn’t be trying to eat it. Second of all, you should be able to engineer… Read more →
Aside
For the record, none of the 104 Chris McLarens on Facebook are me. I do not expect this to change. Also, at present, none of the 23 Chris McLarens at LinkedIn are me–although I expect this will probably change shortly. The top Google result for Chris McLaren, with or without the quotes, is very much me, however.
Aside
Upgrade to WordPress 2.7 was painless, save for the extended tagging plugin I use needing a bit of code tweaking (I’m sure there will be a new version along shortly with 2.7 support, but I was able to make it work for now anyway). Nice UI.
Aside
Remember when Microsoft had the genius idea of embedding code inside documents–remember how that worked out from a security perspective? Remember when browsers started allowing executable code to be embedded in the pages–there was no security problem with that, right? So clearly the best thing for us to do is to add a new way to embed natively executable code in web pages. There’s no way that could go wrong, right?
A short break from politics
And now, a few observations about things completely unrelated to either North American election: That Wisdom book showed up today. Totally worth the money. It’s been a long time since I bought a “coffee table book”, but if I had a coffee table I’d be proud to leave this out on it. You know where I’m find more interesting reading… Read more →
A Linkpost Before Sleeping
I think I’m going to soon look at setting up the site with “asides”, so that instead of gathering up large buckets of links that I have only a few comments on, I can just drop them in as “asides” between my longer and more content-y posts. In the meantime, another (possibly final) agglomeration of miscellaneous links. This might be… Read more →
Browser Neepery 2008 Style
So, like all the other serious geeks, I’ve been playing with Google Chrome for a the last couple of days. In general, I like it–it’s fast, and there are lots of nice little UI bits that I quite like, plus the deep nerd in me likes the multi-process architecture and the built-in memory profiling, etc. However there is absolutely no… Read more →
Shadow Unit & Cool Web Tools
You may recall that I’ve strongly encouraged people reading this to check out the Shadow Unit project on several previous occasions. Well, the first “season” of Shadow Unit has been over for a while now, I want to take a few minutes to re-encourage you to check it out. The work got stronger throughout the season–in an amusing parallel with… Read more →
Cool Web Tool: The Awesome Highlighter.
That’s its name. Not that I don’t think it is awesome–I actually kind of do–but I think it’s even funnier that they called it “The Awesome Highlighter“. And it does just what you think, based on the name: you give it an URL, then you highlight parts of the page, and you get a link to your highlighted page that… Read more →
