whump.com | More Like This WebLogThe more you know, the more jokes you get.Searching for Vulcanoid Asteroids- June 29, 2008 At at party this weekend, I met Cisco engineer Landon Curt Noll. He had a rack of three digital SLRs on a telescope mount, and was getting ready to ship his gear to China in order to observe the upcoming solar eclipse. Noll&8217;s an amateur astronomer, and he&8217;s searching for Vulcanoid asteroids, which, if they exist, ...http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28Atom%29&seed=ht... A quick review of Wall-E- June 28, 2008 If Wall-E had stuck to what it started out as, an elegy in a world without humans, it would had been incredible. Pixar could had made a post-human world Disney friendly, by adapting Howard Waldrop&8217;s Heirs of the Perisphere. Though I loved the starliner Axiom. The designers were channeling the space art of Robert McCall that I ...http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28Atom%29&seed=ht... One Interface, Please- June 25, 2008 To deal with the increasing number of compromised blogs, WordPress 2.6 will turn off XML-RPC and AtomPUB interfaces by default. MarsEdit developer Daniel Jalkut points out that the WordPress developers are ignoring the root cause: If your web service only provides one, first-class API through which all access flows, then youve only got one point to secure, ...http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28Atom%29&seed=ht... Dispelling Some Confusion Over SproutCore- June 17, 2008 While SproutCore uses Ruby to generate static HTML and JavaScript files, you are not tied to Ruby or Rails in production. SproutCore runs in the browser, your production system can use whatever backend you want, as long as it sends JSON to the browser. When I was using an early version of SproutCore to build .Mac Web ...http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28Atom%29&seed=ht... Representation, Again- June 15, 2008 I mean, XML is better if you have more text and fewer tags. And JSON is better if you have more tags and less text. Argh! I mean, come on, it&8217;s that easy. But you know, there&8217;s a big debate about it. Steve Yegge, via Simon Wilison I&8217;ve been asking that question in interviews, and I ...http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28Atom%29&seed=ht... Ashfall- June 14, 2008 After last night&8217;s apocalyptic episode of BSG, and starting the grim novel Daughters of the North, discovering a coat of ash on my car from yesterday&8217;s fires was creepy.http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28Atom%29&seed=ht... Smoke- June 14, 2008 Smoke from the forest fires around Santa Cruz Mountains King City to the South, and a burning foam factory in Fremont to the East have made for dramatic skies this evening.http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28Atom%29&seed=ht... Musical Interludes- June 13, 2008 A mention of Brian Eno results in three out of five people in the car breaking out in a chorus of Backwater.http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28Atom%29&seed=ht... LAT In Orbit- June 12, 2008 My friend John worked on the Large Area Telescope, part of the GLAST spacecraft which rode into orbit on a Delta rocket earlier today. The LAT will look at a large swath of space, detecting gamma ray bursts from exploding stars and other cataclysms. And yes, people use wikis for these projects.http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28Atom%29&seed=ht... Cyberselfish, Again- June 9, 2008 Paulina Borsook comments on the hipster-contrarian vibe of Wired magazine&8217;s 15th anniversary issue. Borsook wrote a parody of Silicon Valley&8217;s techno-libertarian culture for Suck, back in the day, which remains one of my favorites.http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28Atom%29&seed=ht... |