April 03, 2007

Twitter: Fad or Rad?

I heard about Twitter on Future Tense last week, but it kind of went in one ear and out the other. Surprising, since I'm a known social-networking whore. If you build it, I will sign up. Then my husband, Mr. Anti-Social Networking himself signed up for Twitter yesterday. So I had no choice.

Then the husband got me going on this rad Google mashup that scrolls around the world displaying the latest tweets. Mesmerizing. Just sit and watch the world tweet!

I tweet from an easy little (Mac) desktop app.

But, the question remains: What's the point? The NY Times is using this to "tweet" the latest headlines. But, is it just yet another distraction on top of my ever-refreshing inbox and IM? Dunno yet. Jury's still out.

Posted by Meghan at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2007

Craigslist Mashups: Listpic

One of my favorite things about Internet technologies over the past couple of years is the ability for people to create awesome mashups. When my younger sister was looking for an apartment in NYC, I was able to send her a link to a site that placed apartments listed on Craigslist on a Google map for super-simple browsing by neighborhood.

Tonight, via Parent Hacks, I discovered Listpic - a site that allows you to browse Craigslist posts by photo. BRILLIANT! How many times have I wished I could just look through all the pictures without having to click on every post?!

If you're a fan of Craigslist, you'll be immediately addicted to this interface.

Posted by Meghan at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2006

Flickr Fun

Flickr is the best, if not the only, social photo hosting service around. These days I post to Flickr way more than my own blog, even. I *heart* Flickr, in case you didn't notice. Anyway, here are a couple of fun Flickr-y links:

fastr - a flickr game

Enter your name and try to guess the Flickr tag! Compete against other Flickr geeks!

flickr logo maker (see also: Google logo maker)

Posted by colsen at 04:51 PM | Comments (1)

January 14, 2006

Hubble, Einstein and You

Edwin Hubble, after whom the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is named, discovered something really important about 100 years ago -- that the universe seems to be expanding. Coincidentally, Albert Einstein was working at roughly the same time on explaining the universal laws of gravitation, something we now call general relativity. Hubble drew a line on a plot he had made and calculated the rate at which the universe was expanding. Einstein came up with an equation that said the universe was most likely either expanding or contracting -- staying the same was virtually impossible. Einstein, though, believed the universe was not expanding nor contracting so he added a term to his equation, now called the cosmological constant. When Einstein learned that the universe was expanding he called his addition of the cosmological constant his greatest blunder.

With me so far? Hubble and Einstein independently "discovered" the same thing at roughly the same time -- the universe is expanding.

The thing is, the expansion is hard to explain. Given what we know of the universe and the Big Bang, the universe should be contracting. Gravity should be winning its tug-of-war with the initial expansion of the Big Bang. There must be some force causing it to expand, what Einstein called the cosmological constant. We don't know what it is but we call it Dark Energy. The name is not meant to be as mysterious as it sounds -- it just means energy we haven't detected yet. It might be one thing or many things, new or known, that we just haven't put our finger on yet.

Now new research has suggested that the cosmological constant may not be constant. Says Phil Plait on the previous hyperlink:

It’s weird enough that the Universe is accelerating, but if that acceleration is itself accelerating, that makes things a whole lot weirder.

This is one tidbit I picked up while attending a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.

It's amazing the things we can learn about the universe and how we learn it. It's interesting to me to read about the work of people, like Hubble and Einstein, who are trying to figure out the very origin and fate of the universe as a whole.

Posted by Michael at 11:11 AM | Comments (1)

January 08, 2006

PHP Easter Egg: Exposing the machinery of the Web

An easter egg is a "hidden message or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, or computer program." (Wikipedia) Easter eggs are the ultimate inside joke—developers like to have fun, and sometimes insert these geeky in-jokes as part of a larger project. For example, Microsoft software engineers hid a flight simulator in Microsoft Excel 97, a clone of Spy Hunter in Excel 2000, and a version of pinball in Microsoft Word 97. An integrated chip design even includes the outline of a popular video game character, Sonic the Hedgehog. The software used to run the web is no different; it too was created by fun-loving developers, and there are occasional easter eggs.

PHP is a server-side technology used to provide a rich web experience. If you provide a special URL to a web site that runs PHP, you can make it display an image instead of the usual web page. These "magic images" were included into PHP by its developers; they are present in every standard PHP install. Most any site that uses PHP will display these magic images if you ask properly. For example, PHP's own web site can be made to show a dog photo inside its normal logo.

Try it yourself

If you add ?= and a special code to any web address, you can test if the site is using PHP. Try out some example links (check 'em out while they work):

Update: It appears that digg has disabled this easter egg. I've changed the links above to point at php.net.

Read on for the technical details, including the location of these images within the PHP source tree.

(Via Digg)

Examining the Source Code

A quick search through PHP's own source code reveals several of these images embedded within the code. The GUIDs are defined in the ext/standard/info.h header file:

53 #define PHP_LOGO_GUID "PHPE9568F34-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42"
54 #define PHP_EGG_LOGO_GUID "PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42"
55 #define ZEND_LOGO_GUID "PHPE9568F35-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42"
56 #define PHP_CREDITS_GUID "PHPB8B5F2A0-3C92-11d3-A3A9-4C7B08C10000"

The images themselves are stored as binary data in the main/logos.h header file. Most of the images included within PHP are perfectly reasonable; the PHP logo, Zend logo, and credits are all used by PHP to generate the output of the phpinfo( ) function. The PHP_EGG_LOGO_GUID is included (as the name indicates) as an easter egg. Interestingly, the main PHP logo switches to the easter egg logo (with the dog) on April 1st—clearly, an inside joke.

Security Concerns

Easter eggs are fun, but there's a down side: sometimes these hidden features introduce exploitable defects into software or leak vital system information. In this particular case, it appears that the dog in the easter egg is related to the PHP version number. One could easily write a web scanner to check if a site is running PHP and discover its version through a single HTTP request.

Fortunately, this easter egg is quite easy to disable. You can alter your php.ini file to include the following line:

expose_php = 0

For More Information

A large collection of easter eggs is available at The Easter Egg Archive and Egg Heaven.

Posted by Matt at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2005

Just Plain Cool

xmaslights.jpg

Check out this video of Xmas lights sequenced to music. It's freakin' cool.

Posted by colsen at 02:45 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2005

digg

digg.com is cool. It's the normal short-attention-span sharing of interesting links. One thing that makes digg cool is that, once you create an account and configure it, you can click one link and instantly create a blog entry on your own blog and have it tracked back on the digg site. It makes it super duper easy to make blog posts as comments to stories you read there.

Pretty cool.

Posted by Michael at 07:39 PM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2005

Binary Humor

This cracked me up:

There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Posted by Michael at 04:46 PM | Comments (2)

July 26, 2005

Top 10 Web Fads

Just stumbled across this top 10 list on CNET. Ah, memories.

I'm sure we can all think of a few they missed, but they did hit a lot of the biggies.

Posted by Meghan at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2005

The World is Your Jeeves

Justcurio.us posts anonymous questions from around the world, inviting you to answer one of your choosing. If you answer a question, you may then post a one yourself. Recent deep probings include examples such as:
"skip college?"
"What's the difference between growing into love and falling in love?"
and, my fave of the moment,
"When is the McRib coming back?"

Posted by Andy at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

Better Naming Through Technology

A client sent me a link to this baby name website today -- the Baby Name Wizard's Name Voyager.

Even though I'm only 13 weeks along (27 weeks to go, yo!), I've already seen my fair share of baby name websites. This one is by far the best because it gives you a visual representation of a name's popularity over time.

Like most people, I don't want my kid to have the same name as every other kid at preschool. I mean, come on -- didn't we all go to school with like 27 Jennifers?

Posted by Meghan at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)

June 21, 2005

Polariodin' just for the fun of it.

Turns images that you have uploaded into “Polaroids” by putting white space around them, you know, like a Polaroid.

Check this image of Doris.

Polaroiderize something.

Posted by Chuck at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)