It is our 21st wedding anniversary, and my wife just gave me a puzzle in the form of a
beaded bracelet, telling me that there was a message but not what it was.

The beads run like this, starting from the decorative knot that lets you
adjust the size, and using an O for the round beads and X for the cylinders:

OOOXOOXXXOOOXOXOXXXXXOOX

Now, there are two easy possibilities off the top of my head. It might be a
computer code in binary. There are 24 beads total, so they could be three
8-bit characters --

00010011 10001010 11111001

or that sequence backwards, with all the bits flipped, or both. But any way you do that,
you get leading 1s, which mean it can't be ASCII. It doesn't follow the right bit pattern to
be a character in UTF-8, and none of 0x138AF9, 0x9F51C8, 0xEC7506, nor 0x60AE37 are
defined Unicode characters, so also can't be a character in UTF-32. Putting binary aside,
then, I go back to my actual first guess and try Morse code, substituting dots for the
round beads and dashes for the cylindrical ones.

...-..---...-.-.-----..-

That still needs to be separated out, first into individual letters and then into words, but
that's pretty straightforward:

.. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..-

I was pretty fortunate that the most straightforward decoding was also the right one.

I'm also pretty fortunate to have a wife who knows I'd enjoy this so much, aren't I?

Posted at 7:30:19 pm (2460158.47939) [/personal/] #

Seems that OSCON moved back to Portland in 2010, right when I wasn't paying attention. Well, then, looks like a daytrip is in order...

Posted at 4:27:52 pm (2455715.35269) [/computers/] #

I occasionally come across images that get variations on old advertising jingles stuck in my head.

Like this image, and the following jingle:

"Nobody makes / girl_in_a_cup / like Lip-tan cup of girl..."

(Images and advertising on the site may contain nudity. The corresponding links on the supposedly safe-for-work version, safebooru, are here, here, and here. The whole Lip-tan manga is available translated at the full danbooru but not at safebooru.)

Posted at 11:55:51 pm (2455146.70545) [/memes/] #

• Planetary Icosahedrons
  "Each face of the planetary Icosahedron displays a part of the (nearly spherical) planetary surfaces. The triangles are folded so that adjacent triangles are joined exactly at their closest edges."

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454218.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Making your existing Plone install look better in Internet Explorer 7 — plone.org
  "When Internet Explorer was released and pushed down to users as a mandatory upgrade, it displayed some visual artifacts with existing Plone sites. Here's how to fix most of them before the next Plone release."

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454217.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Triste Bertrand’s Blog » Second Life Map Widget 1.0
  "I was wondering when someone was going to think of this. Developer Jeffrey Wickel has developed an OS X Dashboard Widget to view the Second Life® map. ... How much more convenient can you get?" Aww, thanks.

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454215.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

I made this: Second Life Map Widget.

Here's what I posted on my LiveJournal:

Posted at 1:19:29 am (2454214.72186) [/secondlife/] #

• Thank You, Screen! - O'Reilly ONLamp Blog
  "I use Ctrl-a and Ctrl-e to jump to the start and end of Bash lines, but screen uses Ctrl-a as its hotkey. At least, it does until you add one line to your ~/.screenrc: 'escape \034\034' Now Ctrl-\ is my hotkey; I never type that by accident."

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454208.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• NoFunc · Nomadic Functions
  "Nomadic functions are small, optimized, and fairly specific. An example may be anything from a simple Drag & Drag function, to a AJAX Star Rating, or a Text Scroller. They are like widgets… but even smaller." Nifty stuff.

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454206.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• SLOpenID Blogs » SLOpenID SL Maps API
  "What SLOpenID plans do with it’s SL Maps API is along the lines of what XHTML did for HTML; SLOpenID plans seperate design from data, simplifying things a hell of a lot in the process." JSON.

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454205.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• NASA - GSFC Open Source Software
  More great NASA projects, these from Goddard.
• NASA Ames Research Center OpenSource
  "Under the NASA Software Release policy, NASA has several options for the release of NASA developed software technologies. These options now include Open Source software release." Some tasty, tasty projects.

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454204.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• A Fate Better Than Death : How To: Texture Zones
  "I could go the easy route and find a half dozen 512x512 textures of various materials and apply them to various parts of the model, or I could go the awesome route and make a single custom texture crammed full of detail..."

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454201.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
  It really is a book about Ruby. And poignant.
• Writing Software Patterns
  "This is a brief article about how I look at patterns with my suggestions for people who are interested in writing patterns themselves."
• Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
  "The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. There are no books on how to learn Beethoven, or Quantum Physics, or even Dog Grooming in a few
• CodeKata
  "In software we do our practicing on the job, and that’s why we make mistakes on the job. We need to find ways of splitting the practice from the profession. We need practice sessions."
• Unixjunkie Blog: Old (but useful) Shell Tricks
  "I used to have a somewhat long list of somewhat interesting Unix/Shell tips-n-tricks on an old version of my website. A few folks asked me where it was, and as it's no longer available, so I figured I'd repost a handful of the tips:"
• Stevey's Home Page - Practicing Programming
  "I made the unsubstantiated claim that programming is unusual, in that most programmers don't practice their craft -- at least, not in any disciplined or regular way. Those are, of course, fightin' words, so I figured I'd write a bit more about it."

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454198.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Stevey's Home Page - Effective Emacs
  "The tips in this little document are geared towards Emacs power-users."
• Unixjunkie Blog: Handling Filenames With Spaces
  "Mac users ... frequently put spaces in file names because it's natural and may read better. This means that Mac OS X Unix geeks need to make sure their shell commands (and shell scripts) work correctly when faced with spaces in file names."
• Unixjunkie Blog: Two Cool Bash Tricks
  "Bash does some super-cool magic when you access /dev/tcp/hostname/port. It will create a TCP socket that is connected to the named host on the given port. This lets you easily use network sockets with regular shell IO redirection."

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454197.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Unprotect a subdir of a htaccess password-protected directory | flevour unplugged
  "A meticolous search of various .htaccess support forums/sites/pages helped me finding the solution. I just needed to put inside /files/images a .htaccess file containing this simple command: Satisfy any"

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454196.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Coding Horror: The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming
  Getting your self out of the way.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Video Lectures
  "These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced by Hewlett-Packard Television." Based on the first ed.
• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Top Ten Signs Your Software Project is Doomed
  "The list below are common signs that a software project is doomed. Meeting one or two of these criteria isn't necessarily the kiss of death but three or more and you might as well start circulating your resume."
• QR-Code Generator
  Webform to generate QR-Code 2d barcodes.

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454193.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Lemog3d - 3dTextures
  Free textures, and in French!

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454189.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Hair Editing 101: The Ultimate Salon Guide for Beginners - Linden Lifestyles - The Unofficial Second Life® Fashion Shopping Blog
  "With most hair, this kind of minimal editing is possible. It’s detail work, but with a few simple precautions and some close attention, you can have your perfect hairstyle, and wear it too."

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454187.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Browsing Textures on deviantART
  Quick link to the textures part of their "resources" section.
• Texturama - Seamless, Tiling Textures
  High-quality seamless textures. $pendy, but maybe worth it?

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454181.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Getopt::Euclid - Executable Uniform Command-Line Interface Descriptions - search.cpan.org
  Perl module magically scans your perldoc documentation stuff and constructs a command-line parser. Woo.

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454177.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• Cat Proximity: xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
  With graphs!

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454175.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• moo | we love to print
  "Make 100 different MiniCards for just $19.99. Click a logo below to find out more." Half-width business cards with your pictures from SL or Flickr on one side and writing on the other. Spiffy!
• Super Deluxe Tuckbox Template Maker
  "Custom tuckbox template generation. Based on the custom tuckboxes designed by Elliott C. Evans." Put in dimensions, get back a PDF to print on cardstock.
• Making Custom Card Boxes
  "To aid you in making your own boxes, I've put together a few files that you can print out, fold up, and glue shut to hold your cards. This page has instructions for utilizing these files." PDFs.

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454172.79097) [/bookmarks/] #

• tinker.it » Blog Archive » multitouch table experiment
  "This is a very basic demo and we did it just to see how it work and it took us just 4 days!"

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454165.83264) [/bookmarks/] #

• Kung Fu Monkey: Lunch Discussions #145: The Crazification Factor
  "Objectively crazy or crazy vis-a-vis my own inertial reference frame for rational behaviour? I mean, are you creating the Theory of Special Crazification or General Crazification?"

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454159.83264) [/bookmarks/] #

• MOCKIA: Banokia
  I'm sorry, I can't hear you -- I've got a banana in my ear: "This is a genuine realistic faux plastic banana wired to work with your mobile phone as a plug in handsfree."
• Steampunk Keyboard Mod
  Glorious -- refitting an IBM Model M keyboard with old-fashioned round typewriter keycaps. It looks fantastic, and it's still suited to touch-typing. (The function keys are labeled in roman numerals!)

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454156.83264) [/bookmarks/] #

• Identifrac « Perfect Symmetry by Jesse Dubay
  "Identifrac is a system based upon Don Park’s ingenious Identicons. It can be used to visually represent redundant data, the canonical example being comments on a blog." With saples, and your own IP-based identifrac.

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454152.83264) [/bookmarks/] #

• Em Calculator
  "Em Calculator is a small JavaScript tool which helps making scalable and accessible CSS design. It converts size in pixels to relative em units, which are based on a text size."
• Wikipatterns - Wiki Patterns
  "Wikipatterns is not an instruction manual, it's a set of tools. It's examples of techniques that have helped people, and of situations that people have found themselves in that they wished they hadn't."
• Badger: Badge Any RSS Feed With Yahoo! Pipes - kentbrewster.com
  "Badger uses Yahoo! Pipes and JavaScript to create Web badges out of any RSS feed. Edit colors, change feeds, pages, and headlines, and pick up your source code at the bottom of the page."
• danwebb.net - Sumo! A Generic Microformats Parser For JavaScript
  "Yes, there are a few things about but they all tend to be tied to a single format and I wanted to build a framework that would allow any microformat to be defined using a JSON-like definition so it could be used as new formats emerge."
• boto - Google Code
  Python interface to Amazon Web Services - s3, sqs, ec2.
• Tips for Writing Nicer Site Badges - Ed Eliot
  "More on server side versions later - I'd like to start by running through my thoughts on writing cleaner (or improving current) JavaScript badges first."
• AlterNet: The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair
  "The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair."

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454151.83264) [/bookmarks/] #

• Howto Make an Alpha Channel with no White Halo for Second Life © Robin (Sojourner) Wood 2007
  "If you upload this image into SL, you'll notice what we call the dreaded White Halo. If you have semi-transparent areas, you'll also notice that they appear washed out." And how to fix!
• Natalia's Second Life Diary Blog: Day 97: Making Flexi Prim Skirts with Ged Larsen's LoopRez Script
  A very nifty tool.
• Natalia's Second Life Diary Blog: Build (Cloth, Building, Script, etc)
  A very nice set of tutorials for Second Life fashion building.

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454150.83264) [/bookmarks/] #

• Kirkville - Creating User Accounts from the Command Line
  "Creating user accounts from the command line uses the niload (NetInfo load) command together with a few other commands to create the new user's account and all necessary settings. Here is how to do it..."

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454146.83264) [/bookmarks/] #

• The Ecstasy of Influence (Harpers.org)
  "People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves."

Posted at 2:59:00 am (2454145.83264) [/bookmarks/] #