http://www.techyouruniverse.com Musings about technology from a Geek Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:31:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I find that some folks that come to my house are surprised to see that I have my wireless internet is open to the world without a key. I also have my mobile hotspot open to the world. The security minded majority may scoff, but it's intentional. I don't really ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/technology/open-up-your-wifi-for-the-world I recently read a great article from Cracked.com about how video games are engineered to trigger certain pleasure/pain points in our brain to create a cycle of never-ending play. It describes the work of B.F. Skinner, a behavioral scientist who provided a logical framework for how our brains work in ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/technology/addictive-video-games-worse-than-drugs Microsoft has conceded that they don't focus on building good products, but instead - they measure their work by it's broad impact. Monopolistic and anticompetitive business practices do indeed facilitate the illusion of impact. At least in the short term. Full story on Microsoft's blog. This was a reaction to a former VP ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/microsoft/microsoft-says-we-measure-our-work-by-its-broad-impact-ha So Google found that the Chinese government was hacking them to try to obtain information on anti censorship participants. How did they react? By announcing that they will open up their Chinese version of Google to be uncensored, and if China determines this to be illegal, they will shut down their ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/websearch/google-reacts-to-chinas-censorship I attended Robogames in San Francisco this past weekend with my 3 sons. We had a great time watching the robots try to kill each other. I let out a Tim Allen grunt at several points, especially when we saw one of the robots with a flame thrower. I had some ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/software/what-software-developers-can-learn-from-battlebots SPAM. No, not the barely edible processed meat, I'm talking about unsolicited messages we all receive, typically via e-mail. BTW - a common misconception is that SPAM is all junk mail. By the nerdiest of definitions, spam is only the unsolicited messages. If you signed up for a newsletter or ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/technology/the-cure-for-spam-forever Every major language now has tools for JSON encoding a string of text, which is a format that is natively read, understand, and used by Javascript. PHP's json_encode works great, I use it all the time for data transport. The reasons for using XML are getting harder and harder to ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/software/why-on-earth-doesnt-javascript-have-a-json_encode My Apple MacBook Air has a built in iSight camera. I wanted to have it take pictures automatically every minute and save them in a folder for an upcoming home improvement project, effectively turning it into a time lapse camera. It's also good for being able to take pictures of ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/technology/automatic-isight-capture-to-have-your-mac-be-a-time-lapse-camera From Incremental Operations Blog, this call stack shows the layers involved in a [typical?] Java stack. To be fair, this is not necessarily Java itself, but poorly written Java code. But based on my experience, this type of excessive architecture is accepted best practice in the Java world, and the ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/software/php-vs-java-vs-cc-for-web-applications It's time to unwind the giant mess of 301's, meta tag, and robots.txt hacks that we have in place -- all aimed and eliminating "duplicate" content for search engines. We now have a simple way to tell search engines what the canonical representation of a url. That's the promise of ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/wikia/google-canonical-href-with-mediawiki