Caffeine Overview

For those of you that are into caffeine and want to know what is the best drink to get, these guys have done a study, and detail flavour, composition, density of caffeine per ounce as well as how much total caffeine there is in the drink (for those of us too lazy to take oz * caffeine/oz).

Interesting, stuff, like penguin mints have 7mg of caffeine per mint and 3 of them is equal to one 12 oz soda (like coke). The thing to remember is that the LD50 of caffeine and it's chemical info is detailed here.

What's LD50? It's the Dosage of caffeine someone can take and die only 50% of the time. And for caffeine in rats, it's around 179 to 200mg per kg. So if you are a beefy boy, and weigh around 180kg you'd have to drink around (at LD50 200mg/kg) 200 16oz cups of starbucks brewed coffee.... Yeah it's gott 200mg per 16oz cup. Which is about 25 GALLONS.

Oh and this is a neat site about coffee, the Coffee Faq. It may not be CoffeeGeek but it's a start.

Google Tweaks

This is the javascript that adds things like a remembered searches....

Userscripts.org - Universal Repository for Dynamic Scripts

This is a collection of all things javascript/greasemonkey like. It's sweet. And there are tons of various things that are available for greasemonkey et al.

Oh, if only I could find the one that saved virtual folders for gmail, that was a sweet user script.

Ajax applications

Ajax is a neat new emerging technology that lets people do things on webpages without having to refresh the page (amongst other things). Slashdot has an article where they detail various applications that are already out there that could be made into an office suite. Myself, I've seen things like scriptaculous, and I've got to say that Ajax is a neat design paradigm. Where else could you get a webpage where if you like items on the page you drag them to the shopping cart and the page doesn't need to refresh and you don't need to stop shopping. This would be really great for impulse buys and pages set up more like stores. Imagine, shopping for items where you never really refresh the page or have to go any where except when you go to "Check Out" and even that would be an asthetic reason, not because checkouts aren't possible....

Restore your Ipod

Or anything with plastic scratches... at least that is what this guy purports you can do with only a can of brasso and a microfiber cloth. Granted I don't have any cloth, but still might be an interesting thought experiment. . .

Linux Cryptography

So this site covers some of the basics about linux crypto (including the crypt a file and how to make encrypted partitions). How is this important? Well lets just say that just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean that you have to publish that fact. Crypto is good for you and good for your mental privacy. Remember if someone finds your new patentable idea and you can't prove that you were the first one that thought it, it's going to cost you money. And it will cost more money anyway with the court battles.

Mmmmm.

20 Things for you to know in CSS

Shameless crosslinking. This is a site that discusses such neat tricks as making rounded corners as well as how to make them without using pictures, all in CSS. Very neat stuff. Oh and my "Zen of CSS Design" came in today, so I'm an especially happy monkey.

Intro Chapter to Practical Lisp Programming

Introduction: Why Lisp? Here's some anectodatal evidence. Oh and later on in the book they cover how to make an MP3 streaming server using only lisp....

Why Lisp?

Why not? C'mon, lisp is cool. And hey, it's a new paradigm for programming and there is always a need for programmers to learn new paradigms....

Hungry Girl: Muffin Doings

Sadness, the costco muffins are like 690 calories.... ouch.

Polishing Ruby: Zero to Rails in 2 minutes

Feel the Ruby Love, seriously. You want Rails. You want it now. Couple it with some css, ajax, and xhtml and you'll be thankful how easy it is to create new webapps that can live on any os, any browser.

Konfabulator

Want something kick ass?

Free?

Get This.

What it lets you do is have various widgets on your desktop that tell you things like the temperature and forecast for outside. And if you make them be "Below" widgets they embed onto your desktop so you can have icons around it.

Oh, and you can program new widgets for it. SOme say it is really really easy to do. Oh and for your stock fiends, it comes with a stock ticker....

Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7

Upgrade now!.

On an aside, I love Leo Laporte was commenting on a lot of blogs are a waste of time.

Granted, this is a news site/tech feed. But it's cunning disguised as a blog.

Opera's Now Free

Yes you heard it here, opera is free as in beer. Yipee! Now there is no reason why anyone has to stay with IE and it's crap standards.

And I really mean crap standards. C'mon, who really wants to have to do tricks to get PNG translucency to work? I'm just glad they support a subset of CSS.

Granted Opera and Firefox support most everything in the CSS.

Much excitement.

NerdTV

This a neat site. People that are on the tech trail giving television interviews that you can then download and watch. It's like iptv but sponsered by PBS and like some iptv, only available via the internet.

How's this done, bandwidth-wise? Well through the bandwidth sharing, peer to peer client BitTorrent. It's really neat. And the speeds you can get to download things is much faster than some of the speeds the respective servers could handle normally. IE PBS might not have a pipe that can handle hundreds of 1MB connections all at once, but with the miracle of BitTorrent, they don't have to. Cool stuff.

Digg

From this awesome site's copy:

What's Digg? Digg is a technology news website
that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical
editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but
rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the
homepage, the users do.

It's very Cool. And via digg, I found the following link to firefox wallpapers here.

Trailers @ apple

Oh if you want to spend some time seeing what's going to come out in the theatres, why don't you head on over to The Apple Trailer section. Most of the big name movies are there and it's always nice to see them in the privacy of your own home.

Only drawback is that you'll need Quicktime which, while bundled with iTunes, doesn't mean each and every person has it.

Oh, and if you want a good browser, and you don't want firefox, for some reason, you could always get Opera. I'm using it right now to write this entry (and it's fast).

Lulu.com

This site has an interesting premise. Print on demand books people want. So instead of doing pre-determined runs of books, as someone wants a book it's printed out. And, from what I hear, the printing doesn't suck.

And they have several Mac OSX type books (including one book on Applescript).

Neat neat stuff.

Searching Blogs

Ever wanted to search blogs for some information? Well look no further Google now has this service. Vanity google yourself, or just see what other people have said about tech on occasion. It's handy, and has RSS feeds for the searches. So you can pick a topic and see what all people post about it.

CSS and IE6

Did you know that IE6/5 does *not* handle transparent png's for backgrounds correctly? Nope, you have to play tricks with them. Supposedly they will have png support in IE7, but still how can you really force readers of your website to go to IE7?

Oh, and here is the link to the IE7 blog (or at least yet another one).


Oh and here's my favorite quotes from the mezzoblue article:

Lack of support for min-width and max-width

Again comparing to all other browsers on the market, IE is the only one that doesn’t support the CSS2 properties min-width and max-width (which have been a standard since 1997, incidentally). These are incredibly useful for controlling larger areas of type, particularly when setting line length limits to aid in readability.

The trick to getting around min-width in IE is actually pretty easy. IE treats width as if it were min-width. By exploiting the fact that IE doesn’t support child selectors either (more on this later) we can create a simple bit of code that doesn’t allow a browser windows....