Monthly Archives: May 2009

Of Roombas and Art

In case you couldn’t find enough reasons to want to buy a roomba for a little Randomly generated art after my last post, I found a flickr pool of Roomba Art. Right now it’s a small pool of photos, but after looking through them I have a feeling it will slowly fill it up with awesome images as its popularity spreads across the web. I’ve included a two of the more interesting images below. In a side note, I discovered through one of the captions that the initial spiral is created when the roomba starts in spot mode and it then transitions to it’s chaotic orbit.

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OpenDNS: A Followup

In a previous article, I discussed OpenDNS and it’s proxying/filtering capabilities, suggesting that by changing the DNS servers your computer uses for queries will bypass OpenDNS’ content filtering. While this part remains accurate, my suggestion that using a root DNS server from Wikipedia’s article was a bad one.  After actually having tried it, I discovered it does not work for whatever reason. Maybe they restrict DNS queries to edge DNS servers in order to prevent being taken down by a DDoS.  Anyway, use 4.2.2.1 – 4.2.2.6 instead.

opendns2

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Chaos is beautiful

Today, I’ve got another exhibit to add to the awesome visualizations that can result from a little chaos in practice. The image below comes from a blog called SignalTheorist courtesy of Gizmodo.  It is the result of a 30 minute exposure in a darkened room as a roomba carried out its duties.

roomba-movements

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So maybe this time I’ll learn…

If there’s anybody out there reading this (yeah, right) who has worked with WordPress before probably knows about permalinks. They’re those handly little URLs that look like “http://www.sector930.com/01/01/foo-bar” instead of “http://www.sector930.com/?p=666″. We gave permalinks a shot a little while ago, but we noticed it was breaking all the links to individual articles. So we put it on the backburner for a while.

Today I decided to give it another go. The steps involved look something like this:

  1. Ensure mod_rewrite Apache module is installed
  2. Enable FollowSymLinks in httpd.conf
  3. Put AllowOverride FileInfo in httpd.conf
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Who’s Laughing Now?

Today’s post is not directly about the Internet, technology, Web2.0, video games, scripting, cable standards, or the wide, wide world of being a defense contractor.  I do feel, however, that the “web culture” (nerds) will find it the most poignant.  Today’s entry is about revisiting childhood.

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