2010 year-end link clearance

Raymond Chen

Another round of the semi-annual link clearance.

• Sir Humphrey Appleby has a blog, developed in conjunction with Yes, Prime Minister, the play.
• Everybody on television reads the same newspaper. (Another gallery.) Here’s where they got it. The comments on this Boing Boing post are consistently high quality. Related: Everybody on television uses the same paper cup.
• Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel 2009. CG: It’s not just for science fiction shows any more.
• The most ridiculous Food Network recipe of all time. The recipe reviews make this one a winner.
• The most awesome apartment in Seattle: The pyramid at the top of the Smith Tower. Slideshow. More pix. The building owner planned to convert each of the top twelve floors into a single-unit condo. Dunno how that’s going.
• Two words: Muggle Quidditch. Three more words: Quidditch World Cup.
• You’re Doing It Wrong, another practical illustration of What you learned in school is wrong.
• The yellow tape is there for a reason.
• The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Search Presentation.
• Zoomdoggle’s Fun List NYC, a list of over 300 offbeat things to do in New York City. Maybe I’ll try some of them the next time I pay a visit.
• Researchers into memory decay in the context of happiness have determined that Disneyland is the worst place on earth, but yet everybody remembers it as a wonderful happy place. How can that be? (You gotta watch this video just for the Christmas letter.)
• When summer fun turns deadly serious: Jeff Wise, author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger shares an experience that shows how the realization that a situation has become potentially fatal paralyzes otherwise-intelligent people.
• Pachelbel Rant. The classical music version of the four-chord song.
• NPR tackles the question “Why do some songs fade out at the end?”
• This is a news website article about a scientific paper. It is frightening how accurate that article is.
• Why it’s better to pretend you don’t know anything about computers. That comic is so true it isn’t even funny; it’s just sad.
• Ambushing the Ambushers: Trying to ambush the ambush interviewer.
• The Art of the Recap: How the television recap became its own genre, sometimes more entertaining than the original work being recapped.
• Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds: A lengthy study of the Greek economic crisis, and how nobody in Greece pays taxes. (Related: Anti-Corruption Efforts in Russia Fall Short.) (Greece-inspired story: A colleague of mine told me that he had to help a friend of his make an online purchase because the company refused to accept credit cards issued by Greek banks. That’s pretty bad.)
• How low did we go?: A look at the (hopefully no-longer-current) fad of scantily-clad baristas.
• Mark MacKinnon‘s series on North Korea and China.
  • August 24: Peeking at North Korea from across the Yalu.
  • August 25: Into the land of the Kims – a journey in North Korea. Taking a guided tour of North Korea (because unguided tours are right out).
  • August 26: What to do with a stuffed Nicaraguan crocodile. A visit to Kim Jong-il’s palace of random stuff received as gifts from foreigners (not just foreign leaders), formally known as the International Friendship Exhibition.
  • August 27: Passport games – trying to stay out of Pyongyang Prison. Drama as MacKinnon tries to hide an incriminating second passport from the authorities.
  • August 28: The pool hustlers of Pyongyang.
  • August 29: MacKinnon returns to China. Chinese democracy.
  • A police state without traffic police.
  • Bonus video: Pyongyang Traffic Cop. Why are all videos of North Korean traffic cops taken of the same corner? T his video explains: It’s right next to a popular tourist location.
• Fanciful fruit fly gene names will become boring. So much for Cheap Date.
• Reasoning with Vampires: The Twilight series, as annotated by an editor.
• Unearthing Mendelssohn’s Lost Works. The excerpt from the Italian Symphony reminds me of a book I discovered some decades ago which provided mnemonic “lyrics” to major classical works. The so-called lyrics to the opening of the Italian Symphony, as best I can remember them, are as follows:

  Spaghetti! Spaghetti! The meal of Milan,
  With oregano and sourdough and veal parmesan.
  We eat it by night, we it it by day,
  We eat it at work, we eat it at play And we never get tired,
    No, we never get tired,
    Of the meal,
    Yes, the meal,
    From Milano.

  Catchy, ain’t it.

• The Seattle Bubble real estate blog asks, “What’s wrong these photos?”
• I’m not the only one with a long posting queue. So remember that the next time you see a strange coincidence between an article that comes out of my queue and the date it appears.

And, as always, the obligatory plug for my column in TechNet Magazine:

• Beware the Balloon.
• Hiding in Plain Sight.
• History—the Long Way Through. In their zeal to make this article meet length, the editors cut what I consider to be the most important part of the article! Here’s the penultimate paragraph in its full unedited version, with the important part underlined.

  But wait, there’s still more. What if you want to access the real 64-bit system directory from a 32-bit process? File system redirection will take your attempt to access the C:\Windows\System32 directory and redirect it to the C:\Windows\SysWOW64 directory. Programmatically, you can use functions with unwieldy names like Wow64­Disable­Wow64­Fs­Redirection, but those disable redirection for all operations until re-enabled, which causes trouble if you’re doing anything more complicated than opening a single file, because a complex operation may result in multiple files being accessed and possibly even worker threads being created. Instead of using a gross switch like disabling file system redirection, you can use the special C:\Windows\SysNative virtual directory. When a 32-bit process tries to access the C:\Windows\SysNative directory, the operations are redirected to the real C:\Windows\System32 directory. A local solution to a local problem.

• Leftovers from Windows 3.0.
• The Story of Restore.
• The Tumultuous History of ‘Up One Level’. The editors messed up the diagram in this article. The “1” is supposed to be an “open folder” icon, but due to the same error that results in that mysterious J, the Wingdings glyph turned into a plain “1”. Here’s what the diagram was supposed to look like. (Of course, if your browser is one who believes that Wingdings doesn’t have a “1” glyph, then you’ll just see a “1”.)

  So for those of you looking for your Up One Level button, it’s right there on the Address Bar. I’ve drawn a box around it so it’s easier to see.

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  Computer

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  Wallpaper

Raymond Chen

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