tail -f ZS64.log

The oldest, still running science fiction TV series, Doctor Who, has the Doctor jumping through time and space. A lot.

Now David McCandless has collected all of them in a huge dataset on his blog, waiting for someone to visualize them. As David writes in the Guardian,

I really wanted to do a mega-visualisation of all of the Time Lord’s journeys. But faced the cosmic task of trawling through well over 200 episodes, logging every time TARDIS was hurled through time and space.

Can’t wait for the results to show up!

Texas Stadium, previous home of the Dallas Cowboys, was demolished on April 11th. Immersive Media recorded the demolition of the main structure using a 360° high speed video camera, so you can pan and zoom around while the stadium is collapsing around you. I don’t know if this is the first such recording, but it certainly is a nice application of panoramic photo and video recording, so that you can experience something from a position you would not want to be in personally. Too bad the camera got knocked out about halfway through the sequence.

Screenshot of Immersive Media's flash viewer, displaying the demolition of Texas Stadium

via BoingBoing

If you have trouble with Flash segfaulting in Linux Firefox-3.5.2 (the symptom is a browser hang), I fixed that by downgrading Flash from Flash10 to Flash9. Of course Flash9 is full of security holes. In combination with the Flashblocker Firefox extension and only activating it on trusted sites it seems like a reasonable approach. Of course for all we know the newest Flash10 is full of security problems, too.

Telnet too complicated? Just add bgpbotz to your AIM friends list, and ask Merit’s routeviews server anything about their world view. The poor thing has a second personality answering to Jabber’s bgpbotz@jabber.merit.edu.

I have to admit that I didn’t follow developments too closely for the last couple of years, but I was rather surprised today to find that Safari 4, Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 6 to 8 support downloadable TrueType fonts in a compatible and useful manner.

Slashdot post, linked Slate article, nice overview page.

A couple of things that are buried in the pages linked above, but which helped me to get up to speed:

• CSS rules:

<style>
@font-face {
    font-family: "testing";
    src: url("output.ttf") format("truetype");
}
</style>
<!--[if IE]>
    <style>
    @font-face {
        font-family: "testing";
        src: url("output.eot");
    }
    </style>
<![endif]-->
<div style="font-family: testing">
Hello, Multiple Browser World!
</div>

• Fonts available free of charge or under free licenses
• Utility to convert TTF into EOT files (should be available as a FreeBSD port as www/ttf2eot shortly)

Now I just need to quickly build a WordPress and a MediaWiki template, and we’re all set