Ben Darnell › Comments

An ad in the charlotte airport - Ben Darnell from email

I'm not sure I'd be a fan of Sushi that's even a couple of days old, either. - Mark Trapp

I think the 2nd person would be the guy being shot at :) - Joel Webber

The DS is the perfect platform for second-person shooters - the second-person boss fight in Zelda: Phantom Hourglass turned out pretty well. The second screen (an overhead view that shows you but not the enemy) keeps you from getting too disoriented as the enemy moves, which makes it more interesting than the second-person segments in e.g. Battletoads. The real catch is that... more... - Ben Darnell

very suspicious. - Dario Gomez

You would have gotten a better price if you had the appraiser come out on halloween - Ben Darnell

If I were president wookiee suits would be the new Secret Service uniform. - Ben Darnell

the president constantly being surrounded by wookies would be pretty amusing - bob

It's not just about controlling the channel. Youtube has had third party ads take over the page before: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... - Ben Darnell

Wouldn't they have found him already? - Shevonne

I kinda burned down a fence at that same age. Dad drove into driveway and saw me in the act. I ran around the back of the house and then into my room and under my bed. Seemed like it took them an hour to find me. I was happy and comfortable there, wasn't going to come out into the chaos on my own. - Hayes Haugen

I never thought I'd make this comparison, but I'm glad this turned out to be more like "12 Monkeys" than "Up". - Ben Darnell

Thanks for the bug fix! So many people will be pleased. - Anne Bouey

wow. I love this apartment. - Jenna Bilotta

It's fixed now. - Ben Darnell

Dvorak isn't really the right model for touchscreens anyway, since it was designed for a physical two-handed keyboard (maximize use of the home row and alternation between hands, etc). I used the Fitaly keyboard layout on PalmOS (http://www.fitaly.com/fitaly...) and would like to see something like it on the iPhone, but Pete has a good point that this may defeat the iPhone's invisible key resizing. - Ben Darnell

That's interesting. I guess the optimal layout for preventing jammed keys probably is close to the optimal layout for making accurate predictions based on where you actually pressed... - Laurence Gonsalves

Not exactly. For jammed keys you want to avoid having letters that may appear consecutively adjacent on the keyboard. For predictive key resizing you want to avoid having adjacent letters that are likely to follow the same prefix. Having ING next to each other would be prone to jammed keys, but wouldn't pose a problem for predictive input. - Ben Darnell

I got to believe it's a unicode character, and Google's not sanitizing anything that's valid UTF-8. - Mark Trapp

Ah Matt, thanks for confirming it. I couldn't find any info directly from Firefox about it (although I did find a host of other ligature bugs). - Mark Trapp

You mean PHP is Turing-complete? - Tudor Bosman

There are templating systems built on top of PHP (a templating system) which on their own are Turning-complete. *sigh* ;) - Micah

Tudor: I think you could write a Fractan interpreter in PHP, so yes. http://scienceblogs.com/goodmat... - Ben Darnell

The entire "Things I Won't Work With" category of this blog is awesome. To subscribe to just this category in Reader, use this link: http://pipeline.corante.com/archive... - Ben Darnell

"By the time Gerald Ford died in December 2006, his obituary writer had been dead for 11 months. " - Ben Darnell

The interesting part of the article is determining who is at risk, especially younger examples. Should Kurt Cobain's have been pre-written? What about obese comedians or those who drink heavily? - Louis Gray

Long but good article on the challenges facing newspapers (via piaw) - Ben Darnell

The web app is awesome but terribly slow. I've just checked my (empty) inbox (edge, near Paris): it took 38 seconds. - Jérôme

re:gears vs. html5 -- I always conflate the two, but really all I meant is the app cache and database APIs. The javascript appears to be a large part of the speed issues, but the HTML DOM's no speed demon either. And when you compare the speed of the Android native client to the web client, and consider the the Dalvik VM's pretty slow as well, it implies that Javascript *parsing* (startup time) and the DOM are likely the big time sinks. - Joel Webber

"But to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. Those self-stimulating rats, and later those humans, did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The animals, he writes in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, were "excessively excited, even crazed." The rats were in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects described feeling sexually aroused but didn't experience climax. Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, "where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy". It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. ... In order to have the maximum effect, the cues should be small, discrete,... more... - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

A great explanation of why the "dopamine reward system" argument in mass media should always be a red flag: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog... - Jason Wehmhoener

For Jenna :) - Ben Darnell

OMG. gross. (but love fried chicken) torn. - Jenna Bilotta

I wonder if they deliver to Mountain View.... may have to send the Reader team a care package. - Louis Gray

Maybe I'm just lucky but I acclimated quickly. Then again, I've always had tapping turned on other laptops I've owned so I was kind of used to it anyway. - Akiva

I have the same issue as you describe. I guess the only solution is time. - Angus Burton

I can't believe it took so long for someone to do this. I mean, all you have to do is run the image sensor in reverse to let all the captured photons out through the lens, right? ;) - Ben Darnell

What is happening with progress to make a videophone a reality? - Michael Muller

Looks like metafilter has removed the video. It's available with a less-offensive title (sorry mom!) at http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture... - Ben Darnell

It's even more impressive if you have the cultural context. - Misha Dynin

Steve's secret is out ;) - Ben Darnell

denny's! he does LOVE denny's! :) (ben, we miss you) - Jenna Bilotta

To block this if you run AdSense, add evony.com to the blacklist. - Philipp Lenssen

Doesn't Google screen these ads though? Do they consider these ads OK for game sites? (I get emails from families whenever such ads appear on GamesfortheBrain... and then have to ask them to tell me the domain of the ad but urging them NOT to click on the ad, as it would be against the terms.) - Philipp Lenssen

"Ben Darnell, a key member of the Google Reader team, has left Mountain View to jump into startup life. Darnell bailed Google for FriendFeed, which was founded by ex-Googlers and notably in part by Kevin Fox, who used to work with him on the Google Reader team. Darnell is FriendFeed’s first hire in over a year, and will get employee badge number 13. He starts today, and according to the blog post announcing the steal, he’ll be bringing his “ninja-fu data-storage and scalability skills” to the startup." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

I'm sure it's already been done, but Fantasy start-up? - Shirley Wu

It's interesting how hard it is to make apparently-straightforward graphical improvements to a 16-year-old game running on more modern hardware. Also, even without the graphical improvements, "it is Doom as you remember it, which is quite a bit better than it actually was". - Ben Darnell

I was just complaining to Gary today that I remember playing Doom on my 33Mhz 486, but these days you "need" a 400Mhz ARM to get the same performance. Thank you performance sucking abstraction layers! - Private Sanjeev

Just installed http://koti.mbnet.fi/mertama... on my Nokia. Ahh it takes me back. Interesting to see some of the choices that they made for the original game still hold true with a modern PDA/Phone. - John Cooper

You mean I wasn't getting my recommended intake of fruit as a kid by eating Crunch Berries? At least snozzberries are still real, right? - Ben Darnell

Daylight savings time kills. One more reason to get rid of it. - Ben Darnell

I use it on my laptop, and it works well for me. Downside: you need half your hard drive empty to set it up. - Bret Taylor

FileVault interferes with Time Machine backups - the backups still work and will be encrypted, but it's less convenient. Time Machine won't back up an encrypted account while it's active, so you have to log out (or switch to a non-encrypted account) to make a backup, and restoration is all-or-nothing (you can't just reach back in time and pull out a single file). - Ben Darnell

It really sucks if your drive fails. A partial failure will axe your whole disk. - Daniel Dulitz

"it turned out that some of the game content indeed was not up to standards of China’s General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) which requested some modifications.". I'm curious which parts were objectionable. - Private Sanjeev

It's apparently depictions of death and undeath, especially skeletons (http://archive.gulfnews.com/article...). - Ben Darnell

Skeletons not allowed?! I wonder what they use for poison warning signs in China. - Private Sanjeev

Happy birthday! - Ben Darnell

thanks! How are you?? - Susan Shepard

Shellen demos brizzly. - Jenna Bilotta

kfury++ - Ben Darnell