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The modern news consumer ignores Weblogs and online citizen journalism at his own peril. But not everyone has the time to keep track of what's going on the Web. With this blog we hope to track the highlights of what's being discussed online so when news breaks from the Web, we're ready.

Will Femia is a Weblog enthusiast who, through good fortune and dumb luck, was introduced to the form as his position as chat producer for MSNBC.com careered into obsolescence. On any given day, Will can be found having already spent an unhealthy amount of time squinting at a computer screen.

Send a message to Will at spotter@msnbc.com



Women in the cross hairs

Posted: Friday, January 02, 2009 2:47 PM by Will Femia

Have you watched any of the Target Women series? This gal blasts the way advertisers portray women. I haven't seen one yet that wasn't wicked funny.

DressRegistry.com lets you officially declare the dress you're wearing to a big event in the hopes that you'll avoid having someone else show up at the same event in the same dress. It doesn't say who's wearing what, just the designer and the dress.

The Emma Hack body art series (her site is here but the collection is viewed more easily here [and NOTE: These are painted naked women. I saw at least one nipple and it's not clear what they're wearing on the bottom exactly but the whole thing is probably a little too close to naked for work.]) remind me of these much safer for work Vogue photos from 2007.

If you're suffering Rick Warren controversy fatigue you may find it more rewarding to focus on Barack Obama's poet selection for the inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander.

That Kathy Griffin New Year's slip. Since it's always annoying when there's something being reported in the news that the news isn't allowed to explicitly say, here's the clip of Kathy Griffin shouting an off-color retaliatory insult at a heckler. It comes at the very end of the clip. NOTE: Not a curse exactly but a vulgarity using the word "dicks" and yes, it's weird that I feel comfortable saying "dicks" here but not comfortable writing the phrase she shouts.

Cancer Cured headline of the day: "A woman from London will give birth next week to the first British baby screened to be free of an altered gene which causes breast cancer." I wonder if the idea of "cures" will ever seem old fashioned compared to genetically phasing out disease. Science may not cure you but they'll make sure the next generation of babies has some innate ability to avoid getting what you've got.

Did you see the story of all of those Zunes that went dead because of the leap second? Here's what the code looks like (or so I believe, I'm not reporting this with any Microsoft insight even though MSNBC.com is partly owned by Microsoft). You don't have to understand computer code to appreciate a little look under the hood and recognize what's going on. The time keeping starts at line 249. You can see how there is an allowance for a leap year but then down at line 314 we see how it turns seconds into hours and there's no allowance for that leap second that was added this year.

For the end of the year, a nice collection of "the end" frames.

Here's the time lapse video of the construction of the hockey rink in Chicago. I wouldn't have guessed it would take that many days to make a hockey rink. I've always thought it would be cool to work for a place like the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island in New York, which can have a rock concert one day, a monster truck mud show the next day, a hockey game the next day and a lacrosse game the next day, all in the same space. Maybe my imagining of how quickly the space is converted for use is a little off.

The winners of the Go Miniman Go Lego video contest are so fun you'll soon find yourself on Amazon looking for video cameras with single frame features.

For some reason I can't stop looking at this photo of a dog literally sitting.

I spent a fair amount of time this break reading backward through the Online Photographer's blog. For folks like myself who are still early in the learning stages there are few things as valuable as reading someone with strong opinions to help shape the parameters for judging your own work.

This guy made a hoverboard with a leafblower.

JPG Magazine closed.

Double checking the medical accuracy of the story lines of the House TV show. What's interesting about this, beyond the content itself, is that I'm sure the show uses real medical consultants of some kind. I wonder how much of the details caught on this site are also by the show's medical consultants and overruled by the writing staff.

Here in New York City there's a local TV station that does a daily review of headlines in New York's newspapers called Today's Papers. On weekdays, the job is handled by near-cult favorite anchor Pat Kiernan. The segment is wicked handy and arguably prototypical video blogging and now he's doing it on his own site, Pat's Papers, and including papers outside of New York City.

"A tiny microscope that employs the same kind of chip used in digital cameras can produce high-resolution images of cells without the expensive, space-hogging lenses that have been part of microscope design for centuries."

I think it's safe to say that the light saber is objectively cool, meaning even outside of the Star Wars milieu.

Commuter Click: This 2003 New Yorker piece on Albert Ellis and the psychological philosophy that is essentially "get over it." It reminds me of a huge fight I got into with a college housemate in which I insisted that sadness (in this argument, parents grieving over a son lost at war) was not a right but a choice. (Her: The death of one's son is objectively sad and a person in that position can't help but feel sad so they're perfectly within their rights to do so. Me: How one feels about the death of a son at war depends on how they feel about death, war and sons and it's entirely possible to imagine a perspective that would not see it as a sad situation and therefore grieving parents have chosen their grief and are not to be pitied.) Of course I was a huge, arrogant jerk and made my housemate cry with frustration but it's nice to think back with slightly more maturity on the ideas that were stewing in my rotten little brain back then.

Skate and Annoy - as cited in this NYTimes piece on skating the pools of foreclosed houses.

How cool would the job of movie location scout be?

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Comments

Actually the Zune issue was not seconds, though they don't handle a day having more than exactly 24 hours.  The problem was with them accounting for days.  The 31st was the 366th day of the year, and line 265 goes in to an infinite loop... it IS a leap year, but the days are not greater than 366, so it keeps looping without subtracting days to be able to break out of the loop.
The Zune bug is because of the leap year. It has nothing to do with the leap second. The bug will happen every leap year.
The difference at Nassau Coliseum, though, is that the ice rink doesn't have to be rebuilt -- it's always there.  For other events, they put a floor covering over the ice, then put the mud or turf or whatever on top of that.
Ah, I see. Thanks guys. I saw that there was a consideration of leap year in the code and figured that covered that. So specifically it's line 267 that's the real problem with that incorrect greater than?

if (days > 366)
Great link to Target Women, Will.  I don't normally watch commerials thanks to hubby and his TiVo, so these were laugh out loud funny to see from the host's perspective!  
Will, yes if the days variable is exactly 366 then you will stay in the "while" loop forever since 366 will always be greater than 365 but you will never fall into either of the "if/else" conditions since for that 366 value it will never "not be a leap year" nor will the days value ever exceed 366.

The greater question is was this code ever properly reviewed?  I see how this could slip by in a casual review but it would be fairly obvious to someone whose job it is to just review code (a position I would expect a large "professional" organization like M$ to have).  But really the even greater question is why re-write code to do date functioning when there should be plenty of time-tested code already out there.  This problem definitely never should have cropped up in this day and age.
KRW, that's what I was wondering too. They don't have boilerplate code for clocks and timers? Seems like that's something they more sort of paste in rather than write out.
Here's a time lapse of the RBC center in Raleigh, NC going from a NC State Basketball game to a Carolina Hurricanes ice hockey game in less than an hour and a half.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-8hubpvhVw
Will, it's not even a matter of boilerplate code really.  I don't know what the underlying platform is for Zune but it being M$ and possibly on a 386-type structure, you could probably even use the same compiled libraries.  Even if the platform is different, you could still use the original source code and only need to tweek the variables that are platform specific.  The basic logic would not need to change.  And there was nothing in this function that would have been affected by that.  It's definitely cut-and-paste code at the very least...Assuming one had access to the original source, which may be the real reason it was being re-invented...ah, who knows.

The primary coding issue here is the use of literal constants 365 and 366. These should be replaced with a variable named something like daysInThisYear which would be set to 365 or 366 based on IsLeapYear returning true/false. Other code changes would be required of course, but the flaw in the thinking is in the assumption made about the value 365 always meaning "a year" in the while loop logic.  

Though the simplest solution would be to just break out of the loop if IsLeapYear is true and days > 366 is false.  Aren't you glad these guys aren't writing the software to pump drugs into your veins or land your next red-eye airline flight?


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