Hey, +Google Chrome team:

Why doesn't video in hangouts work in Chrome anymore? I've had to resort to Safari! (yes, I tried to give plus.google.com access to my camera; it didn't help)

This issue seems to affect other sites that try to access the camera too, like bluejeans.com.

(Chrome 39.0.2171.71 on OS X 10.9.5) This worked in chrome ...65

I'm really liking playing around with Wolfram Programming Cloud (https://programming.wolframcloud.com/app/) - it lets me relive some of the fun I remember of messing with Mathematica as an undergrad without having to pay through the nose for a professional tool I don't really need.

This is the result of:

Export["wavy.gif",Table[Plot3D[((1-Sin[#+a])/(Exp[#/5])&)[x^2+y^2], {x, 0, 2}, {y, 0, 2}, PlotRange->{0,2}],{a, 0, 2 Pi,0.1}]]

Typing is going to be a bit slower today than expected.

It would be a bad idea to build up my twitter following list by just going down the list at https://twitter.com/search?q=%22daniel%20martin%22&mode=users and clicking "follow" to every vaguely interesting description, right?

Some of my dopplenamers are bound to be real jerks.

This morning, NPR played a story I've been complaining about for years. Go ahead, open an incognito window and try to find me given my name.

Seriously, I checked in the internet wayback machine and found a webpage of mine whining about this problem 15 years ago. I think the last time I could search on my name and find stuff about me (or where people had linked to my stuff, and credited me) was sometime in 1996.

Google has received approval for the .prod gTLD

This news is probably a few months old now, but I wasn't paying attention to these things and only just now tracked down a corner case mystery surrounding IP address 127.0.53.53.

Basically, if you are a small company with internal-only DNS names that end in .prod, you need to assign someone to look into this right now. It might not be too late to complain if this is going to be painful.

For example, you might have an internal DNS that resolves names like "www.prod" to an inside-the-VPN IP address for the production network and "www.beta" or "www.dev" to an inside-the-VPN IP address for the dev network. When the .prod gTLD goes live, how does that affect you?

To be fair, if you're going to have serious problems the instant .prod goes live as a gTLD, you're probably already seeing them as "anyarbitraryname.prod" resolves to 127.0.53.53, and will until at least some time in December.

However, do people in your company automatically assume that any .prod name is an internal IP? Do you think they could be fooled by an email that said "Hey, I ported over a fun internal thing we used to have at Google; check out http://memegen.prod/  --  It uses your LDAP username/password for authentication."? Because when the new gTLD goes live, suddenly .prod will no longer mean "inside your company"; it'll mean "inside the company for certain specific names, but generally whatever someone buying a DNS name from Google wants it to mean."

Talking with the 10-year-old on the ride to school today, she was telling me how she sometimes makes jokes so obscure and geeky no one else gets them.

Specifically, in computer class (which she has once a week) they are each making an ad for some imaginary computer part. She initially wanted to call her company "Veridian Dynamics", but as she was Googling for the logo decided that was too obscure so went with the company name "Aperture Science".

Me: "Oh, well that your teacher will at least get that."
K: "No; she didn't." (in that forlorn "no one understands me" tone tweens start to practice)
K: "There's a spot for a satisfied customer quote and I was thinking of something like «I've been stuck in this FREAKIN' PLACE for weeks!» but that didn't sound satisfied."
Me: "«The cake is a lie»?"
K: "Maybe; I should figure out some way to fit a cake joke in there. After the company contact info, I did put « We do what we must, because we can »."

So, this morning I told the 10-year-old about Lovecraft and his Cthulhu stories to set up the joke that I'd seen +Naomi Kritzer  retweet:

It's time to light the candles // it's time to kill the sheep // it's time to wake the Muppets from their thousand years of sleep

The kid thought this was hilarious, so on the way to school we came up with more:

It's time to light the candles // it's time to kill the sheep // it's time to wake the Muppets from their thousand years of sleep
It's time to grab the relic // and make the shadows creep // it's time to wake the Muppets from a thousand years of sleep
Why would you try to stop them? // Their rise has been foretold, // so let's all start the torture // to feed what lies below
Why don't we get things started? // Why don't you get things started
<we weren't sure what to do in place of the "On the most sensational..." stanza, but we're pretty sure it has to involve "diabolical">
THIS IS WHAT WE CALL THE RITUAL! <Gonzo's horn makes a bloodcurdling scream>

(To give proper attribution, the last line and "It's time to grab the relic" were all her)