It's been a while, so I have a tasty treat for all of you. A super long rendition of Line Noise! Hold on to your hat and brace yourself for these thoughtsicles!

First up, a man in Toronto has been dubbed the world champion of bike thieves, having arranged upward of 2,396 bicycles, which have been confiscated by police. Also discovered was cocaine, crack cocaine, 15 pounds of marijuana, and a stolen bronze sculpture of a centaur and a snake in battle.

Tired of using a knife or a pizza cutter to deal with that pesky slice separation problem? Look no more!

Ever been interested in hardware hacking? Zachtronics has an interactive hardware reversing game, great for an afternoon distraction. You can keep tabs on future releases here. For another game, check out this physics based puzzie solving flash game called Fantastic Contraption.

Apparently C++ wasn't confusing and convoluted enough, so Bjarne Stroustrup is on the path to create C++0x. Yes, that's the name of it. It's going to include lambda functions and other features for those of you who love the functional programming. If you'd prefer to stick to the interpreted language front, here's a haskell-like monad implementation for python.

If you're stuck doing real work, you might need to convert files from one format to another. Try zamzar, an online file converter. If that online tool doesn't fit your fancy, maybe you need to go more low level and try JSASM, the JavaScript x86 assembler. While still pointing out the online tools, Pedram pointed us at this online XUL editor. On top of that, we have our own repository of online tools here.
 
If you've ever wondered about how to do on the fly patching with GDB, Cody pointed out this link for a concise rundown.

Ali found a paper on making Erlang run in real-time. Ali likes Erlang, don't hold that against him. If you are a fan of the more obscure languages, you might want to pick up COBOL, it's not going anywhere and is a growth industry!

Have you ever been on a plane and wondered why a seat cushion is a flotation device, but they also hand out life vests? Apparently so did Air Canada Jazz, so they got rid of the vests to lighten the planes. If you do get stranded at sea however, it might be wise to invest in a dolphin shaped submarine.

Ali pointed out a paper on regular expression optimizations. There is a focus on the engine creation, which is important to understand if you're writing regexes for speed.
 
Ever been playing with a site and wondered what the track record was for XSS vulnerabilities? If it happens, try checking out xssed.

The CERN Large Hadron collider went online since the last Line Noise, apparently not only do they have web-cams but theme songs and security holes as well.

A group of italian AI researchers formally modelled SAML 2.0 Single-sign-on and implemented it into their model checker. They verified this against google's implementation and found a flaw.

Chris Eng's blog had an interesting post on malware distribution. You all read Chris' blog regularly though, right? Right?

Apparently the residents of Lancaster, California are none too happy with the road they let an advertising agency for Honda modify. My first reaction was that this was a cool idea, but then I realized the novelty might wear off and I'd agree with the locals.


Our last link is to an article on using NLP to gather information on the internet. This type of technology is at the same time really cool and really really scary.

That's it for now, stay classy blogosphere.