2002.06 (Jun)



2002.06.29 (saturday)


Thumbscript (via bifurcated rivets) Semi-clever graffiti-esque scheme for text input using a standard 9-key numpad. It’s a bit confusing, because the diagrams for each letter connect dots through the “5″ button (eg “a” goes from 7 through 5 to 9), but you’re not actually supposed to use the “5″ button (for “a” you just push 7 then 9).
6:31:45 PM #



How To Block Ads (& Web Bugs) Without Extra Software Actively maintained list of webbug/ad sites that you simply paste into your hosts file, which prevents your computer from even contacting these sites. Includes easy instructions for most operating systems.
1:00:03 PM #


Mathematical Lego Sculptures (via antiquark) Mobius strips, Klein bottles, and other interesting surfaces, all built with lego.
11:02:18 AM #


WinURL Win32 tray app from the PuTTY d00d auto-opens any URL on the clipboard when clicked on. This makes it a ton easier to open URLs in programs that don’t have automatic link detection and browser-activation (like PuTTY).
10:59:47 AM #


2002.06.26 (wednesday)


The Wireless Arcade (be warned, this is a FIVE PAGE article about games on your cell phone, and there is something really fucked up in the style sheet that makes some paragraphs render in two different styles depending on where your mouse is)

Though most of us are now familiar with the idea of getting driving directions or surfing the Web on a cell phone, the real killer app of wireless devices is games.

Yeah, the eagerly awaited SNAKE III will rescue Nokia from this slump. Hello??? These must be the same mouth-breathers that said that downloadable ringtones would be a billion-dollar market by 2002 (this predecits $6B by 2005). Yes, lots of people play these dumb games while waiting in line or whatever, but do you think anyone would PAY MONEY for them? Sure, some tiny number of people will, and it will probably be the same twelve people who paid $0.99 to get Elenor Rigby in 2-bit sound.

But wait, these are “wireless games!” Now instead of playing a built-in game that came with your phone, you’ll get to play the same lame eat-the-dots game, but pay $0.99 each time you play it [cite] because you’ll download it from your phone provider - wirelessly!

11:09:35 PM #

2002.06.24 (monday)


I’ve been victimized by spammers. Today, I got two bounces from AOL that were spam obviously forged from my domain. My ISP tells me this is called a “Joe Job.” At least it was for 2nd mortgages and not some goat fucker thing.
8:39:13 PM #

2002.06.22 (saturday)


MEMS - Micro Electrical Mechanical Systems These tiny machines are built with the same processes used to make integrated circuits. This may not sound exciting at first, but this technology will revolutionize just about everything. Think of an inertial sensor 1/150th the mass of a conventional sensor, 1/200 the size, uses 1/35 as much power, is 1000 times more impact resistant, and costs about 1/40th as much. Applications are pratically unlimited. Guidance systems on a single chip, sensors embedded everywhere, entire surfaces with active configurability (think of aircraft constantly adjusting their aerodynamics). Faster, better, stronger. Adaptive optics, medical systems, the list goes on. How about nanobots that can liquify your body from the inside, like that Itchy and Scratchy episode?

Slide 13 is particularly interesting, outlining some of the issues involved with devices this small. Classical physics isn’t enough, and atomic forces become significant.

See also: [analog devices] [bell labs]

11:03:00 PM #


dselect is the morse code of Debain.I’m sure it used to be useful, even vital, but now it only exists as a barrier to entry. The old-timers fight to keep it around to weed out the wanna-bes and posers so they don’t have to deal with them. In the process, though, they manage to piss off a lot of smart people who don’t have time to fuck with an installer that tries to get them to guess which version of perl they really want out of the 15 available and administers Kobayashi Maru scenarios in which a package you want requires some other package that is “not available.”

6:12:39 PM #

2002.06.21 (friday)


NPR linking lameness: yawn. And the next guy to use the word “pablum” in a rant about the music industry gets stabbed in the face.
10:41:17 PM #


Yamaha T@2 Burn (human-readable) patterns, text, or graphics into the unused portion of CD-Rs.

9:47:10 PM #


Random Word Generator You can even specify letters to begin your random words. Great for coming up with unique domain names.
7:02:00 PM #

Documenting the American South
6:36:33 PM #


Fear of Style Sheets 4Zeldman advocates use of pixels for font sizing, which I hate, since MSIE won’t let you override document-specified sizes when they are in pixels. Of course, now I’m using Mozilla, so it doesn’t bug me as much. He makes a convincing case that all other options are even worse. This reminds me that I need to give my css a major overhaul to clean up a lot of nitpicky inconsistencies that are bugging the crap out of me but that no one else probably cares about.

6:35:26 PM #



I’m liking Mozilla more and more.I’m now totally addicted to tabbed browsing. The UI, however, still needs a lot of work. If I have a page with a lot of links and I start opening them in new tabs, the little dotted line around the link that appears while you have the mouse button down won’t disappear, and soon all the links on the page have little boxes around them. This is really nitpicky, but its just one of a ton of tiny annoying “features” of the one-off widget set Mozilla uses. And I’m really pissed that Mozilla totally ignores the ALT tag on images. Not only does it not pop the ALT text up in a tool tip when you hover over images, it won’t even show it to you when you right-click and get the properties. View source is your only recourse.

QuickTime is about to get itself evicted from my machine. Not only does it take over all mp3 playing from inside the browser (even though I told it not to), it crashes Mozilla every time I click on a .mp3 file. The Recall applet from mozdev doesn’t seem to be able to recover from these crashes, either.

6:31:38 PM #

Self-confessed “Wilford Brimley on ‘ludes” lookalike [cite] Doc Searls is looking for a calculator that keeps a scrollback, like an old adding machine.I can’t believe he doesn’t know about bc(1). I wouldn’t normally say anything, as it is a pretty obscure tool, but Doc also is ignorant of the Win32 command line and of basic options to ps(1) [cite for both], yet he claims to be a “command line bigot” [cite].

Here’s my standard Doc-slamming disclaimer, that I’ve used before [2002.03.13]:

I give Doc a hard time, and I’ve plonked him a couple of times, but I keep coming back to his site for some demented reason. Who else is going to selflessly go to SXSW and give me constant real-time updates on who is real-time-blogging various panels?

Doc should just stick writing rants against clueless corporate morons, which he excels at, and leave the heavy dork snobbery to the professionals.

6:25:39 PM #

2002.06.20 (thursday)


Googlebar (via email from lalo)I just complained about losing the google toolbar when I moved to mozilla, and I get this hot tip in the mail. It’s not yet perfect - the “up” function doesn’t seem to work all the time and the “find term in page” function doesn’t work unless you load a page after you type the term in - but it’s well on it’s way. At the very least, I have quick access to the “search site” functionality again.

More badass projects at mozdev:

  • banner blind: block banner ads
  • bookie: network-accessible bookmarks, on your own server
  • optimoz: gestures and pie menus!
  • recall: recover your browser session after browser or OS crashes
  • spellchecker: this is intended only for the mail applet, not for navigator TEXTAREAs or forms, and it crashed my 1.1 installation when I tried it :(

11:56:13 PM #


David Bowie’s new album, Heathen, is fucking brilliant, btw.I napstered it (from gnutella, but “napstared” is a much better verb than “gnutellaed”) and I think I’ll actually go buy it. Used, of course. Mr. Bowie won’t mind, I’m certain. This is the most excited I’ve been about new (non-bluegrass) music since Weezer’s first album. What was that, like 1994?

11:39:42 PM #



Exif ReaderThis win32 app reads all the kewl secret info your digicam encodes into your pictures, such as shutter speed, flash condition, focal length etc. Occasionally you’ll find this data in Yahoo news photos.

11:23:15 PM #


Durian JuntakThis is some sort of Durian plantation in Jakarta, Indonesia. It’s rumored that they give tours [ark].

11:15:41 PM #


Ok, like everyone else, I’m trying Mozilla. I dig it.There are still some rough edges, but the mailreader is sweet, and I’ve already decided I’m going to use it for my corporate mail from now on. It has enough positives over Outlook to justify the loss of outlook’s calendar, which I am a moderately heavy user of (1-2 events per day). For my personal mail, I think I’ll stick with mutt for the time being.

The browser will take some getting used to but I think I can live with it. I really don’t like losing the groovy IE TEXTAREA editor thingy, though. I may never get used to the loss of my “back” and “forward” buttons on my MS Intellimouse, and I’ll miss the “push and hold the wheel” for the scroll-lock or whatever it’s called.

On the plus side: my new tabbed browsing technique is unstoppable. I love using the middle button to open a new tab - and keep the current tab on top! And now I can finally resize text on pages that have fonts with sizes specified in pixels! YAY!!!!

I really need my google toolbar though. I really didn’t realize how much I used that thing. There are bookmarklets to replace much of it’s functionality, but it had pretty much totally replaced IE’s built-in find function for me. Also, I can’t get the yahoo companion to work right, which is where I keep a lot of bookmarks that I use both at home and at work.

10:31:56 PM #



Day 9: Providing additional navigation aidsThis tip seems of marginal utility. Why not just provide regular HTML anchors that everyone can see regardless of their browser? If you provide both, you get redundant links, which can be confusing. I do, however, like the technique of using this to provide meta-links such as the location of the RSS feed for a site (though again, a clearly labeled visible link (like the orange XML button Dave uses) is probably better, since the reader doesn’t have to either depend on his browser to find the link and determine what to do with it or manually look through the html source to determine if there is a RSS feed link hidden in there.

OK, let me re-write that. I’m now convinced of the wisdom of using the navigational LINK tags (a mail from Mark and turing the “site navigation” toolbar on in Mozilla 1.1 lit the bulb for me). And I still like the RSS tag. What I was trying (and failing (miserably)) to say was that I get annoyed at sites that have RSS feeds and don’t have some visible indication of the fact.

Unfortunately, I do not know how to satisfactorily implement this in other weblogging tools. I am checking with Jake Savin to see if it is possible to implement this with Radio macros.

This brings up one of the limitations of Radio that has been bugging me lately. It’s more of a deficiency than a limitation, really. The front page and the archive pages all use the “home page template” while everything else on the public website (stories, etc) uses the “main template” (this terminology is a little confusing, too). You can implement additional templates on a per-directory basis, but not from within the browser interface (AFAICT). Ideally (for me), there would be a template for the main public home page, another template for archive pages, yet another for everything else on the public website, one for the main page of the desktop website (which we have), and one more for all other pages on the desktop website (they currently use the “main” template).

2:45:49 PM #


2002.06.19 (wednesday)


Gordon Moore: Sun should adopt Intel architectureThis should get an award for the dumbest statement of the year. Why not just make the headline “Man wants Companies to Buy his Product”?

9:46:50 PM #


Adding a date to your Radio archive pagesI got this to work, and with a little bit of effort, customized it to use my date formats. I put a the following into workspace.gtDateFormat:

on gtDateFormat (d) {
local (month = string.padWithZeros (date.month (d), 2));
local (day = string.padWithZeros (date.day (d), 2));
return (date.year (d) + “.” + month + “.” + day + ” (” + string.lower (date.dayString (d)) + “)” )}

Which is basicly what I used to have in my day template. Now I’ve got it in a central location so I can change it once and have everything that uses it pick up my new favored format. I’ve now simplfied my day template to this:

<div class=”dateline”><%archiveLink%> <b><%local (d = date (”<%longDate%>”));
return (workspace.gtDateFormat (d))%></b></div>

And then I put the following in my home page template:

<title><%siteName%><%local (d); if radio.weblog.file.getArchiveFileDate (radioResponder.fileBeingRendered, @d) {”: ” + workspace.gtDateFormat (d)} else {”"}%></title>

That works great. However, is the workspace the best place to put stuff like this? I’m not sure. I tried to make it a macro and dump it in the macros directory, but I kept getting syntax errors and I can’t figure out a good way to debug stuff in there, though I’ve managed to write macros before.

Another great thing would be daily titles like Manila has. Having a page with a descriptive text title in the TITLE tag really seems to boost the attention google gives to it. I don’t see this coming soon, though, since Manila seems more day-oriented and Radio is more post-oriented.

8:47:34 PM #


Self-Annihilating Sentences (via plep)

If you think about it long enough, you’ll see that it’s obvious.

12:26:28 AM #


Optical Emission Security FAQ (via cryptogram)Clever eavesdropping on CRT displays by examining the ambient light cast by the CRT. It’s a surprisingly simple attack, though the effective countermeasures are also very simple (certain color combinations are very hard to pick up, and turning on the lights in the room drowns out the light emitted from the CRT).

12:17:11 AM #


2002.06.18 (tuesday)


Stripping Away Big Pharma’s FigleafStandard essay on the evils of big drug companies, focusing on massive exaggeration of R&D costs used to justify price gouging on pills. There are some good (obvious, even) suggestions:

Meaningful reform might include ending the industry’s patent extension tricks, licensing drugs developed with public monies on a nonexclusive basis to permit price-reducing competition (or at least permitting competition where prices are excessive), and considering rollbacks to the 20-year patent term and the adoption of price controls.

However, this conclusion is frightening:

Why couldn’t the government simply take over the job of drug development, and then let private companies manufacture and distribute medicines in a competitive environment — doing away with patent monopolies on drugs altogether?

It should be painfully obvious that letting the government “take over” anything is a bad idea. Regulate, maybe, but “take over,” never.

11:11:08 PM #

2002.06.17 (monday)


memewatch: has.a.posseAnd, just to pad my own hits:

10:35:13 PM #


Andersen Trial Yields Evidence in Enron’s Fall

Evidence introduced at the Arthur Andersen trial suggested that the company’s downfall was the result of an accounting decision meant to benefit a single corporate insider.

Yes, a single fucking loser, CFO Andrew S. Fastow, caused all of this bullshit just to line his own fucking pockets. I hope he enjoys his windfall pilfered from his stockholders, whose interests, as an officer of the corporation, he was legally obligated to serve. His mother must be very proud. Whoever first thought of the concept of karma was probably influenced by assholes like this guy.

12:12:24 AM #


2002.06.16 (sunday)


Inside the District’s Red LightsIt’s inherently obvious that the new wave of red light cameras isn’t about reducing accidents, it’s about money. Finally, here is some investigative evidence to prove it. However, it’s not just the cities installing these cameras that are raking in the cash. The private companies that operate most of these cameras don’t get a flat fee for their services, they get a cut of each ticket, which gives them direct incentive to maximize the number of tickets issued.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, WBTV found their safety conscious officials failed to install cameras at 23 of the highest-crash intersections. And in San Diego, the Red Light Camera Defense Team, a consortium of pro bono lawyers representing motorists against the city found that 12 of the 19 red-light camera intersections had three-second yellow intervals, and that Lockheed Martin IMS–our old friends from D.C.–had sought out intersections with high traffic volume, short yellow cycles, and downhill approaches–the kinds of intersections that citation-happy police officers used to call “cherry ponds” or “duck patches.” What the lawyers didn’t find was any evidence supporting officials’ claims that their program, like D.C.’s and Charlotte’s before it, was “about safety.” Not a single one of the city’s 19 cameras was operating at one of its highest-accident sites.

11:45:14 PM #

Measuring The Effects Of Mobile Phones On Ear, EyeAs a heavy cell phone user (3,000+ minutes/month), I’ve got a very keen interest in these studies.

9:29:38 PM #


Toilet Paper Algorithms
9:29:08 PM #


Brent Geese 2002Satellite tracking of geese migrating from Ireland to Canada via Iceland and Greenland.

7:56:40 PM #

2002.06.15 (saturday)


Leaflets Dropped Over AfghanistanThis must be a semi-official list of propaganda leaflets, as it’s hosted on a military site. Some are intended to frighten or demoralize enemy fighters, and some are aimed more at regular citizens. Most have both english and Dari/Pashtu versions. Many of them are bizzare.

12:24:41 AM #

2002.06.13 (thursday)


Couldn’t obnoxious web ads that eat up 100% of your CPU be considered “theft of computing resources”?I guess there’s probably some legaleese in websites’ usage policies that say by accessing the site, you agree to get haXX0rd by advertisers. What about spam? Couldn’t we prosocute spammers, especially those that use HTML and web bugs etc to plant tracking devices on your machine, using this kind of strategy?

What about Tivo, replay, etc? Can they legally delete features (eg commercial skipping) from my machine that I bought? Do I actually “own” the device or not? Sure, I’ve got a service agreement with the vendor that allows them to send software updates, but that’s with the understanding that it will *enhance* the functionality. Can a court really order this without some kind of compensation of the user? This is getting close to an imminent domain discussion. Could a court order a VCR maker to go to every customer’s home and break the “record” button on their machines?

12:49:19 PM #


2002.06.12 (wednesday)


Robotcop

Robotcop is an open source module for webservers which helps webmasters prevent spiders from accessing parts of their sites they have marked off limits.

9:41:35 PM #


Mysteries Under MoscowProfile of “diggers,” a group of Muscovites that “study the historical, ecological, and social aspects of the Moscow underground.”

9:40:35 PM #


Visualizing Internet Topology at a Macroscopic ScaleIt only takes a few seconds to see the relation of actual geography to the layout of this graph. All latitudes are simply compressed into a single plane, and the radius of each point is determined by its interconnectedness.

9:28:11 PM #


2002.06.11 (tuesday)


Replay TV and forcible-content-watchingThe claim that commercial-skipping is somehow stealing from broadcasters and that there is an implied “contract” between the network and the viewer is so bogus that it is almost self-evident. This is really the missing piece that shows how over-the-top media greed has gone.

The people have already paid for the content of a TV broadcast with a very valuable public resource, the RF spectrum it is broadcast on. So there really is no contract between the TV viewer and the broadcaster when it comes to advertising. In effect we have already paid our share.

11:11:28 PM #

Art Deco EagleNice stamp. Too bad it’s $0.57, instead of $0.37 (or whatever the new first-class rate is). WTF would you use a $0.57 stamp for? Also available in a gold $0.55 version.

8:51:07 PM #


American AntigravityThis may be something legit, but something is a bit off here.

Lifter technology is a method of producing directional thrust using an electromagnetic propulsion system that has no moving parts. This could be considered the effective equivalent, or “effective” Antigravity for the purpose of future vehicular transportation.

See also: Transdimensional Technologies, which has some similar-looking devices. The site is more “rough around the edges” which makes me think it may have more science and less flim-flam, but the information is even vaguer and the QT videos are so short and difficult to make out that they decrease credibility more than increase it.

8:21:01 PM #


National Driver’s License Records BureauLookup ANY United States drivers license! Returns detailed info, including an image of the actual license!

8:17:53 PM #

2002.06.10 (monday)


Patenting the Harvard Scientist

While refusing to divulge all the details of the process used to create their son, the scientist’s parents maintain that it is unique.

9:52:48 PM #



Site stats - the sequelI now have webalizer, another free web server log file analysis program, running in addition to awstats [5 jun 02].

9:23:24 PM #

SDS-70 Super Dimension Movie SystemAnother 48FPS film system (see also Maxivision48 [16 may 02]). The company aims to make retrofitting existing theaters as easy as possible. This system uses 70mm film (as opposed to 35mm that is used by current standards and Maxivision48), though it can be shrunk to a 35mm format to work with projectors that would be backward compatible with current formats.

Related NYT story: New at Movieplex: Return of the Wide Screen Format

7:35:49 PM #


Fisheye Menu in Flash MX (via drew)Flashified List Box UI element; when the number of items doesn’t fit in the available space, it makes your cursor act like a magnifier. It’s a lot like OSX’s dock, only useful and with text instead of icons.

5:19:04 PM #

2002.06.09 (sunday)


The CloakFree SSL-capable web anonymizer. You get what you pay for; it’s not guaranteed to protect your anonymity, but it’s got to be better than nothing. It all works via javascript, so you don’t have to set up any proxy stuff in your browser config. While this makes if very easy to use, it has the downside of breaking in some browsers.

6:40:44 PM #


You Are Where You LiveDemographic breakdowns by zip code. I think I’ve logged this before, but I can’t find it, so it may be in the archives I haven’t gotten around to migrating yet.

6:34:06 PM #



Secrecy NewsAn email publication providing “informal coverage of new developments in secrecy, security and intelligence policies.”

6:18:06 PM #


Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids (via decafbad)Lots of fairly simple projects, including the ever-popular gauss rifle. Also includes an on-line store to order some of the harder-to-find parts.

Make toys at home with common household materials, often in only a few minutes, that demonstrate fascinating scientific principles.

6:09:32 PM #

2002.06.07 (friday)


From the 34th floor, the back of the Alamo really looks like a Taco Bell. And there’s no guided tour, so I couldn’t ask if we get to see the basement at the end. I could have asked one of the cops that are all over the place there, but it wouldn’t have been the same. 8:44:00 PM #


Advanced Games (already broken link)One other totally bizzare thing today. In the Rivercenter mall right across from my hotel, there is a tourist-trappy restaurant that has one of those prize crane games, except instead of being full of cheap stuffed animals, it’s full of LIVE LOBSTERS!!! If you catch one, they’ll cook it, but it’s two bucks per try. I’d guess the machine starts vibrating as soon as the crane decsends, which probably makes the lobsters scurry out of the way. Predictably, PETA is pissed. See also: PETA front group editorial with pictures.

8:37:21 PM #


Virtual Reality NinjaAWWWWW YEAH!!!! Be sure to zoom in for a sample of the “state-of-the-art,” “high-tech,” “3-D,” “true color” graphics that are none of the above.

8:25:19 PM #

Prolook Perfect SideburnsSeen in the Southwest on-plane magazine on the way to San Antonio today. It’s a neutered, lensless pair of glasses with some little TIE-Fighter-esque wings that clip onto the earpieces, which cover up the part of your sideburns you want to keep. I’m not sure whether the “before” or the “after” pictures look dorkier [qv].

Disclaimer: I used to have mutton chops, so I feel comfortable calling these guys “dorky.”

8:17:58 PM #


Sun Setting, Not Rising?Sun as the new DEC:

Just as Olsen disparaged Unix while his company reluctantly sold it, so Sun is holding its nose while offering Linux products in its acquired Cobalt line.

And another thing: Many good people left Digital because they got bored. Gordon Bell and Dave Cutler come to mind. Sun lost Eric Schmidt several years ago and now Ed Zander.

You can effectively add Bill Joy to that list. He’s too busy predicting robot annihilation to actually crank out something useful nowadays.

7:59:20 PM #


sissies.jpg (via haddock)

It looks like they’re watching a live castration. I assume this is from the “world cup,” which is apparently some kind of soccer tournament. We obnoxious Americans like to call it “communist kickball.”

7:54:14 PM #

2002.06.06 (thursday)


802.11b Homebrew Antenna ShootoutThe beef stew can outperforms the cannonical Pringles cantenna. Also includes a good how-to for building your own.

10:58:48 PM #


Security through obsolescenceVaguely interesting story on the resistence of ancient operating systems to script kiddies.

Or imagine running a DOS variant or an OS like AIX that has never been widely used for Net-attached servers but is adequate for handing out simple Web pages and receiving responses through online forms and handling email, which are the primary tasks performed on most publicly-accessible servers.

HAW HAW, I knew those IBM boxes running AIX weren’t worth a shit! I suspect they mean A/UX, Apple’s old excuse for a 680×0-based Unix that was produced just so they could compete for government contracts that required Unix-capability, even though there was no realistic expectation that such capability would ever actually be used.

While this “security through obsolescence” strategy may be effective against script kiddies, it’s pathetic against a determined, competent attacker, who will know the weaknesses of your OS that were discovered after the vendor stopped maintaining the software.

8:49:29 PM #


Post No Bills You’ve already seen the WTC $20 bill trick at the top of this page, but have you seen the copulating mutant rodents on the european money at the bottom?
8:00:03 PM #



Kasparov Wins at Grand Prix Chess (via rw)Kasparov beats up 15-year-old, takes lunch money. Seriously, though, this is a big step towards re-unification of chess.
Under the new agreement to reunify the chess world,

Kasparov will play the current FIDE world champion, 18-year-old Ruslan Ponomariov of Ukraine, next spring while the other world champion, Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, defends his title under the auspices of Einstein Group plc, a British company.

The two winners will play for the unified championship in the fall of 2003, after which a normal world championship cycle would begin.

8:41:06 AM #



Why Caldera Released Unix: A Brief History
8:36:07 AM #

2002.06.05 (wednesday)


Small Players MatterBig media wants you to think that they are the only producers of valuable content on the web, which justifies them dictating the technical development in a way to further tighten their stranglehold. It’s obviously bullshit.

you find that the average surfer spends less than 2.5 hours on the top 10 web properties, less than 2.9 hours on the top 25. What do they do with their other 8+ hours? And anyway, are they reading the news, horoscopes, and other “professional” content, or are they using Yahoo! (#3) Mail and Microsoft (#2) Hotmail and therefore reading personal content?

There’s the connection that everyone has been missing. People want to communicate with other people, not with companies. This is why wap failed; nobody wants to be ordering shit from amazon or getting propaganda about the latest Disney movie when they’re on the subway, they want to send text messages to their friends.

If Disney or Yahoo! had all you wanted, why would you need Google?

11:07:38 PM #


Gammatron PaneThis link will open a search pane in MSIE with my weblogs.com favorites, my blogroll (which is just the sites that I read that don’t ping weblogs.com) and a google box of related sites (which I like to monitor). I’ve been running this off of my Radio desktop website for a while, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it reliably upstream every hour. The solution [discussion thread] is to make a new Radio Tool, whack everything except for (toolname)Suite.background.everyHour, and paste in file.touchPath (user.radio.prefs.wwwfolder + “pane\\pane.txt”). Actually, don’t do that. Just add the file.touchPath call directly to user.scheduler.hourly, which works better and is easier to explain (it’s not quite as elegant, but it works). The part that kept fucking me up was that this returns false and “fails” in windows, but it does the job anyway [file.touchPath doc].

I put pane.txt in its own folder so I could have a special, stripped down template. The real key is to remember to put a <base target=”_main”> in the HEAD section of the template so your links get loaded back in the main window. My pane.txt is pretty simple, it mostly has radio.macros.viewFavoriteWeblogs, radio.macros.blogroll, google.macros.box, and just a few other straight html thingies.

In theory, this should be just about as easy to apply to a Mozilla sidebar, except the target needs to be “_content” instead of “_main”. I logged a bit about this a while back [17 dec 00] (that link is probably broken, I haven’t finished moving my archives, but you can find it in the archive for december 2000), and adamv just recently wrote a better quickie how-to [qv].

If for some reason you’d like to read what I read or just watch what I read, you can drag the following up to your IE links bar: gammatron pane

10:44:12 PM #


Site StatisticsI got awstats working. It looks like it has pretty good log analysis, so I’ll give it a try for a while. The documentation isn’t exactly perfect, even if you ignore the fact that the author is obviously not a native speaker. It’s at least a little more informative than the default Radio Userland referer tracking [qv].

9:22:28 PM #


History of Mathematical SymbolsHistory of Mathematical Terms (both via antiquark)

Both of these resources include an incredibly impressive amount of detail. The section on division in the section on operation symbols is particularly interesting; I had no idea that the รท symbol was called an “obelus” or that the familiar long division symblol is derrived from the use of a close parenthesis as a division symbol.

9:18:27 AM #

2002.06.04 (tuesday)


I’d really like to give Mark’s PySiteStats a try, but my web host is using an older version of python. I guess I could bug them or install 2.0 in my own space, but I’m too lazy. I may try AWStats in the meantime. 11:44:09 PM #


My First MonopolyI should get out more and meet the other people in the hood. I’m already meeting new and interesting people.

If Smart Technology is vetted in primary colored busy-box trials with children, Microsoft can eventually consider incorporating it into their operating system products.

11:37:53 PM #



My hood: [google] [blogdex]diveintomark is very high on both, though we generally have little overlap. I do read and enjoy Mark regularly, though. The google list seems to have more sites that I read and like ranked higher than the blogdex list, which has more that I’ve never heard of and more that I actively aviod.

11:29:32 PM #

Cerenkov RadiationGood plain-english explanation of the blue glow emitted by nuclear reators.

Often, beta particles are emitted with such high kinetic energies that their velocities exceed the speed of light in water. When this occurs, blue light is emitted and the reactor core “glows blue”.

11:21:41 PM #


Heinz EZ SquirtIf green or purple wasn’t enough to make you squirm, you can now buy “Mystery Color” ketchup.

You don’t know until you squirt!

10:19:50 PM #

2002.06.03 (monday)


AMD Opteron Motherboard Pic (via inq)(warning: gigantor 2400×1800 795kb jpeg)

“Opteron” is the new productized name for AMD’s 64-bit CPU previously code-named “Hammer.” The only really interesting thing about this nForce-based refernce motherboard is the HUGE clearance area for the CPU heatsink.

11:58:05 PM #


Via Steve Pilgrim, I found the most excellent free (as in beer) Fluid Dynamics Search Engine. Installation was reletively painless on my remote server and indexing was very fast. I’ll eventually get around to tweaking the templates to make it blend in a bit more.
9:27:18 PM #


Antec Blue and Trilight 80mm Clear Fans Review (via [H])PC-Riceboy case fans with LEDs surrounding translucent blades for a neat effect. [$15 each]

7:28:13 PM #

Randomization - IBM’s answer to Web privacyBetter link: IBM Scientists Rely on the Principle of Uncertainty To Develop Web-Privacy Answers

I don’t particularly like the way IBM’s press release alludes to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. All this technique does is randomize numerical data, which has nothing to do with the uncertainty principle that states that one can not accurately observe both position and velocity of particles without influencing the particels. Anyway, the point is that you would put some data into some web registration form (or whatever) such as your age, weight, income etc. IBM’s super-advanced quantum technology (not) would then fudge your input a bit (eg you enter 100, it records 112 or 95 or whatever). This way, no one can say for sure that John Doe makes $500,000 a year and weighs 200 pounds.

However, I don’t think this does very much to protect anyone’s privacy. It seems that if you had the randomization data, you could figure out a good range for John Doe’s income, which is probably almost as useful from a customer profiling perspective. If you could get multiple sets of “randomized” data from John Doe (with the appropriate randomization factors), you could probably get pretty close to the real value pretty quickly. It doesn’t randomize non-numerical data, like my name, address, etc. And it still doesn’t provide any incentive for me as the customer to answer truthfully.

How about this: if you really care about your customer’s privacy don’t collect non-essential data! Or, if you absolutely must have demographic info, don’t store any name, address or other personal data with general statistical data like weight, age, etc. Just have your database store them seperately and you don’t need fancy technology with bogus connotations of quantum theory.

7:22:03 PM #

2002.06.02 (sunday)


The only thing I really don’t like about Radio is it’s lack of a frequently-rescanning externally accessible search engine. Mark Paschal’s kit does a great job of letting me search my own entries, but has no interface for readers on the outside. Google’s spider crawls the front page several times a day, but only crawls the archives about once per month, which means stuff “disappears” from it’s view for as long as three weeks before showing up again. Because of Radio’s two-piece design (the part I run on my desktop and the remote machine that serves the pages to everyone else, which could be any http server, dynamic or static, cgi or not), it’s hard for UserLand to provide this piece. A webservice interface to the Kit suite would solve this problem for webloggers that have “full peer” connections.
9:33:01 PM #


My Blog, My Outboard Brain (via jrobb)I generally find these “weblog theory” essays pointless, if not downright annoying, but I like this one, probably because it’s the first to sympathize with my motivation to run a weblog. It’s a lot easier than bookmarking stuff, and just writing about it solidifies connections in my head (and provides more target text for a search engine).

Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mentalregisters.

This applies to both personal weblogs and work-centered k-logs [info]. The point (for me) isn’t to challenge journalism, it’s to 1) help me organize the information inside my own head and 2) make it accessible to readers (whether they be random readers of my weblog or coworkers reading my k-log).

9:32:48 PM #


Via email, some interesting right triangles with integer sides. Of course it’s impossible for a right triangle to have integer sides and be isosceles also. But these triangles are almost isoscles: the perpendicular sides differ in length by one.

         3	         4	         5
        21	        20	        29
       119	       120	       169
       697	       696	       985
      4059	      4060	      5741
     23661	     23660	     33461
    137903	    137904	    195025
    803761	    803760	   1136689
   4684659	   4684660	   6625109
  27304197	  27304196	  38613965
 159140519	 159140520	 225058681
 927538921	 927538920	1311738121

9:15:40 PM #


Analysis of FBI’s new surveillance powersThis is a great summary of what the new powers Ashcroft has given to the FBI do and do not allow.

One fact suggesting that there is more here than meets the eye is this: All of the changes relate to the FBI’s domestic guidelines, not the international terrorism guidelines under which Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are investigated.

8:29:58 PM #


I’ve tried, but I just can’t get used to reading weblogs in the Radio aggregator. I’d much rather just let weblogs.com tell me when my favorites update and go read the “real” page myself. For “real” news-type stuff, however, I don’t mind so much.Jeff passes along a neat trick: if you use Radio’s aggregator, and would like to leave a personally identifying referer behind, you can just change aggregatorData.prefs.appSignatureUrl to whatever [eg].

8:14:33 PM #



Smaller slower, supercomputers someday may win the raceOfficial LANL press release on the new Green Destiny low-power supercluster [21 May 02].

1:11:44 PM #


Telephone EXchange Name Project

An exchange name is a word that is used to represent the first two letters of a 7 digit telephone number (exchange names have nothing to do with area codes or country codes). The first two letters of the exchange name are the first two digits of the phone number, when they are spelled out on a telephone dial or keypad.

11:09:35 AM #

2002.06.01 (saturday)


Food Holidays (via robotwisdom)Both June and September are “National Papaya Month.” Greedy assholes. There’s no National Bacon Day, which I was pretty upset about until I remebered that every day is Bacon Day.

9:44:08 PM #