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One good site
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Nelson Minar
Blog licensed under a Creative Commons License
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Tuvalu, the
Pacific island nation
and home of the fresh, new, exciting Web address .tv,
is closing
down. Being a flat island nation is bad when the sea
level is rising. [Metafilter]
Fun Flash music toy, the Dub
Selector. There are six different dub machines to play with. I
really like this genre of music toy. [Metafilter]
I'm writing my O'Reilly talk into an article, and I'm fanatic about my
images looking good. See how nicely centered and anti-aliased that
little picture is? I use xfig to do
vector graphics, fig2dev to convert to PNM, then netpbm to scale the images
nicely. But netpbm was missing a tool to say "make the image this size
by padding it on all sides" (pnmpad isn't that smart). So as a
procastrination tool, I wrote up the ugly shell script pnmpadtosize. Unix at
its best!
So no, my DSL doesn't always work. Running loopping to ping every
10 seconds, I've had seven DSL outages in the past four days.
Outage for 360 seconds started Sun Nov 18 12:03:34 2001
Outage for 50 seconds started Sun Nov 18 13:24:00 2001 Outage for 90 seconds started Sun Nov 18 18:56:25 2001 Outage for 100 seconds started Sun Nov 18 21:32:55 2001 Outage for 40 seconds started Mon Nov 19 08:19:43 2001 Outage for 50 seconds started Tue Nov 20 21:10:13 2001 Outage for 900 seconds started Wed Nov 21 01:59:12 2001
In Europe, poultry has flavour - chicken is actually yummy! In the
US our birds are bred so much for industrial processing that they have
no flavour, just like oranges and tomatoes. Great article in the New
York Times about this,
The
Hunt for a Truly Grand Turkey, One That Nature Built.
Everything is online, even
the summer camp I went to
when I was 10. Jumping from the big rock
was a good test of nerves. I don't particularly remember having to
wear a bathing suit.
PacBell DSL seems to be dropping my link every day around 10am, for
about 5 minutes at a time. So I wrote loopping, a small Perl script that pings my
link every N seconds and notes failures. Yeah, trivial hack, but it
always takes longer for me to do these things than it should.
Writing installers for Windows packages is a pain in the neck. The
commercial packages don't work well and have these funky proprietary
scripting languages for the install script. A better alternative may be
the Nullsoft
Installer, used mostly in WinAmp related programs. Free software,
simple and workable.
I'm working on buying a house. Everyone told me how much of an
advantage it was, but I never really understood it until I built
a spreadsheet to test it out.
For instance, if you put 20% down on a $300,000 house your monthly
payments are about $2000, but after you count the tax advantage it's
really more like $1300! Crazy.
Cute article
in the NYT about Diablo as a father-son shopping experience.
Kevin Poulson on dark address
space: parts of the Internet that can't find a route to each other.
Result is by Internet researcher
Craig
Labovitz, although I can't find this paper. Some hints by Poulson
that this could be related to folks hacking Internet routers to make
safe spaces for themselves. Fun stuff. [RobotWisdom].
Way back when, the Internet was only 30 hosts wide. That is, the time-to-live field on packets in the common TCP/IP implementation was set to 30. If two hosts had more than 30 hops on their route, they couldn't talk to each other. The Internet grew bigger than a diameter of 30 sometime in 1992 or so, and all those TCP/IP stacks had to be updated. I think most stacks now set the TTL to 255, the maximum. Update: The Slashdot thread is surprisingly useful. It includes a link to the author's slideware, but still no paper to be found. 
Crop circle research has been an amazing site for a
long time, deeply detailed analyses of people who want to believe.
There's a wonderfully detailed analysis of a formation
near Arecibo, which a remix of the 1974 message SETI folks sent
to the stars. Photo to the far right is originally from
Lucy Pringle's crop circle photography.
My old friend Chris
Kline saw the mention of
urinal.net on my weblog, and
mentioned that he took the photos of the Millenium Dome urinals that
are on the site. He and the urinal.net guy were roommates in college.
Small world, united by simple things.
I've picked up the new game Civilization III, which has the exact
same horrifying addictive qualities as its predecessors. The best fan
site seems to be CivFanatics. The forums even
had a fix for the ugly font bug - remove the Windows installed copy of
LucidaSansRoman. [Memepool]
Fun little utility, http://surfraw.sourceforge.net/. Command line tools
that know about web service sites, so you can run google
Pixelvision from the command line and have it do the right thing.
He has little scripts for about 20 sites. The big drawback is it just
invokes lynx; I'd rather it used wget, scraped the result, and
formatted it as domain-specific text. Hmm, sounds like a good hack.
(PS: I love Debian. I just typed "apt-get install surfraw" and away it
went, like magic.)
[sweetcode]
Disturbingly (in)appropriate for the time, but
Flight 404 is a poetically
lovely Flash work about the thoughts of people on a doomed (fictional)
plane.
Neat stuff on JPL on
the basics of space flight.
So someone hacked
Passport. Pretty bad, too.
By cobbling together a handful of browser-based bugs with flaws in
Passport's authentication system, Slemko developed a technique to
steal a person's Microsoft Passport, credit card numbers -- and all,
simply by getting the victim to open a Hotmail message.
The Register has some
details
about MessageLabs. About $.66/user/month for spam scanning, about
$2.20/user/month for virus scanning. MessageLabs claims they have
over 500,000 users, so that gives a revenue estimate of at least a
million dollars a month. Not so bad, although I bet their operations
are expensive. I wonder how well their service really works? There's a
lot of value in centralizing this kind of filtering.
Pixar has made their short films
available on the Web. A complete history of film-quality 3d rendering
in seven easy downloads. [Slashdot]
I finally released Funes, my email search software.
Report
today that there's now a limited North Korean email service,
SiliBank. My packets go through
China before I can't figure out where they're going, and they're
running IIS. Can't tell much more - the English version isn't working,
and I can't read Korean.
Graphs
of Virus Activity published by MessageLabs, a company that scans
email as a service. Interesting to see what's in the ecology.
There's an editorial on
Advogato with more concern about SourceForge's long-term
stability. Good comments - a reply from the SourceForge manager
himself, also some info on alternatives: Savannah (GNU), Tigris (collab.net?), and BerliOS (GMD Fokus). Also lots
of reports of ad-hoc arrangements people make.
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