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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
The various screenshots of this Freeware PIM are pretty attractive and I may go ahead and give it a try. However, the Paranoid lurking inside of me was yelling, "Watch Out!". After all, advertising the function of keeping all of one's passwords in this piece of software, "encrypted" or not, would be a very simple tool for gathering that data and using your own system to e-mail it back to the designer ;-) Do pictures Like This work for you? I've stared and stared at various of the damn things in poster shops and believe I only ever managed to discern the embedded image in one of them. I'm still trying with this teapot, but so far, no luck ;-) It's worth drilling down through the links to see what's said about the Holographic Principle and etc., it's all rather bizarre. I'm still at sea about the Planck Length though, to my mind that wasn't much of a definition. Planning to take a trip outside of the US? I hope this little Health Advisory from the Center for Disease Control doesn't scare you away from the idea ;-) Actually, it has a lot of good info and should be worth a pre-trip visit. Monday, April 29, 2002
Well, clearly this list of the 50 Greatest TV shows of all time was generated by a committe. That makes it a bit pointless to nitpick, but I am compelled to ask: should M*A*S*H really only be number 25?! Surprise, surprise, the mania to gobble up every conceivable Domain Name that might be coveted later by a legitimate business, or, as it seemed all too often, might suggest prurient content, has finally abated. To me that signals a healthy change for the Internet - perhaps the sleezoids have moved on to some other form of anti-social behavior ;-) Last week the skies cleared for a change and I was able to view the alignment of our Solar System's inner planets along the Ecliptic. For those of you who still haven't ventured out in the evening to take a look, here is a very Nice Image of exactly what it is you are missing. Be sure to pass your mouse over the picture to activate the labels. For any poetry lovers who may pass by, this is a nice little, and little is the operative word I'm afraid, collection of Biographies of some of the brighter lights in the genre, both past and present. Perhaps I should have said selective, rather than small - the biographies themselves are nicely done. Sunday, April 28, 2002
OK, I'll admit it, I'm somewhat of a sucker for these silly tests. Not that This One is really a test, it's a joke. After all, I only scored a "moderately annoying" 59, how meaningful could it be? ;-) Another interesting character from the Lewis book is the venture capitalist, Andy Kessler. His strategy is to make list of pairs of what he calls "The Center" and "The Fringe." He feels that money making opportunities arise from subtle shifts in the relations between them. Some examples given were: What would some of your candidates be? I'm beginning to see the universe as a giant Rorschach Test. Today's stunning APOD image of a potentially Doomed Star looks more to me like a seriously damaged brain ;-) Saturday, April 27, 2002
Are you as tired of the nuisance calls from telemarketers, that always seem to come just as you're sitting down to dinner, as I am? This FCC.GOV site claims to offer some relief. Yeah, sure, I believe them. I notice the Post Office is raising my rate for "1st class" postage to 37 cents, but still allows the !@##@! bulk mail advertisers to fill up my box with unwanted crap for about 20 cents - I suspect our government is equally harsh on the phone pests ;-) Another interesting section from Michael Lewis' book draws parallels between the Unabomber's Manifesto and ideas explored by Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems in his essay Why The Future Doesn't Need Us. One of my favorite characters, Danny Hillis, is also mentioned in regard to his essay, The Millennium Clock. I just finished an interesting little book: Next: The Future Just Happened by Michael Lewis. The first chapter's subject, which is one of the better ones, is a 15-year old boy who, somewhat illegally, made $800K in the stock market. You can read an account by Lewis Here. Friday, April 26, 2002
A Taste of Omar (The Good One) The Cookie Crumbles: If you're a MSN Hotmail user, and many of us are, at least for a throwaway e-mail account, then here's yet another Security Compromise you should be aware of. Hmmm, it seems that some things that are free aren't even worth that much ;-) OK, so we're all tech heads and don't need the help, but for that not quite as knowledgeable friend who needs a simple explanation of a computer/internet term, this online Dictionary can be a useful resource. A good story that's been making the rounds is Alan Guth's speculations on the Creation of Everything. Better yet, going to that convinced me to bookmark the web page for Discover Magazine - a lot of interesting articles in their large archive, I'll be busy for a while ;-) Now here's a way to brighten someone's day: send them a friendly, anonymous e-mail telling them, politely of course, that you feel that They Stink ;-) Thursday, April 25, 2002
No, I'm not advocating an application such as Dead Man's Switch, I simply found it interesting that someone felt it was worth doing. Also, this page brings up something else that I was curious about: "Web Standards." If you try to visit the Arsware.org page that talks about Dead Man's Switch you'll get nudged to that page of "sanctioned browsers." OK, perhaps that's useful, but what the heck is going on at AOL?! They keep putting out incremental upgrades to Netscape 4.7x, why not either make it compliant or shoot it? Another Article About Blogs from the Washington Post. For some reason the text doesn't want to display with IE 6.0 and WebWasher running, but will if I turn WebWasher off. No such problem with Netscape 4.79, but far too often these days it takes IE to view a site "properly." Sigh - I really don't want to convert to IE, but clearly that day is coming. I've had a bit of fun with this site lately, a selectable collection of the covers from Life Magazine. It was an old standby in many homes when I was growing up. Life was published on a weekly basis so I was able to closely bracket my birth date between two covers. During this month, and through May, five of our solar system's planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus and Mercury) are lined up and visible to the naked eye. This Sky Chart will generate their alignment for any night in that timeframe. For an even more detailed view of the night sky, adjustable by both time and place, a great little shareware program is SkyGlobe. It serves as an example of just how well some of the old DOS programs were crafted. Wednesday, April 24, 2002
Ouch! - More Bad News for one of my cable TV standbys, Tech TV. No, it's not great programming, in either sense of the word, but when nothing else is on I often hang out there for a spell. "Oh, to be in England Now that April's there..." - Browning certainly had the right idea, and this Game On Exhibit at the Barbican amplifies his point. I wasn't a fan of arcade style video games, but some of the greatest stuff was created for the old Apple II and suchlike. One of my favorites was Space Eggs, how about you? What a surprise, links on the web are ephemeral ;-) Well, perhaps not quite that short lived, but certainly not etched in stone either. I like their term "link rot" though, it seems a lot more descriptive than 404. If you enjoy Escher's designs then you should love these Animated Tessellations. NB: it's possible to save them, just as one would any image on a web page, and the action is displayed when opened with an image viewer. Also, when I opened the page with IE 6.0 I was prompted to download the Japanese character viewer (or whatever it's called - well worth the extra one-time effort!) It seems that there still isn't a solid consensus on the need to transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Well, perhaps 256^4, or roughly 4.3 billion, unique IP addresses will be enough to go around for quite some time, but such things as added security do seem to argue for the change - what's your take on the issue? Well, it is Spring and things are blooming all around us, so perhaps it's not all that strange that this image of the Trifid Nebula looks very much like a flower in full blossom ;-) Tuesday, April 23, 2002
I must say, I was very pleased by the service provided by the folks at Crucial Memory. First, it's a convenient place to order memory. I told them what I wanted, a Compact Flash card for my camera, so I was taken to a selection page where I entered my make and model and they listed what they had that it supported. Second, the price was more than competitive. Third, and this was a surprise: I ordered the card yesterday just after 1:00 pm and it just arrived at about 11:00 am! It's only been on my system for 2 days now, but WebWasher seems to deliver exactly as advertised: no residue pop-under ads when I shut down my browser and the only pop-up I've seen after visiting many sites that left them in the past was the subscription nag at Time.com. Even that should be a thing of the past as there is a 1-click option to ad things to the filter. Feeling adventurous I'm running the 3.2Beta3 version, but the old 3.0 is also available - both are free for Home or Educational use. Does the world really want a miniscule PC? I can see the case for a PDA, but that's about as far as it goes and I know I'd soon tire of the interface issues. Also, with the limitation of a 10G HD and XP (yes, that's what I meant, XP doesn't read like a plus to me ;-)) I would expect a commensurately small price, $1000 just doesn't seem to fit. Last night I had meant to go outside right after sundown and view the current planetary alignment - it's a somewhat rare opportunity. However, 9:30 rolled around and I realized I had missed the boat :-( I'm determined to do a little better tonight so in preparation I downloaded a copy of the great little desktop planetarium Skyglobe. A nice reminder of just how good some of the old DOS programs were. Hopefully the skies will be clear again tonight. If so, I should be able to see Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus and Mercury - I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Monday, April 22, 2002
The page may be a bit slow to load, but Sky and Telescope has a nice Guide to the current planetary viewing opportunity for those of us in North America. So far I've been snubbed due to local cloud cover, but I'm really looking forward to the alignment due on May 13. That appears on page 3 in the sequence, but if you're impatient, Here it is. I wish that I had seen this story before Wired.com's privacy entry. Even better, from a "gee whiz" point of view, is this anti-crime surveillance concept from England. Street cams again, but this time they're programmed to detect potential miscreants before they act. Hmmm, do we have a privacy right to protect our public furtive actions? ;-) Well, how about it, are you concerned that the government may be taking measures to invade your Privacy? I'm not certain what the real issue is with face recognition cameras. On the one hand the privacy advocates say they simply don't work and have never caught a "bad guy." Yet, at the same time they bemoan the fact that the technology will allow the government to compile a day-by-day log of our every action. OK, fellows, make up your minds - which is it? When I weigh my right to privacy against the freedom from fear on our streets and in public places, I come down on the side of safety, but then I don't feel I have anything to hide. I wonder if our policy makers and legislators can say the same? ;-) Alaska has many scenic wonders to be proud of, but the one I'm most envious of is the Aurora Borealis. Better yet, in this spectacular picture we are treated to a view of the Aurora & Comet Ikeya-Zhang. Sunday, April 21, 2002
I didn't understand what was being said recently, as in this report from NASA, about the possible discovery by the Chandra X-ray Observatory of two Quark Star candidates. In reading the various reports I got the impression, obviously mistaken, that this was new theoretical ground. Clearly that's incorrect as this 1997 Report by the American Institute of Physics talks of their possibility. In any event, it's yet another instance of the mind-boggling scale of the Universe, in this instance, the possibility, if not the likelihood, of incredibly dense states of matter. I'm not quite sure what to make of this Strange Picture from APOD. It's certainly interesting, and even attractive in an odd way, but it seems it would look more in place on the wall of a dermatologist's office than that of an astronomer ;-) A friend sent the link to this Wild Story about the neighbor from Hell. A real life instance of the crazy movie, Neighbors, with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd? ;-) Saturday, April 20, 2002
That's it for today, and likely the rest of the weekend. We're off to San Diego to visit Mike and Helene. The choice of today for taking a road trip had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it's 4-20 ;-) Arts & Letters Daily posted this story about an interesting series of books from Penguin Lives. The one focused on Here is a new biography of Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley. This growing Photo Collection is a lot of fun to visit, especially if you own a digital camera. Every time I think I have a new idea for a shot I find someone has beaten me to it ;-) Friday, April 19, 2002
A Taste of Omar (The Good One) Here's a speed issue that's close to my heart and likely enough, yours too. Tired of waiting for your computer to boot? Hopefully in the next machine generation or two this non-volatile memory will be used to crank up the process. By now you've certainly heard about Internet2, but not too many specifics on actual usage. This user story rekindled my case of bandwidth envy. Heck, I'm not even on a slow connection, my DSL line is averaging > 1.0 Mbs which is on the high end of that type of service. Still, a remaining problem for we "pedestrians" will be the slow response time of most of the web servers we hit, that's getting worse it seems to me. Thursday, April 18, 2002
Spam, spam everywhere and not a bite to eat: unless you too are receiving ever larger portions of this crap you're keeping a lower profile on the net than I am ;-) Last week the NY Times had this little anti-spam column in their Technology section. Apparently it generated its share of response, not all positive - here is this week's follow-up. It seems that more and more of the folks I know are paying a visit to the hospital, their doctor or a laboratory to have some fancy test perfomed; most I had at least heard of, but a few I knew nothing about. If you, or someone you care about, is facing one of these diagnostic procedures this is the place to go to find out what it's all about: the preparations, process, aftermath, value and caveats. Unfortunately I didn't stumble across this nifty little Flu Watch site until after the flu season was over, but I'll definitely keep it in mind next year. Very nicely done IMO. Wednesday, April 17, 2002
The amazing story du jour, and one you've likely seen, is about the huge colony of Argentine Ants discovered in Europe. The thing that strikes me about it is that billions of the little rascals can live cheek to jowl, or whatever the ant equivalent is, in peace. Too bad that we can't infuse whatever component of ant DNA that governs that spirit into the human genome, especially the warring peoples of the Middle East. Yet another article about the blogging phenomenon and this fellow actually claims to have turned it into a money making proposition. Well, that likely isn't in the cards for 99% of the folks playing around with it, so why do they bother? Why do I? Beats the Hell out of me ;-) Actually, I was motivated by curiosity, and thought it would be an interesting experiment. I already was sharing news & oddity links with a number of people and a Blog just seems like an efficient, and fun, way to do that. Better yet, the w.bloggar interface makes it about as simple as posting an e-mail. Here's another nice shot from APOD - what appears to be a circular rainbow. I saw something similar in Hawaii once, but don't have the picture to prove it. For those who are really serious about English usage, the old standard, Strunk's The Elements of Style is available online. Good luck though, I've never found the answer to any of my questions in the bound edition, but this is searchable ;-) Here's a more extensive English usage aid that focuses on common errors. Never again will you need to wonder about whether to use "infer" or "imply" - well, actually it says so few of us do that they have become virtually interchangeable, but is does explain such differences ;-) This site has some clear instruction on the use of capitalization & abbreviation for things such as titles, addresses, dates, numbers and money. Tuesday, April 16, 2002
Pretty funny article about a woman in Venice, CA who got in the face, well, actually the windshields, of the SUV Owners who she feels are despoiling her habitat ;-) There always seems to be something of interest in Bruce Schneier's monthly reports though be advised that the waters sometimes get a bit murky here for the casual reader. There is also the option to have them delivered via e-mail. Now this is an odd challenge: to post ones thoughts on anything, the only limitation being that they must be expressed in exactly 100 Words. Hmmm, perhaps they had the Blog community in mind here ;-) This might be an interesting poll - picking a new set of Wonders of the World. Odd though that he seems to confuse Saint Basil's Cathedral with the Kremlin and Red Square - it's adjacent, not synonymous ;-) Monday, April 15, 2002
Is your goldfish self-aware? your parakeet? your cat? I'm convinced that my dog was, but I don't believe he dwelt on issues, such as mortality, that get we humans exercised. He didn't seem political and never wandered off to church, but I don't feel that necessarily made him a bad person ;-) Well, that's not really what I wanted to mention, but this article on robot awareness got me started along those lines for some reason. What I'm actually curious about is whether or not robots will ever reach the level of sentience expressed by the central character in this great book by the late Robert A. Heinlein. Want one? Well, by current standards it certainly wouldn't be anything special in terms of processing power, but the Black Mac, as described in this artcle from Wired.com is intriguing, especially the attention paid to Tempest shielding. Here's an interesting resource for world population information (take the link on the right of their page to World Population Data Sheets) and much, much more. I suspect that most of us feel that our cost of living has been steadily on the rise. Still, unless you live in one of the places listed in this top 25 cities cost comparison it could have been much worse. Most of the cities mentioned weren't a big surprise to me, but I didn't expect the large representation from China and the placement of Moscow amazed me. Sunday, April 14, 2002
A view from the bizarro world of Joe Conason on the definition of fair discussion. Now, I enjoy listening to Begala, he's bright, articulate and takes no prisoners. However, James Carville, or Serpent Head as his wife lovingly calls him, seems certifiably insane ;-) With him front and center I doubt that Begala will get much air time, let alone any hapless guest. Damn, Dawg - now how could President Summers not feel that producing a rap record constitutes a worthy display of scholarship? Cornel West is a bright guy, and an entertaining TV talkshow guest, but somehow I'm wondering if Harvard's loss is really Princeton's gain... Have you ever heard of nontransitive dice? Neither had I, although the term is somewhat self-explanatory. In this little article you will learn all about them - be the first on your block to win bar bets and lose friends ;-) Saturday, April 13, 2002
Total Visibility? Well, that's what this sounds like anyway. Sure, I can see the technological and convenience arguments for the grand convergence, but I can also hear the phone starting to ring off the hook as all those morons who send me spam start placing reminder calls ;-) Intelligent Discussion? At $110 and 805 pps., this is probably more money or time than most of us want to invest in the pros & cons of creationism. Still, this review from the NY Times did start me wondering. Not about creationism per se, but how/why people get so exercised about something that has to be taken on faith, no matter what arguments are applied from either side of the issue [requires simple registration to read the review.] Water, Water Everywhere - What Are We To Think? It seems that NASA has either found water, as on Mars, the likelihood of it, as indicated by this view of Europa or the possibility of it, which spawned the plan for this seemingly unlikely search on the scorched planet Mercury. The implication, of course, is where there is water there may be life - stay tuned... Friday, April 12, 2002
A Taste of Omar (The Good One) If you're having one of those days when the world seems to be going against you, and you feel down, this fellow's serious case of bad attitude will likely make you look like a amateur. NB: definitely not expurgated ;-) It's hard to believe that people still feel MS should have their applications stripped out of their browser, as indicated in this story. I'm no IE fan, but it's more and more often the case that one needs to use IE to view a web page properly. I've tried most others: Opera, Mozilla and both the 4.7x and 6.x flavors of Netscape, but keep finding myself returning to IE for something or other. Yahoo has a number of interesting features, but here's one I hadn't tried before: just enter your address and/or ZIP code and it will give you some interesting demographics about your neighborhood. Thursday, April 11, 2002
This is an outstanding little web site IMHO. The navigation to the sketches is very nicely done, but be certain to use the back button on the page, not your browser's, to see all the drawings full size. Interesting - every time we think we have the Universe just about figured out something like this pops up to muddy the waters ;-) Given the relative risks and benefits I think I would far prefer that we reconsider the use of nuclear power plants to this rather scary idea. Better yet, why not pass on both? Wednesday, April 10, 2002
A mildly interesting look at the phenomenon of memoirs by "nobodies", which seem to be increasing in number & popularity. Of course, those who lack the time & discipline to write a book can simply start a Blog ;-) All the math formulas/identities you're likely to need. Sure, we learned the little of this we normally need many years ago. Still, I now and again stumble across something I'd like to check for myself and find the old memory less & less reliable. What's wrong with this picture? A bit of a departure for the folks at APOD - this shot is from our own back yard. In fact, it's not too far from where some people claim the Moon landings were filmed ;-) Well, perhaps it's true that we get the government we deserve, after all, we vote for these clowns. So, is your senator and/or congressperson bringing home the bacon? ;-) Tuesday, April 09, 2002
It would be great if they brought it up to date, this site has 1900 vs 1998 statistics, but the info is fascinating and the presentation is nicely done. This is a somewhat troubling report on the frequency of various hacker incursions, but likely overblown by the sampling process used. Still, I think even home users, especially those with dedicated Internet connections, are foolish not to use some protection such as the free version of ZoneAlarm. Monday, April 08, 2002
I'm not sure how meaningful some of these diagnostics are, but PC Pit Stop is at minimum an interesting exercise. They weren't too thrilled with my HD performance so I guess I'll close down for a while and start the defrag going ;-) Well, it looks like I'll be referencing APOD just about every day - always something interesting going on there. Not all of the images fill the bill, but many make for a pretty nice desktop design. I have my Linux KDE desktop set to cycle through about 60 (currently) of them. Sunday, April 07, 2002
London: The Biograpy - I ran across a small review yesterday that prompted me to dig up the New York Times review - now I'm really tempted to read the book. How The Universe Got Its Spots by Janna Levin. An interesting review in the online version of NewScientist of a book by a Cosmologist who won high praise from Lee Smolin. Listen!!! - Having trouble getting your point across? This won't win you any friends, or style points, but it may get the other person's attention. On the other hand, it might as likely earn you a punch in the nose ;-) Hubble Hubble - Another awesome Hubble photograph thanks to our friends at NASA. If you don't visit this site daily you're missing out on something special. Saturday, April 06, 2002
Spell Check If you happen to be as weak at spelling as I am then this is a great little applet. It just lurks in the background until you run across a word you're not sure of then simply point to it with the mouse & right click - kewl! Info Resource If you need to know where, what or how to do something in your state this link base will likely get you started. Great Tool Only tried it a couple of times, but the link is going to sit on my tool bar. Put in a word and it zips back with reference text cites for the topic. I just tried fractals and got 27 hits. Ouch!! Even to a non-Catholic, this is starting to sound like piling on. How many more hits can the church take before everyone decides that perhaps the Druids were on to something? Low Res NASA ;-) What's up with today's APOD? The image looks like one of my old attempts at cellular automata ;-) Really, I'm just kidding - this is an awesome site that's well worth a daily visit. Friday, April 05, 2002
Say Cheese This baby seems to demand both quite a bit of bandwidth & processing power, but the results are pretty slick. Plug in an address and it will return a satellite image which you can zoom in & out of (given time.) They want to sell the images, so have your own screen grabber ready to shoot ;-) Body Builder Don't think I've quite got it figured out yet, but seems pretty kewl. A desktop Lego kit that uses real legs &c ;-) Great Architecture Some pretty nice shots - wish I had seen more of the "top 30" picks, but surprised I've seen as many as I have. Now, where did I put those #@$#$! 3-D Glasses? Peek-a-Boo Redux Damn, how does he do that? Good ol' technology just gets more and more intrusive it seems. I'm not clear on the implications of adding his code snippet to this page, even though it's private and seen by very few people - I didn't do it... Daylight Savings Well, it's upon us again, time to change our clocks, and who can ever remember which way? Here's a site that talks about the whys and wherefores a bit, but I'm still a DST atheist... Thursday, April 04, 2002
Blog Alert ;-) Story from the Los Angeles Times (may require painless registration to view) on the Blog phenomenon and why it may have some folks in a dither. DUCK! I guess I won't lose any sleep over this one, but the thought of poor Mother Earth getting smacked that hard is pretty intense. Not that I think She would be any the poorer with a lot less people ;-) Canada's Loss, Russia's Gain Darn, who would have guessed there was that much annual motion? Wonder what sped things up? Star Wars On The Cheap Pretty darn cool, but it would seem that someone has FAR to much time on their hands ;-) Wednesday, April 03, 2002
This Looks Worth Watching I have my doubts about the Turing Test though. The quality of the software isn't any more under review than the cleverness/intuition of the human interrogator as I see it. Doesn't Sound Good To Me There goes our DSL service... 
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