Quote of the day, re the Melissa virus:
"It's not a virus, it's a frigging media event."
--- Paul Mc Auley
Via Marylaine comes Butterflies of North America
A new NETFUTURE
Fabio meets bird on Busch Gardens ride , there's a gory picture of the incident here .
It wasn't entirely clear whether the blood was Fabio's, the bird's or both, said Deborah DeMarco, the park spokeswoman.
Of course in passing this on I'm giving them more free publicity...
In Salon this morning, a review of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone . Because the local library has a huge waiting list for this book, and because we've heard so much about it, Catherine and I bought it to read and then donate to the library. I think it says something about children's literature today that this is so immensely popular, I mean, it's a fun escapist book, but unlike some of the books of my childhood I don't think I'm going to get anything out of it by rereading it.
Via Hack The Planet , a cool piece by Neal Stephenson called In the beginning was the command line .
And we're also getting a chance to check out a new version of Newwwsboy today (fixes I'd done last week but never installed) with better glossary management. Fingers crossed.
I don't know what I'd do with it, but I think I want one. In lengths from 24" to 42":
The Hooligan Tool is one of the world's most popular forcible entry tools . These heavy duty tools were designed to pound, puncture, pry, twist, and cut all types of barriers encountered by emergency service personnel.
It looks like Time has unceremoniously removed that star-trails picture referenced below and replaced it with something more obviously military. Now I'm sorry I didn't grab it for posterity.
Peter Merholz turned me on to Lloyd Wood and I'm not sure I'll forgive him that... Peter links to Lloyd's awesome screed about Jon Katz .
So something hit me about this "Melissa" virus: They're going whole hog after the author because of some really stupid design decisions in Microsoft Word. Now for my home network I occasionally play with apps that can do some scarily autonomous things. I'm fairly careful about resource useage, but what happens if I release the source code to one of these things and some incompetent sysadmin abuses it, or runs it in an environment that isn't configured right. I don't quite know how to phrase it, but there are some scary side issues to this whole thing that disturb me more than a little... and the NIPC scares me .
Time Magazine may have screwed up this photo caption , if those are "tracers from rockets" rather than simple star trails from a long exposure, how come they're all equal length, nearby ones are parallel, and they seem to trace an arc? It ain't just internet journalism that's in trouble...
QOTD:
New game, a la "Jenga": take turns deleting a file from the Windows directory, until a) you get three files in a row that are not deletable, or b) Windows crashes, at which point(s) you lose.
--- Joe Thompson
Aaaugh! So a DNS server choked this morning at work. My Windows NT box was configured to use that one, so I quickly popped into the control panel to reset my server IP address, and discovered that I had to close all of my applications, log out, log back in as administrator, then change the setting. Thankfully I didn't have to reboot, but whose lame-brained idea was it that you can't switch users once you're logged in to a session on this horrible excuse for an operating system?
Yay! According to the AP Alabama's ban on sex toys has been thrown out!
Via Cameron , this New York Times column titled Internet Companies Reinvent Math . What grabbed my eye was the tale of the guy who's been trying to buy advertised computers from vendors with low prices one one of the price comparison sites, who take personal information then won't ship the computers claiming that they're no longer available (despite continued listings on their web site). A reiteration of my claim that most vendors don't want to make their information easily accessible.
I've fallen in with a rough crowd recently. All us web-loggers (hey, does that mean we clearcut the old growth pages?) are starting to get mightly self-referential. I don't know how many of my readers read other web logs, how much of this inbreeding gets noticed, but several of us do have quite a bit of original content. On The Bradlands a particularly good essay called "Respect Your Elders", perhaps a bit out of date, on Jocelyn Elder's dismissal , but well written.
Everyone's been passing about Eric S. Raymond's self-pitying call for someone else to pick up his work , but we're all responsible for building our own brand, and that's what Eric's been doing. I didn't discover Linux because of Eric, good software will continue to be written whether or not "the evil empire" is successfully fought. Now I admit that I could use a little cheerleading at times, and my own free software is sadly underused, but... Dude, evangelism isn't a cross anyone has to bear if the cause will stand on its own merits; just drop it. Eric W. Sink of AbiSource has one take on Eric's cry for help , Bruce Perens has another, calling for speakers, not leaders , and there's a rather funny parody of the ESR essay as well.
Since everyone else has linked to this, I feel like I should be seeing something in cluetrain.com that I'm not. As I read it, the manifesto calls for openness between vendors and customers, but we've already pretty much established that modern consumers don't want honesty and integrity from their vendors, and the whole thing feels verbose and buzz-wordy.
Okay, a quote of the afternoon:
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
--- Stephen Roberts
Pet Peeve of the Day: People whose writing I enjoy but who insist on using HTML which forces their text to be in fixed-pixel-width columns (despite the fact that I've got two glorious 21" displays on my deskt at work, and a 17" at home), and 'cause I occasionally correspond with these people I don't want to make a bit issue of it. Maybe they'll read it here and mend their wandering ways [HINT, HINT!].
Quote of the day:
You know the big SUV craze ? Best damn commie stealth plot I've ever seen. Them can blend in nuke attack subs and aircraft carriers in plain view on public roads and still no-one's the wiser....
--- Bram 'mouser' Smits
Marylaine talks about structure in My Word's Worth this morning: "For one thing, if there were no rules, how could kids ever hope to thumb their noses at grownups?". Brings to mind one of the weirdest things about Burning Man , that everyone was messing with the meta symbols. Was that siren an indication of trouble, or just performance art?
This week in Sluggy Freelance, Bun-Bun may have met his match , and it's as good a time as any to catch up on User Friendly .
Back from an enjoyable weekend in Sequoia National Park , there'll be a rant about that forthcoming, although it may wait 'til I get my slides scanned.
Lessee, in the Teletubbies you've got a "good cause" (ie: PBS) telling parents it's okay to leave their kid's early childhood development to a virtual, non-interactive world which distorts how they'll interact with reality. In Microsoft you've got a big company pushing mediocre products on ignorant consumers. It's only natural that the Teletubbies and Microsofties team up . Shudder:
Once the radio transmitter is hooked up to a video recorder, the toys can interact with the TV or videos that appear up to a range of 15 feet away from the transmitter.
For a while Pixar's voice-mail message has started "Thank you for calling Pixar Animation Studios. Just turn left at the refinery." A T-shirt was made with that sentiment. This morning's suggestion include T-shirts with charred PT flea, Buzz and Woody running from a mushroom cloud, or just adding "...at the burning refinery".
"The Internal Revenue Service is everything the so-called tax protesters said it was; non-responsive, unable to withstand scrutiny, tyrannical, and oblivious to the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution."
Bill Humphries on Associate Spam, using misleading economics to fool search engines . How Amazon and similar "associate programs" are filling web search engines with more trash to be waded through while we look for real content.
Two years ago today the "containers" of many of the members the Heaven's Gate group were found in Rancho Santa Fe, California.
Literary masturbation as a field of study in Salon . And speaking of the possibility of guilty pleasures, another article on Groening's Futurama , but I've stopped watching the Simpsons, and it's not likely that I'll be willing to give more time to TV.
Yesterday at about 2:30 building I work in shook. Usually when that happens it's either a train derailing on the tracks that run just outside the building or an earthquake. We were betting earthquake, although it was kind of weird that the building shook and not the ground. Then someone suggested we look out the window...
The oil refinery across the freeway went "boom" in a big way . Some questions about the article: it claims that the flames were out by 4:30, live shots on the news after 5 still showed lots of boiling orange; and news sources seem to differ on the number of emergency workers hospitalized, although everyone seems to agree that no one was really seriously injured.
Students file suit because Southern Methodist University computer class was too hard , all twelve students failed a course which was supposed to certify them to use Microsoft products. Now I've had at least one operating systems class which was difficult because the instructor had no clue about the subject at hand ("the right answer, or the expected one?"), I wonder whether the problem in this case was the instructor or the students?
Surprisingly enough, there is a new Mouthorgan , all the things they thought they couldn't write about in one column. And because it is a bunch of small pieces it doesn't feel too drawn out the way the columns sometimes do.
I'm a big fan of John Fowles' The Magus, and like some of his other books. Recently I picked up Wormholes, a collection of his non-fiction essays. They don't read as smoothly as his fiction, and I disagree with much of his philosophy, but a few quotes stand out:
"I'm sick to death of the inarticulate hero. To hell with the inarticulate hero. Pity the slobs, but don't glorify them."
-- John Fowles
"Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation."
-- John Fowles, in I Write Therefore I Am, collected in Wormholes.
Keith Knight continues the ABCs of touring with a band in Salon.
A long time ago I decided that I wouldn't become an Eagle Scout. I had various reasons at the time, about what sort of statement I'd be making if I joined the company of my contemporaries who were, things like that. But it's incidents like this firing of a longtime Boy Scout employee that reinforce that decision regularly. It's a shame, because I think that Scouting has a lot to offer, but the ethics of bigotry and exclusion don't need reinforcement.
Clean Sheets updated this morning , nothing that really interested me from the headlines except for Suzanne Steel's photographs and erotic art , which are kind of interesting in a very illustrative sort of style, but a little too clean for my tastes.
Salon's report on iCanBuy, a website which bills parents and then lets kids shop , makes me cringe in abject terror. Be a good little consumer... Shudder. If this takes off I'll lose still more of my rapidly dwindling faith in humanity.
Via RobotWisdom a link that I'm almost afraid to pass on. It's an article in the Washington times about a study on the long-term effects of child sexual abuse . Things always get touchy when talking about these issues, but as usual the loons like "Dr. Laura" have used it as knee-jerk fodder. The Rind-Tromovitch-Bauserman study is controversial because it suggests that the negative effects may have been overstated:
The study based such remarks on findings that indicated up to 37 percent of the boys who were abused and 11 percent of the girls reported "positive" childhood sexual experiences with an adult.
I await, hunkered in a corner, on the incoming barrage, for just bringing up the topic.
Okay, we're back. I think the momentary lapse in Flutterby availability was related to my trying to switch to ssh for data transfer, gonna have to back up and take another running start at that. I was at a Philip Greenspun talk yesterday , alas it was targeted towards a less savvy audience than me, got bogged down in some of the simplistic technical stuff, and was a little disappointing. But it was on the Berkeley campus so I did get over to Cody's Books.
I've got much of a customized content aggregator written, although it is taking longer than I thought, but if you've got a web log in My Netscape, Whump/More Like This, or Scripting News XML that you wouldn't mind being syndicated, would you e-mail Dan (danlyke@flutterby.com) the URL I can reliably pick up the current document at (can be calculated) and which format you've put the data in?
Via JJG , a report that Slate is selling more subscriptions since they went free . There may be more people out there than the pessimists think who understand that we're going to have to tighten our ethics concerning content if the 'net is going to change things.
Via Scripting News comes this article on why XML is a good common format, but it reeks of unnecessary complexity , recalling my Complex != Better rant in February
Marylaine writes about background noise in My Word's Worth.
Catch up on Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly .
Rev. Kirby J. Hensley, Founder and President of the Universal Life Church , passed away at 2 AM Friday morning.
Another overzealous prosecutor attacks freedom, this time in Polk County, Florida. http://www.dreamnet.com/defense/ I'm looking for third party confirmation on this, if anybody has some I'd appreciate it.
Via yesterday's Robot Wisdom , a Sunday Times report that the latest Roman Catholic Catechism has reconsidered on masturbation . I think it's time for a celebration. What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Today's Daily Tish is on the similarities between the 'net and the highways , it's the usual fluff piece, but there are good parallels to be drawn, few of them pretty.
I may already have a quote of the day, but here's another one. Columbine, in Alewife Bayou, on Tarot :
That, to me, is the use of Tarot cards. They trick you into seeing what you already knew but didn't want to admit to yourself. They are for prying information out of your subconscious. And "prying" is the word I want - they are a remarkably trite and blunt tool. But then, so's psychoanalysis, so why cast stones?
Longer links are for the My Netscape crowd, I'll see how I like 'em.
The new Need To Know has arrived, meshing nicely with my Salon criticism :
"Everyone was in the same place professionally. We got in a circle and sang 'Kum-ba-yah.'."
- SALON politics writer explains rigorous selection process
(http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9911/cotts.shtml )
...Someone's haemorrhaging cash, my Lord - Kum-ba-yah!
Via Scripting News , CNNfn reports that Mattel has bought Purple Moon . As I mentioned before when I passed on the report that Purple Moon had ceased operations I liked the concept of a girl's game, but the executions seemed to perpetuate a lot of bad stereotypes. However, less bad stereotypes than Mattel, so maybe this is good news.
Susie Bright's piece in Salon is a fluff piece on genital shaving. Maybe my discontent with Salon isn't with Salon, rather my own tastes are changing.
I can't believe I missed the Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet updates.
Okay, the script isn't working yet, but in anticipation of my getting the bugs out you can now add Flutterby to your MyNetscape services .
Via Rafe Colburn comes Tim O'Reilly's rant on why their technical books sell big and competitors don't . Very good read.
Via /. , a link to InfoWorld where Microsoft is claiming that they can make SQL7 run within 100x of Oracle8i, for 16th the price .
Okay, I'm just waiting on the My Netscape confirmation e-mail to tell me what my channel number is so I can put an add button out there and both of you who care will be able to add a subset of Flutterby as a channel.
Quote of the day from Thorfy's .sig file :
The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. -- Anon
Nah, the problem is that it doesn't have enough chlorine. -- Lionel in ASR
It also lacks an undertow for the weak ones. -- Joe Creighton in ASR
Or is it just disinformation? Via Robot Wisdom comes a report in New Scientist debunking low frequency incapacitation weapons . Bummer, I had my heart set on that 7Hz chicken killer, and the riot control weapons that made people soil themselves.
On other fronts, Mouthorgan tackles romance novels this week.
This giving away content to My Netscape is getting on my bloody nerves. I finally got the address registered from my Pixar e-mail, and I put 16 rather than 15 entries in my RDF file, my fault, but then they keep sending me these stupid e-mails in HTML. Morons.
Anyway, that means that it'll be tonight or tomorrow morning before I can get to the source code to myns and correct it. Sorry.
I'm still fighting with Netscape's sign-up process (I've sent them a gazillion freakin' confirmation e-mails and been to their "click here if you can see the image below" site many times (when the server wasn't refusing connections). grumble grumble grumble) but if you want to create a My Netscape channel of your own from an existing HTML file you might start with http://www.flutterby.com/software/scripts/myns_pl.txt
Well, I've created a little app to make Flutterby into a "My Netscape" channel that should be adaptable to pretty much any HTML document. Unfortunately Netscape's servers appear to be way overloaded 'cause I can't log in (after turning on stupid JavaScript) to register my document. Anyway, if you're totally nerdly take a look at main.rdf (Note that you'll have to "View Source" if you try to load that in a browser).
This weekend maybe I'll try to build a "My Flutterby" capability where I can take RDF files from other people.
Oh yeah, Happy Drink Cheap Beer With Food Coloring And Wear Something Green Day. Although I've got to admit that the corned-beef, cabbage, potatoes with this wonderful horseradish gravy that I had for lunch was quite good. I'm sure the sauce wasn't authenticly Irish, but nothing else of this day is. So I've got a question, how come the parades don't involve big hulking dudes with monster two-handed bronze headlopper swords? I mean, if you're gonna celebrate ancestry, let's look at the good stuff!
Okay, Pixar fans, here's an unofficial Toy Story site . I can neither confirm nor deny...
In Salon, Keith Knight on the ABCs of touring with a band .
Oh yeah: You can avoid all the hokey JavaScript when trying to set up a My Netscape by going straight to the quick start .
Not that anyone's going to wade through all the stuff I'm churning out today anyway, but would anyone read a Flutterby My Netscape channel if I created one?
Update on the use of "porn" in non-sexual contexts: Mark Hughes writes:
One of the primary sources for it is Pat Cadigan's novel Synners (1991) - her characters use the phrase constantly for any kind of self-indulgent, overobsessed media or social construct.
This also has the mantras "change for the machines" (where change is a verb) and "if it don't dance and you can't fuck it, eat it or throw it away", which have spread in various forms.
Time to hit the bookstore, I've missed Cadigan completely.
While I'm hitting the bookstores and name-dropping, George Smith, editor of The Crypt Newsletter has finally shamed me into ordering his book, The Virus Creation Labs by forwarding me an excerpt from the newsletter (the full newsletter is available to those who send him a specific quote from the book) which points out that a year ago the same John Hamre who's hollering about the current "attacks" on the Pentagon's Internet connected computers said almost exactly a year ago that the Pentagon was under a direct attack from cyberspace, which turned out to be two teens from northern California and one from Israel.
If that was all your average small-town ISP had to deal with they'd thank their lucky stars.
And just because I haven't found anything worthwhile in Salon in a long time, James Poniewozik writes about how the web is further blurring the line between advertising and content. Nothing we haven't already seen in much less blatant forms (watching the Linux versus Microsoft thing play out in Ziff-Davis publications is a hoot!), but just a reminder that if you aren't explicitly paying to get your information someone else is paying for you to get it.
Via /. , NAiAM introduces the CD-MP , plays CDs and MP3s off of CD-R disks.
A credit card sized Linux platform with some real computi9ng power. Well, it's a research project right now, but it looks cool.
Quote of the Day: "Sure, we Americans know what weapons of mass destruction the Iraqis have. I mean, we still have the invoices."
In the new Netfuture Craig Holdrege's article talks about the school I went to through 7th grade.
A new NETFUTURE is up:
The occurrence was trivial: a sign outside a bank displayed the time as I drove by. Well, it didn't just display the time; a pattern of lights paraded across the sign and then congealed into the correct numbers -- again and again and again. What hit me with a tiny shock of revulsion was that those responsible for this sign were content to add their little bit of meaningless distraction to the landscape.
I read a lot more than I post to Flutterby. If it were otherwise this would be one huge mess of awful prose. I don't know if I've linked to the Rapidly Changing Face of Computing before, but I browse it because occasionally something turns up there.
I recently had an exchange with the author of it over his linking to the story about the alleged cracker takeover of a British military satellite. Since it dropped from sight almost immediately and had all the other hallmarks of a hoax I opined that it was probably a false report in an attempt to raise general hysteria and help push a funding issue. I pointed to John Harme's recent money-oriented scare-mongering as an example. In the latest issue he uses these and similar quotes in predicting that there'll be a group similar to Tom Clancy's fictional "Net Force" formed soon. I think he's right, and it saddens me to think that people are truly that stupid and gullible.
Marylaine has her own domain , My Word's Worth this week is an update on her plans as she retires from librarianing. Go Marylaine!
And you can catch the weekly version of Sluggy Freelance and go catch up on User Friendly .
Congratulations to Larry Gritz, best known for authoring BMRT , on his PhD.
The Illustrated Guide to Breaking Your Computer
Figure 4.4 shows partitioning of the drive using an ordinary hacksaw. Partitioning in this manner is advantageous over fdisk because it allows partitioning of individual platters and is independent of operating system. You also get to make cute designs.
I've become incredibly scornful of the Postmodernists. After some time trying to figure out what they're trying to say I've come to the conclusion that they really are as shallow and self-absorbed as their writing and criticism implies. But the futurists are kind of whacked too, so we really need a pre-futurist movement.
Going a slightly different direction is Bruce Sterling's Viridian movement, for all you who've come out of your youth with the angst intact and guilt and self-reproach to boot. But at least we'll get some mighty impractical tea pots out of it.
via RobotWisdom , a report that Fallingwater is falling down . Fawning over Frank Lloyd Wright has always seemed to me to be a typical case of personality over performance; his designs are still sometimes stunning, but the few buildings of his I've been in haven't seemed very practical or useable.
On the other hand that seems to be the case with architects in general, and, for that matter, software designers. Stuck in concepts of elegance that have nothing to do with useability they curse the technology that can't keep up with them, while ignoring the beauty inherent in good practical engineering.
Need To Know is up.
In Salon magazine's letters section some interesting notes from the trenches on keeping flamewars out of mailing lists.
Carl passes on "time porn": All those TV shows with pretty people who hang around doing essentially nothing that let you live their hours of vicarious free time in 22 minutes + commercials.
Everyone and their brother is going to be linking to this quote by Al Gore in Wired News
Then came the kicker: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Isn't there anybody who isn't a blithering idiot who'd like to run for office?
On March 15th, the United States Marine Corps will invade Oakland California .
The Marine Corps' plans for the invasion reveal that Urban Warrior is designed to give marines practice in seizing control of urban areas -- including taking over food and water supplies, utilities, and communications systems. And statements and articles by military leaders suggest that the armed forces are preparing themselves to contain popular uprisings -- including uprisings in U.S. cities.
The light at the end of the tunnel is muzzle flash.
Via Cameron comes Killer of Smurfs
Via /. , Jesus poseable figure with background play scenery . Wasn't there something about idolatry in the precursor to that religion, or am I hallucinating again?
A new mouthorgan .
I like to think that the bears that my Dad and I built had a modicum of restraint. This whirligig of Bill and Monica has no such qualms: http://www.pe.net/~reimbold/blowin.htm
Employees of Despair, Inc are devastated that they've won 1st place at the National Calendar Awards Competition. They're best known for the demotivators products.
Paul Bruno has the right response to the Dave Winer comments I referenced earlier.
Jorn talks about dealing with regularly published web data and how that might be pulled together...
Dave Winer misses the point again in his latest DaveNet . He asks why Unix doesn't have a single desktop environment. It's because most of us Un*x users don't want one. Give me genericism, give me configurability, put me in an environment built for evolution, not for dictated stasis. I don't want someone else's ideal environment, I want an environment customized by me that's evolved to meet my working style.
I was disappointed in Best American Erotica 1999. Some interesting stories, but some of the control and death issues just totally squick me, and I don't like those issues in conjunction with sex. In Clean Sheets this week there's a review of Lonnie Barbach's latest editing endeavour, Seductions: Tales of Erotic Persuasion , which looks worth a read.
According to Reuters , France has outlawed hunting or sale of the ortolan songbird, a type of bunting. For those of you into bizarre custom, this bird is usually eaten whole with a napkin over one's head to keep in the aroma.
Have penis size issues you need to resolve? http://poseur.4x4.org/futuresuv.html
And http://www.98lite.net/ explores what you can do when you decouple Windows 98 and Internet Explorer:
These possibilities are realised by implanting the leaner and faster Explorer shell from Windows95 onto the improved core of Windows98. You keep all the great Windows98 improvements to the hardware support, drivers, memory management, Fat32 and improved networking, but the Explorer95 interface is considerably faster and consumes fewer computer resources.
So has anyone else noticed the non-sex related meanings for "porn" that have been creeping into the language? Wildlife photographers talk about "eco-porn", around my office "porn" was used to describe the overabundance of pretty architecture shots unrelated to the articles in an issue of Electronic House magazine.
Jorn Barger writes about the Erasmatron
On Dave Winer's discussion board, Scott Rosenberg announces that Salon is dropping their thin frames , which will make referencing articles there much easier. Now if they'd just bring back content, I'd be happy; there's been nothing there recently.
With deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre using ignoramii to fuel the current media hype about the script kiddies pinging the AFIWC servers, it's time to revisit The Crypt Newsletter . But News.com cuts to the chase, hang on to your wallets and your privacy, 'cause they're both being targeted:
Earlier this year President Clinton sounded an alarm about the serious of computer security threats and outlined plans to prepare for such attacks and to ask Congress for an additional $1.46 billion to fund the effort.
Thomas Karsten has some environmental portraits in Nerve . Figure photographers should recognize that there is a person behind those curves.
Specialized rituals for every-day use: Technopagan Blessing for a new HeNe Laser and Technopagan Blessing for a Leatherman Tool (or any other Multi-plier) .
I've fallen in with a bad crowd, but it's interesting: The concept is Wiki Wiki . The specific web site is the Whump discussion area . Wiki Wiki is a simple CGI script that seems like an overly complex way to build HTML that really doesn't do what you want at first, but after playing with it for a little while I'm starting to see some ways to automate large-scale collaborative web sites. The way you create new pages is by writing an InterCap word, which then has a "[?]" link after it which leads to a way to create the page for that word. After you create that word (or if you reuse a word that already exists) it links the page automatically.
As I look for cleaner ways to put glossaries, collaboration and on-line editing into Newwwsboy it's giving me some directions to play with. There are some glitches to work out, simultaneous editing loses someone's changes, for instance, but the concepts are interesting for ways to automate building better hyptertext.
So I finally figured out what causes the occasional duplicated date headers. When multiple messages arrive at the same time, Newwwsboy looks at the date, figures it needs to run the new day code, locks the file but doesn't change the access date. The second message's instance of Newwwsboy looks at the access date, says "I need to run the new date code", then waits for the lock to clear at which point the first process has already updated the date information. Ahh the joys of access contention...
In Linux Weekly News Elizabeth Coolbaugh paraphrases the ideals section of Linus's keynote :
It doesn't hurt to have some morals. Basically, I'm a very selfish person and I really don't care about all of you. I care about doing what I enjoy.
This is why Linux is so cool. Can you imagine Bill Gates honestly describing his motivations as anything other than "I will crush you all because I'm insecure and was picked on in grade school"?
Stanley Kubrick: dead
Comics-wise, catch up on Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly .
And, of course, it being Monday, catch Marylaine's My Word's Worth on conjecture versus information, thinking versus regurgitation.
The New York Times reports that Microsoft has been embedding tracking information into user's documents which lets them link individual documents to a user database.
"We're definitely sensitive to any privacy concerns," Robert Bennett, Microsoft's group product manager for Windows, said.
ie: The users shouldn't expect any?
A different Dan talks about his inability to visualize . More and more I believe that thought is a function of languages and the constructs we develop to manipulate symbols, and that languages can be taught. There's a lot about Waldorf education that I disagree with, but I do appreciate that they gave me an internal language for visualization.
Need To Know is up.
On Dave Winer's http://discuss.userland.com/ discussion area there's been talk about standardized GUIs for Linux. I don't get it. There are a couple of widget sets and key bindings out there, and I pick the one that works for me and use the application set that uses that interface. It's not like there's any shortage of word processors or spreadsheets or what-have-you for Linux. Related to that, I asked Dave Winer what's so great about a dedicated outliner and Dave missed the question . I responded, frustrated over my inability to understand that large gulf between the Mac/Windows users and the Un*x folk.
Susie Bright on the new JAMA sex survey, in Salon.
Augh! Okay, that Annabel Chong replacement rant went to the wrong place. I'll fix it tonight. Sorry.
First the bumblebee, now the Wright Brothers? CNN reports on the difficulties people are having reverse-engineering the original Wright flyer in an attempt to recreate the 120 foot first powered flight for the 100th anniversary in 2003.
This was originally written to be a mouthorgan story, but Todd & Debbie decided not to run it. They want about 2500 words, which is about double what one of my rants usually comes out to, so this feels a padded and has sort of an "ewok dance" ending and I was going to trim it before I posted it, but since they do reference this piece in the current issue I figured it was more important to have it available than to go back through it again.
Via News.com, Microsoft has announced that if you can keep your Windows 95 or 98 box running for 49.7 days it may crash. I suppose I shouldn't have to point out that it took 4 years for anyone to notice.
Todd points out that Red Herring tries to put positive spins on things, and it's not managing to do that with the net grocers. To me it's obvious: around the turn of the century the rich ate processed food, but now it's the rich who can afford to eat fresh food. The net filters fairly effectively for income, and the net customers are those who want the fresh stuff. Catherine and I had fresh produce delivered for a while, but in the end we want to make our own decisions at the market on what's fresh, what fits in with what we like to make, and so on.
Anyway, some interesting links on the future of net groceries:
http://www.redherring.com/insider/1999/0303/news-groceries.html
http://www.redherring.com/insider/1998/1201/highpoint.html
http://www.redherring.com/insider/1998/0805/filings.html
A new Mouthorgan has arrived, talking about Annabell Chong. I haven't read it yet, but they read my essay (going up this afternoon or tomorrow) on it first so they must have got most of it right.
Mark points out that yesterday's Bill Keane satire on Amazon was probably promulgated by the Dysfunctional Family Circus crew. I think he's right.
Uh oh: It looks like the alt.syntax.tactical folks have discovered Amazon, from the look of the reviews of Bill Keane's Daddy's Cap Is on Backwards collection of Family Circus cartoons.
The several dollars spent on this handy little book is a lot cheaper than the $1,654.79 needed to collect all the cartoons contained inside from their original newspaper runs. All your favorites are here: from "Mom, I stepped on a nail!" to "Mom, I stepped on a nail again!" to "Mom, I stepped on a nail '78!" to "Mom, my lockjaw continues to worsen!" to "Mom, surely Soviet Man is superior to Joe Six-Pack."
So I'm considering the next thing on my home stereo rack, and I've decided that if I'm going to buy a DVD player, it'd be handy to have it play MP3s and CDs as well, and be controllable from anywhere, and there's really no reason not to put a Linux box in the rack that I can plug into the house Ethernet and control via a web browser.
So, can anyone out there enlighten me on DVD playing issues and MP3 decoders for Linux? How about CD jukeboxes?
Todd passes along this: In New York Times Thomas Friedman writes about the http://www.positively-you.com/ bookstore, which is underselling Amazon (from pretty much the same distributors) for about $150 overhead per month. Branding is going to be very interesting in Internet commerce: What if every mom & pop store could be WalMart?
Finally, the truth about the leaders of the most powerful company in the world! http://www.jps.net/abarrow/thetruth.htm
I've seen this story and had it forwarded to me by enough people that I feeled compelled to pass it on with the caveat that I think it's a hoax. Hackers Reportedly Seize British Military Satellite
A correspondent recently asked why Objectivism is a recurrent theme with me given that I don't consider myself an Objectivist. Although there's a much longer discussion on this boiling somewhere, part of it is that most humans aren't even remotely rational, they're still dominantly driven by herding instincts and react based on them. In the SF Bay Guardian, Brook Shelby Biggs touches on this in an article about consumerism and waste in e-commerce.
Yow. The game industry sucks right now. Sierra On-Line laid off approximately 150 people. I think this is a symptom of the tendency of companies, game developers in particular, to hire people with a little too much specialization, which drives development costs way up and ends up being a very short term strategy.
I mentioned the demise of Purple Moon a short while ago. Upside has an article that expands on that, including an interview with Brenda Laurel, that's worth reading.
Marylaine weighs in on the independent counsel in My Word's Worth .
And a new set of Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet , Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly strips.
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com
