Flutterby™! From 2000-12-01 to 2000-12-31

At Scotch Night last night people were talking about the Flawed Transmeta Chips and how Sony is taking it on the teeth. Also there is talk about moving Scotchnight to a Berkeley location now that Pixar has moved to Emeryville. Any suggestions??

[ related topics: Pixar Web development Animation ]

Lots of webloggers are participating in the Day Without Weblogs. I wrote last year about why I don't participate in DWW. Last year I also asked for links to web pages celebrating artists with or who had died of AIDS. That disturbingly short entry is in the archives. Other than this short mention, Flutterby will carry on.

[ related topics: Web development Weblogs ]

At Scotch Night last night people were talk about the Flawed Transmeta Chips and how Sony is taking it on the teeth. Also there is talk about moving Scotchnight to a Berkeley location now that Pixar">Pixar has moved to Emeryville. Any suggestions??

[ related topics: Pixar Web development Animation ]

Todd has been trying to get me to love Flash, 'cause we believe that reports are an interface that doesn't allow the data to be manipulated, and inverse kinematics are sometimes appropriate even for financial data. Well, Charlene and I have been having some of those discussions recently, and all of a sudden I felt like Flash and I were having a dysfunctional relationship:

Flash: "I wuv you".

Dan: "I lov... like some aspects of your personality a lot."

Flash: "Does my scripting language look all fat and gross?"

Dan: "Well, you move nicely and your line primitive is thin..."

[ related topics: Dan's Life Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

So a friend just called asking if I had any consulting leads 'cause he needed some work after getting screwed in some business dealings. He said "Before this all went down I used to think that lawyer jokes were rude and insensitive. Now I think that they're too kind."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

The Shadow passes along Death by Pornography: I find this the most tragic part he died to see the wrong naked woman, whom he never even got to see (the minor-repellent shrink wrap was intact when an Emergency Medical Team pulled the magazine from his tightly clamped hands).

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Via Daze Reader, another one of those 'blogs which makes me wonder why I even try 'cause it's done so well, Japanese men dating Perl scripts via email. Except that the denizens of IRC and AOL chat rooms have been doing this unintentionally for a long time... But more seriously there are some deeper social change and interaction issues here that have been puzzling me and that Columbine has been mulling over. "You have the happiness of a secret woman, a hidden relationship, with none of the fear that your wife will find out and be angry. My grandfather had the geisha, my father had the bar hostesses and I have Love By Mail."

[ related topics: Web development ]

In the greatest of ironies, St. Chad is the patron saint of disputed elections. And has anyone else noticed the irony in the Republicans stating that it isn't a vote unless the chad is completely separated from the ballot, whereas the Democrats say it's a vote even if it's a partially pregnant chad?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

A Salon article on amateur wireless networks based on 802.11b. I've been wanting to install 802.11b at the office, at home, and talk with the guy who runs the coffee shop I hang out in (It's cool to walk in on a Saturday morning and have two guys in the back crankin' out the blues...) about a hub there, but I think that there are still some antenna issues in using 802.11b in a standard PCMCIA slot. Can anyone confirm or deny?

[ related topics: Web development Wireless ]

One of my fantasies is making a couple of tens of millions so I can afford to run a small bookstore or lending library that lets me buy all the books I want without having to figure out a place to store the danged things. Spectator's review of Marc Rivière's Up & Down is yet another book that'd be cool to look at, but I don't think I can dedicate dwindling shelf space to.

[ related topics: Language Web development Books Sexual Culture ]

Clean Sheets asks What's abstinence got to do with it?

[ related topics: Erotic ]

Snicker. Via rc3, the Washington Mint 2000 Presidential coin, an ounce of silver with Dubya on one side and Algore on the other. Hey, speaking of which, gore2004.com is taken...

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

When Flutterby started it was a lot more personal than it is now, although Eric has been pulling it back that direction. I occasionally think about starting an online diary, but involving the other people in my life with that degree of exposure seems a little wrong. Anyway, this is an entry to help my memory, I don't want to muse on it in public because there's lots of conflicting feelings about it, but Charlene just dropped by to give me back the key to my place. I've made this pronouncement to a few friends before and been wrong, and there's one more step we're going to take, but that relationship feels like it's over, and over in a way that doesn't feel comfortable to me but that I'm not sure I can do anything about.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Hormonal Robots might be in our future.This might give a whole new bend to Battle Bots

The 3rd world (maybe 2nd world) is in a big hurry to show they can be just as Backwards as a Superpower with judcial morality. Aww c'mon people...

[ related topics: Web development ]

Sigh. Listening to the Wayne's World of technology, CNET Radio, they described Kevin Mitnick as "Hacker Extraordinaire". First off, it's cracker, not hacker; second, he got caught! How good can he be!?

[ related topics: Web development ]

Sorry about that very first entry popping up there in the comments, I'm testing some code to delete duplicates. I was goaded into this by a post on Hack The Planet.

Ok I know it isn't the tightest spec and it seems a bit wordy but what is so wrong with WAP" ?? Yes you can go cross-eyed from reading the specs and they seem to have developed a committee that is more officious than the DMV... but is there anything wrong with the technology???

This was a request for help in dealing with the Range: header in CGI apps, shortcutting having to dig all the way through RFC 2616, but then I found the IETF draft on HTTP Range retrieval.

Granted this post is akin to saying Buddhism is better than Hinduism... I've finally begun the learning curve in EMACS. For the past couple years I've been using joe in Linux but I need an editor with a few more features. Like Dan, I was a huge BRIEF fan. In fact the biggest difficulty I've had in learning regex in Unix is that I learned BRIEF's regex first - not too different from the pain of breaking my C-k habit I developed from joe (C-k precedes commands in joe whereas it cuts the rest of the line to the buffer in EMACS). I have had the pleasure of using CRiSP for a while on HPUX but I've been running into the same problems that led Dan to EMACS: setting up CRiSP on every machine you encounter is a pain in the butt. I don't plan to be an expert at EMACS anytime soon. In fact, it appears that people have written Doctoral theses on EMACS. But I'm already close to being functional... C-x C-c

[ related topics: Free Software ]

I try to be an evolutionist, but cell-phone salesweasels blow that theory all to hell. Heard no less than 4 times today: "What's WAP?" Even used car salespeople aren't this clueless.

[ related topics: Wireless ]

Shades of building the bears with my Dad, a Florida man has copulating reindeer in his lawn display

Last night's As It Happens has an interview with Kelly Zamudio who's been researching mating patterns of the side-blotched lizard (scroll down). The interesting bit is that although three different sorts live in the same area none has triumphed over the other two because their mating strategies play a sort of "rock-paper-scissors" against each other, one's territorial, one's mate guarding, the third's sneaky and has coloring more like the females so it can sneak behind the other two. When I heard this I was immediately reminded of yesterday's SF Gate advice that techie guys should dress like gay men.

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

I found a copy of the paper version of Nerve. Boy, was that disappointing. Reminded me of a particularly bad version of GQ. So, suggestions for good sexy magazines? Anything That Moves is further into the activism than my tastes run (and, as much as I'd like to be trendy, I'm pretty het), the issue of Black Sheets I've got looks good, a bit dark, Libido has its moments but production tends to be shoddy (sometimes missing pages). Of the online sites, Clean Sheets tends to be my favorite, Scarlet Letters has some good editorials but is hard to navigate. I know Eric has posted some suggestions here, and Debra has mentioned a few, what's your favorite? I'd like something that tends towards the tastes David Steinberg showed in Erotic by Nature.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Christian, of Whorl, passed along this tale of holiday cheer: Furniture store buys surplus mannequins, wants to sell same. Furniture store incorporates naked mannequins into Christmas display, townspeople complain. The southwest can give the southeast a run for its money in terms of ignorant prudery: "We sit back and titillate like it's light-hearted," she said. "This can lead to something else and then something else, until we have somebody molesting a 9-year-old."

[ related topics: Religion ]

Also via Whorl:

[ related topics: Web development Photography ]

Tuesday evening I got a splitting headache, yesterday I had a sore throat and same headache, constipated but liquid goes right through me. Others have reported similar symptoms. Normally I'm a fan of medicine only as a last resort. This year? Get a flu shot. This sucks solid objects of celestial scale through microscopic orifices.

Browsing Pacific Sun this morning in the coffee shop. I think the guy meant to say "virile" in his personal ad, but... well... I wonder what sort of responses he'll be getting.

Salon has a quick biography of the Marquis de Sade. Nothing terribly revealing.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Those Brits again: a new study on sex in the workplace shows that: "Twenty-eight percent of British working women say they have had sex in the office and 65 percent of them don't regret it, according to a survey published on Thursday."

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Gawd! What Fun! Driving Over Jakob Nielsen

[ related topics: Politics User Interface ]

This one's for Mike: via Borklog comes 10 reasons to start skateboarding.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

There's a long comment about Utah that really deserves a little more reading than some of the one-off "yeah, that was cool" comments also in the current list. Any suggestions for ways to give the folks who write essays as comments a little more coverage? I was thinking a byte count along side the comment count, but that seemed a little nerdly.

At Best Buy buying cell phones. Got sidetracked by the Sony Clie. Looks like a really nice cheaper Palm V without the cheesey Ideo flare.

It was 20 years ago today that John Lennon was shot.

Everytime someone gives me that "things are better in northern European socialist states" I sigh and wander on. Yet another example: Norway has castrated hundreds for homosexuality and other crimes. Also mentioned was a previous admission by Sweden of sterilizing tens of thousands in the name of racial purity.

Via Edgecase (and I think this was also mentioned in Borklog, although the link there broke with a VB Script error), stone throwing baboons take revenge on driver. What's remarkable about this is that they waited for and identified the same car to come down the road, and that they appear to have planned and executed a fairly complex ambush. One of my issues with many of the philosophies I grew up with and have been exposed to is the differentiation between human thinking and those of the "lesser mammals". Between cell-phone salespeople and tactically savvy gorillas I sure see anecdotal evidence of substantial overlap.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Iron Science Teacher geee billy, learning can be fun...BILLY! put DOWN the acid!

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Technolust this Palm Bot looks pretty darn snazzy

[ related topics: Web development ]

Dan enters the 3^rd millenium: I just got an install date of December 20 between 12 and 2 for cable modem.

I haven't really played with cell phones before. As Todd and I explore the messaging and feature set of these new Nokia 8290s, I think it's ironic that this current top of the line digital phone has a_l t_e c__l clar_ty of t_e c_m__rci__s t_at cl__m d__it_l is be___r th_n a_a_og. At least from Todd's and my houses (checked with land-lines on either end). And when I first fired it up I thought "hey, it's got a contact manager and date book, and we're gonna make it talk to information sources, this doesn't bode well for the Palm!" After looking at how they structure service plans and an hour or two playing with it I've got the feeling I had in the early '90s about ISDN from the BBSer perspective, talking with phone company people who couldn't understand why you'd want to use the D channel. They've got the resources to do cool stuff, but they really just don't get it. Just as packet switched networks were the future then and phone companies couldn't understand that, it seems from my awfully luddite perspective (yes, this is my first cell phone) that there's amazing potential here that's just being squandered by both the phone manufacturers and the service providers.

[ related topics: Books Wireless ]

Charlene and I (yes, my relationships are complex) went to see the Skin exhibition at the Reflection Gallery. A few really cool chalk figure drawings, some neat holograms (although only one of them spoke to me in an artistic sense). Didn't blow me away, but I might go back for one of the chalk on black paper ones before it closes on the 22nd.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

SMS (Short Message Service) is one of the things Dan & I are looking into right now and it might save us from WAP...whew. So in my research I found SMS PORN

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Furrfu! Jung'f fb trrxl nobhg ebg13? Be vf guvf jul V xrrc trggvat "V gevrq gb ernq lbhe jro cntr ohg vg jnf fb grpuavpny" pbzzragf? Thanks, Jay, I haven't done that since my Scary Devil Monastery reading lapsed.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Marylaine has gone back to writing My Word's Worth columns regularly, Dec 3^rd's is called Life Without a Plot Line.

[ related topics: Web development Marylaine Block ]

A couple of notes on that grand institution, marriage: One way to participate in a deep meaningful sacrement might be to buy a domain name and advertise for a wife. Just be careful to specify a religion, in this case "Christian or Catholic"... Or perhaps you've already found that special someone and wanna elope and have a nice quiet wedding in Scotland? Sucks if your wedding banns get posted next to Madonna's.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama ]

Are scooters dangerous? Perhaps, but let's not get knee-jerk about it. After all, parents and relatives are the most hazardous obstacle kids face in getting to adulthood alive, and it looks like in at least one case we've got cause for a recount: Kid originally reported killed by scooter actually murdered. Now if we can just get some sanity for the skaters.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama ]

"All breast meat" my ass: Chicken head found in box of chicken bits from McDonald's.

Ortega said she fixed grilled cheese sandwiches for her family. "I will probably cook at home from now on," she said.

Excuse me, ma'am, what did you think you were eating?

[ related topics: Food moron McDonald's ]

A couple of people have been talking about last night's 60 Minutes about making money on the 'net. CNET Radio this morning, and Dave Winer's take give me a little of the flavor of the show, and I think it points out the obvious: The whole point of the 'net is to connect people together. If you're one of the economic leeches that survives by placing impediments between the producers and consumers, ala car and cell phone salesweasels, most brokerages, and the like, then the 'net is working to make you obsolete. The point of growing an economy is making people more productive, removing the impediments between the free flow between people who make stuff and people who want stuff. If, long term, you want to make money on the 'net, do something productive, don't assume you can get in between the producer and consumer and take a cut, 'cause the 'net is about getting around you.

[ related topics: Dave Winer New Economy ]

Ok I was so ready to flame PacBell Wireless about lousy customer service today. I needed to call them today to activate SMS on the phones because that was screwed up from our best buy purchasing adventure. I called and got a person within 9 minutes and she was friendly and activated the service and promised it would be working within 4 hours. 10 minutes later Dan and Dylan are playing joy buzzer the officemate with the SMS alert!!! hun... Why am I so amazed that I got good customer service???

[ related topics: Wireless ]

I was just browsing the doll selection at Amazon (looking for X-mas presents for my daughter, of course), and came across this gem: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obi...02-6442794-7156865#more-pictures There's also a Barbie to match but Ken is definitely funnier.

[ related topics: Books ]

I was listening to Joseph Klock's inadvertantly hilarious Supreme Court performance yesterday. After the performance recounted in that link, Scalia started out his question with "I'm Scalia..." and the whole place broke up in laughter.

Local Rant: What wireless needs is a modest proposal for how to give disappointed WAP users (as documented in the recent Nielsen Norman Group WAP study) what they want while lowering digital cell phone bandwidth usage. Probably nothing original, I'm still fumbling around this wireless space and amazed that nobody seems to get it.

[ related topics: Web development Wireless User Interface ]

Thought for the day: It takes more muscles to frown than to squeeze the trigger and smile.

David Steinberg reviews Quills, a movie look at the Marquis de Sade: "Sade knew perfectly well that the moralists who declare themselves most loudly to be defenders of righteousness are exactly the people who cause the most mischief in the world, both to people close to them and in society as a whole."

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

I was browsing around Netcraft this morning checking on Hotmail among other things (yes, Hotmail is still running about 50% FreeBSD and Apache) and decided to explore the Exodus Communications netblock. Lots of interesting names show up in the high ranks of uptime but not a single NT server in the top 50 (all over 300 days). Isn't Netcraft great?

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft ]

Canadian researchers claim Winnie the Pooh characters are seriously troubled: "Pooh needs intervention. We feel drugs are in order. We cannot help but wonder how much richer Pooh's life might be were he to have a trial of low-dose stimulant medication"

[ related topics: Drugs ]

Via Mary: Divine Interventions. "Baby Jesus Butt Plug". I don't think I need to say anything more.

[ related topics: Religion Humor ]

Heather Corinna, of Scarlet Letters fame, saw my plea for good erotic magazines and recommended Cupido. There are no english links off the main page, but a random Cupido photo page shows promise.And David Steinberg is one of their photo editors.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Via Borklog, the source to the Pooh's neuroses news blurb I linked to yesterday Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne: "Finally, we turn to Rabbit. We note his tendency to be extraordinarily self-important and his odd belief system that he has a great many relations (many of other species!) and friends. He seems to have an overriding need to organize others, often against their will, into new groupings, with himself always at the top of the reporting structure. We believe that he has missed his calling, as he clearly belongs in senior-level hospital administration."

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Kenyan girls win circumcision ban: A court in Rift Valley Province issued a permament injunction on their father, Pius Kandie, stopping him from allowing his daughters - 17-year-old Ednah and 15-year-old Beatrice - to undergo the process without their consent.

QOTD: Well, i'll fetch a spammer, you fetch an iMac, some baby oil, and some burly mechanics to assist in the insertion, and we'll Advance Science!

--- Patrick R. Wade in the Scary Devil Monastery

[ related topics: Quotes ]

Wow, this is like a really bad movie: HP worker falls to death from company airplane, is reported missing after the plane lands, 45 minutes later. The conspiracy theorist in me is just going nuts... "There were conflicting reports about whether any of the four other passengers or the two pilots aboard the 20-seat DeHavilland DHC-6 aircraft witnessed the woman's exit."

Via Dorknewz, a great article by Brenda Laurel on Purple Moon, girl games, and how women interact: The feminist ideal of collaboration is not a great recipe for getting things done. On the contrary --- without a clear authority structure, a faux-flat organization forces people to resort to the underworld secret alliances and covert operations in order to exercise personal power. Such an organization can expend far too much energy on the complexities of its emotional and political life.

[ related topics: Politics Web development Games ]

Someone is living in Denial here. I keep picturing Jeff Dachis holding his hands over his ears saying na na na na na while his accountants explain the remedial math.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Love hamsters stolen from CamWorld

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett ]

Voyeurweb usually is loaded with pictures of chubbies who make you thankful their faces are blurred out but occasionally someone gets it right. The commentary is always fun to read and there is very good tutorial on shooting nudes.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic ]

So is Corporate Spying such a tame sport? With public access to half meter imagery things might get a little more interesting. When things seem this calm I get worried. Why? because people are getting too good to get caught doing naughty things...

[ related topics: Web development Books ]

Ages ago when Phil, Bill, Loren and I were writing an awesome 3d framework called Rapix (reading some of the stuff on the PS2 makes me realize how far ahead of our time we were...) a little chipset called the Voodoo made its way into our hands. It had roughly the same drawing speed as our code running on a prototype P150 MMX, which made it impressive because we'd watched graphics accelerators get announced, but by the time they finally got to market they'd get trounced by the existing hardware. This was the harbinger that the tide had changed. So it's with a little nostalgia that I find that 3dfx is no more.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Via Backup Brain, although my take is a bit different from Dori's, Bush uses a Mac.

[ related topics: Politics ]

If Eric's gonna post that nude photo tutorial, then I'll follow suit. I've used DCC Photo a couple of times when the subjects in the photograph didn't feel comfortable using a local lab. Jack Cutler's taste in women and how to photograph them is often a little too glossy and overproduced for my sensibilities, but his descriptions of technique and shooting sessions are useful. He's got some suggestions for shooting model photos in midday sun that get some reasonable images out of light that I've often given up for hopeless.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Stan Lee Media shuts down. I really like what some people have done with comics as a form, but it seems that someone with the skills to make a really good visual story who's interested in commercial success in the US market should go into TV or movies; to get the sort of market penetration necessary to make comics economically viable here requires abandoning the current fan base.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture ]

It's just not safe on the streets anymore....giggle

[ related topics: Web development ]

KFOG this morning had the Kinsey Sicks on. The dragappella group was doing "Crystal Day", a meth inspired parody of "Christmas Day". Might be worth catching them at the Herbst while they're in town...

Bill Humphries of Whump fame says Vignette to Replace Presidential Front-Runners with Story Server: "By leveraging Vignette's best-of-breed solutions for e-business," said the Gore Campaign's head of e-strategy, "we can step out of the way and let our key contributors shape the message instead of our mediating it for them."

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

What will the future be like in 15 years? CIA report tells us how it's going to be. Good Stuff, Scarey Stuff, Silly Stuff

[ related topics: Web development ]

Steve Levy has his new Crypto Book out now......yawn

[ related topics: Web development Books ]

Gadget Lust: In a previous thread I'd ranted that once 35mm cameras hit 6 megapixels film would be dead. I figured it'd take another year or so. Now I'm kicking myself for going with Canon lenses, 'cause the 3040x2016 Fujifilm FinePix S1 Pro takes Nikon mount lenses. Okay, so it's still $4k, but I picked up Phil's old Epson PhotoStylus 750 EX over the weekend, and there's a little bit of artifacting and aliasing with the standard printing systems, but an 8"x10" at 150DPI on that printer using an image captured by my 2Mpixel 1600x1200 Digital ELPH looks pretty damned good. Digital's probably still a little more expensive if you don't print a lot of pictures, but if you're in a business other than large format portraits and people shots (where digital still isn't fast enough) that relies on film it's time to start exploring alternate directions.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Photography ]

Via Ziffle, the Spud o' Christ T-shirt.

[ related topics: Ziffle ]

The Joke is in the comments so you can ignore the "spam" if you choose

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

The Coyote Grits building is under siege from men in helmets & orange vest(uncertain about the nationality of this army) and large orange machines perhaps from a nation called Caterpillar

Frustration: Cable guy showed up early, said "Yeah, you can use DHCP, but it's much better to just use static IPs", life is groovy, birds are chirping, then he finds that he's missing the tool to do the cable connection on the pole top. So here I sit with the little RCA box on top of my monitor blinking forlornly... And I'd tell y'all the IP but then every script kiddy in the known universe would be ping-bombing my poor little Winders box (not like that's not gonna happen anyway...).

Via Camworld, Bill Gates says other people's standards should be open. Specifically, he called the chairman of the FCC to urge a close examination of AOL's dominance of instant messaging. Freakin' hypocrite.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Web development ]

The day at home has me stumbling through a few old boxes. Anyone out there need a Targa 32+ graphics board? Probably only useful if you're supporting a legacy embedded system in a TV studio or somesuch, but I don't really have a use for it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture ]

Via Pursed Lips (speaking of which, I owe y'all a review of some sort of Debra's Resurrection: An S/M Love Story), Susie Bright on swingers versus S/M parties: "You mean, they're just swingers in black leather clothing?" "Well, not quite," I said, "because they're too young. They think swinging is something you do when you're over 50 and live in a randy subdivision. No, these people are looking for erotic thrills without a lot of head games, and it just so happens that the kinky scene is the only place that supports it. There's no other place in the adult American dating scene where you can be a bit of a show-off, or have two lovers, or fool around watching other people, or try a whole bag of sex toys."

[ related topics: Erotic Games Sexual Culture ]

Salon cuts 20% of their staff. Lots of causes here, unfortunately none of them are ones that would drive Salon towards becoming a better magazine for readers like me. Bummer.

Via Columbine, Curious GWB goes to Washington.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Jay linked to the New Internet Computer and dissed the Netpliance box. My grandmother recently had a stroke, and the family has been discussing lightweight ways to get her on the 'net so that she can read the musings of my generation (and I'm the oldest of the grandkids) via email and web. That New Internet Computer looks like just another big ol' system with a bit of flash RAM and no disk, but it's got a CRT monitor. The appeal to me of the Netpliance and similar is that it and the display will fit on a desk in a shared room somewhere. Anyway, if people have suggestions for low cost net appliances I'd be interested in your experiences.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

After my arrogance about security and cable modems, Chris emailed me a potential root exploit... Any interruptions in service you may have noticed were me franticly upgrading bits of the server, including things like the C libraries, without access to the big red switch. Gulp. Anyway, that security hole has now been replaced by a whole set of new but unknown ones...

Garth Kidd (don't have a better place to link him to, so here's a gratuitous Network Appliance plug) passed along a Register article on Content Protection for Recordable Media for ATA hard drives. As the leeches in LA try to suck more royalty dollars for media that isn't necessarily used for their content it's important to keep our voices heard and stick to open products and standards that keep this sort of crap from getting snuck in underneath our radar.

[ related topics: Web development Privacy ]

Ok so we all get spam jokes in email and most of us (myself included) find it really anoying because they are forced upon you in your email. I was expecting flames from the last time I posted email humour but instead got possitive encouragment. Sometimes the jokes are REALLY funny. So here is a social experiment. Post your favorite piece of humour in replies to this Entry and share. Aww c'mon we all like to laugh right?

[ related topics: Humor ]

Yet another reason the very concept of DWI is stupid: Judge tosses case against driver on kava tea, saying prosecutors had failed to show that the beverage had impaired the driver's ability. Hello, the guy was weaving through traffic and driving erratically, and we don't have rules to take him down for that? If he'd been randomly firing a gun in a shopping mall we'd charge him, but let him recklessly throw two tons of lethal steel around a highway and we've gotta show that it "wasn't his fault"? This is the problem with drunk driving laws in general, we need to stop blaming the substance and start blaming the actions.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I'm worn out. My tolerance for shopping and huge crowds is low, I'm not much at giving gifts because of an event, and I've still got stuff to wrap. But I've been thinking that if we just look at this as a good time to sit on someone's lap, tell 'em if we've been naughty or nice (and if so, how...) and express what we really want... well... that I could get into. Along those lines, I've been kinda disappointed in Susie Bright since Full Exposure, but it seems like she's hit her stride again. Via Daze Reader, Susie Bright on Christmas cheer.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture ]

Yay! I found the switches to turn off the the annoying ringing ("Compensate for digital camera" my tush, and contrast filters are fine, but only in moderation!) and minor banding on that Epson PhotoStylus 750 I got from Phil. There's still some experimentation I need to do, but some of these prints are starting to look nice. Unfortunately I'm about out of that expensive photo paper in the small sizes. Bummer.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Via Scripting News, the web as ultimate copy protection proposes that we need protection from ASPs going out of business, and that variants on the GPL are necessary for those who contribute to open source software that could be enhanced and run under the ASP model.

[ related topics: Free Software Web development Dave Winer ]

Also via Scripting News, a New York Times editorial: The Dot-Com Bubble Bursts: The current sense of despair in the dot-com universe may be as overdone as last year's euphoria. The Internet, after all, really is a transforming technology that has revolutionized the way we communicate. Now I'm not sure the stock market has yet deflated enough to bring parity to the world, but I've also been spending a bit of time outside of my usual retail haunts this midwinter merchandising season, especially since one of my favorite music stores is in the process of liquidating its stock so I've had to go to mainstream music stores, and I find myself flip-flopping and becoming an e-commerce believer once again. The real problem is that the towns in which we reside aren't built to be lived in; because of suburb sprawl we don't have the downtown commercial districts which once were communal spaces, instead we've got malls, which we have to drive to, and which we have no sense of ownership over. Oh well.

[ related topics: Web development Music Dave Winer ]

I was at Blockbuster last night perusing the DVDs and was shocked to see about 20 copies of But I'm a Cheerleader on the shelf. I'd be surprised if anyone actually rented it. I loaned out my DVD and haven't seen it in a while. I was just checking to see if Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was playing locally. Unfortuantely Chattanooga isn't even cultured enough for that... Oh well. I think I'll be back in Boston next week. I'll try and catch it there.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Good Afternoon! (Or, in a blatant rip-off of one of my favorite greeting card artists, Boynton, three fish ewe a mare egrets moose panda hippo gnu deer.

Check the comments for a general rant on life...

John passed along the bios of the RCN abuse administrators. Some good ideas for corporate image shots here.

[ related topics: Web development ]

From that RCN abuse administrators page I found afterburner's quotes page which had this gem which kinda makes me wanna look at the language: prhine D'you know anything about JavaPerl? As in how they combine the two?

Colin Well. Imagine that Java is a dainty, well-dressed Victorian lady. And Perl is a big, grimy 10th century viking with a hard-on. JavaPerl is like a small room with a bed.

[ related topics: Quotes Web development ]

So having referenced Sandra Boynton's greeting cards below I figured giving her a link or a plug would be cool. While trying to find said link I discovered this disturbing URL: http://www.sexbuzz.com/webguide/Shopping/Children/Music/

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music ]

This just completely rocks. Via Bradlands, the Chicago Tunnel Company Railroad. A few years back you might remember the flood that shut down the Loop for a while. This is the tunnel system that contributed to that, dating from the days when the narrow gauge electric railway was used to deliver coal and remove cinders and ash from boilers all over the city..

[ related topics: Web development ]

Via Robot Wisdom, Motley Fool recants Foolish Four strategy, new data shows it isn't as good historically as they thought, and this year it's been especially bad.

[ related topics: Jorn Barger Web development ]

So I went to Fucked Company, and the banner ad pointed to Ice Cream Source.com, a mail-order ice-cream place, and I just couldn't escape the irony.

Via Edgecase, Guppy fish may explain the dating game. Ages ago a female friend of mine told me "if you wanna just get laid, wear a fake wedding ring". Apparently guppies exhibit "mate copying" too: According to a study in the US, a female guppy is much more likely to have the hots for a male guppy if other female guppies like him, too.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Games ]

Tileable lunch meat backgrounds. Including a 320x320 tileable olive loaf.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Via pretty much everywhere, Evan Williams on paying for web content. Micropayments seem pretty much dead. Per use pricing died with DiVX, even if ASPs are having trouble catching up with the consumer market. Explorations of Eric's recent link to Voyeurweb lead me to Redclouds, an amateur porn site which charges $20/year, non-recurring. If the net is truly going to revolutionise publishing, and I think it is actually cheaper to put up a web page than to try to print a paper 'zine, then prices which reflect that reality are a necessity. And, yes, this means you English majors who thought the .com world was going to mean you could make $150k/year are having to look at similar job prospects to those you went into school with. Deal.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture ]

The 2000-12-22 entry in Rebecca's Pocket (archive should end up here) mentioned a list of weblogs sorted by owner's gender, and that the lists were of roughly equal length. As I go through my own list of "at least once a month" reads I guess they do come out about equal, but the daily list is heavily male, even accounting for the TG folks. I like date movies, I'd never have figured myself for that much of a "guy" guy.

[ related topics: Web development Weblogs ]

Say It With Penis. Reminds me, in a way, of Joani Blank's book Femalia.

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Web development Books Sexual Culture ]

Via Genehack, Morbus Iff on browser games.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Games ]

I've been using Opera for Linux since beta 1. It's now up to beta 3 and few of the bugs I've reported have been fixed, and there's a crash that only happens occasionally. It'd be great if I could tweak on things, and if I could get a core dump and stack trace of that occasional seg fault, but I can't. I haven't wanted to deal with the horrors that are Mozilla just 'cause I've heard how big and bulky it is. I don't mind paying for Opera, but it'd be really cool if the model existed to let me tweak on the source when I find glitchy things. I guess this is the big quandary of Open Source, just add me in as another whiner.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama ]

QOTD, by the grandfather of Loren of Underacheivers: "Be good. Be careful. But if you ain't, name it after me!"

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama ]

In honor of Scotch Night tonight, the science of ageing whisky.

I'm not one of those perpetual critics of Microsoft, I actually like Windows 98 and NT when they are working, but there are some things about Microsoft that is troubling to me. Mostly it is the reliance that I'm seeing on this company's products. IDG.net is reporting that I'm not alone in my concerns. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has released a report calling the recent breech in Microsoft's network has national security implications.

"It is doubtful that the millions (sometimes billions) of lines of code required to power Microsoft's products could readily be sanitized," the CSIS report states. "With most military and government systems powered by Microsoft software and more generally reliant on [commercial, off-the-shelf systems], this recent development can pose grave national-security-related concerns," the 73-page report concludes.

It isn't the break in and possible theft of code that worries me as much as the fact that the code that so much business is dependent upon is only available to a relative handful of people that I'm not quite sure I can have confidence in their long term motives.

[ related topics: Web development Microsoft ]

Maybe reparation paid to descendants of slaves is something we should be doing, maybe it isn't but it sure does open up some money making opportunities for some.

Robert L. Brock, 75, a legal activist who for decades has been barnstorming the country spreading the word on reparations. He contends that black people are eligible for special tax rebates and, if they pay him $50 to fill out a claim form, they will one day collect a half-million dollars in compensation for all that slavery and state-sanctioned discrimination stole from African Americans.

Now, I'm not saying this fellow is a con artist just out to take $50 from people that probably could put the money to better use, but I've seen it done before.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Web development ]

Yup, getting old. While trying to glean some information about cell phones. I stumbled across a phone hacker site grass hopper unit and found myself feeling abit nostalgic after reading about the exploits of teenage boyz searching city drain sewers scaning 800 numbers for modems on the other end...

[ related topics: Web development ]

I hit a rarely used button on my radio and tuned in to a station playing ZZ Top and Led Zeppelin, a genre I hadn't listened to in a while, and it struck me how music follows technology. The late '60s, through the early '80s technology was transforming from a tool to the shaper, and the music reflects that push to take amplifiers to the edge of breakdown, the struggle as the humans took the technology to its limit and played along the fringes. As the later '80s came in the technology outstripped the reflexes of the humans, to here in the late '90s and early aughts the physical skills of the humans, like voices and reflexes and such, really don't matter any more, all of that can be fixed and changed in post-processing, to where we haven't heard a real unaugmented human voice or drummer in popular music for years.

[ related topics: Music ]

A face plate bit for my Canon PowerShot S100 Digital Elph has been loose, and on this morning's hike I lost it. It appears that my only option for replacing it is shipping this thing off to Illinois somewhere for some indeterminate amount of time. It pisses me off that ya can't buy replacement parts for anything any more.