There's a new Clean Sheets up.
Awesome analysis of MFC and how lazy programming has lead to bloatware of incredible proportions , using a megabyte when 45k would do just fine.
Mark Hughes pointed out the similarities between two interesting quotes:
"If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?"
-- Howard Roark in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
And an excerpt from A Next-Generation interview with John Carmack ( http://www.next-generation.com/jsmid/news/6471.html ):
NG: Does the quality of your work, and Id's work, in some part stem from being on top, from not having to pay a lot of attention to what else is happening in the industry?
John: I do think there's a lot of benefit to be had from having enough confidence in your own decision-making process to go ahead and forge forward.
The interview is worth reading.
Need To Know has arrived for this week.
QOTD: In an ABC News article on children in airplanes Jerry Clavner is quoted as saying:
"Traveling on a domestic airline with children on board is like traveling with a Chihuahua with diarrhea"
Via Robot Wisdom comes an interview with Milton Friedman in Forbes .
In Salon , an exploration of the connection between grad school and masturbation .
I generally dislike Jon Katz's writing style, but his recent pieces on /. on the Littleton shootings have been dead-on. Jon's current piece on the repercussions of Littleton is well worth reading if you'd forgotten just how bloody clueless high school administrators and law enforcement officers tend to be.
Aaron pointed out to me that Marylaine's Fox column changed in between my posting it and yesterday evening. Too darned much to do, I need to automate my link-checking. But the current one talks about morality at the end of the last century, draws parallels between Bennett and Comstock. The more things change...
This week's Mouthorgan is up.
via Cameron , some trenchcoat mafia advertising parodies .
A new explanation of the refugee situation in Yugoslavia (tongue in cheek) .
Todd passes on the Mind Reading Markup Language .
QOTD:
"Your god and I have a basic philosophical disagreement. He thinks he should be in charge. I think he should be brought up on charges." --- Author unknown
Marylaine's Fox News column weighs in on the Littleton shootings, another quiet voice saying "look at the social conditions" in the hurricane of sounds crying out for blood and against video games, pornography, homosexuality, or any other sacrificial lamb du jour.
Keith Knight on geeks versus jocks
Clean Sheets is updated, some interesting photography by Kim Weston, a few other articles I haven't gotten to yet.
We just got our invite to this year's Adams Gallery landscape photography exhibit at the Mumm Nappa Valley vineyards . They haven't updated the info on their web page yet, but it opens on May 8th and runs into September and if it's half as good as last year is well worth going to see. We'll probably be going to opening night and then at least once more.
Now you can sell yourself and your friends on E-bay .
Whoops, just after I fired off that last update I realized I had caught that Queen On-Line update. I really do need to automate some of this stuff. The current Berkeley store exhibit of the photography of Bob Giles looks like it might be fun.
Also at Good Vibrations , I think I missed the update to Queen On-Line .
May 7th is National Masturbation Day :
Here's how you can participate: The Masturbate-a-thon is like a Walk-a-thon, but it's more fun--you don't need to leave your house and you won't get blisters on your feet! Between now and National Masturbation Day (May 7th), ask people you know if they will sponsor you for every minute that you masturbate on May 7th. All the proceeds you collect will be split between four great community HIV- and AIDS-prevention organizations across the country (masturbation is safe sex, after all). After you have masturbated for the cause, tell your friends how much money they have helped raise.
I want that "I Came For A Cause!" bumper sticker.
Via Robot Wisdom , the Lassez Faire City Times presents a scathing analysis of the Columbine High School incident . I don't necessarily agree with it, but it is a refreshing alternative to the usual "we should ban black trenchcoats" mainstream press:
But documentary films made in Nazi Germany during the 1930s establish clearly that the real Hitler Youth were athletic, clean-cut, flag-waving "patriots," not unlike the brainless Columbine jocks that Eric despised and wanted to defeat.
Oh yeah, new Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet , Helen gets a crush on a former English professor, Sluggy Freelance weekly didn't update last week, so it's just a bunch of T-shirt designs (which are still warped and cool), and User Friendly has new strips.
Salon takes on the lack of nudity in American cinema . I've got a whole lot of commentary I'd like to make on the topic but I think I'd better wait a while, let some recent experiences sink in a bit, before I start rambling. Anyway, a teaser, pushing the limits of "fair use", to get you to read it:
"If female moviegoers are the ones who are made to feel uncomfortable at the sight of a naked actress on-screen, they should also consider that cultivating a climate in which women's bodies are kept under wraps, revealed chastely and tastefully or not at all, isn't the answer to making them feel better -- if anything, it's only likely to make them feel more objectified."
My Word's Worth this morning ponders life in other times.
Sorry y'all about the late updates this morning, we spent the weekend at a wonderful workshop and I'm still recovering.
April 27th is "Free Cone Day" at Ben & Jerry's , remember to tip your scoopers.
A DSP-based decompressor unit for high-fidelity MPEG-Audio over TCP/IP networks Master's thesis for the M.Sc. Eng. Phys. degree By Bjrn Wesn
Need To Know is up.
Making your wedding comfortable for gay and lesbian guests :
You've probably been choosing vows, color schemes, photographers, food, and music. But have you given any thought to making your wedding more accessible to the gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT) members of your family?
The anti-virus maker's PR machine swings into motion with the announcement of the CIH virus . Note from this account particularly the amalgam of ways it supposedly spreads: It's an EXE file; no wait, leave your e-mail attachments unopened; no wait it actually infects other EXE files and sits dormant; no wait, it infects floppy disks (boot sectors?).
Segfault is sometimes hit or miss, but they hit with the Scared Civil program for persons found guilty of harrassing tech support staff :
"Help desk technicians like the program because it saves them years of therapy. Companies like it because it saves them insurance costs. And religious customers like it, because it saves them from going to hell."
An interesting day on CNN Custom News : Subsidizing sports arenas not as good an idea as team owners would like us to think , they generally "fail to generate economic growth and new jobs" and in Paris the Galeries Lafayette has been forced to move its live lingerie display indoors .
Jack Murighan on Sex in the Bible in Nerve Magazine .
The new Mouthorgan has no sex, instead it talks about the Columbine High School killings. It's amazing how much this incident has affected me. Anyway, some good notes, and some good comments.
Meta: Advertising on the web. My ad in Clean Sheets apparently started running on Friday, last weekend was my first weekend over 100 distinct visitors (95/88 for the weekend before, 126/122 this weekend), first two days over 200 viewers (weekdays are normally 145-160, Friday the 16th was 200, Monday 179, Tuesday 210, today at 171 and climbing), out of about 5870 impressions so far. I don't have referrer info in my logs, so I can't pinpoint where the extras are coming from, but I haven't said anything profound or gotten any other press (which usually accounts for booms in readership). I expect the next week to be interesting 'cause they update on Wednesday, so today should be a big boost.
Oh yeah, last night there was comment about putting a target frame in my links so that links opened in a new window. I pointed out that on the operating systems I generally use the middle mouse button does that. The person who made the suggestion (who shall remain nameless) said "Cool, I'm going to have to try that." Just in case you didn't know. I'll keep on leaving the user interface decisions to the end-users.
A teacher teaches the difference between penalty and punishment .
In the "doh, why didn't I think of that" department, here's an awesome patent (If you go, be sure to read the full descriptiong) for a "Photon push-pull radiation detector for use in chromatically selective cat flap control and 1000 megaton earth orbital peace-keeping bomb".
But if light comes in indivisible "photons", as shown in Figure 2(A), ifyou are one such photon, how do you decide whether to go on through, or bounce back, or reflect or, in other words, "Does God play Dice with the Universe?" I am informed by a Professor of Physics that there is "no one on Earth", who can explain this simple problem for me.
Robot Wisdom has a link to a Rocky Mountain News article about the Trenchcoat Mafia . What grabs me about this story is that except for the Hitler thing (we were too well informed about that, but pick any other random source of evil), I had a bunch of friends in high school who were just like that; "extremely bright, but not good students", the weapons interest, the black trenchcoats. Some of 'em went military, one of 'em tried to commit suicide and last I heard (it's been years) was laying low to avoid some coke dealers he'd crossed, some of us went into 'puters. And it seems to me that this whole deal (which isn't really significant in isolation, so ignore some of my kneejerk response) could be easily reformed by making high school a useful institution rather than just a holding pen for that period between having the physical attributes of adulthood and being brainwashed enough that they can join the lockstep of the rest of the spawn-n-die culture.
Via Robot Wisdom , a link to a New York Observer article on the "Dogma Vow of Chastity" , a manifesto by a bunch of Danish filmmakers asking:
"stating that films must use hand-held cameras; all shooting must be done on location; off-camera music is prohibited; and any superficial action in the plot, such as murders, must be avoided. Most perplexing at all for an industry where egotism is a prized asset, the director of a Dogma film cannot be credited."
Not sure I'm for the credited thing, but the other parts could lead to some interesting films, for a change.
Anyone else heard of the documentary The Lifestyle? From the Reuters article on The Lifestyle :
The vast majority of the film consists of commentary from 20 or so swingers -- mostly straight, conventional, homely looking Mom and Pop types from Orange County, Calif., who just happen to be into orgies rather than bridge or bowling.
Clean Sheets updated today. Seems a little light, but given the temporary circumstances of the editrix that's completely understandable. Nothing lept out, there's a rerun Mouthorgan piece, and a new piece of fiction. And an ad for Flutterby that started running there 'cause I thought they needed a little support.
Seor Wences dead . "'s'all right? 's'all right."
The Electronic Glasgow Herald reports that the NATO airstrike which killed over 70 was called in on a CIA cellphone by Serb forces .
Angus Reid, a Ljubljana-based filmmaker, on the NATO bombing in Serbia .
Oh yeah, A Bug's Life was released on video (VHS reframed and letterboxed, and DVD) today. Buy a copy for the sake of my stock options.
I'm sure my usual correspondents will give me the "well, duh" response, but... A good portion of my unease over the NATO involvement in Yugoslavia stems from having no reputable news organization covering the situation. We get rehashed Serb press releases piped out via e-mail, we get NATO press briefings barely edited, but there's no one out there trying to figure out what's really going on, they're just republishing the videotape that other sources are giving them. This has been happening for a long time on the local news level, and maybe it's just that I've only recently become so aware of it, but I don't even remember the assorted Iraq fireworks shows having such a discrepancy between stories.
I'm also thinking about the demise of the BBS, the withering of several mailing lists I've loved, and how after 16 or so years of championing virtual communities I'm finding that there's really no substitute for face-to-face contact. And that the "Information Superhighway" has had much the same effect as the Interstate highway system in terms of destroying the vitality of small communities and encouraging a warehouse-store sameness to everything.
A new Netfuture
Via /. , a very interesting interview of George Lucas by Bill Moyers . It's kind of frightening to see George saying that the myth he wants to tell in his story is "spawn and die and continue the cycle". Is this why I've become so fed up with popular culture, American movies in particular? Isn't there more to life than marching lock-step through the same patterns our ancestors trod? George doesn't seem to think so, and that scares me.
Clinton proposes further hobbling those of us who choose not to have children , treating parents as "as a protected class with respect to employment discrimination".
If you're headed down under, you might want to learn more about the drop bear before you go to Oz.
JJG pointed to a Red Herring article in which Network Solutions claims that the .com namespace isn't mined out , and some things suddenly became clear: Much like encouraging artificial shortages on Beanie Babies and Furbies, Network Solutions has a vested interest in keeping the namespace tight and encouraging domain name speculators.
Via /. , a ZDNet article saying that the websites of companies with which the federal government does business must be handicapped accessible . I'm not much on federal intervention in general, but I think all consumers should demand this, and it'll be a great leap forward for web design.
Marylaine talks about Pun Pals in My Word's Worth this morning.
And Pete was on vacation last week, so Sluggy Freelance wasn't updated, but User Friendly should have new episodes.
This weekend I read Fax from Sarajevo: A Story of Survival (ISBN: 1569713464) and was strangely disappointed. As non-fiction comics go it was a decent read, although nowhere near Maus: A Survivor's Tale (ISBN: 0679748407), simply because it told the story of exceptional people. The hero of the tale was well enough known that he could have hundreds of people around the world lobbying assorted governments for assistance, unlike so many who were forced to stay. Still, as a chilling reminder of how tenuous civilization is. A year or two ago I went to a photojournalism exhibit, and one of the most striking images there was a picture of Beirut, but the only clue that it wasn't Miami or any other beach-laden coastal city was the towers of smoke and the missing parts from the luxury hotels. On the anniversary of the Waco assault and the Oklahoma City bombing (ie: today) it's frightening to contemplate the possibilities.
Haven't read it yet, but Brad's got a frustrated end-user's lament .
============================================================================ Brad L. Graham [mailto:blgraham@bradlands.com] Writer, Editor, Prophet, Softshoe Dancer & Singer of Sentimental Ballads Visit the scenic BradLands: http://www.bradlands.com
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." -- Bertrand Russell ============================================================================
----------------- Posting: camlist@camworld.com Subscribe: camlist-subscribe@camworld.com Unsubscribe: camlist-unsubscribe@camworld.com http://www.camworld.com
Need To Know is up.
A new Queen On-Line at Good Vibrations on why European sex shops are the same awful things we normally associate with "adult book stores" despite them having more open attitudes about sex.
Florida searching for exotic dancers , because of a request for visas for foreign workers to dance in a club in Stuart, the state is trying to verify that there aren't any potential employees in the state. The job is nights, 40 hours a week, $11/hour. Now it's been a while since I've hung out with exotic dancers, but at $11/hour that's gotta be a pretty small redneck dive.
In the "Mick's gotta hate that" department: E-mail to a company mailing list trying to sell tickets to Tuesday's Rolling Stones concert for two thirds of the original price. Maybe the world finally is getting some taste.
In the "things I need to fix" department, obviously making the glossary matching a little more dynamic would be a good start. Sorry about those italics rather than links down below, sometime around October when I've got nothing better to do maybe I'll rewrite Newwwsboy from the ground up to rerender pages on which links change during updates and take care of all of those other things that I now know would be better done some other way.
Quote of the day, regarding that recent suit against ID and similar companies by people related to that teenager who opened up on a prayer group:
"Those games [Doom, Quake, Redneck Rampage] teach shooting skills the way Pac Man teaches us how to eat."
--- Scott Amspoker
Apropos Yugoslavia, via Marylaine comes this Human Rights Watch report on Rwanda .
For those of you who use My Netscape , My Userland or another site which uses the RDF version of Flutterby (don't be shocked if you try to load that file in a regular browser and see nothing, try "view source"), how has it been recently? Am I providing enough link text?
And the Linux Weekly News article points to Eric Lee Green's detailed dissection of the problems which is worth the read if large Intel based servers are in your future or present.
More Mindcraft benchmark debunking at Linux Weekly News .
Tech to watch out for: Bluetooth is a wireless protocol for assorted devices within your home to talk to each other. And at a retail cost of 10-20GBP additional per device that's a competitive price with X10. A Bluetooth special report is low on technical details and high on corporate ego, but still gives some clues on where things are going.
A wonderful Ziff-Davis critique of those cooked Mindcraft NT benchmark numbers that have been floating around. Gee, what was the first clue that the Mindcraft people were either in cahoots with Microsoft or just drooling idiots, the fact that this test ran counter to every other benchmark anyone's published? That they were apparently trying to run software RAID?
Mouthorgan tackles the issues of VR sex from an MIT perspective.
Regular sex will make you less susceptible to colds and flu .
Speaking of Clean Sheets , if you're one of the participants or you correspond with one regularly, you might ask 'em why I got no response back from my request to buy some ad space. Is their mail going wonky?
Jourdan Shelbourne takes on chat rooms in the latest issue of Clean Sheets , along with a bunch of other updated stuff.
Goodbye Altavista, for selling hit results to the highest bidder .
Whoops, here's the direct link to the Red Herring story about the Palm OS open to hardware clones .
Red Herring (alas, no independent link to the story) reports that Palm Computing is opening up the Pilot to hardware clones. I actually haven't looked at the API for the OS, but from an end-user standpoint it's a great implementation and mine is quite useable. It'll be nice to see something to stand up against Windows CE.
Keith Knight bemoans the rising complexity of handshakes
I'm not normally a Tom Tomorrow fan, but his latest has Iowa launching airstrikes against New York and is worth a read.
A lifetime of free lunches for a tattoo : Forget web banners, the future of advertising is body modification.
More impending world doom , possibly in 2027 or 2039. It'd be cool to be around to see...
Hey, how come we don't have nude magicians out here in the bay area, huh?
The new issue of Gauntlet has arrived, talking about the continuing (and it seems increasing) legal and social issues surrounding strip clubs and strippers. In case you're not a subscriber, it's a comic book sized (although 110 pages) newsprint magazine dedicated to "Exploring the limits of free expression". I'm particularly plugging them because their last issue had pictures by and interviews with Jock Sturges and Sally Mann, among others, and as a result of this they've been dropped by one of their distributors, Diamond, so if you're used to seeing them in your local bookstore you may have to look further. Last Gasp and Ingram still carry them.
The next issue comes out in November and focuses on "the many faces of feminism".
CarTalk takes on the Ford Valdez... errr. Excursion :
FORD: More than 85 percent of the vehicle is recyclable by weight.
TRANSLATION: And when you're done with it, NAFTA allows us to sell it to Mexico as low-income housing.
From a Philadelphia Enquirer article :
A study of 199 low-income U.S. households found that about 1 in 4 contained fewer than 10 books. "We found that half of parents reported that they rarely or never read books or newspapers," says the report, by the American Academy of Pediatrics. "Over half of these households had fewer than 10 children's books; in fact, almost a quarter of these homes contained fewer than 10 books total."
How much you wanna bet they had a TV, and I'll bet within the next decade they'll have a "web surfing" tool of some sort...
Has Santa finally triumphed over Bun-Bun? Sluggy Freelance
And you can catch back up on User Friendly .
Sam forwards:
The first step to European integration:
EEC Directive 14533-8
'The term "spending a penny" will be replaced with "euronating"'
via Robot Wisdom , a report in the Telegraph alleging that the NSA is involved in industrial espionage for U.S. companies . Even if it's not true it's got another great indictment of patents.
"German politicians still support the rather naive idea that political allies should not spy on each other's businesses. The Americans and the British do not have such illusions"
--- Udo Ulfkotte
"What is good for Boeing is good for America"
--- Bill Clinton
What's really fun is when you combine this with the call for key escrow. I do not trust my government.
Information wants to be free only in the same manner that cars want to be free. That's why we have to put up with locks and alarms on cars and horrible obfuscating ad-ridden layout in HTML.
Need To Know is up.
Ouch: Sex in the back seat can get you 3 years in Italy according to a Reuters report. A recent court decision has upped the penalty from a 300,000 lire fine "indecent public act" to an "obscene act".
Peter Meerholz points out that he's been pointing to Arts & Letters Daily for a while too. I'm beginning to think that between the basic list of webloggers we've completely mined the web for the good stuff.
Passed on without comment:
C H E V R O N
04/08/99 12:53
CHEVRON
901 W. CUTTING BLVD.
RICHMOND, CA.
STN 00090103
VISA
xxxxxxxxxxxx5345
Invoice 0326510
Auth 008236
Pump # 5
16.437 G @ $ 1.839
UnlP/Self $ 30.23
Total $ 30.23
TOY CARS
AVAILABLE INSIDE
Vendors matter: Matching Wes's experiences with Buy.com, A ZDNN article reports on Buy.com's shadey business practices .
A study which shows that women think feminine looking men are more likely to be committed to a relationship .
A call to boycott Swatch over the pollution of the HAM radio band .
In Salon this morning, Jean Hanff Korelitz takes two pages to tell us that she's discovered plot , alas the piece goes no further than that. What about the challenges of saying something original within a genre? Gets little more than a sentence. How about using plot to expose character? If her fiction is as flat as her essay this is all I'll read of her.
The new Mouthorgan talks about the Japanese cosmetics for men craze .
Cameron Barrett's new rant confronts the evils of the world from the clarity of insomnia .
One more from the Consumer Reports archives, the Mr. Wizard kit for culturing molds and bacteria .
/. points to assorted photos by date from the Consumer Reports archives , interesting for the reminders of how recent technologies like freezers are to products that would have serious liability issues today, like the Aerosol-can deactivator from 1971 . Remembering experiences as a child with an air rifle and a shaving cream can we thought was empty, I'd love to see the picture in color after the demonstrated position was used on a can of day glow orange...
"Position a thoroughly emptied container inside Saf-Can's heavy metal frame, step on the plunger, and a spike drives into the can. When used out of the reach of children and away from fire, Saf-Can is the most realistic approach we've seen for the safe disposal of aerosols."
Electricity from bath water . Summary: Mike Rowe of Cardiff University has a semiconductor based thermocouple that'll provide 100 watts on a 50 degrees celsius temperature difference.
I'd point out that Salon bought The Well but most of my readers probably had their brief Well flings back in the late '80s, and Salon is shedding any hint of interesting content in favor of boring mainstream stuff, so chances are good that none of you care.
Like me, y'all were probably hoping to put off knowing anything about this Pentium III serial number business 'til the smoke blew over. Well, it looks like that's not going to happen, and I've had to look at what's true and what isn't, so a few notes. First, here's Intel's document on how to use CPUID to access the PIII serial number (PDF) . A few notes:
Clean Sheets has updated, although nothing's leaping out at me.
The K Chronicles takes on Martha Stewart with living tips for the rest of us :
Always buy several different colored pairs of socks and wear them mismatched... that way when you start losing them in the wash you won't be as disappointed.
A transcript of the ABC 20/20 piece on textbook errors sticks to the fairly mainstream mistakes. There are some really good reasons for having teachers who actually know the subjects that they're supposed to be teaching, but given the current political climate for central control of the process you'd never tell.
Oh. My. $DEITY. (or would that be @DEITIES?) (Pardon the Perl jokes) (and the inane parenthesized self-explanations): A Variety article on selling the new Star Wars: "No, try not. Dew or dew not. There is no try." Whether or not the film ends up being decent, I still think I'm gonna hurl.
Speaking of Salon , half the links off their front page don't work today. Guess the redesign killed more than just their usability.
Salon interviews the author of Therapy's Delusions which takes psychotherapy to task. I've gotta like anyone who approaches the subject with the healthy skepticism that "Therapy includes mechanisms to build the client's devotion to the therapy." There are some serious vested dollars in the status quo of the practice, it's good to see someone taking them to task.
This is sent blind, I don't have the time right now to check out the web sites and I'm trusting my sources more than I like to, but... Apparently http://www.junkscience.com is advocating a provision that'd make federally funded science subject to lots of Freedom of Information Act issues. Unfortunately this would make things like participants in surveys public, things like that, that are a really bad idea. A Washington Post article about the Shelby Amendment should provide further reading.
The Crypt Newsletter update raises some of my concerns about the Melissa virus hype
GENEHACK (the link that didn't take below) points to an Economist article about the myth of the QWERTY keyboard which also mentions counterexamples to those old collectivist myths like lighthouse costs and such.
Aviation Week's Roton Rocket critique
Didn't have time to do anything longer on the topic, but those of y'all who celebrated the death and alleged rebirth of the male relative of your diety this past weekend happen to notice that the name of the holiday often celebrated with eggs and bunnies and other symbols of fertility sounds and awful lot like oestrus? Jes' mentioning.
Just passing on the O'Reilly link to The Future Does Not Compute so that I get it in the glossary.
More quotes of the day:
"Stupidity used to be a terminal disease; now it's just a chronic condition."
--- Joe Thompson
I'm reading The Future Does Not Compute by Stephen L. Talbott, the editor of NETFUTURE. Thus far it's an excellent book for those who'd look at what community is and how we interact with technology, he manages to avoid the whining that pervades so many anti-media writers. Quote of the day:
"What hope is there for peace and human rights when I conceive the barriers separating me from my fellows to be mere obstructions on a network technology diagram rather than the powers of darkness shadowing my own heart?"
Salon Magazine has a new layout, more evidence in the argument that readability comes in second to displaying advertisements. I'll see if they've actually got any content under there in a bit.
My Word's Worth this morning is on blood sucking reporters.
Comics-wise, Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet updated in the middle of last week, and you might as well catch up on Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly .
I keep promising myself I'm going to automate the checking for recurring stuff so that I can keep up with a few more comics, but this weekend was spent getting my home Windows development system up and running and writing a Netscape plug-in. Soon.
Update on the bumper stickers, John S Jacobs Anderson (www.treefort.org/~jacobs/) asks: Shouldn't the Church of All Worlds slogan be 'I Found Me'?
Bumper stickers of note:
Campus Crusade for Christ: "I Found It"
Campus Crusade for Cthulu: "It Found Me"
Church of All Worlds: "Thou Art It"
So at lunch today the "Do net meddle in the affairs of..." quote came up and we were wondering exactly where it came from. I've always thought of it as "Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins for they are quick to anger and have no need of subtlety", Sam found these:
Gildor the Elf to Frodo the Hobbit:
"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
And, from Jerry Pournelle:
"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light."
I also found this on someone's page:
"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup."
Speaking of which, I've only got a hundred or two readers... Sam just bought a house and is having an empty house party before he moves stuff in... Wanna impose in his hospitality [evil grin]?
CNN reports that some poor sod's been busted for the Melissa virus . I hope there are some computer knowledgeable people on the jury. My favorite "related story" on this link was the "Melissa takes down Marine Corps e-mail", I had a little trouble figuring out the binding of that last "e" given the small font they use.
A new Suzie Bright column in Salon , about when her daughter's elementary school assignment is a report on her job.
NT peeve of the day:
How in the heck do I abort a WriteFile() call that's trying to talk to a process that's exited? I've tried SetCommTimeouts(), which fails because this isn't the right kind of handle, and while I can set all sorts of flags or whatever in another thread I can't figure out how to cancel this read operation.
In Un*x like operating systems this is simple to do with signals. Unfortunately, NT isn't like an operating system, let alone a Un*x like one.
Peter Meerholz mirrors 0sil8's Simply Porn parody of 3Com's Simply Palm advertising campaign. Unfortunately the parody isn't all that far out given what I've seen of the 3Com campaign. All those entrendres involving "Palm Pilot" are nothing compared to what the ad agency cooked up.
As we're about to get hit hard by the "Oh, isn't it great that the serial numbers in Microsoft Word documents let us track down the creators" propaganda, it'll help your bullshit detectors if you remember that those numbers are only inserted when the document is created, not when it's edited. So if I open one of your documents and insert the virus, you're hosed. Similarly, all these mutations will point to one person.
Via Camworld , Vivid Studios has Vbay, an eBay parody .
An investigation toward a program that helps a writer build works of interactive fiction
So I read in the paper this morning that the U.S. military is concerned about the potential shortage of $1.2M air launched cruise missiles. While we're blowing $50M/night on an overdone fireworks show has any thought been given to foreign aid for Albania, where private citizens are paying out of their own pockets for space for refugees? It's not that I think the air strikes are a bad thing, although it would be have been nice if we'd intervened in some non-white European genoiceds sometimes too, but if we're going to step into this struggle at some point we have to understand that this is about people, not politicians.
You know it's a hoax when someone accuses Linux users of behaving like Michigan State students .
A new Mouthorgan .
First April Fools gags of the morning: Segfault and User Friendly .
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com