I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the amount of hacker activity, open-relay attempts, and SPAM activity have gone up drastically since I registered a new domain for my wife’s consulting company.
Are the spammers really polling the registries that aggressively, or are the rumours about Verisign true? One wonders….
I received my DS1921L in the mail on Friday (I ordered it at the beginning of the summer, but oh well).
In a nutshell, this is a device the size of five dimes stacked on top of each other. It has an onboard clock and temperature sensor and enough memory to store up to 2048 temperature samples, with a sampling interval of between 1 and 255 minutes. (I can’t believe something so small can do this :-)
We’ve been having trouble with our vegtables freezing, so I stuck the ibutton in there for a day with one-minute sampling and got an interesting graph. It’s not our imagination, something really is wrong with our fridge.
The manufacturer has basic temperature sensors in both iButton and standard packages. The standard ones are great for putting computer monitored temperature sensors all over the place…
Netscape 7.0 has been released by AOL. Is it a revolution in the browser space, or too little, too late?
AOL is bundling it with the rest of AOL software, which might increase their browser ‘share’ a little bit.
I’ll download and try it, but it took a lot of convincing for me to move from Netscape to IE a few years ago, so it’ll probably take a lot of convincing for me to move back.
10 weeks ago I was wondering what I was going to do to fill the summer. Work was relatively stable, and I had a few weeks of vacation planned with the kids.
I took a week off, and did a bunch of stuff around the house. Then the kids were in summer camp for six weeks. This turned out to be a good thing because my job went insane, as did the spouse’s. A bunch of high-profile customers all wanted relatively large code changes all at once, and my developers (annoyingly) kept going on business trips or vacations :-). Six weeks went past in a flash, and suddenly I was on vacation with two kids (and no spouse), with no idea of what to do!
The first week was hot! We went to the science center, the museum, and other indoor pursuits so that we wouldn’t melt.
The second week was perfect weather for me, with highs in the mid-20s, but slightly cold for the kids. It rained one day so we went to see Stuart Little 2. We went to the CNE, and discovered once again that our kids are roller-coaster and ride maniacs; Charlotte (at three years old) was the first one to stick her hands up in the air. We took a day trip to Wasaga Beach, and built sandcastles and played in the water and generally had a good time. We stayed busy.
And now I’m sitting here on the last day of August, wondering what happened to summer (although I have a better idea now that I’ve composed this journal entry). The kids go back to school in three days! (and they’re very excited about that). Charlotte’s 4th birthday is in five days. We’re starting into the busiest time of the year, with school birthday parties, family birthdays, curling, thanksgiving, hallowe’en, and Christmas; so I’d better get my bearings and get on with it!
Scientific American: Wearable Device Could Secure Laptop Computer Files
Now this device could be useful, at least for casual levels of security. No passwords, or smart cards, or other hardware tokens to plug in to a connector that’s never in the right place. Simply a wireless authentication token that you wear (eg. in a watch, or a ring, or on a necklace). When you are in range of your laptop, it is unlocked; if you leave, the laptop locks itself.
This would be even better integrated with other security systems, such as building access, car control, etc.; although like every other technology, you’d probably end up with a necklace full of pendants, or rings on every finger :-)
Combining it with technology that autoconfigures your environment would make this a killer-app, I think. You could sit down at any computer and it would automatically identify you, load your profile, and give you access to your e-mail and current desktop, change your keybindings, and all that useful personalisation stuff. Or it could automatically adjust the seat and mirror settings in your car when you sit down in the driver’s seat…
There are the usual problems with one-factor security, of course; if someone steals the tokens from you, they are you. For any environment requiring more than “casual” security, I’d want to see a password or passphrase that either unlocks the wireless token, or is used in addition to it.
Still, this is something I’ll play with when it is commercially available.
Free Trade is anything but. Who woulda thunk it? Imagine, if you will, a system for powerful interests to impose terms on the weak…
It seems that, in the wake of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a bunch of German researchers have (almost :-) invented “transparent aluminum”. (Actually, they’ve invented transparent aluminum oxide, a ceramic not a metal).
Naturally, people are already coming up with applications.
A recent Spin of the Day article says what many have suspected; the CEOs knew exactly how fragile the house of cards was, and while we were all madly investing in the stock market, they were quietly bailing out.
“Executives and directors of the 1,035 corporations that met our criteria took out, by our estimate, roughly $66 billion. Of that amount, a total haul of $23 billion went to 466 insiders at the 25 corporations where the executives cashed out the most.” – Investigative journalist Lowell Bergman.
Cognitive Properties of a Whiteboard: A Case Study in a Trauma Centre
Abstract.
Distributed cognition as an approach to collaborative work holds that a work unit is cognitive system in which cognitive activities are carried out jointly by workers with the use of tools. This approach has several direct implications to the study of collaborative work. In this paper, we analysed staff interactions with a large display board in a Level I trauma centre operating room unit. Coordination needs are exacerbated by the unpredictability of incoming emergency surgery patients admitted to the trauma centre as well as other contingencies (such as changes in scheduled surgery cases or staffing). The public display board has evolved into a key component for supporting collaborative work. The physical and perceptual properties of the board are exploited by the clinicians to support rapid paced, highly dynamic work. The canvas-like appearances of the display board, combined with magnetic objects attached to the board, afford its users to taylor the board as an effective coordinative tool and to invent new ways of representing information. Based on the concept of display-based cognition, our analysis illustrates the role of public displays in facilitating negotiation of scheduling, joint planning, and augmenting inter-personal communication.
PRWatch has a Spin of the Day website. Lots of fascinating reading about the so-called “Public Relations” industry, and their latest attempts to brainwash the Sheep…
I never knew you needed to be a computer scientist to use toilet paper. Good thing I am one!
(via Debbie.)
Micah Wright has a collection of humourous postors in the style of 1940’s war propoganda. Some of them cut deeper than others…
(Thanks to David Brake.)
The Food Timeline was created in response to students, parents and teachers who frequently ask our librarians for help locating food history and period recipes.
Pretty cool site. Hotdogs date back to 1484, for example.
As usual, there’s more to the storey than meets the eye.
Seems that HP listens to severe customer backlash. On the other hand, HP is blaming the DMCA thing on a “last minute addition by an outside lawyer”. Bullshit; HP can afford lawyers that don’t make stupid mistakes like this.
On the gripping hand, the *real* problem is SnoSoft’s published policy of “”full disclosure” of security threats–unless that company retains SnoSoft as consultants.”, which HP claims is extortion, and I have to wonder if HP is the wronged party here. Ah well; we’ll probably never know…
HP is suing a group of hackers who publicised a security hole in Tru64.
How utterly ridiculous. Throwing lawyers at a problem is the wrong answer at the best of times, but wouldn’t it also *cost less* to simply fix the problem instead?
I have utter contempt for HP these days. Their OS sucks, and now they pull this crap. Now strictly speaking, Tru64 is Digital’s Unix. Digital was bought by Compaq, and then HP and Compaq “merged”. So I suppose my contempt for HP should be tempered in this context. On the other hand, I’ve been fighting with HP/UX 11 for years now; I reserve the right to be unreasonable.
We took the kids on their first camping trip this weekend. It rained so heavily on Friday that we decided to drive into town; we couldn’t see the car in front of us on the road. Saturday was much better; misty in the morning, but the sun came out in the afternoon. Of course, Sunday morning the rain returned, and gave everything a thorough soaking just before we had to pack it all up and head home.
We went to Presqu’ile Provincial Park, about an hour and a half east of Toronto. It’s usually a nice park. There’s a 2 kilometer long sandbar, complete with beach, running between the mainland and what used to be an island in Lake Ontario. The beach is at least 50 meters of empty sand, great for kite flying.
Alas, thanks to recent storms, the beach was closed for swimming. It seems that all of the contamination from Toronto’s beaches travels east, and the first thing it hits is Presqu’ile (and then Prince Edward County, which includes Sandbanks Provincial Park).
On the plus side, there were lots of other kids there, so our kids were never bored. In fact, despite the rain and the lack of swimming, they both said they want to go camping again!
I’m overweight, and I’ve been having trouble dealing with that. I know people who are doing quite well on the Atkins diet, but several people I trust had convinced me it was a bad idea.
What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?
(Update: the article is archived at a diabetes site now)
The research community has been recommending low-fat diets for 25 years, based on (it turns out) very little justification. And it’s hard to argue the fact that humans cannot have evolved in a carb rich environment, because we’ve been farming for less than 10,000 years.
An example from the article:
the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. […] they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same.
Time to go do some more research, I think.
Spent the weekend at Over The Edge, the Toronto Kite Fliers annual fun fly. The weather was great, sunny and hot both days. Over The Edge is held at Ajax Waterfront Park, which usually has good winds. Well, mostly; when the wind is off the lake it tends to roll up and over the field, so the winds are fine 100′ up, but lower or non-existant at ground level. Naturally, it was like this both days :-)
On the first day, Lee’s son Kane was there, so Gareth and Charlotte had someone to play with all day (which they did!) while the rest of us flew kites. Of course the kids got into it too, despite the ‘subtle’ winds. I got to fly my new Loon Dance Rokkaku, my new favourite kite because it is so easy to fly even in light winds.
On the second day, we took my nephew Mark William with us, so again, Gareth and Charlotte had someone to play with. The wind at ground level was much lighter, and dropped steadily during the day, although (as usual) the winds 100′ up were steady and strong. Kites would sometimes fall out of the sky, and required quite a but of work to relaunch!
Sunday dinner was pleasant. I think people are getting used to our kids, because some of them actually chose to sit at our table instead of the other one! Gareth even won a Popcan Kite in the raffle.
Canal Days is coming up, and I’ve been drooling over several large kites at Into the Wind. Alas, the kites I really want are expensive… maybe I’ll buy myself a birthday present for next year’s kite season.
Janis Ian has written a thoughful article about the whole “free downloading” mess. Her argument in a nutshell: free downloads help sales.
This is apparently true for most people with a large catalog of “mid-list” items (books or music); see the comment about Misty’s books in the article. The industry is so focused on stars, and get-rich-quick items, that the mid-list is pretty much dead, which hurts the artists (but not the publishers, or they’d fix it).
Remember, this is about the Music Industry, not the artists, and always has been (look at the number of people who have been screwed by the Industry with bad contracts…)
The Tippmann Hellhound is a jeep. With a 10-barrel, 50 round-per-second, chain gun (powered by a variable speeddrill :-). It has a 6,000 round ammo hopper, a grenade launcher, 15 lb air tanks (so you never run out of pressure) and on and on.
Proving, once again, that some people have too much time on their hands.
Can I get a copy of the Food Timeline?