Compendium

Entries

Thursday, June 27, 2002

Off for a couple of days

No, not lounging on a beach or anything like that. We're completely overhauling the site and the new site goes live on Monday, so I need to work on that. See you after the weekend!

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Wednesday, June 26, 2002

An XML programming language

That's what x++ claims to be (question: Can you have x++ if there was never just an x to start with?).

I have invented the world's first general purpose programming language based on XML version 1.0. The language, x++, is not a meta-language, like MetaL, or a programmer's tool like XSLT/XSLFO et. al., but a full object oriented programming language. x++ is currently an interpreted language with plans for building compilers for it.

Via BillSaysThis

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WorldCom's former auditors

One guess.

Via Dan Gillmor

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Tuesday, June 25, 2002

Beware the chalk-wielding wireless geeks

Back in the day, hobos used to leave pictographic signs alerting other hobos to such things as the presence of police, free food, etc.

Warchalk is an effort to replicate this hobo language for the wireless age. The idea is that the sort of people who wander around cities looking for wireless LANs to connect to will leave chalk markings for others to let them know they've just stumbled across a usable wireless-access point:

Find a node, and leave a chalk symbol for others to find the node with a minimum of all that tiresome netstumbler business.

The site already has a PDF of symbols suitable for printing.

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Death of the 'Net predicted?

Scot Hacker looks at articles by or about Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf about where the Internet is heading; neither seemed too happy, due to excessive commercialization. He concludes:

It is natural and good that the Internet should grow and evolve. But we must take care not to subvert its most fundamental attributes. Open = strong. Corporations and governments must be continually reminded of these basic tenets, or we risk damaging that which makes the Internet great

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Dude, the '90s are over

Why would somebody think Greedmaster is a good name for a Web-design firm?

Via CamWorld.

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Monday, June 24, 2002

Pickle-jar time management

The Pickle Jar Theory lists a supposedly new way to manage your time more effectively. Anybody try it?

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The XML site map

eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language (XFML) is an effort to give organizations a reliable way to exchange information about their Web sites:

XFML allows for easy creation of advanced, automatically generated navigation for your website. You can even automatically generate links to related topics on other websites. It also allows for merging of metadata between different websites.

Via drop.org.

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The Mouse knows if you've been naughty or nice

The Orlando Sentinel reports that Disney World is experimenting with technology to keep guests from mooching on return visits.

Seems the theme park sells souvenir mugs that are good for unlimted refills during the visit in which they were bought, but, can you imagine, people sometimes bring them back for "a lifetime of free drinks for one purchase." So new mugs might be imprinted with a bar code to prevent such thievery.

Via Boing Boing.

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Friday, June 21, 2002

Mid-day update: NPR re-evaluating linking policy

This, as they say, just in: Faced with a growing brouhaha over its linking policy (see below for more), NPR now says it will change the policy.

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RSS in the enterprise

If you've heard of RSS, you probably think it's just a way for Web sites to trade article headlines.

But RSS is also a subset of XML, which means it's really a way of structuring information. What if you integrated it with, oh, ODBC? You might get an easy way for non-programming types to access all those endless reams of information your databases are forever being filled up with.

That's the idea behind the Windows-based Fetch, which consists of a server that processes ODBC requests and converts the answers into RSS, and a client, which periodically polls the server for the data to display to the end user in English (for example: "447 angels got their wings today") in a dockable toolbar on their desktop.

You can get more background here.

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NPR doesn't get the Web

Wired reports on the stupid controversy over National Public Radio's insistence that you get permission to link to any of its pages.

It's the sort of thing you'd expect from some Big Company, not an outfit that, at least here in Boston, runs pledge drives roughly every other week reminding us (inbetween the "donor messages" that sound more and more like commercials) that we're listening to *public* radio. But here's a quote from NPR's ombudsman in the story:

Dvorkin said he told the e-mailers "that NPR does not refuse links but it just wants to make sure that the links are appropriate to a noncommercial and journalistic organization.

It isn't only commercial activity that concerns NPR. Asked if a link from someone's noncommercial homepage would bother the company, Dvorkin said: "It depends on your homepage -- what if you're an advocate for left-handed socialist diabetics? We wouldn't want to give support to advocacy groups."

Here's a guy who clearly doesn't understand what a hyperlink is.

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When cellphone users go too far

Associated Press reports:

A man became so annoyed with another sauna user at a fitness club for refusing to end his cell phone conversation that he punched him.

In a sauna?

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Thursday, June 20, 2002

Color me bored

Caution: You're about to read about today's (dare I say, this month's?) biggest waste of time.

First, some background. If you've ever dabbled in HTML, you probably know there are 216 "safe" colors you can use, i.e., colors that will appear more or less as you intended them on all browsers and platforms. Currently, the colors are identified by a hexadecimal code (well, browsers do recognize English names for some of them, such as "blue"). The Web-Safe Palette Naming Initiative is an effort to give a specific name to each one of the colors. You get to nominate names, then, at some point, somebody gets to vote on them. Take for example, the proposals for color #FF66CC:

Electric Pink (Anonymous)
Barbie Pink (Katie)
gum-pink (kojikb)
Pepto-Bismal (Anonymous)
Look At Me! (Joe Nonymous)
Shoe Bottom Pink (Lane McColl)
pentex (Anonymous)

Hit Reload to cycle through all the colors.

Via Ordinary-life.net.

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The dangers of inifinite domain names

So PWC Consulting plans to change its name to Monday when it separates from PriceWaterhouseCoopers (hmm, so what can I call myself when I leave Network World? Monday's out. Tuesday's taken, so's Wednesday. I know, I can call myself June 22). To introduce themselves to the world, they created introducingmonday.com. Alas, they didn't register http://www.introducingmonday.co.uk, which takes a slightly different view of the name change (make sure your sound card is on for full effect).

Via MetaFilter.

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Tuesday, June 18, 2002

Real intrusion detection

This guy describes building a system to see if any intruders are trying to get into his computer. Really getting in. Like with a hammer:

When any chassis component is removed, the circuit should open and the motherboard will record a chassis intrusion event.

Via Slashdot

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Telcommunications implosion?

Forget all the overbuilt dark fiber, the mergers, the huge salaries. John Robb writes that the real problem is the lack of fiber to the home, which prevents a Moore's Law explosion of new services.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to motivate the last mile providers to deploy the fiber. Nor is there one to force them to pass on price improvements and improved bandwidth that the current doubling rate in price/performance of fiber is able to provide. This is one of the worst recent failures of our free market system I can find.

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SMS for newbies

transL8it is an online translator. But nothing so boring as, say, English to French. Instead, it translates English into SMS, you know, those tiny, telegram-like messages you send over certain cellphones (and should you get texted, you can also use the site to translate that back into English).

Via The Shifted Librarian.

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How to define XML tags?

In this article, Walter Perry takes an interesting look at the politics and gaming involved in developing "standard data vocabularies" for XML subsets, i.e., the definitions and syntax of specific tags. His headline leaves little doubt where he stands: "Standard Data Vocabularies Unquestionably Harmful:"

This methodology itself strikes at the heart of domain expertise, which demands intimate knowledge of the details of the data which defines the field. Instead we have an open invitation -- indeed a government mandate -- to gamers of the system to concatenate those specific items of the SDV which will produce desired outcomes in reports ranging across taxation, securities regulation, investment analysis, and other high profit opportunities for fraud.

But reading something like this, one wonders if the people busy building increasingly complex XML vocabularies have ever talked to the wizened old timers who faced the same challenges in building EDI systems.

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Monday, June 17, 2002

The war between ISPs and wireless hackers

The San Francisco Bay Guardian reports on the increasing friction between ISPs and people who like setting up wireless access points that let anybody nearby tap into their 'Net connection:

Wireless community groups aren't arguing that people shouldn't have to pay the company that is giving them broadband. Nor are they trying to resell broadband access to other people. They just want to share some of the broadband they've paid for – in the same way you might give your neighbor a glass of water out of the pipes you've paid to use, or let a friend use your toilet without paying for every flush.

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Today's best 404 page

It even talks

Via meryl's notes.

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A snag on the road to Mac nerdvana

Damon Wright is chronicling his transformation from Windows user to Mac-head. He recently ran into a snag, though: He does enterprise-type consulting and he needed to run Oracle SQLPlus to get a job done, and Oracle hasn't put out a Mac version:

So crap. I guess what I need to do is find out if there is other non-supported software that will act like SQLPlus. Either that or keep my windows laptop just for Oracle's tools. Darn. Maybe I'll hear from someone how to get around this...

Via Evhead

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Friday, June 14, 2002

Bottom-up knowledge management

In this essay, Peter Dorfman argues the only way KM systems will work is if people at the bottom are given the power to add content:

Knowledge management has been, up to now, largely a top-down enterprise. Driven by a concern that corporate knowledge repositories would quickly fill up with inaccurate, useless junk without rigid quality review, organizations have created small priesthoods of knowledge administrators responsible for virtually all authoring. Unfortunately, the result often has been massive bottlenecks as content generated in this centralized way sits for weeks or months awaiting review. By the time knowledge reaches its intended users, much of it has aged to the point of irrelevance.

Via John Robb.

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An opportunity of a lifetime from Spamania

David Plotnikoff reprints a message:

Most felicitous greetings and please excuse in advance my intrusion into your present attentions! For some reason unknown to anyone, this is how we Spamanians syntax when proposing most critical business dealings to kind strangers. Thank you, yes!

Via Amy Wohl.

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Great Caesar's Blog!

Bloggus Caesari - sample entry:

June 11, 2002

Cassivelaunus has agreed to my terms. So we leave for the continent imminently. Because this year's harvest in Gaul was so poor, I'll need to quarter the legions in different regions rather than all together in one spot, as I'd prefer. So this will be the next matter to settle.

Meanwhile I'm dealing with Pompey about Julia's funeral. He wants to bury her on one of his estates, and I don't think there's anything I can do about that.

Posted by Julius Caesar at 09:04 PM

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Thursday, June 13, 2002

Novell's purchase of Silverstream a mistake?

William Lazar doesn't think much of Novell's purchase this week of Silverstream Software:

Now Novell, which has had much more publicity in the past two years due to their merger with consulting firm Cambridge Technology Partners than any software release, think they can leverage SilverStream to get their stock ($3.40 as I write this) back to where it was five years ago (around $8). But what they're really doing is putting themselves more squarely in the sites of IBM, Sun, Oracle, BEA, and Microsoft, all of which are firmly entrenched in the web services space and all surely happy to finish the job of crunching Novell into the dirt like an old cigarette butt.

What do you think? Discuss in our Novell/Silverstream forum. Here's what some people are saying:

What do you think? Add your comments to the thread

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SpamAssassin goes after spam

Simson Garfinkel writes that this e-mail add-on is doing a great job at keeping his inbox free for real mail:

Today SpamAssassin has more than 300 rules and a dictionary of 10,000 phrases it uses for spam detection. SpamAssassin also hooks in to several anti-spam networks, including the Mail Abuse Prevention System, better known as MAPS, and Vipul's Razor.

It's a Unix module (with an API for plugging into a variety of messaging apps), though, so you Outlook users will have to keep suffering . Get it here.

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Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Why programmers shouldn't be let out of the office

The Philadelphia Inquirer lathers up with a story about a computer programmer who has amassed a large collection of free hotel toiletries:

He takes his endeavor very seriously.

"This is like talking about my children," said Dalessandro, who is single.

What is now an 800-plus piece trove began in 1989, when Dalessandro decided to keep and categorize the free toiletries from the many business and pleasure trips he took. The coconut-oil skin moisturizer with aloe and sandalwood hand lotion "remind me of happy times," he said.

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The PowerPoint challenge

Who da PowerPoint Man/Woman? Two Webloggers are battling to see who can come up with the best PowerPoint presentation.

Via mrbarrett.com.

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A standard Web

The Web Standards Project is dedicated to getting browser makers to comply with various standards, such as CSS and XHTML 1.0. It'd been on hiatus for awhile, but is back just in time for the fifth-anniversary, um, celebrations of Netscape 4.x.

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Monday, June 10, 2002

Museum pleads: Hackers, help us!

Ananova reports that a Norwegian museum is seeking help from hackers. Seems a worker setting up a collections database for the museum (unnamed by Ananova, alas), died without telling anybody the database's password.

Via CamWorld.

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Amy Wohl takes on Ralph Nader

Wohl doesn't think much of Ralph Nader's insistence that the government stop buying Microsoft products:

Maybe we need to reassure our government that it's okay to make a decision to buy software from whatever source it needs to -- even Microsoft -- and to ignore silly would-be politicians, looking for free publicity by ranting on about subjects they know less than nothing about.

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CDs that won't work on your computer

Fat Chuck's Corrupt CDs is a listing of all the music CDs that incorporate copy-protection schemes that will prevent them from working on a computer.

Via Aberrant News

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Friday, June 7, 2002

Animals: Houston all a-buzz

ABC-13 gives us another reason to not move to Houston:

Tens of thousands of bees are invading Houston! On one side of town, up to 60,000 were taken from one home. And on the other side, a swarm of aggressive bees killed a dog.

Complete with photo of pest-control worker removing a 25-foot-long beehive from somebody's house.

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Security through obsolesence

Robin Miller says he and some friends may have stumbled upon an effective way to keep Web sites secure: Run them on obsolete OSes. He explains:

Brian points out that some of the most secure Department of Defense Web sites -- ones that don't make headlines by getting cracked all the time -- run old versions of Mac OS and the venerable WebSTAR server suite. "[Mac is] a great operating system for that application," he says. "No scripting or remote capability at all, so there's no way for them to get in."

Not only that, the hacker/cracker crowd is fixating, as usual, on the latest versions of everything, like Windows 2K/XP, Mac OS X, the most recent Linux kernels and BSDs, the newest Solaris, and so on. What fun is there in breaking into a system running something so ancient only a dad would even consider using it?

Via Slashdot.

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The myth of the community open-source project?

One of the good things about open-source software is supposed to be the community - have a problem, post it to a newsgroup or mailing group and soon you have a fix. Sandeep Krishnamurthy was curious most open-source projects really have lots of active developers at their core.

In this this article on First Monday, he says he looked at 100 mature open-source projects on Sourceforge, a large repository of open-source apps:

What I found is more consistent with the lone developer (or cave) model of production rather than a community model (with a few glaring exceptions, of course).

Via CamWorld.

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Thursday, June 6, 2002

Mozilla 1.0 finally out

Download it here. Questions: Is it a noble effort that comes too late to make any diference? Especially in the enterprise world, is anybody considering replacing all those IE clients and various specialized IE-specific apps with it?

I'm downloading it as I type to play with, but what do you think?

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Trying to keep the spammers at bay

If you run a Web site, you know what happens when you outfit your pages with lots of mailto: links - those addresses start getting inundated with spam. A List Apart offers some suggestions on getting ahead in the spam wars through such techniques as encoding the characters in addresses (links to scripts and sites that do the encoding for you are helpfully provided).

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Gaming online moderation systems

Design for Community has an interesting essay on the perils of moderation systems - you know, things like the "karma" systems used on Slashdot and Kuro5hin to make various postings visible or invisible, either to all readers or in your own personal reading list:

Problem is, all this groovy functionality adds several layers of new interface elements. Every filter, rating, and setting means adding another button, dropdown, and submit button. It's easy to see a future, not very far away, when the site grows so interface-heavy it will scare off all but the most determined new users. While what might not slow down the rabid Slashdotters, it would certainly impede a new site with a fragile audience.

Worse, sometimes all the widgets backfire altogether, encouraging the very behavior they're designed to avert. Sometimes all the rules have a dangerous side-effect: they create a game.

And the object of the game, of course, is to defeat the system.

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Wednesday, June 5, 2002

Paging Dick Tracy

The WristWatchComputer is a project to build videoconferencing systems you can wear on your wrist, using Linux (or Gnu/Linux as these Richard Stallman fans call it).

Via The Shifted Librarian.

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Check out the SuperComm 2002 Weblog

Edge Managing Editor Jim Duffy and Senior Editor Tim Greene have their own Weblog to report on and analyze SuperComm, from the low attendence to the question of MPLS (threat or menace).

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Will Opti-Onics give Johnny a 4-tube notebook?

It's back to the past with this ad.

Via webgraphics.

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Tuesday, June 4, 2002

Open-source security tool compromised

SecurityFocus reports:

The popular open-source security tool Fragroute is bugged in plain sight by unknown hackers, who may have struck before.

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Anti-spammer throws hands up, quits the fight

Michial Thompson figured he'd found a way to fight at least one source of spam - e-mail links on Web sites - through a technique for encrypting e-mail addresses. You can read more here along with his explanation for why he's abandoning the project:

As of 12:30 Central time on 5/31/2002, I have decided to end this project after receiving threatening calls on my residential phone. This project was not intended to cause problems for anyone. My intentions were simply to offer people a possible solution to the problem of SPAM.

Via JD's Blog.

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Monday, June 3, 2002

Denial of Responsibility attacks on the upswing

Forget denial-of-service attacks. Andy Oram says the real threat to our computer security comes from denial of responsibility attacks:

DoR attacks used to be of a simple, garden-variety type where a computer manufacturer obscures the fact it has shipped a system with bugs (sometimes known to the company in advance). More recent DoR attacks include the inclusion of "cool features" that benefit only a few curious experimenters but open the door to serious intrusions.

When asked what software vendors are doing to control DoR attacks, industry spokesperson Heidi Vadanduck responded, "Our industry is committed to a secure and trustworthy experience in every format, as evidenced by the upsurge in customer-offering-based solutions embodying tested protections and proven, standards-based reliability."

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Just jabbering away

IBM has put up a paper on using Jabber, an open-source, XML-based instant-messaging app in an e-business environment (oh, geez, shoot me, I just wrote "environment," but it's early and I haven't finished my coffee):

Fun is very important here, so I'm going to show you one way of integrating Jabber instant messaging into a state-of-the-art e-business environment, and at the same time share some insights that will leave you ready to play with Jabber yourself after you finish reading this article.

Via Ecademy.

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