Compendium

Entries

Wednesday, July 31, 2002

Off for a couple of days

To re-stain a deck and go to a state park. See you on Friday!

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Tuesday, July 30, 2002

What to do with those extra mouse pads

The Mouse Pad Couch is a couch constructed entirely out of (tasteful blue) mouse pads:

Here is the Mouse Pad Couch in my Office. We conduct meetings, work on problems, or just relax from a stressful day on it.

Via MetaFilter.

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Phone shui or Phone pfooey?

Phone Shui is a site, sponsored by a British cellphone vendor, that purports to bring calming essences, or something, to your use of the ubiquitous annoyances. Among its 10 "wisdom tips:"

Phone Shui is about making life-altering decisions about your mobile - not talking about it.

Phone Shui has three jewels: vitality-energy-spirit - the right phone will capture these for you

Stay aware of yourself, your life and your phone - of everything - constantly.

Look after your mobile, and your mobile will look after you.

Hmm, wonder if there's a LAN shui or a SANs shui or a business continuity shui?

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Monday, July 29, 2002

How the Semantic Web could work

How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web is an interesting little fantasy (prediction?) about how everybody's favorite search engine could get into e-commerce in a big way and wipe out what are now much larger e-commerce competitors. It's also a good introduction to the whole Semantic Web thing.

Via CamWorld.

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The cellphone signal pen

No more embarrassing jokes about your operatic ring tone. The Cellphone Call Signal Pen has a little light that flashes when a call comes into your muted cellphone:

The pen has a signal range of about 6 ft and comes with 2 LR-41 batteries. The batteries and pen ink cartridge can be easily replaced. Works with any standard cellphone.

Alas, doesn't seem to be in stock right now.

Via Boing Boing

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Friday, July 26, 2002

Ivy League stupidity

Just in case you need proof that certain elitist East Coast colleges aren't all they're cracked up to be, read this Yale Daily News article about how a Princeton admissions officer got caught perusing applicant records stored on Yale's Web site.

First, let's give some bonus stupidity points to Yale for leaving the records around on a public Web site with a dumb authentication system that consisted of asking for a users name, address and social-security number.

But, as any smarty-pants Yale law professor would tell you, leaving your door unlocked or your windows wide open doesn't make burglary of your house any less of a crime.

So let's give an A+ in ethics to Stephen LeMenager, director of admissions at Princeton, who said he was merely concerned about the privacy of applicants. The paper quotes him:

"It was really an innocent way for us to check out the security. That was our main concern of having an online notification system, that it would be susceptible to people who had that information - parents, guidance counselors, and admissions officers at other schools."

The Boston Globe reports Princeton has now put LeMenager on paid administrative leave pending an internal investigation (as opposed to the external one launched by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office in New Haven, Conn.).

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Some PC food

Trubador proves that you can fry an egg on your average modern PC's motherboard:

With everything completed i shut down the PC and took the tray off the heatsink and promptly removed the egg and put it onto my bread with a little Brown Sauce and WooHoo, Food time

Complete with pictures and PC specs.

Via MetaFilter

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Thursday, July 25, 2002

New resources coming to Fusion

Well, not new, actually, just revamped, expanded and just generally made too peachy keen for words. The one closest to launch is our rebuilt Downloads area, where you'll be able to find eval, shareware and free software for running your network. Even as I type, our gnomes are out scouring the 'Net looking for useful, downloadable apps (sorry, our definition of "useful" doesn't include Doom, although, hmm, Doom as a tool for system administration might be cool). You'll be able to rate the usefulness of the apps, see which are the most popular and easily suggest new apps we might have missed.

It officially goes live Monday, so apologies in advance if you find pages or functions that don't quite look right (the search results page, for example, still needs a graphical makeover). But do let me know what you think!

Less further along is our revamped Research area, which will use the same software to help us create a database of useful primers, papers and resources on the 'Net - as well as give you an easy way to add good resources you find. But if you want to take a look at a rough prototype, here it is. Once both areas are fully up and running, we'll integrate them into our Topics pages and search engine as we turn Fusion into your one-stop source for networking information (hmm, should we copyright that?).

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Filtering the filters

A Harvard Law prof and one of his students is curious just how pervasive Inernet filtering (you know, using software to block sites you deem too horribly offensive for your children/employees/citizens to see) is. So they've set out to create Documentation of Internet Filtering Worldwide:

With this project we seek to document and analyze a large number of Web pages blocked by various types of filtering regimes, and ultimately create a distributed tool enabling Internet users worldwide to gather and relay such data from their respective locations on the Internet. We can thus start to assemble a picture not of a single hypothetical World Wide Web comprising all pages currently served upon it, but rather a mosaic of webs as viewed from respective locations, each bearing its own limitations on access.

And don't forget to sign up to get notified of the release of the software they're developing to test the extent of the censorship.

Via MetaFilter.

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30 Days to a More Accessible Web site

Dive Into Accessibility is a collection of tips for making a Web site more usable for people with disabilities, arranged by both design principle and type of person specific tips would help.

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Wednesday, July 24, 2002

The Pocket Calculator Show

Come back with us now to those halcyon days of yore, when real geeks proudly showed off their calculator watches. Yes, an entire site devoted to personal electronics from the 1970s and 1980s.

Via Research Buzz.

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How open is RealNetworks' new "open" software?

You may have read about RealNetwork's Helix server, which not only will dish out Microsoft streaming media but which will supposedly be open to developers for tinkering.

Bruce Perens, long active in the free-software community, analyzes the announcement and calls it a good first step toward true openness:

Obviously, they are under pressure from Microsoft's Media Player, and would like to prevent that product from achieving market domination. Increasing open-ness is a weapon in
that battle, because a perception of open-ness will make more people consider RealNetworks products as standards rather than just products. But RealNetworks may not be able to afford to be open enough - their revenue today depends on licensing fees for the use of their software, and
unless they can change their business model somewhat, it will be difficult for them to achieve a real partnership with the Open Source community. That community has little to gain by replacing Microsoft's proprietary audio format with RealNetworks still-proprietary audio format.

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Tuesday, July 23, 2002

Miss us?

In case you tried to reach Fusion earlier today, no, we didn't suddenly disappear. Our new Web-hosting company (which has been making news of late) decided to do some maintenance at the facility where our servers sit. Apparently, it didn't go too well.

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Google text art

When you use Google to search Usenet postings, it color-codes your search words in messages it finds.

Paul Johnson has been playing with this to create art where art has no business belonging in straight-ASCII messages.

Here's one example.

Here's another.

Give the man a medal!

Via MetaFilter.

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The perils of Wi-Fi

Yes, it's no secret that most default wireless-LAN setups have the security of a piece of Swiss cheese. But as they become more and more popular among the less technically oriented (like your neighbors), don't vendors have a responsibility to put more emphasis on security?

Allen Hutchinson was installing Lindows on a PC when he noticed his wireless card was blinking. He writes:

So I tried to log in, but it wouldn't take my password. So I tried the default password on a linksys router "Admin" and I got in. Then I realized that I wasn't logged into my network at all. I was getting to the net through somebody else's access point somewhere else in the network.

This person had never bothered to do anything to secure his network. Upon further inspection with a sniffer, I found that I could grab all of his traffic off the air in my office. He was using no encryption and no access control. I could browse the shares on his computer, I could see his password flying by. If I only knew where he lived, I could go tell him, and help him set up something more secure. All I know, however, is a general direction from my condo, South.

Via J.D.'s Blog.

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Monday, July 22, 2002

Resolved: A document is not a car

The leading entry in this year's competition for best statement taken completely out of context comes from this message on a World Wide Web Consortium mailing list about URIs (what the really cool people use to refer to URLs):

Summary:
TBL's argument the HTTP URIs (without "#") should
be understood as referring to documents, not cars.

And now for the rest of the story. TBL is, natch, Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Web and all that.

At issue is his effort to build a semantic Web, in which machines learn to navigate data through extensive, and standardized meta information about the data.

And one of the raging issues is just what makes up the components of a URI:

[T]he http: scheme says you can reference network resources with it:

The "http" scheme is used to locate network resources via the HTTP
protocol.

One can argue, therefore, that it's wrong to assert that http://nwalsh.com/galaxies/andromeda is a URI reference that identifies the Andromeda galaxy. The Andromeda galaxy is not a network resource. The
extent to which a person or a car is a network resource is perhaps debatable, but one school of thought clearly says they aren't and that "network resource" should really be read as "document".

So is it reasonable to assert that http://nwalsh.com/galaxies#andromeda identifies the Andromeda galaxy? Maybe. Because "andromeda" is a fragment identifier and its interpretation is determined by the MIME type of the representation of http://nwalsh.com/galaxies that I retrieved. If that spec says fragment identifiers can identify real world objects, so be it.

Via Better Living Through Software.

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Dude, you're gettin' a Mac!

Yeah, yeah, you can't stand Steve the Dell Dude, either. And with each increasingly self-referential commercial, he gets more and more annoying. Well, now there's Ellen Feiss, the Mac Dudette.

One of the many people who supposedly have switched from Windows PCs to Macs, she's taken the Weblogging world by storm, in large part because people just can't stop debating whether in the ad she's stoned or just really tired. You can judge for yourself (QuickTime required).

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Friday, July 19, 2002

You think telemarketing is bad now?

PC World offers up today's depressing telco news:

Phone companies now can share a consumer's private information with certain affiliates without first getting that customer's consent, a new Federal Communications Commission ruling says.

Details of who customers call, when they call, and how long they talk may be shared with communications-related corporate affiliates, the ruling says. Customers can choose to keep such information private, but must initiate the request. The carrier does not have to ask permission.

The Shameless Telco Shill Award goes to Mark Uncapher, senior vice president of the ITAA, who's all in favor:

He likens it to customers being willing for Amazon.com to know which books they have purchased, and recommending others.

Only people GO to Amazon; imagine if Amazon just started calling you at random times...

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Extreme wireless

Dan Kohn writes:

I finally have my "extreme wireless" home music setup working. In my bedroom, I have a Bang & Olufsen Beosound 9000. This is great for playing 6 CDs, but all of my music is now MP3s. So, I got the Rio Receiver, which pulls MP3s off of any Windows machine on the LAN and outputs them to a stereo system or directly to speakers. However, I have no Ethernet jack in my bedroom, so I hooked the Rio up to this wired to wireless Ethernet converter from Orinoco.

Via Gordon Mohr

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Thursday, July 18, 2002

Putting his money where his blog is

Phil Windley is CIO for the state of Utah. He has a Weblog and thinks the whole blogging concept is a productivity boon, to the point that he's announced he will buy blogging software for up to 100 of the state's IT pros:

I think we need groups of specialists inside various departments to communicate with others in their specialty and without. Consequently, I'd like to see more people writing blogs and communicating their ideas through an open forum like the one blogs engender. To that end, I'm willing to pay the licensing fee to Userland for the first 100 employees who start a blog.

Userland's Radio goes for $39.95.

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Why two heads are better than one

Ev writes:

I've discovered one reason pair programming is productive: It's a lot more obvious you're spending time surfing blogs and checking your email for messages from girls when there's someone sitting beside you helping you work on a problem (especially when you're paying them out of your pocket).

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Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Critic says: Time for Mac fanatics to give it a rest

Steven Den Beste has nothing against people who use Macintoshes. It's the people who worship at the feet of Steve Jobs that drive him nuts:

I remember as a kid the news reports about how every year on a certain anniversary Chiang Kai Shek would make a speech to his army telling them that this was going to be the year that they re-invaded the mainland and kicked the Communists out. It became something of a joke in the rest of the world, sort of the archetype of grandiose plans which would never come to fruition and which no-one in their right mind would ever believe.

Like, for instance, the way that the hardcore Mac faithful seem to believe just before each MacWorld that this is going to be the time that the Steve finally announces the killer product which is going to rock the PC heathen back on their heels and begins the great exodus from the dark side into the grace of Steve's love. I think that the majority of Mac users don't believe this any more than the rest of us, but there's always a core group, the ones for which the Mac is not just a computer but a culture and a lifestyle, who wait each time for the Second Coming, when their years of faith will finally be answered and they'll get to go to heaven. (And indeed some do actually portray the struggle in terms of a morality play. It's a bit disturbing, really. [As are their constant wails of "We had that first!"])

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The case of the bounced e-mails

Mary Alice Gorman and Richard Goldman, own a bookstore in Oakmont, Penn. called the Mystery Lovers Bookshop, along with a companion Web site at www.mysterylovers.com. Every month, they send out an e-mail newsletter. And every month, they couldn't figure out why the newsletter kept bouncing back from users of a particular Oklahoma ISP.

Turns out, according to a report by Bookselling This Week that the ISP is concerned about the moral fiber of its users or something and was blocking any e-mail from sites with "lover" (and God knows what else) in the domain name.

Via RINI.

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Scrollbar racing

It's the ultimate online sport.

Via Friday Fishwrap.

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Tuesday, July 16, 2002

Yahoo gets medieval on your e-mail

Need to Know has compiled a list of all the words that Yahoo Mail automatically changes in HTML e-mail to its users.

Such as medieval, which gets changed to medireview.

Why? Yahoo is attempting to protect its users from malicious JavaScripts and other eevil things that can be spread via HTML mail. "eval" happens to be the name of a particular JavaScript function that can be used to do things so terrible we cannot repeat them here. Alas, Yahoo apparently never bothered to check whether the letters "e-v-a-l" might appear in real words.

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You can call me Wing Commander Tibbs

British Airlines leaves no stone unturned in its efforts at inclusiveness. The registration page on its "My BA" site lists 203 possible salutations, from Mr and Ms to Viscountess and Wg Cdr.

Via UseTheSource

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Monday, July 15, 2002

Palladium patents

Want to dig deeper into Microsoft's revolutionary/1984ish (depending on your point of view) proposed Palladium OS? You could, of course, start with our stories and columns. But after that, why not take a look at Microsoft's Palladium patents?

Via Hack the Planet.

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The Web-enabled Etch-a-Sketch

No, we're not talking about some Java simulation. This is a real honest-to-goodness shake-it-upside-down Etch-a-Sketch that uses a TCP/IP connection, some stepper motors from old hard drives, a bit of C programming and, of course, some rubber pulleys to let you make designs from hundreds, even thousands of miles away.

Via danelope.

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Friday, July 12, 2002

Cyberwar czar a cyberwar dud?

Security expert Richard Forno doesn't think much of Richard Clarke, the president's special advisor for cyberspace security:

At the heart of the issue is whether Richard Clarke has a real understanding of the critical issues that underlie information security, and, by extension, whether he is qualified to be the top cyber-cop. It should be noted that neither Clarke nor many on his staff in the Cyber-Security Office are technologists with real-world, operational experience. So it's not surprising that we see goofy proposals being floated around the country. They just don't know any better.

Career politicians, desk-bound analysts, and people lacking real-world operational IT experience are the wrong ones to be advising the President and working with industry leaders to develop stronger security programs.

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World's first song about Webcasting and the Library of Congress

Lisa Rein isn't real happy about the Librarian of Congress's recent decision on copyright fees for online playing of music. She's put her complaint to music - "James and Marybeth" is all about the Librarian of Congress and his eeevil cohort, the Register of Copyrights:

I know it's hard to do your job and make things work and
I know it's riskier to try new things
but I'm so scared of a world where I must ask to ask a question.
James and Marybeth, can you help me to be free?

Via Boing Boing.

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Thursday, July 11, 2002

Dublin Core meltdown

Imagine the Dewey Decimal System applied to the Web. That's pretty much the idea behind the Dublin Core, which seeks to standardize the structure of meta data about online documents.

NUblog argues the initiative could, nay, should become the center of an effort to create an automated Web directory, sort of like the Open Directory Project, only without all those fallible, tired volunteer human editors - with Web sites self-categorized under the DC, it would become a snap for you to instantly create your own directory on almost anything:

ODP’s function of categorizing the Web has legs; sometimes you want to read everything there is on a topic. (Did you just get diagnosed with a disease? Are you suddenly interested in, say, Islam or anthrax?)

Alas, NUblog ignores a key problem - because "any idiot" can apply Dublin Core meta data, I'd argue it would be roughly, oh, two weeks before the spammers caught on and started applying bogus meta data (so you search on "anthrax" and you get back a list of links to porno sites). This is exactly what happened the last time people started applying meta data to their Web pages, via the old-fashioned meta keywords tag. And this is why researchers at places like Google keep trying to come up with new ways to avoid meta information.

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If a Web site were a tire swing

It'd look like this.

Via CamWorld.

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Wednesday, July 10, 2002

If you open a Wi-Fi point, the terrorists will have won

Cable providers are stepping up their campaign to scare (dare I say "terrorize"?) wireless geeks into shutting down those wireless access points many have set up.

In this Newhouse News Service story, an executive at Time Warner Cable is quoted as saying:

"If you have a Wi-Fi connection in a public park, what would stop, God forbid, a child pornographer or, God forbid, a terrorist using that network?"

Via MetaFilter.

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The Google mirror

elgooG is just what it says it is: a mirror of Google.

Via Memepool.

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Best spam of the day

It advertises "the portuguese footwear portal and B2B Application."

Lest you think this is a rare occurrence, a long time ago, in another lifetime, I was a reporter covering a tiny Boston suburb, when a company came before town officials seeking permission to put up a building (yes, there is a connection, hold on a sec). The company originally made support hosiery, but it started a profitable sideline selling a version of its inventory software. My story on the building request started: "Well heeled high tech is coming to Medfield."

OK, I'll stick to editing from now on...

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Tuesday, July 9, 2002

Sounding the alarm over the Homeland Security Web site

David Weinberger and W. David Stephenson take a look at the official Tom Ridge Fan Club, um, Office of Homeland Security Web site and say: it stinks:

The page currently is nothing but a tawdry public-relations exercise for Tom Ridge and George Bush. There's the ''Homeland Security Photo Essay,'' a montage of Ridge and Bush shaking hands with people in suits. There's the ''Homeland Security Timeline'' listing speeches and budget increases but not a single arrest or attack, not a single official alarm. It is the Homeland Security PR Event Calendar.

As if to emphasize the point, the page is framed by the White House site, so in case of attack, we are closer to Laura Bush's schedule than to any useful information.

The pair outline some things they think the Ridgies should do with the site, like add a way for citizens to report suspicious activity, even, dare they say it, a moderated forum for posting questions and stories.

For more independent analysis of the War on Terror, check out Homeland Security Monitor.

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Mathematical Legos

When it comes to Legos, most of us are content building simple little houses that look remarkably like cubes or seeing how high we can stack them in a narrow column before they topple over.

Andrew Lipson, though, believes in making life difficult for himself. As he
explains, he's developed a C program that comes up with theoretical designs.

Now I have to try to construct the damn thing out of actual Lego bricks so that it actually holds together. Worse, I have to use the collection of bricks actually in my possession and not currently in use in some other construction [in case anyone's interested, I've convinced myself that this is, in general, an NP-hard problem. One of these days I'll write up the proof]. This usually takes far longer than the first stage - and a few times I've had to give up. Occasionally I cheat just a teeny bit and deviate from the output of my code in order to help the structure hold together.

One wonders, though, why he hasn't bought a Legos Mindstorm system so he could have a robot build the things for him.

Via serious surfer Dave Kearns.

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Monday, July 8, 2002

Sometimes, interactivity bites

Online learning is changing the way we work, eat and sleep, isn't it? It's just so cool and a way to provide on-demand training for the new super-drones of the next millennium.

E-Learning Magazine, though, says: enough!

It's not that interactivity is a bad idea. It's just too simplistic to be a useful guide for instructional design. It can even be dangerous.

In other words, making online learning interactive just for interactivity's sake is stoopid.

Via Mery'ls Notes

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Gooey light could speed optical computing

New Scientist proves just how bizarre the universe really is with a report on how some scientists say

Light can be turned into a glowing stream of liquid that splits into droplets and splatters off surfaces just like water.

Other researchers think the whole thing will never work, but if it does:

Blobs of the stuff could form the heart of an optical computer. ... An optical computer based on photons would be much faster (than one based on silicon), but it's tough to bounce light around without the beam spreading out and information disappearing. "Liquid drops are optimal candidates to be information bits," says Michinel.

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Shut the bloody phone off already!

New Scientist reports relief could be on the way for people tired of having movies, weddings, funerals, etc., disrupted by the rining of cellular phones:

Magnetic wood could be a major plank in the battle against noisy cellphone users. The high-tech material absorbs microwave radio signals, making it impossible to use a mobile phone in any room lined with it. Or a radio for that matter. So theatres and restaurants, for example, can stop people using cellphones on their premises without resorting to signal jammers.

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Wednesday, July 3, 2002

Just in time for the Fourth: The official Army kill-people game

AMERICA'S ARMY is an all new first-person (and multi-player) shoot 'em up from your friends at the U.S. Army, available for free download starting at midnight on the Fourth of July, although, if the site's sluggish response this morning was any indication, it'll take you through the Sixth of July to download it all.

Via Saltire, who says:

You take a core demographic and develop a free community (game) that allows that group to get together and kill each other. Toss in a dash of patriotism and the ability to pop a cap in Osama bin Laden and you have a winner. It will be interesting to see if America’s Army can turn gamers into future soldiers. Your tax dollars at work, but hey at least it's more useful than a $500 screwdriver.

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Meet up at meetup

Meetup is a site that lets you arrange semi-public meetings, things like book clubs, Slashdot fanboy parties and the like. Thank goodness the dot-com bubble has burst, so we don't have to worry about his cool little thing going public and then disappearing forever six months later.

Via Doc Searls

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Tuesday, July 2, 2002

It's amazing what some people throw out

DealMac has a forum on the best things dumpster divers have found in the trash. Among them: Various Macintoshes, monitors and a rack-mounted RS/6000 server. But the winner has to be the guy who worked at a place in 1996 where they swapped out the main CPUs boards for its printers and just dumped the main CPUs in trash boxes in the hall:

I picked one up just to take a look to see how they were made. I was looking at the board and I spied ZIP memory, a form of high speed SDRAM, I took down the number and called a memory recycler I saw in the back of MacWeek magazine. Well lo and behold they said they would give me $100 a piece for each one I sent them, there was 16 per board and I had 20 boards sitting in and around my office! They wanted the whole board so they could remove them without damage. I packed them up and used the company's own UPS account to ship them off, two weeks later I recieved a check for $35,000! There was also other types of memory on the boards I wasn't aware of! Bought some cool stuff and invested the rest! Yes, told the IRS and took the hit!

Via Boing Boing

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When everything seems like hieroglyphics

Get yourself to Write Like an Egyptian and see what your name would be in ancient Egyptian.

Via /usr/bin/girl.

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Monday, July 1, 2002

So what do you think?

I'm back, neither tan nor rested, but ready, at any rate. Tell us what you think of the new site design and all the new Topics pages.

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State of Utah gets into wireless warchalking

Warchalking, the effort to create chalk signals to wireless geeks that here be an open access point, may become an official thing, at least in Utah.

Philip Windley, the state of Utah's CIO, writes that the idea could really help police officers with Wi-Fi cards in their PCs:

We network over 250 buildings for 22,000 employees. We're also in the planning phase of deploying Wi-Fi access points at places where cops hang out so they can connect to the net during their shift (they use CDPD for low bandwidth ops, but need a high bandwidth option sometimes). In this kind of environment, warchalking has some important uses beyond finding a free net. I'm hoping to use the warchalking icons to alert employees to the existence of wireless nets in conference rooms and other places.

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Contact Online Executive Editor Adam Gaffin