I was reading the May issue of my high school newspaper, The Mall, when I came across a charming (although unsolicited) advertisement on page 9 for this very site. Notwithstanding my general antipathy toward all things high school, I was tickled pink.
The most interesting article in the issue was the editorial "A Tale of Two [...]
Due to the extremely large amount of hits of the various formats of my resume, and the lack of job offers, I must conclude that the vast majority, if not all, of such visits were voyeuristic. As the result, all resume formats are gone.
Seriously though, said resume was out of date, and the amount of [...]
From Slashdot today comes the news that the newest version of the popular Shareaza peer-to-peer program has been released under the GPL. Why is this important?
Suppose the main developer of Shareaza develops a terminal illness. Or suppose the RIAA realizes that its strategy of suing the people who use peer-to-peer networks will not work. Instead, [...]
When I first read this article, it simply confirmed what I already knew about the Berkman Center; it was an important part of the Internet landscape. At the time, I was attempting to build a RSS aggregator in C#, inspired by this article. Although I never finished that project, when I became to read both [...]
Google is a great search engine. This greatness is not just due to its ability to find things, an important component of any search engine, but its company's benevolent philosophy was also an important part of Google's rise.
In contrast, we have Yahoo!, a company which makes a search engine so exciting, they needed to put [...]
While most normal people were asleep, I was migrating the blog to WordPress. The new structure is going to take some getting used to, though. It took me a long time, but I believe that all of the old MovableType links should work, thanks to some mod_rewrite magic.
Either way, I am going to change some [...]
As requested in the comments section, here is my analysis of the first issue of H Bomb Magazine (relevant Crimson articles here and here). I do not have a scanner, so if you want pictures, you will just have to buy the issue (which you can do online through their website). My issue is in [...]
Robert Scoble complains about a lack of media disclosure in an informIT article by Nigel McFarlane that is highly critical of Internet Explorer. Scoble says:
Imagine for a moment that I wrote an article praising Longhorn in PC Magazine. Wouldn't you want to know that I'm a "professional commentator" on the topic and that I'm seen [...]
Just a week ago, I was in Ronald Reagan National Airport, thinking about the prudence of naming a landmark after someone who was still living (I mean, he could not even be put on a stamp, for Christ's sake).
However, since I read this blog entry, I was less surprised that I probably would have been. [...]
Obviously, I was not alive while World War II was taking place. The closest I have come to the beaches of Normandy has probably been the "Operation Overlord" mission in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. However, if Omaha Beach was only half as confusing, nervewracking, and deadly as the MOHAA level was, I am certain [...]
As first reported here. Updated files are available at the project page. Just in time for the Commencement coverage, which starts tomorrow.
From Gizmodo comes an article about a methanol fuel cell-powered laptop. "Alternative" energy is quickly becoming mainstream.
I read very few magazines. One of those that I do read, The Atlantic Monthly, is regularly covered in advertisements from oil and automotive companies proclaiming their vast investment in natural gas and hydrogen power, in order to [...]
This Wired article about lovelorn geeks using their computer skills in an attempt to gain women seemed run-of-the-mill fare until the last three paragraphs:
Moore's buddy Matt Chisholm chimes in to tell me about a similar hack, a JavaScript app he wrote with Moore that works on Friendster. It mines for information about anyone who looks [...]
I have lost patience with web bots that do not look for robots.txt when they visit this site, so I am now denying all non-compliant robots access. Now my .htaccess file looks like this:
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.marteydodoo.com/403.html
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.marteydodoo.com/404.html
# Goodbye bad bots
# The World as a Blog - cool, but non-compliant
Deny from [...]
This article from the Harvard Gazette details Niall Ferguson's speech to seniors during the Phi Beta Kappa exercises. He talked about the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, and the possibility that the influence of our shared heritage might be coming to an end:
Moreover, in its essential outlook and national character, [...]
Apparently frivolous lawsuits are not just a feature in America. Guo Yong, a Chinese Bentley owner, is suing the Beijing branch of the popular automobile company after his car went out of control while he was driving it in March 2003. Although nobody was injured, he complains that nobody at the company was willing to [...]
The UK newspaper The Telegraph reports on how Governor Schwarzenegger's role as a Turkish sultan in the film Around the World in Eighty Days may re-raise public images of him as a lecher. While this is possible, I suspect that like past California governors, Schwarzenegger's political personality is made of Teflon.
One thing that struck me [...]
Just fifteen minutes after I posted about The Conqueror, a film starring John Wayne as Temujin, later known as Genghis Khan, the movie started on AMC. It was a decent 1950s adventure film, by which I mean to say that I found its "suckiness" relative. A 15-second Emergency Alert System test interrupted the final battle [...]
With Kofi Annan as the official Commencement Day speaker, it was inevitable that someone would bring up the United Nations's relative inaction in Sudan. The Crimson had two articles about it. While this news article seems to conflate slavery and the conflict in the south of the country with the atrocities in Darfur, this editorial [...]
The only question is who will win? Oxblog pointed out this excellent map of the two candidates' current position, "state by state." On the other hand, Pandagon links to this New York Post article by Deborah Orin suggesting that Bush will triumph, like Reagan did in 1980 against incumbent Jimmy Carter:
But there's a big [...]
I think this post by Tom Burka adequately conveys the media's current fascination with Ronald Reagan (You would think that celebrities had stopped dying, or something). Hopefully, by the time next week rolls around, the entire country will be so tired of Reaganmania (a meme in the making) that our current President will be unable [...]
As you may recall, in February and March of last year, the Bush Administration made the case that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States (although they may have not used those exact words), due to the fact that it would be able to directly threaten the United States with WMD.
What does this [...]
Juan Cole attempts to compare Bush with Neo and Agent Smith from The Matrix. On the blog "Just a Bump in the Beltway," Rodger comments that:
Bush could be Agent Smith though most people won't see the analogy Mr. Cole posits as it is a bit obscure. Then again I can't really think of a contemporary [...]
Engadget points to this Boston Globe editorial about an up and coming feature in cellphones: ringback tones. Although I agree with the writer that personalized ring tones are annoying (having a top 40 single as your ring tone does not automatically make it cool), the article is Luddite in tone. But why does the writer [...]
I found a link to the official campaign blog of Barack Obama, a Democratic candidate for an Illinois senate seat on Atrios' Eschaton, noting that Obama was willing to have a series of six debates with his opponent, Jack Ryan. Having read some things (all good) about Obama, I was not surprised. However, I did [...]
The BBC reports on conflict between the Dutch government and Médecins Sans Frontières (or Doctors Without Borders for non-Francophones) over the release of Arjan Erkel, who was kidnapped in Dagestan (which is next to Chechnya). After spending more than a year as a hostage, Erkel was released in April. I almost posted about him when [...]
"The View From Purgatory," Safire's latest column in the New York Times takes the format of an interview with the deceased Richard Nixon. Despite the obvious potential in such a format, Safire simply uses Nixon (and this is not the first time) in order to voice his own half-baked ideas about Iraq, the current domestic [...]
In high school, I can remember having conversations with a number of my English teachers about Ulysses. The general "vibe" that I got from those conversations was confirmed after I read some Joyce (Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man), I got the feeling that Ulysses was one of a very [...]
Kevin Drum reports on a new development in the electronic theft of Democratic Senate memos (which I reported on earlier here); the aide accused of the crime, Manuel Miranda, has been appointed the head of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary's Ethics in Nominations Project. Yes, that's right, ethics.
Incoming Trackback pings do not seem to be working. I am not feeling well right now, so I will look at it tomorrow morning.
I have not posted during the last couple of days because I was moving marteydodoo.com to a new web host. This move has fixed the problem with incoming trackbacks.
While waiting for the DNS settings to be updated, I took the opportunity to change some things.
Manually cleaned up the WordPress MySQL database, which was quite messy [...]
This post on the official Bush campaign blog claims that Kerry has the lowest percentage of positive supporters in recent history.
Furthermore, the poll confirms something we've suspected for a long time, while President Bush's grassroots overwhelmingly supports him because of his leadership and positive agenda, an unusually low number of Kerry supporters are inspired anything [...]
Wesner Moise, a former Microsoft employee, writes about how his computer contracted a Trojan Horse, as a result of using Internet Explorer. Frankly, I was not surprised until I read the last paragraph:
I can't believe that it was this easy to become infected; I also couldn't believe that Internet Explorer could be so flawed as [...]
This is in slightly bad taste, considering his violent death, but when I read this previous BBC News article, I thought that the comments made by Kim Sun-il, the South Korean hostage kidnapped in Iraq, were a bit strange.
In the video released by the militants, Kim Sun-il, a 33-year-old translator working for a company that [...]
Warning: this entry is a bit geeky.
Recently, it has become a bit of a habit-cum-obsession for me to browse Dell's website and look at prices for various custom computer configurations. When looking at desktops, I normally start with a Dimension 8600. Early yesterday morning, I decided to use their new model, a Dimension 8400 as [...]
I was originally going to make this two different posts on two different issues. The first part is from a post on The Volokh Conspiracy entitled "The UN and Anti-Semitism." I respect Eugene Volokh, and I believe that he is an intelligent man. After I read the speech that the post points to, however, I [...]
This Reuters article describes how Afghan forces beheaded four Taliban guerillas as a reprisal of the beheading of an Afghan soldier and an interpreter. Hopefully, this will not spread to the conflict in Iraq, especially after the handover at the end of this month, when Iraqi government forces are supposed to be in charge of [...]
In an none-too-surprising development in the story of the Afghan army beheadings, the "army" officer who made the original report has now retracted his statement in response to criticism from human rights groups. Apparently, beheading prisoners violates the Geneva Conventions.
I think the article's assertion that it was Human Rights Watch which claimed that the beheadings [...]
North Korea zone reports on a new official website for North Korea. Located at kcckp.net, Naenara-DPRK looks a lot "slicker" than the other site (2000 called. They want their non-standards based Dreamweaver 4 website back). The new site looks more like a web portal than the source of North Korean propanganda. However, once you actually [...]
Atrios points out this zinger from Bad Attitudes:
After Reagan's death, the cable channels insisted on reliving the right wing's fantasy version of the 80s. Now that Clinton's book has been released, we are now forced to relive the right wing's fantasy version of the 90s.
I can assume this is the run-up to November, when they [...]
This is the funniest letter to the New York Times that I have read in a while. Throughout the article "Tyson Looks in the Mirror and Sees a Troubled Man," the boxer repeatedly makes reference to the adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Jay Wolpert wrote in to clarify that one of Tyson's quotes [...]
I would like to think that Secretary of State Powell's trip to Darfur (NYT, BBC, etc.) will cause the situation there to be thrust into the national limelight, spurring action to prevent what can already be considered a humanitarian crisis, but I think that I know better by now. Consider these three factors:
The Bush Administration [...]
What You Should Know About Download.Ject
You have probably already heard about Cheney's use of the F word on Thursday. From an interview with FOX News:
And I informed him [Leahy] of my view of his conduct in no uncertain terms. And as I say, I felt better afterwards.
Ultimately, that is what is most important - feeling better about yourself. It get [...]
That's relative poverty, mind you. From "Crimes of Others Wrecked Enron, Ex-Chief Says:"
The years since the Enron collapse have transformed Mr. Lay. The changes in his financial status are stunning. At the beginning of 2001, Mr. Lay said, he had a net worth in excess of $400 million  almost all of it in Enron [...]
From Slashdot this morning comes news that Real Networks has completed an agreement with Red Hat and Novell in order to expand their Linux presence. Real will license their Helix Player under the GPL, and Red Hat and Novell will include the Linux version of Real Player 10 in the enterprise versions of their software.
Even though I do not own a Mac (too expensive!), I have to admit that Apple is more forward-looking than many other technology companies. Take the release schedules of their operating systems. Not is there a new release every few months (a page straight out of the open-source playbook), but the codenames are easy to [...]
In David Brooks' latest column, he harps on a topic that seems to be increasingly in vogue as the election approaches - the political polarization of the country. After noting both that polarization rises with higher education, which together with the "information age" is leading to "political ghettos" being created, in the red and blue [...]
The Crimson reports on a mysterious package at the Holyoke Center yesterday. Normally, I would find this a serious event, but the package was opened before the police arrived.
An unidentified male opened the box and removed an object that ?looked like something electrical, like a cell phone or a beeper,? O'Connor said.
O'Connor added she was [...]
Although there is nothing in Kermit Lipez's biography to suggest a high level of computer proficiency, his dissenting opinion in the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals case U.S. v. Councilman suggests that he knows what he is talking about. While the majority opinion (which also contains a discussions of MTAs) claims that e-mail intercepted by [...]