It occurred to me that I ran across references to the region of Sichuan three times yesterday. First, while reading a New York Times article about crowded Chinese beaches which described three young interns' from Sichuan's first time at the beach:
"There are plenty of people in Sichuan," he said. "We can see a lot of [...]
When I started reading the New York Times article "Susanna Clarke's Magic Book," I was not impressed. Another supposed successor to Harry Potter, I thought, when will these publishers ever learn? Then I saw the endorsements from Neil Gaiman and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Interest piqued, I downloaded the first chapter [PDF] and read it.
I liked [...]
General
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Most popular day: 28 July 2004 (see Search Queries)
In the interest of full disclosure, Amazon follows Anarchy, State, & Utopia with three more government books, followed by a lot of random music interspersed with some science fiction and a number of works of French existentialism.
As all of the tech media websites have been talking about, Amazon has changed its review system to include "Real Names." They explain their rationale thusly:
In general, we believe that a community in which people use their Real Names will ultimately have higher quality content, since an author willing to sign his or her real-world [...]
Accordion Guy blogs about the "Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism" Conference (clunky name, but interesting content), which occurred earlier today in Toronto. Over the span of several posts, he lays out a detailed reconstruction of the speeches and Q&A sessions in convenient bullet-point format. Start at the first post here. It's [...]
Wednesday, August 4, 2004
It's a Dell Inspiron 9100. I did not want to spend the next few days ignoring family, friends, and countrymen, so I manage to prevent myself from installing any games (even though Republic: The Revolution would run decently on it, as compared to my other, older computer). After a few minutes playing around with the [...]
Wednesday, August 4, 2004
I was randomly looking at Wikipedia articles when I noted that August 4 is the date that the Gestapo arrested Anne Frank and her family in Amsterdam. Even though it occurred only sixty years ago, Occupied Europe seems like another planet.
After discussing Neutral Milk Hotel in the July statistics post, I decided to do a [...]
Since both my old computer (a HP Pavilion 522n) and my new laptop (Dell Inspiron 9100) have 60 gigabyte hard drives, I decided to simply copy everything over on the old computer to a folder in my home directory. As I watched hundreds of Windows DLLs scroll by that I would most likely never need [...]
Pitchfork has reviewed the Conet Project, a collection of recordings from "numbers stations" - shortwave radio trasmitters used by the world's intelligence services to send coded messages. They gave it an 8.0, which in the old Pitchfork ratings key, means "very good." I disagree.
I first heard of the Conet Project when I read a Wired [...]
When I decided to switch to Linux, I was only slightly concerned about finding suitable applications. For web browsing, I figured that I had it covered. Mozilla Firefox, simply the best browser on today's market, had the advantage of running on Linux as well as Windows (good ol' cross-platform compatibility strikes again).
My previous experiences with [...]
From Slashdot comes the news that Kensington laptop locks may not be all they crack up to be (pun intended). Seriously, the author ("Marc") of the security alert claims that the lock can be breached without the use of force in less than a minute using common objects. However, the language is used in the [...]
I normally stay away from online quizzes and from people trying to sell stuff, but when the purpose is computer security, I am as eager as anyone else to prove my skill (although I still will not buy anything). As you can see for yourself, I did quite well on this quiz.
Regardless, I still would [...]
Because of the extensive amount of time I have spent configuring my laptop, I am extremely behind on my blog-reading. I spent all of last night awake trying to catch up. I still have not.
A large part of the problem is a prolific blogger like Atrios. On a whim, I selected his latest post "The [...]
eWeek reports on a security problem found in the latest version of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) which could allow malicious code to be executed if the user clicks a hyperlink in an AIM conversation window. While the group that released a public advisory yesterday, Secunia claims that AOL never contacted them (prompting the release), iDefense, [...]
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Michelle Malkin complains about an article in the Arizona Daily Star entitled "Border agent fires at SUV as it tries to run him over." She had this to say:
The incident actually involved 12 illegal aliens with two vehicles trying to crash through the U.S.-Mexico border. Not only do the headline and story fail to mention [...]
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Robert Bennett writes in today's New York Times about the possibility of a tie in the Electoral College, an issue I have touched upon before. Bennett has a simple solution for this problem, adding another member to the Electoral College in order to increase its numbers to 539. He admits that such a solution would [...]
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
The BBC interviewed a number of Sengalese World War II veterans who helped liberate Paris sixty years ago. The piece detailed the French government's "crystallization" legislation passed at the end of the war, which froze African veterans' pensions and prevented their widows from collecting money after their death. While these laws have been repealed, the [...]
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Slashdot reports on a plan by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a group dedicated to preventing the illegal use of software, to educate American schoolchildren about copyright by distributing comic books through Weekly Reader. The short comics will include their cartoon mascot, a 'copyright-crusading ferret,' who will be named in an online contest. And your [...]
Thursday, August 12, 2004
From the Guardian comes the story of Iorworth Hoare, a man who won seven million pounds in the British lottery. The problem? He is a convicted rapist:
Mr Hoare is 15 years into a life sentence after being convicted of attempted rape in 1989. He was also jailed for a string of sex attacks during the [...]
Thursday, August 12, 2004
When I first read the story about McGreevey resigning, I assumed it was because of new allegations in the rash of scandals currently afflicting his administration, not because he was a homosexual. Assuming his sexual orientation is the only reason for his resignation, I do not think it is right. Sure, social conservatives would undoubtedly [...]
Earlier this morning, I realized that I was disappointed in the mileage that I was getting out of Linux. I decided that I had a number of options:
Quit: Backup all of my data, format the drive, and reinstall Windows, living the cruel but beautiful world of Linux behind forever.
Start Over: Backup all of [...]
Yesterday, http://del.icio.us/hublicious and the Waxy.org link blog linked to my RSS directory, which contains the "bootleg" (their words, not mine; I contacted Pitchfork earlier this year about adding RSS feeds and received no response) Pitchfork RSS feeds. While I wish they linked to an actual post (instead of an directory listing), I am still happy [...]
The lack of blogging this weekend was caused by my decision to reformat and reinstall Gentoo (and not by fears of litigation) after gxine and mplayer gave up the ghost. Except for the massive amount of time it took, the only casualties were my "dot files" (which scp did not copy), which included all of [...]
The Crimson reports that the eminent Mark Zuckerberg, author of thefacebook.com, has a new project, a file-sharing site entitled "Wirehog:"
The Wirehog software will be downloadable to a personal computer from the website www.wirehog.com. When the software is initially launched, it will search the user?s computer and upload certain default files like music to a user?s [...]
Well, not quite yet. An article in today's New York Times (which does not actually use the phrase "astroturfing") details music conglomerate Warner Bros.' attempt to ingratiate itself with MP3 blogs in order to promote a band called The Secret Machines (who, incidentally, have 2 albums with 8+ ratings on Pitchfork) - with disastrous results:
"I [...]
I changed the layout in order to decrease the length of pages. I added a new toolbar at the right to contain the blogroll (from which several links have been removed) and reduced the number of items in the "recent posts" and the "recent comments" sections.
One thing that I have missed this week is Bugmenot.com, the innovative website that allowed you to bypass mandatory registration schemes on websites that provided otherwise "free" content by providing a list of usernames and passwords. Luckily, the good people at Boing Boing managed to do some detective work, finding a thread on the MozillaZine [...]
The MemoryBlog points to a Washington Post article (hot tip: try the DailyKos newspaper logins) highlighting the danger (and absurdity) of the government's misuse of its ability to classify information. It examines the Department of Justice's use of "secret evidence" in the ACLU's cases against it:
Among the phrases originally redacted by the government was a [...]
The "corefonts" package makes installing Windows fonts like Verdana on Linux systems easy. However, the corefonts ebuild does not include Tahoma, the font used in Windows XP buttons, menus, and dialogs. As a result, I decided to install them manually.
The fonts will not be recognized unless special files exist in the directory. To make these [...]
The first reports that I read about the recent theft in Norway of two of Edward Munch's paintings concentrated only on "The Scream." As a result, my only thoughts on the matter were, "How sad. I hope they find it." Then, later on, I read Boing Boing's account of the theft, which included pictures of [...]
Since the entire idea of writing online is producing your own content, blog plagiarism would seem a bit moronic. As any reader of Chilling Effects could tell you, this is not the case. I was reading a post on Weblog Tools Collection about a person offering to install WordPress blogs for others for free. It [...]
The story: Boy sees movie. Boy falls in love with character from movie. Boy buys DVD of Japanese movie that inspired character boy loves. Boy realizes that DVD is Region 3, since there is no Region 1 DVD. Boy gets angry. Boy gets even, by constructing an extremely funny dialog between "DVD Jon" (famous for [...]
Since the IPO, it has become cool for tech pundits to atttempt to figure out what Google's next big endeavor will be. The latest, straight from Slashdot, explains how Google could utilize the open-source goodness of Jabber to create a viable alternative to other inferior messaging networks like AIM (popular to the US) and MSN [...]
The lack of new posts is a result of work that was supposed to be finished this week. About two weeks from now, I am supposed to do a presentation at school for my job. I was supposed to submit a draft this week, but it is still not finished. Since I had received a [...]
As I stated earlier, I planned to buy a Blackspot sneaker. Yesterday, around 8pm, I received an email telling me that "my sneaker" was able to be ordered. I assume the exhortation to "tell my friends" to buy the sneaker means that I can post about it. Read on to receive the "secret" URL when [...]
Saturday, August 28, 2004
From Microsoft's Internet Explorer FAQ:
Q. Does Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 (SP1) include Internet Explorer?
A. Yes. Internet Explorer 6 SP1 is the most recent update to the Internet Explorer technology, and it includes a full installation of Internet Explorer 6. The service pack is the latest update to the Internet Explorer technologies representing general improvements to [...]
Saturday, August 28, 2004
Was reading this Slashdot article on the new captcha in Gmail's login process to disable third-party notifiers. Since there is no Linux port of the official Gmail notifier, I use Doron Rosenberg's excellent Firefox extension. Checking to make sure that the automatic login still worked, I noticed a curious link. "Invite 5 friends to Gmail," [...]
Back before I consumed my news by RSS, I used to read Haaretz regularly. Now, I am lucky if I get to it once a month. In an attempt to change this, I have created four Haaretz RSS feeds.
Haaretz News
Haaretz Editorial & Op-Ed
Haaretz Features
Haaretz Business
Photo Matt likes Hero. It is a good film, but I would have to issue some caveats in my recommendation. Spoilers follow:
One of the reasons that I use Linux is because I am addicted to updates (another is that I am a masochist, as previous events will show). Waiting several years for new features (much less bugfixes!) is ridiculous. Sometimes, one pays a price for being on the cutting edge.
About a week and a half, I [...]