September 2000 Archives

Afraid of my new version of PSP? You should be. [via whim]

I thought the penguin computer case was silly enough, but that it would at least appeal to some of the more whimsical Linux fans. The new Kitty and Doggie models are just way over the top; however, both of them are "a mega hit in Japan". But then, who am I to talk? After all, I have a translucent purple case, and like the idea of a custom painted system.

Seeing racism in a Mr. Potato Head seems to say more about the viewer than it does about the spud.

My upgrade to Paint Shop Pro 7, the new version of my image editor of choice, has arrived. (Obviously, this site shows the dangers of placing the power of a powerful graphics program into the hands of an amateur.) O'Reilly has a nutshell book for PSP7 coming out in a couple of months; one of the authors is Mardi Wetmore, whose Web Graphics on a Budget offers all kinds of tips on how to create nice-looking effects.

I went into a *shudder* Radio Shack last night with the intention of burning through some of Digital:Convergence's venture capital and acquiring a cheap bar-code reader. I chickened out; I felt dirty enough just walking into the store, let alone approaching one of the "helpful" salespersons. Still, if I do ever get one of these beasts, it's nice to know there are 101 uses for a dead :CueCat. [via Media News]

I'm not going to pretend that Slobodan Milosevic isn't scum, and as long as the U.S. is going to interfere in the internal politics of other nations, dumping $25 million into non-state-controlled media is pretty benign. Still, what if other countries were to do the same over here?

In October, the major networks will be airing the prime-time series of debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Just the two of them. Those debates are being financed by firms like Anheuser-Busch. The beer company is paying $550,000 as a funder of the historic Bush-Gore encounters.

Maybe there's a government somewhere -- or perhaps a brewery in a foreign land -- that could spare half a million bucks for an independent series of U.S. presidential debates that would include Ralph Nader.

I'm not saying that the government should subsidize the IMC as much as I think we need to take a closer look at how we would react to foreign nations interfering in our policy to the degree that we meddle in theirs.

Good Eats, starring Alton Brown, may be the most practical cooking show I've ever seen on TV. The program focuses on simple, basic techniques, and assumes very little cooking know-how on the part of the viewer. I'm not the only one who loves this show; there is now a Good Eats with Alton Brown Fan Page. [via Kestrel]

Looks like Handspring will be offering a color version of its Visor PDA next month. [via VisorCentral]

I never had much faith in any business model that involved letting William Shatner sing.

Imagine the Windows user interface and applications running atop a stable operating system kernel. (I know it's difficult, but try.) Rumors have begun to surface about Wind-X: Windows for OS X.

Why make only half an operating system? Well, Windows has never been known for stability, while Unix has. By using a kernel perfected by others, Microsoft can concentrate on other aspects of Windows. It also gives them an out when you call customer service. "Sorry, that's a kernel issue."

I honestly don't know whether to cheer, laugh, or cry. [via have browser]

Can't wait until Tuesday night for your undead-hunting fix? Check out the Buffy the Vampire Slayer boardgame!

An explanation of how the Olympics changed from an "amateur" sporting event to one dominated by professional athletes. [via Lake Effect]

Some of the other people who are winning TiVo video recorders (such as Kestrel) are already planning on hacking their TiVos.

1.4. Why is the TiVo hackable?

The biggest reason for this is that TiVo used Linux for their Operating System. Linux is an open source OS that is widely available for many different platforms. The other reason is that TiVo uses standard off the shelf IDE hard drives. This makes the hard drive upgrade easy since you can go to any computer shop and buy an IDE drive.

The most common hack is to add an extra hard drive to dramatically increase capacity.

The latest study shows that breaking up Microsoft would have devastating effects on the world economy! Obviously, such esteemed and independent researchers as... uhh... wait a minute...

The estimated cost of breaking up Microsoft has reached a new high - consumer worldwide could wind up paying anything up to $310 billion more, according to a new study produced by Professor Stan Liebowitz under the banner of pro-Microsoft and Microsoft-backed lobby group the Association for Competitive Technology.

I'm sure they're already working on a study to detail the effects of legal action against the company on global climate as well.

Salon examines the roots of the demonstrations against the IMF and World Bank meeting in Prague:

Bello believes that the demonstrations in Prague, following so swiftly on protests in Melbourne, Australia, represent "a critical mass" leading to what authors Brecher and Smith call globalization from below. Bello describes what he calls "deglobalization" as "re-embedding the economy in society, rather than having society driven by the economy."

I wish I could say I was shocked by the idea of using old Hendrix footage in a power company's commercial, but my outrage was all used up years ago when Mercedes-Benz bought Janis's song for one of their ads.

Want a free TiVo video recorder? They claim to be giving away ten every day, but I've lost count of how many people in this MetaFilter thread alone have won; I'd guess at least 30-40 out of that group. Besides, if my essay was a winner, anyone can win.

Do not mess with Stephen King. Bad things could happen to you.

It sounded like a story straight out of a Stephen King novel when Bryan Smith, 43, the man who struck and nearly killed King last year, was found dead in his Maine home Friday evening. The mystery deepens: An autopsy Monday could not explain the cause of Smith's death. There were no signs of violence or trauma. State medical examiners are performing toxicology tests. The results could take several months.

Creepy. If King's books, and Murder She Wrote, hadn't already convinced me to never travel to Maine, this would do it.

I have no real need for a two-way pager (I'm getting along just fine without any pager or cell phone), but Motorola has some nifty looking toys. I was curious about the neat little communicator I saw advertised on TV, but got sidetracked by a couple other gadgets they have in the works. Of course, a Personal Communications show in Chicago has even more geek-lust-inducing goodies. *sigh*

Progress towards a cleaner car continues. Aside from work on electric fuel-cell vehicles, European scientists are working on a drastically more efficient Volkswagen.

In Brussels, the European Commission launched a project worth 5.2 million euros (US$4.5 million) to develop a lightweight car that would travel 100 kilometers (62 miles) on one liter of diesel fuel.

My back-of-the-envelope figures may be off, but doesn't that translate to over 200 MPG?

XML and Perl are two technologies that I've read about extensively, and played around with a little. I've never done anything major with either, though I'm scheduled for a class in XML in the hope of using it at work. While looking around at the interesction of the two, I ran across XMLBoard, a GPL'd Perl script for a web-based message board using an XML-based backend. This looks like a great starting point for a personal project I'd like to do in my copious free time: a Bloggerish web content management system. Of course, like my Linux experimentation, I'll probably need to back-shelf this until I once again have some spare hardware with which to play.

But I like moldy cheese!

So much for the band The Offspring's support of free digital music.

Warning: Spoilerific links ahead! Tonight's Buffy season premiere was good, but does anyone else think it was a bit too easy? I think I liked Angel a bit better. Fresh Hell brings up the Tara question; the best theory I've heard is that yes, Tara is a supernatural creature, but no, she isn't evil. Faerie, perhaps?

The Internet connection at work has never been the greatest, especially since X-Stop picks the strangest stuff to block, but yesterday and today our connectivity really blew chunks.

For the record, waking up to a clock radio kind of assumes that the selected radio station will be on the air.

Oh, Hell. There's been a school shooting in New Orleans. I haven't gotten much detail yet, but it sounds more like a personal dispute that escalated to violence than a Columbine-style random killing spree. While a closer look at truly violent students may be called for, when I hear a story like this, I start to worry about "roundups" of schools' "weird" students, like there were in the wake of Columbine.

Why are the media so concerned about late-night cracks about the presidential candidates? My theory is that when the news media decided they wanted to be part of the entertainment industry, they completely lost the ability to distinguish between entertainment and news.

I've mentioned VisiBone before, and their color lab for experimenting with web-safe color combinations. I have a couple of their color reference products, and they now have a new product line of HTML reference cards and posters. This is the most compact yet complete reference I've seen, with color coding for browser incompatibilities.

I haven't really been following this year's Olympiad, but still... You go, girl!

A flock of vultures seem to be circling above a dying cat.

In all, a disastrous start to a marketing concept clearly executed by greedy fools. Now for a quick fix in keeping with the company's rig-it-and-roll mentality: we look for 'CueCat2' to come stuffed with a tiny squib, detonated by opening the plastic housing. They can worry about children's prying fingers after the fact, as they have done with every other potential pitfall.

As William Gibson wrote, "The street finds its own uses for things." I'm still tempted to get one of these felines more to waste the company's VC than to use it for a cheap bar-code reader, though.

The Chinese edition of the latest Harry Potter book seems to be selling pretty well; too bad it hasn't been published yet. Pirates are already cranking out translations of the popular children's fantasy. I have no sympathy for commercial-scale piracy, but this does bring up some interesting issues. I seem to remember a story a while back about German fans getting in trouble for posting an amateur translation of Goblet of Fire to the web in advance of the German-language release. Japanese animation fans have been exchanging fan-subtitled videos of popular titles (especially those which seemed unlikely to see commercial translation) for years. Pirate videos of the most recent Star Wars movie were popular in Europe well before the official theatric releases on that side of the Atlantic. A lot of this piracy seems to have to do with delayed releases of popular entertainment in different parts of the world, and a globally networked culture is making movies, books, etc. available to foreign fans faster than the legitimate market can manage. Is there any way that commercial media can manage global, cross-cultural releases fast enough to beat the pirates?

The kids are all right. Columnist Molly Ivins takes a look at a book that questions whether public schools are really failing to educate American children.

The point here is that the "fall" in scores compares half of today's seniors with the one-10th who took the test in 1941, when almost all college-bound kids were a well-to-do elite. And SAT scores go down by 15 points for each decrease of $10,000 in family income, which is, among other things, the reason they're useless for judging the relative intelligence of African American kids.

I believe that I was the recipient of a pretty good public school education. I tend to believe that a lot of the problems with public schools are in those areas where either there isn't enough of an economic base to support good schools (public or private), or public education budgets have been gutted by those who put their children into prestigious private schools.

I do a lot of my personal HTML work, such as the templates and other pages for this site, with a text editor called UltraEdit 32. I'm a lot more comfortable editing my own HTML by hand than with any WYSIWYG editor I've used (although I've heard good things about Dreamweaver), and the tool I really prefer is a text editor with syntax highlighting (which helps me catch a lot of errors before I make them), easy switching between files, and good file management. I was just checking to see if there was a new version (version 7.0a is out), and learned that a version control package called CS-RCS now allows for integration with UltraEdit. I've just downloaded CS-RCS (which claims to be free for individual users), and plan to try it out; I'd love to be able to manage archives of revisions to my code.

"We must always bear in mind that you do not play games with One-Eyed Willy."

I hate it when a troll about cannibalism doesn't hook any responses.

I happened into a local game shop last night and got involved in a demo of the new Red Alert! starship combat game. This is a licensed Star Trek game from Last Unicorn Games (recently assimilated into the sprawling WotC collective). It's a disk-based tabletop wargame (produced in conjunction with Fantasy Flight, the creators of the Diskwars series of wargames), and the best simple simulation of space combat I've seen in years.

Anyway, the components of the game are cardboard disks, representing ships, weapons, crew members, ship systems, orders, etc. This is a collectible-style game; you buy boxes of "flats" of disks, and each box contains a standard set of flats representing a specific ship and set of resources for that fleet, as well as a bunch of random flats containing extra disks f4rom which you can pick and choose. All movement is done in terms of "flips"; the counters are flipped end over end a prescribed number of times. Damage is detemined by a "coin toss" throw of special damage discs, and each ship has a sort of "tactical display" to show current status, crew members, ship systems, etc. Actions must be plotted out ahead of time, specifying the "orders" for each of three phases at the beginning of each turn. The game is remarkably easy to learn; being familiar with other Diskwars games, I was able to figure out a lot of the rules simply by examining the disks and being familiar with the setting. I enjoyed playing, even though my Cardassian warship was the first destroyed (critical hits are brutal), and will probably pick up some sets when they are fully released.

Also at the game shop, I picked up a pretty Looney game: Icehouse is a set of game pieces which can be used for a variety of abstract strategy games, or to make up your own games. I grabbed a Paper Icehouse set, which is a bunch of cheap die-cut cardboard to be punched out and folded into the pyramidal game pieces. The game designer, Andrew Looney, has a neat site to explore, including a Java version of one of his other games, Aquarius.

Rob Bender is looking into CVS as a source code versioning system. A while back, when I had a spare computer that I planned to use for some personal Linux / Apache experimentation, I was looking into CVS myself. I happened upon a free book on the software. Well, to be honest, it's just part of a commercially available book, but the free chapters appear to be those most concerned with the technical setup and operation of the program. I'll drop Rob a line so that he can take a look for himself. P.S.: Long, long ago, when Webmonkey was actually putting out new articles on a regular basis, they had a nice little CVS overview.

Fine. You're getting your cheap gas. Are you happy now? Update: More details.

There's an international, Star Wars-themed LEGO building contest going on in California today.

The Empire Strikes Back: Multinational corporations react to anti-globalization protests.

Just because you have a right to express yourself doesn't mean that anybody has to watch.

I seem to be peppermint, which is fine, especially if it's Penguins. [via Ghost, who I'm surprised hasn't constructed a sorting hat portal]

We are all going to die. [via kottke via randomWalks]

Ralph Nader finally explains his silence on racial issues.

“Do black residents of (wealthy) Scarsdale get abused by the police? No. When people have economic power in a community, they get their calls returned,” Nader said. “Prosperity and economic justice greatly reduces racial injustice, and that’s true from the courts to the prisons.”

Apparently, Nader believes that issues of racial and gender equality are really just part of wider-reaching class equality issues.

Today's urban legend is the WOBBLER Email Virus. Fortunately, my dad has become wary enough to check with me before he starts to worry about these things.

Sometimes I think Dubya is just playing a game of What do you want to be when you grow up?

250,000 copies of Windows ME in four days. The Reg is correct that that comes to 43.4 per minute, but they didn't use the proper scientific unit of measurement. Remember, One Barnum (1 bm) is equivalent to one sucker per minute. At any rate, 43.4 bm for the new consumer release of Windows is a much higher measurement than the 24.8 bm recorded for the first two weeks of Windows 2000 sales. P. S. Can anyone propose a simple method for converting Neilsen ratings to Barnums?

Bah. I was scheduled to travel to California next week for some technical training, but the company rescheduled my class. Rearranging schedules and travel arrangements is a nuisance, but I'll admit I'm happier with the new date (late October) so I'm not taking off from the office again so soon after a vacation. Besides, this way I'll have the option of going to the local SF/gaming con.

The idea that the next generation of nuclear weapons might not be too terrifying to use is terrifying in itself.

I thought the center was made of caramel and nougat. Oh. The other Milky Way.

At the moment, the company for which I work has given me some extremely good reasons to stay. If I ever do get sick of programming, however, it's nice to keep abreast of other career options. [via Ghost]

Ethel the Blog has some good links on creating your own scripting language.

Media critic Av Westin, researching a handbook on proper journalistic practices, is aghast at current television news standards.

Westin, no relation to ABC News president David Westin, is a consultant these days while winding down a fellowship with the Freedom Forum, a group that fears, with cause, that as media credibility dives, so will public support for press freedoms under the 1st Amendment.

While journalistic integrity was never perfect, Westin sees a dramatic decline within the last two decades. [via Media News]

The Mississippi commission on changing the state's flag (which currently incorporates a Confederate flag) has decided to turn to a more rational authority for a potential redesign.

Spy thriller scribe Frederick Forsyth plans to follow Stephen King's lead in releasing a net-only book.

Q00L. /usr/bin/zannah has created a new weblog portal called blogstart. I suspect the categorization will need to evolve, as the vast majority of blogs seem to fit one category, but I don't have any specific suggestions. Yet. [via Bry]

Handspring's next add-on for its Visor PDA may be a mobile phone.

"There's a very good chance of Amy getting de-ratted." That's one of the better rumors from a collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer spoilers. Amy's transformation is one of the dangling threads from previous seasons that has been nagging in the back of my mind; another is the "problem student" who was turned into a vampire, and fled during Spike's first big battle with the slayer. By the way, I love the idea that Darla, slain a few episodes into the first season of Buffy, is returning to plague Angel. [via Fresh Hell]

Football. Miller. Britannica.

Scrambling while facing a heavy defensive blitz is a high-pressure job that rewards clear, focused thinking. Something akin to reading the news on Saturday Night Live while worrying about your hair.

You know the drill.

I actually had a shorter version of this conversation with a fast food service employee a while back.

Me: I'd like a small orange slush.

FFSE: We don't have small slushes. Only medium and large.

Me: Is one of them smaller than the other one?

FFSE: Yes.

Me: Well, give me that one, then.

Besides, is it just me or doesn't the term "medium" inherently imply that it's in between two other size options?

Got Cat? Joel writes about just how many types of dumb idea this is.

Then again, the Convergence Cable makes the CueCat look like a work of genius. Let me get this straight: I'm going to run a wire from my TV to my PC, and when a specially encoded cue comes on the TV, my browser goes to a page where I can view "useful" information. Perhaps I have some ideas about "useful" information that I doubt the broadcasters would share. Wouldn't it be neat to press a button when a news program is talking about a company, and get information on the business relationships between the company in question, its partners and/or rivals, and the television network covering it? I'm sure you'd learn some really interesting things that way. That may not be the type of information that's useful to the broadcaster, though.

I'm tempted to order some of this stuff for free just to waste the company's venture capital.

Deleting temporary files on my server is a common and routine task. Still, having the machine ask if you really want to delete 6,660 files is unnerving.

College recruiting doesn't seem to have fully adapted to the internet era.

This may not be news to anyone else, but I may have to take a crack at this one-stop shop for credit reports.

"If we're trying to get in touch with the inner boy and reach our target audience, there's nothing better than cars smacking into each other." Unfortunately, the local religious broadcaster which carries UPN as a sideline is as unlikely to show this series as they are to show WWF Smackdown. [via The Other Side]

Gore / Lieberman: Veterans of the culture wars.

When I heard about the upcoming astronaut-training reality series, with a prize of an actual trip into space, I figured that it had to be courtesy of the same country that sold Pizza Hut ad space on a booster rocket. [via Looka!]

Highlights of my vacation, in no particular order:

• My dad's remarkable recovery from last month's quintuple bypass
• The colorful patchwork quilt that Mom had finished for me (pictures forthcoming)
• Roast beef po-boy, dripping with extra gravy
• Grandma, in good shape for a 90-year-old
• One more showing of Alegria before they leave Biloxi
• Fresh shrimp, purchased straight off the boat
• One of my favorite teachers is still running a gifted students' program
• Used bookstores (Hughart's Story of the Stone) and game shops (vintage D&D materials)
• Hunting fish in N'Awlins (pictures forthcoming)
• Lunch with a cousin I haven't seen in five years
• Not having to talk to the networking department for a whole week

I should have known that Jay would be a good source for Tampa-area storm info. When Gordon was headed towards south MS, I was worried for my parents; when it moved towards the inner coast of Florida, I was concerned about my cousin east of Tampa. Gordon missed the folks I was most concerned about, and those who were in the storm's path have my deepest sympathies.

It's nice to know that crackers have some standards. [via MeFi]

I'm home. While I don't have anything to blog right now, I'd like to take the opportunity to say that if Interstate 55 between West Memphis, Arkansas and Cape Girardeau, Missouri isn't the most mind-numbingly boring stretch of highway in the United States, it certainly deserves a spot in the rankings.

It's September; Where are my new shows?

I'm on vacation this week, and only online through my dad's AOL account, so updates may be sporadic. However, this is the most leisurely vacation I've had in a couple of years, so I may make some changes I've been meaning to make for a while...

This has got to be the most nonsensical headline I've seen in quite some time: Guidant Says Won FDA Nod for MULTI-LINK Ultra Stent

Oh dear. And Mornington Crescent players are usually so polite.

Having trouble understanding Dennis Miller's comments on Monday Night Football? Perhaps the Britannica can help.

What Miller might have meant: Perhaps the referees were not really penalizing Denver for delay of game, but in fact were trying to let Paris know that Condé-sur-l'Escaut had been captured from the Austrians.

Or maybe somebody's just trying to prove they can be a bigger wiseass than Miller. [via twernt]

The next generation of heat sinks may operate by transforming heat into sound.

The Digital Freedom Network is looking for concrete examples of failures of filtering software. [via the Reg]

"It's like the running of the bulls in Spain, only a whole lot safer." [via Rebecca]

Does MCI have an obligation to inform its customers about rate changes?

If Bush doesn't want to debate Gore in prime time, perhaps someone else could take his place.

Rebecca Blood returns from vacation to write the best essay on weblogs I've seen yet. She writes about the history and development of the form, but more importantly, she makes some fantastic points about the effects keeping a weblog can have on the way the weblogger thinks:

As he enunciates his opinions daily, this new awareness of his inner life may develop into a trust in his own perspective. His own reactions--to a poem, to other people, and, yes, to the media--will carry more weight with him. Accustomed to expressing his thoughts on his website, he will be able to more fully articulate his opinions to himself and others. He will become impatient with waiting to see what others think before he decides, and will begin to act in accordance with his inner voice instead. Ideally, he will become less reflexive and more reflective, and find his own opinions and ideas worthy of serious consideration.

I spotted this at Kestrel's Nest, but I expect that a lot of webloggers are going to be linking this in the next few days.

I'm finally trying to get active with my new site, the Blog of Holding. If you're interested in the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, check it out. I'm looking for a few good collaborators, so drop me a line if you'd like to get involved.

England's next "reality" series actually sounds more interesting than existing offerings: Jailbreak will place contestants in a prison, from which they must escape to win. The inmates are competing more against the guards than each other, and can split the prize if they cooperate to escape.

In the post-Columbine world, profiling returns to schools along with the students.

"I'm fearful once we start putting these things out, every principal in America is going to come up with (the names of) 10 kids," Schiraldi said. "Putting out a profile booklet, slapping a couple of cameras up, a metal detector or two are bromides while the ulcer festers beneath.

"I think when we're trying to figure out what makes kids tick, we ought to talk to parents, teachers, child psychologists, students themselves, not people called 'special agent,"' he said.

I have this nagging fear that were such measures common in high schools when I was a student, I would have been counted among the "usual suspects", more for my associations with others than for my own behavior.

Kevin Warwick's outrageous claims about the future of cybernetics are finally drawing some skepticism. Unfortunately, he may be bringing the entire discipline into disrepute.

At a recent job interview (before I joined the company I now work for) my prospects were ruined as the interviewer was convinced my degree lay in the realms of fiction. He'd arrived at this conclusion by reading several of Warwick's books, and heard numerous quotes and soundbites in the press. In light of the fact that not many people know that cybernetics is actually a very varied and technical subject, it was difficult to convince him otherwise.

The sensationalist "cyborg" seems to be distracting those outside the field of cybernetics from practical real-world applications such as realtime systems and feedback theory.

Survivor is news! Really! A couple of newspapers attempt to justify their decision to run front-page stories on the TV show. [via Media News]

Just when I thought there wasn't a new low to which the MPAA could stoop, now they want to control what TV shows you can record.

Led by the Motion Picture Association of America, copyright holders want the FCC to require that circuitry be built into nearly every digital TV device - receivers, VCRs and set-top boxes - that will prevent recording programs carrying copy protection information set by the program's owner.

The various media industries will not be happy as long as you can play any music or video recording more than once without paying for it separately each and every time. Publishers are probably looking for a way to charge readers every time they open the cover of a book, too.

Hotter than habanero? According to Ethel, an Indian chili has been found to be at least 50% hotter than the previous record-holder. While I love habanero sauces, I'll admit to using my Melinda's XXXXtra Hot Reserve rather sparingly; besides, for pure flavor, I've come to prefer the smoky taste of chipotles over sheer heat.

Dan Gillmor isn't thrilled with the idea of an implanted electronic leash to "protect" children.

Dennis Hopper got caught with marijuana? I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Ben Brown has not been taking the failure of his startup well, but he seems to be trying a new project with the technology. Good luck! [via MeFi]

Microsoft has been in business for 25 years now. One commentator who's written about the company for years relates the company's attempts to handle her.

Microsoft's PR agency started keeping a dossier on me, as they did a number of other reporters they felt they needed to re-educate by withholding their access to key executives as punishment. Then I got blacklisted from an on-campus event that was open to other members of the press. Microsoft suggested to a couple of my bosses at Ziff that I be removed from the Microsoft beat, a suggestion which only endeared me more to my newsroom colleagues.

I wish I could believe that Microsoft put more of their effort into releasing better products instead of trying to control people's perceptions of them.