November 2001 Archives

YayDir is the latest weblog directory and update tracker. Or will be, anyway; it seems to be a work in progress. [spreading the word for Firda]

I swore off masively multi-player roleplaying games several years ago, when I had a bad experience with the early days of Ultima Online, but Lost Continents may force me to reconsider. It's got a very cool pulp / steampunk feel to it, based on the pictures of the Atomic Mummy, the Chimpatron, and a really spiffy flying machine.

I've just read a mildly disturbing exchange of posts on a few weblogs. I don't want to link, because the parties involved have just settled matters between themselves, and I wouldn't want to risk stirring things up between them. Anyway, it all came down to a disagreement about the rights and obligations of a weblogger (or other site admin) towards users who post comments to his site.

Sometime in the next month, I plan to switch my weblog over to a different content management system, one which includes a comment system that I want to use, to allow readers to post their own remarks about my entries. I'm not expecting a lot of comments from my small (if not imaginary) reader base, but my paranoid mind can't help but imagine somebody coming in and making a deliberate effort to cause trouble, and my needing to delete rude or disruptive posts.

So, it seems the thing to do is put up some kind of Acceptable Use Policy and hope I never have to enforce it.

Those Cool Guys may have a song entitled "Shit, Piss, and Corruption", but they seem to have taken down the MP3.

Let me explain my expression of displeasure yesterday. I've been working on configuring a couple of Windows 2000 clusters this week. Certain clustered resources weren't working, or weren't failing over from one machine to the other. After at least a day of banging my head against various walls, I finally learned that the machines were infected with some strain of the NIMDA worm. Since then, I (with a great deal of help from my boss) have been working on disinfecting and protecting these new machines as well as we can. It looks like I'll be spending today, and a considerable part of tomorrow, fixing the damage, but at least we appear to have the matter under control.

Useful reference site of the day: The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation. [via Neil Gaiman]

'We looked at art that goes back to the dawn of humanity and found it had one common feature: animal-human hybrids,' said Dr Christopher Chippindale, of Cambridge University's museum of archaeology and anthropology. 'Werewolves and vampires are as old as art, in other words. These composite beings, from a world between humans and animals, are a common theme from the beginning of painting.'

Are cave paintings of werecritters for real, or is Rossi seeding stories into The Guardian? [via Plastic]

Dan Gillmor gets why leaving backdoors in security software for our helpful government agencies is such a bad idea:

But we have to ask something further. What will Symantec and the other antivirus companies do about this? Will they, too, alter their software to leave all of us vulnerable not just to the FBI but any hacker who finds a way to mimic the signature of the FBI's surveillance tools?

(Emphasis mine.) Unfortunately, at this point, I think the company's committed to buying McAfee to save us from unpleasantness like the current NIMDA incursion; damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Shit, piss, and corruption. Today is gonna be a long day....

The Google search engine may be one of the most useful sites on the web, but it's turning out to be a little too useful for crackers.

Some clever empiricist appears to have been abusing Google to attack Web servers, switches and routers in a novel way, by crafting search terms to include known exploits. Such a search will occasionally yield active Web pages used by administrators. On top of that, a number of them have already been cached. It's reasonable to surmise that a hacker has been using Google not merely to search for vulnerabilities, but as a proxy to hide behind while executing attacks.

Thanksgiving was good. I got to see my cousin and his wife who had come up from Florida. There was far more food than the small group who gathered at my uncle's table could eat, but it was all good, and my dishes were well received. That evening, we all sat around and watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? which I'd been meaning to see for months. Plus, the Bulldogs beat the hated Rebels in the only football game I really give a damn about.

Also last night, after I was done with my pre-cook, I decided to take in a late showing of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. My verdict? I could nitpick a lot of things if I really wanted to, but my face spent most of the movie curled into the kind of goofy, involuntary grin that means I was having a great time, even if I wanted to maintain some high-falutin' pose to the contrary. I caught a few elements at odds with the book which bothered me (especially the Sorting Hat's audible deliberation over Harry's house), but it was still one of the most faithful film adaptations of a novel I've ever seen. Also, some scenes seemed a bit rushed in an attempt to fit too much into the movie's (already two and a half hours) running time, but I'd be hard pressed to think of anything that could have been left out without sacrificing significant plot points. The accellerated pace may not have given the actors enough of a chance to truly shine, but it's hard to see how it could have done any better without tackin on yet another hour or so. The atmosphere and look of Harry's world were an incredible translation, with a few minor changes that I think enhanced the visual presentation of the tale. Despite my quibbles, I'd have to say that this first film was a triumph, and I hope the rest of the series can live up to this standard.

I'm cooking my share of Thanksgiving dinner at the moment, which is to say, I'm sitting around ripping CDs while I listen for the timer. I did all the hard parts last night; all the dishes I'm taking over to my uncle's house (Much More Than Mushrooms, French Onion Casserole, and Bread Pudding) are the sort of things that need to set overnight before baking. All I have to do today is pop them in the oven. In fact, I'm considering a little last-minute addition: A clear rum sauce to go along with the bread pudding.

BMG's first experiment with rip-proof CDs has been a disaster; customer pressure has led them to replace copy-protected Natalie Imbruglia disks with a rippable version on demand.

Of course, whether BMG will release other CDs that have been protected by Cactus - or, for that matter, other copy-protection mechanisms, such as Macrovision's SafeAudio - remains to be seen. Given Virgin's stance, we reckon the company is most likely to try again but this time advise consumers through a sticker on the CD packaging.

Let's see how fast those labelled, rip-proof CDs fail to sell to informed buyers; an open, honest approach should prove whether or not consumers are willing to put up with use restrictions.

It looks like the decomposing corpse of Douglas Adams is going to have a new book out next year. In case you can't tell, I'm rather skeptical of the idea of digging through a dead author's notes in order to publish one last work which the author never got to edit to his own satisfaction. [via Ars Technica]

One of the fundamental truths of technology (as I told my parents when we were talking about what I want for Christmas) is that as soon as you get a top-of-the-line piece of gear, a newer, better model will be announced. You can either live with what you've got, or let it drive you crazy. (But stiil, 16 MB RAM? *sigh*)

I think yesterday may have been the last day of warm weather of the year here in St. Louis. It's been five and a half years since I moved up here from Mississippi, and I still hate even the mildest of cold weather. Physically, I can cope — my body has a regrettable amount of insulation. Psychologically, however, I don't cope well with the cold.

If P.T. Barnum were alive today, he'd probably observe that there's an eBay account born every minute. Case in point: As of this writing, an Xbox box — that's right, the box the game console came in — has been bid up to $366.

In class this week (Clustering! Fun fun fun!), and busy getting ready for Thanksgiving when I'm not.

It's less than a week until Thanksgiving. I've mentioned before that I've been told that if I'm going to stay in St. Louis again, I will be expected to cook. Not that that's a problem; I've got a couple of favorites I'll be happy for an excuse to make, plus a new recipe to try. It's called Much More Than Mushrooms. My mother doesn't remember where she found this one, but she swears I'll love it. I've been meaning to post this in case anyone else wants to give this a shot (plus have a copy that I can get to from work to make a shopping list). I'll also be making the French Onion Casserole and Bread Pudding that got raves last year.

• 1 pound mushrooms, sliced
• 4 tablespoons butter or margarine
• 1/2 cup chopped green onions
• 1/2 cups chopped celery
• 1/2 cups chopped green pepper
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 2 teaspoons chopped parsley
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 6 slices firm white bread
• 3 eggs
• 2 cups milk
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan or Romano cheese

Sauté Mushrooms in butter for 5 minutes. Add green onions, celery, green pepper, salt, pepper and parsley; cook about 3 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in mayonnaise and set aside.

Remove crust from bread and cut into 1-inch squares. Put half the bread in a greased 2-1/2 qt. casserole. Spoon mushrooms mixture over the bread, and then cover with remaining bread. Beat eggs and milk together until frothy; pour over mixture in casserole. Refrigerate, covered, for at least 1 hour or as long as overnight. Bake, uncovered, in a 325 degree oven for 50 minutes. Remove from oven and sprinkle cheese over top; return to oven and bake 10 minutes or until golden brown. Makes 6 servings.

My culinary hero Alton Brown (of Food TV's Good Eats series) finally has his own website! [via GirlHacker] Of course, there's still a great fan page around, notable for its transcripts of show episodes.

Why we're still seeing new releases of obsolete browsers. [via Zeldman] I'm not going to waste a lot of sleep making my new page Netscape 4.x compliant; in fact, it'll probably look pretty plain-jane on any non-CSS browser. I will provide a link explaining why my page looks like crap, but I won't deny access.

Windows XP may have better security than its personal-market predecessors, but does that really matter if you have to perform everyday tasks with an administrator-level account?

Many aspects of this will cause gales of mirth in the Linux camp, where the security systems are a model of Stalinistic structured control-freakery (well, that's what we think, anyway). Doing your day to day work from an admin account isn't good practice, but XP can easily be installed with just that assumption. And having programs that won't let you run them unless you're admin will quite likely mean Joe Public will wind up letting everybody run as admin. If he can figure out how, that is.

Unfortunately, here at work, some of our lusers have gone on and upgraded to XP. (There is justification in some cases, but it's still a support nightmare.) The worst part is when some program lets you go through all the motions of installing or configuring something, only to have your work disappear without any explanation why. One luser was trying to set up a system ODBC data source according to e-mailed instructions, and called me over because he thought I hadn't given him database access. He went through all the right steps, yet the data source never appeared in his list, and no error message ever popped up. We eventually realized that it was because he didn't have admin privs, and I managed to push him off on Desktop Support.

Chuck writes about the game Halo, and how Larry Niven deserves some credit for inspiring the setting for the new vdeo game Halo. I was kind of skeptical about whether Niven truly pioneered the concept, although his novel Ringworld certainly popularized it. Out of curiosity, I dug a little and found the Dyson Sphere FAQ; while it acknowledges that Freeman Dyson got his inspiration from other works, it does credit Niven for introducing the idea of a ringworld.

I have to admit, I was irritated a few years ago when two different meteor-impact disaster movies hit the big screen, and no one mentioned Lucifer's Hammer. Given the quality of the films in question, though, I'm sure Niven and Pournelle were just as happy to avoid any blame.

An online multiplayer RPG, with television and possibly movie tie-ins, and an emphasis on good storytelling? Sounds to me like one step closer to Dream Park. A while back, I seem to remember hearing about some group who were working on building a real Dream Park; I'll have to see if I can find anything current.

I think we can safely say that national ID cards will never get off the ground if even an arch-conservative like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia opposes the idea.

Apparently, Norton Antivirus (which I have on my home machine) has been crying wolf or, more to the point, crying W32.Nimda.enc(dr). Is that why I was having problems last weekend trying to install No One Lives Forever?

I think I've managed to figure out my little CSS layout problem of a few days ago. I tried to drop a sample inline, but my code seems to work everywhere except within my existing page structure. Heck, it even worked OK on my Blogger preview page. Well, take my word for it until I can get a sample up on my development site.

What still bothers me is that I'm still ending up with five layers of nested <div> tags: two levels to create my desired page structure, and three more for the layout of individual entries. Can someone remind me of the supposed advantages of doing layout via style sheets rather than tables? I'm probably going to stick with the CSS layout though, because it'll surely be lighter than the mess of tables and border / spacer GIFs I'm using now.

I'm surprised that there don't seem to be more sites dedicated to identifying copy-protected CDs that can't be ripped by MP3 software. Only one American site is listed, and the article questions its reliability.

This list, which also includes responses from other people, carries few certainties, however. Most of the sightings are speculative, with other people weighing in to dispute original reports. Listed CDs range from Britney Spears' "Britney" to Aerosmith's "Just Push Play."

As experts have noted, the widely varying reports are exacerbated partly because CD ripping remains an unscientific process, varying widely from machine to machine. Computers configured differently have varying rates of success or introduce their own errors, and individuals' lack of technical experience can translate into poorly recorded MP3 files.

There's another site listing UK releases which may not be rippable, and I'll be keeping an eye out for other such sites. I'm more than willing to pay for my music (though I would prefer more options like buying individual tracks and try-before-you-buy), but I have no patience for artificial controls on how I can use it once I've paid for it.

The first review is out for the Sony PDA I've been drooling over for weeks. The reviewer's description of the screen is pretty disappointing; I guess I'll have to get my hands on one when they're released, and judge for myself.

Another fire alarm this morning; I never did find out if the last one was for real. Today, I think everybody just trooped back in when the alarms stopped (our alarms are so irritating that we have to leave the building), and the fire department never did show up.

Feature I want to see in MP3 recording software: When you rip an entire CD to digital format, automatically generate a playlist with the songs from that album, in order. Random access to your whole music collection is great, but there are some albums that are best listened to in the original order. In fact, some albums may make your head explode if you listen to them in the wrong order. Update: Rob Bender sent me a spiffy little Python script to iterate through a directory structure (such as the /artist/album structure created by MusicMatch) and auto-generate playlists; sorry things have been too hectic for me to thank you via e-mail.

If any CSS layout geniuses are reading this, I could use some help. I've got some ideas that I want to use in the template for the next version of my weblog, but I'm kind of at a loss how to implement them without using tables. In particular, I want to arrange links, timestamps, etc. around each entry aligned to four corners of a box. Let me show you what I mean using tables:

[Title]	[Timestamp]
(Borders turned on to show layout only.) I'm sure there has to be some way to reproduce this layout using Cascading Style Sheets and a few nested <div>s or <span>s; once I have that, I'm sure I can color, box, or otherwise style this layout to my satisfaction. The part I don't understand is how to put left-aligned and right-aligned elements on the same line. If anybody can explain to me how to do it, or can point me towards a resource that can help me out, please drop me a line.
[Author]	[Link] [Comments]

Wow, I just got ripped.

Along with pretty much every Buffy: The Vampire Slayer fan in the greater St. Louis area, from what I can tell. I've been waiting for the special all-singing, all-dancing episode of Buffy since Tuesday, the night it was broadcast on real UPN affiliates. You know, the one I said was going to run about ten minutes overtime, but only on the first showing. The one that was going to be rebroadcast in an edited, one-hour version in the future. Finally, after I spend all week avoiding spoilers, the Saturday afternoon block of UPN programming (Enterprise, Roswell, and Buffy) on our local WB station airs. Guess which version we got to see? Yup, the one-hour version. Dammit. Anybody know where I can get a bootleg?

Well, at least I got to see The Kiss.

Plus, I decided today to check out a new computer game I've been hearing about, but never played: No One Lives Forever. When I got home, I found out that my copy of the Game of the Year Edition has a special feature that's not listed on the box or on the website: A free copy of the Nimda worm hidden in one of the install files! My antivirus software caught it before it could do me any damage, but I'm left with a coaster instead of an install disk.

The heck with it. I gotta get out of here before I break something.

"...all you really need to know about a TV program can be learned in the first five minutes."

Put simply, in a world where there are essentially no costs to replicate content and it is effectively impossible to stop anyone from doing so at will, the current economic model underpinning content creation will be dead. Despite the protestations of lawyers, (certain) rock bands, and legislatures (all on the same losing side, oddly enough), we are entering that brave new world.

If, as this hard technology determinist viewpoint suggests, content is destined to be free - i.e., the content creators and publishers will not be directly compensated the way they are today when you make a purchase from your local CD store - then the real question is what system could replace the content compensation system that has worked quite well for the last 300 years. However, implementing revenue models for infinitely redistributable goods is not an entirely novel question, and there are several economic models that can support the creation of content. What there may not be is enough revenue to support the publishers of that content in addition to the authors, which helps explain why the RIAA is so eager to thwart digital distribution. When an ecosystem undergoes severe environmental changes, certain organisms that were previously essential - like the cyanobacteria that originally converted carbon dioxide to oxygen, or the record companies' A&R men - may recede to minor ecological niches.

Please Steal This Essay; I stole it from Kulesh. This looks to be the beginning of a good series on the problems of charging for information age content in an industrial age economy.

Given this result, one might conclude that Microsoft is actively sabotaging the work of web standards and W3C—or at the very least, demonstrating an almost unbelievable lack of competence. Microsoft points to W3C specifications when explaining why they lock competitors’ browsers out of MSN, yet none of the documents published on MSN follow these W3C specifications. In any case, it will be harder for Microsoft to blame browser lockouts on standards in the future.

The chief of technology for the Opera alternative web browser looks at the recent MSN debacle, in which Microsoft denied non-Internet Explorer users access to the site.

It is an incredible relief to read that folks within the Bush administration don't seem to actively support the boneheaded idea of a universal national ID card.

As technology companies promote the idea of a national identification card, the president's special adviser on cyber-security said Wednesday the idea has little support within the Bush administration.

Richard Clarke said he couldn't name one official who supports the idea as proposed, although conceding that the administration doesn't yet have a formal position on the concept.

This appears to confirm that the only people really in favor of this boondoggle are a handful of opportunistic technologists (Ellison, McNealy, etc.) who want to promote their pet products. [via David Chess]

This morning's entertainment at work was provided by a fire alarm; I have no idea how real, or how serious, the fire was. I do know that we have one of the most obnoxious fire alarms I've ever heard, capable of physically driving all the employees out of the building. We were able to go back in after about half an hour, though. At least this wasn't as bad as the gas leak we had when I worked on the 19th floor of the University Club Tower.

I finally figured out the end-stage of Michael Jackson's physical transformation last night. The loss of pigmentation, the disappearing nose, the unfamiliarity with Earth customs... His Reticulan DNA is finally expressing itself, and he'll be a full-blown gray alien by the end of the decade. I'm just waiting for his eyes to start getting larger.

Again, I'm trying to avoid dumping money and time into Windows XP for as long as possible, but Dr. Q points to some really good tips for any early adopters out there. I just hope I'll be able to find these when I (eventually and inevitably) do succumb.

Of course, even if The Tick disappoints, I'm really looking forward to my next major dose of superheroics.

This is what geeks love about team comics. It’s a particular subgenre, born out of conversations that start with questions like, “If Batman and Captain America fought, who would win?” This is what we geeks were talking about when you normal people were playing sports and kissing. We want to know why these heroes are the way they are—we want to know how they act when they’re off duty. “We’re total geeks about this stuff, but if we do our job right then a mainstream audience will get this as well,” says Timm. “We try to make the show for the 12-year-old in all of us.”

[via TV Barn]

"Gravity... is a harsh mistress."

Yeah, I watched the premiere of Fox's new live-action adaptation of The Tick last now. And as much about the show as I found irritating, especially compared to the old cartoon series, I think I maintained a broad, silly grin throughout most of the show. I dunno; I'll have to see how the show goes, and how long it lasts. But I think there are a lot of things I'm going to miss; Captain Liberty was much funnier as American Made, I doubt they'll ever have villains as over-the-top as Chairface Chippendale, and worst of all, I miss the old theme song.

"Dut Dweeee... Dut dut dut Dwee dow..."

Next week, Bill Gates will claim to have invented the transistor, and he'll probably be responsible for the discovery of fire by the end of the year. P.S. In all fairness, I should point out that Neal Stephenson, in his great essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line", also credits relatively standardized PC hardware, popularized by MS-DOS, with providing a platform for today's open source movement.

I hate anti-Irish prejudice. Having a last name with an apostrophe can cause all kinds of problems when software isn't expecting a string delimiter there.

System builders are already learning to hate Windows XP, for the close ties between installation and hardware configuration in the name of security.

Every time the manufacturer changes the make of hard drive he's putting in his systems, he needs to create a fresh recovery disk for the PC, because of driver issues with WinXP. This was something that was never a problem with Windows 98 or ME.

And changing the make of the hard drive also means the system builder has to create a new universal cloning module - the master version of the software to be pre-installed on all the PCs.

The blog thing:

Here's the thing for me. I've kept books of things I like since I was a kid, before knowing they were called commonplace books. Sharing such things was a natural outgrowth of enthusiasm. Bothering with whether anybody gave a damn seemed extraneous.

Yeah, but if somebody's having fun with that extraneous part — if that's where their enthusiasm lies — what's the problem? [via Doc]

Another day of working with the consultants. Remember, people: down, not across.

I watched the first episode of the new series 24 last night. In case you haven't heard of it (which would seem to require not having watched any FOX network programming over the past month in order to avoid the advertising onslaught), each hour-long episode represents one hour of real time on a particularly wild day. Last night's episode began at midnight, and ended at 1:00 AM, on the day of the California presidential primary.

Wow. That was only one hour?

At the very least, the series premiere was one of the most relentlessly paced hours of television I've watched in recent memory. There was so much going on that I'm reluctant to critique it until I've watched it again, but I did enjoy myself. I suspect the show's biggest problem will be a high barrier to entry for new viewers. I've seen plenty of shows where it was easy to get lost if you missed an episode or two; when watching 24, I'd be reluctant to take a bathroom break for fear of missing something critical.

We've had a lot of consultants in for various projects over the past few months, and for the most part, they haven't been too bad. Just the same, I find it hard to disagree with this Demotivator about the profession.

There's a good Buffy article up at Slate.

But it breaks the iron law of TV formula. It ruthlessly mocks its own conventions and catch phrases (and pop culture in general). It's a big ratings deal when Sherry Stringfield exits or returns to ER. On Buffy, more central characters have now left the show than there were central characters to begin with. Relationships morph, characters become good or evil, uncannily nonhuman, or gay. Faced with overwhelming pressure to handle sensitive issues with Very Special Episode sanctimony and obvious right-thinking agitprop, Whedon is stubbornly, heroically, creatively perverse. Buffy boasts the least stupid shows ever done on date rape, teen suicide, and seducer teachers. After Willow Rosenberg, the witch, got an enchanted gal-pal, scandalizing viewers shocked by realistic lesbian characters, Whedon spoke out: "I've made a mistake by trying to shove this lifestyle—which is embraced by, maybe, at most, 10 percent of Americans—down people's throats. So I'm going to take it back, and from now on, Willow will no longer be a Jew." His is the first show truly to master the teen native tongue, sarcasm.

Those of you who aren't living in a UPN-free zone, remember: Tonight's episode, the musical, is scheduled to run about ten minutes long this broadcast only. And don't tell me anything before I get to watch it this weekend.

Jeffrey Zeldman has been working on a style guide for the New York Public Libraries, which looks like a good jumping-off point for standards-compliant web design.

I'm glad to see that Aaron McGruder, the creator of The Boondocks, isn't taking his strip's cancellation by some papers personally.

I anticipated getting canceled by the New York Daily News while I was doing the strips ... I figured given New York, the sensitivity there, it wouldn't go over well and I'd probably get dropped from the New York papers. But for me it was a worthwhile gamble. And there's still no guarantee that the New York Daily News will ever start running it again. ... It's New York City ... and they've gone through a lot, and you can't really expect them to take the jokes well. I've tried to be really careful to not make light at all of the death and suffering, which, like everybody else, I feel really bad about. But I have a different perspective on things than what the media's putting out, and I thought it was important to voice that, and if it meant losing the New York papers, I think it was worth it.

I know a lot of fans (the kind who don't know how to distinguish between editorial judgement and censorship) had a pretty harsh reaction to the papers that dropped his strip.

A security hole in Microsoft's Passport security could have compromised credit card information? I'm shocked! (Shocked that it took this long to discover, anyway.) [via Cam]

I'll be spending Thanksgiving in St. Louis, without my parents, again this year. Fortunately, I have plenty of relatives in the area, and a few coming in from out of town, to spend the holiday with. Naturally, as soon as I accepted my aunt & uncle's standing invitation, they asked me what I was going to cook; last year's French onion casserole and bread pudding made such an impact that they were more than happy for a repeat. Of course, I need to build on last year's selections; I might try making some kind of rum sauce as an addition to my usual bread pudding recipe, and my mother has already passed on a "much more than mushrooms" dish which she recently discovered; I'll try to post that recipe ahead of time.

Who needs sleep when you have Civilization III?

Shit.

I know a lot of folks are excited about Apple's recent release of its iPod portable hard drive / MP3 player, but I don't really get the excitement. (Although I come a lot closer to getting the excitement than I do to getting all the vitriol that the usual Apple-bashers are spewing.) Yes, it is a lot more versatile than the pure MP3 jukeboxes, but I'm pretty sure I saw the Terapin Mine over at Think Geek well before Apple's announcement. It appears to be bigger than the iPod, and definitely not as cute, and it does cost a bit more. However, it has a distinct advantage in that it can be hooked directly to devices other than the most recent Macs — televisions, digital cameras, etc. Not that either device is at the top of my gizmo wish list, but it seems worth a comparison.

Sony's dispute with a robotic-dog hacker, which I mentioned yesterday, turns out to be a lot more complex than it appeared at first glance.

"Aibo is an exciting toy, but Aibopet's enhancements kept the excitement going," said Richard Walkus, an Aibo owner. "He's made tools to see what mood Aibo was in, or set it in different life stages, or have better wireless communications. There are tools to see in real time what Aibo sees, and vital signs, emotions, mood, voice recognition. Those were enhancements riding on top of Sony's Aibo that Aibopet created."

But the key thing to remember about Aibopet's stuff, Walkus said, is that all of his programs were enhancements to existing Sony software; and to use it, Aibo owners had to purchase the original software from Aibo.

For example, Sony has a programming language for the Aibo called Rcode that sells for $34 (the programs are sold on Sony Memory Sticks). Aibopet has developed an enhanced version of Rcode that is available for free, but the only way it can be used is if an owner first buys a $34 stick from Sony.

Wired also looks at Aibo's competition in the smart-toy category: A series of robotic insects based on a different philosophy of artificial intelligence. The bugs are a lot cheaper, but they don't look as cuddly as cute and cuddly as the cybermutts.

By the way, if I do get some sort of Palm-based PDA, one of the first programs I want to install is Jeff Jetton's Tricorder. What's the point of having a gadget that looks like you stole it from Captain Archer's quarters if you can't point it at someone and say, "The subject appears to be emitting an intense stream of bogons" or "I'm reading an abnormally high quantity of cheese in this television program"?

I finally heard back from Think Outside, and the word is that their Stowaway Keyboard for the Sony Clié won't work with the PEG-T415 model I've been drooling over for the past week. Disappointing, but they claim that they're working on a PEG-T415 "solution", so I'm not quite ready to give up hope.

Passing on a Public Service Announcment from Fresh Hell: Next week's Buffy the Vampire Slayer — the much-touted musical episode — will run into overtime. Another great advantage to having a TiVo: As soon as this change makes the electronic schedule, my recorder should pick it up, as it did with the 70-minute Smallville premiere. Those of you with old-school VCRs should adjust them accordingly. P.S. Could allowing this overrun be an attempted tactical strike by UPN against rival networks WB (Smallville) and FOX (the 24 premiere)? Another reason to be glad I don't get Buffy until the weekend.

The only time Microsoft gives more than lip service to open standards is when they want to edge into a new market.

Jason recommends a new ad-blocking applet called AntiPopUp. I'll have to give this a try.

Lemony Snicket speaks!

It is natural now to wonder how some people can do terrible things, how we can stay strong when something terrible could happen to us at any moment, whether it is right to inflict horror on other people because it has been inflicted on us. The answers are unlikely to be found in stories that ignore rather than acknowledge these questions. I have found myself reading the work of Raymond Chandler. There's comfort, I find, in the methods employed in the world of Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe — careful observation, an incisive way with words, quiet restraint in the face of deceitful and irredeemable acts.

Stories like these aren't cheerful, but they offer a truth — that real trouble cannot be erased, only endured — that is more soothing to me than any determinedly cheerful grin. Certainly there are times when we want to escape to a trouble-free, imaginary world. But when the real world is so searing that it cannot be glossed over, we can find value in stories that admit the world is tumultuous, instead of reassuring us that it is not.

Confession: I have yet to read any of the "A Series of Unfortunate Events" books, though I hope to change that. I've finally picked up The Bad Beginning, and it's on my read queue; I really need to get to it so that I can pass it on to the mouldering corpse of Britney Spears. [via Neil Gaiman]

Sony clamps down on warez for robot dogs.

I have to assume that the closers won last night, and that we're safe until at least 2020.