From Wired: This Blog Is 100 Percent Solar.
Most web-hosting companies pride themselves on the speed and reliability of the servers they house in their data centers.
But for a select few, the pride comes from knowing that the electricity coursing through their servers is 100 percent clean.
Over the past several years, these boutique firms have carved out a "green" niche in the crowded web-hosting market by running data centers powered entirely by solar panels.
The panels are not only good for the environment, they're also good for business. In addition to saving the companies thousands of dollars a month in electric bills, they're drawing in customers from all over the world who want to host their websites in a green data center. [continue]
From the New York Times: Interactive 'Clickers' Changing Classrooms.
Professor Ross Cheit put it to the students in his "Ethics and Public Policy" class at Brown University: Are you morally obliged to report cheating if you know about it? The room began to hum, but no one so much as raised a hand.
Still, within 90 seconds, Cheit had roughly 150 student responses displayed on an overhead screen, plotted as a multicolored bar graph -- 64 percent said yes, 35 percent, no.
Several times each class, Cheit's students answer his questions using handheld wireless devices that resemble television remote controls.
The devices, which the students call "clickers," are being used on hundreds of college campuses and are even finding their way into grade schools.
They alter classroom dynamics, engaging students in large, impersonal lecture halls with the power of mass feedback. "Clickers" ease fears of giving a wrong answer in front of peers, or of expressing unpopular opinions. [continue]
You'll need a password in order to read the rest of the article.
From The Register: UK computer boffins build sign language avatar.
Computer scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have joined forces with animation specialists at Televirtual, and the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) to create a signing avatar capable of translating written web pages into British sign language.
Two signing experts from the RNID helped to translate the physicality of British sign Language into a set of symbols. These symbols have been further translated into computer code by UEA researchers, the BBC reports, which will prompt Guido to animate the appropriate gesture. [continue]
Related:
Virtual signer for deaf web users - BBC
From csmonitor.com: Goal: educate world's kids with $100 PCs.
A cheap laptop in the hands of every child in the developing world. It's the kind of dream reminiscent of the dotcom fervor of the 1990s — and a personal goal of Nicholas Negroponte since the 1980s. But only recently has the funding been secured to move forward on his goal: a portable computer that can survive excessive dust and 130-degree days, recharge itself in villages with no power, and hook up to the Internet when the nearest server is hundreds of miles away. The cost? No more than $100.
"What actually happened was I got sufficiently irritated by people telling me it wasn't possible," says Mr. Negroponte, chairman and cofounder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here in Cambridge. "I'm a firm believer that half of the solution comes from sheer resolve." [continue]
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Low-cost laptops for kids in need
Related news articles:
Group Puts $100 Laptops in Poor Countries - LinuxInsider
Digital guru floats sub-$100 PC - BBC
From MIT.edu:
MIT Media Lab: $100.00 laptop
Nicholas Negroponte
Now here's a completely fascinating BBC article about children in India teaching themselves how to use computers. The story starts with an IT worker named Sugata Mitra, who set up a computer kiosk for poor kids and left it for them to play with.
What happened next amazed him. They taught themselves how to use it.
Sugata took his experiment further and set up computers amongst the underprivileged communities of Delhi.
He built special kiosks where only children could reach the keyboard, and left them connected to the internet. In each case the results were the same.
Without adult intervention, the children got to grips with the technology, even with their limited understanding of English.
Sugata was able to make some important but controversial observations.
"Groups of children given adequate digital resources can meet the objectives of primary education on their own - most of the objectives." [continue]
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Simputer
Simple computers for hard lives
Elsewhere:
Hole in the Wall - www.niitholeinthewall.com
Reporter's Notebook: Making Connections - pbs.org
Kids-eye view: Looking through the Hole in the Wall -pbs.org
Hole in the Wall Project - ncl.ac.uk
‘HOLE IN THE WALL’- a human concept - the-south-asian.com
A Wired article, Keyboard is Mightier than Sword, notes:
...despite advances in video technology, text-based games, both online and off, have maintained a following. [continue]
Now that's nice to hear. I've never understood the appeal of today's glitzy computer games. The only computer game I ever loved was a completely text-based thing called Zork, and I only stopped playing it because it was far too addictive.
Do any of you remember the text-based version of Zork? You can play it online now, for free. Just imagine: You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all the windows are barred. And so it all begins.
From the National Post: Med students get dose of virtual reality.
A video game-inspired female character resembling Tomb Raider's Lara Croft is a promising new tool to teach aspiring physicians better bedside manners, research by her Canadian and U.S. inventors has shown.
Students at the University of Florida enter a mock examination room where they are greeted by the DIgital ANimated Avatar, a life-size projected image on one wall of a 19-year-old Caucasian woman apparently suffering acute abdominal pain.
Not only must they ask the right questions to know what ails "Diana," students learn to read her non-verbal cues -- grimaces of pain, nods and shuffles -- and have to demonstrate empathy by maintaining eye contact with the avatar.
It is the first simulation system tailored to rehearse the crucial art of the patient-doctor interview, and represents a major advance over educational videos and books available to medical students in the past. [continue]
From a posting at Techdirt: College Student Beating Microsoft in Court.
A student at Kent State University sold a copy of two Microsoft software packages on eBay. He was then sued in federal court by Microsoft, who threw four lawyers at the case, making a number of claims and allegations. The student is representing himself and appears to be winning his case. Microsoft now wants to back out of the lawsuit, but the student won't let them out. [continue]
The student's detailed account of all this is at prfree.com: Ebay Sues David Zamos Over Sale Of 2 Legitimate Software Titles- Apparent Mistake- Won't Appologize.
I wonder if David is has any desire to use Microsoft software now, or if he's switched to free alternatives like Linux and OpenOffice.
Related:
Make your Windows desktop apps open source - NewsForge.com
From ZDNet Australia: How to track a PC anywhere it connects to the Net.
Anonymous Internet access is now a thing of the past. A doctoral student at the University of California has conclusively fingerprinted computer hardware remotely, allowing it to be tracked wherever it is on the Internet.
In a paper on his research, primary author and Ph.D. student Tadayoshi Kohno said: "There are now a number of powerful techniques for remote operating system fingerprinting, that is, remotely determining the operating systems of devices on the Internet. We push this idea further and introduce the notion of remote physical device fingerprinting ... without the fingerprinted device's known cooperation." [continue]
This is going to make certain snoopy governments very happy.
From Engadget: HOW-TO: Turn your laptop into a home security system.
In light of recent events, we thought it might be a good idea to show you how to whip up a low-cost home surveillance system. Not only is this system useful for nabbing burglars, British or otherwise, but it can also be used to check in on your pets (warm-blooded or robotic), or merely to provide some added piece of mind that house and home are still standing.
With almost any generic webcam and some relatively cheap software, you can set up a motion-detecting security camera, a periodically refreshed image of your home interior/exterior, or even a live video feed direct from the excitement of your empty living room. [continue]
Font geeks will love this one: BitFontMaker invites you to to create your own bitmap font, which you can then save in Truetype (.ttf) format for use on your own computer. The help page is all in Japanese, but the main page is in English, and seems straightforward enough.
I'm amused by the "gryphs map" tab. They mean glyphs, I think.
Link found at Kottke.org's remaindered links.
Bill Gates now says he supports interoperability. Oh, right. Håkon Wium Lie responds to that nonsense here at The Register.
Related:
Gates' interoperability claim ‘is nonsense’ - ZDnet.com au
Bill Gates Claims OSS Has Poor Interoperability - Slashdot
When spammers get caught and sent off to jail, I do a little happy dance. From New Scientist, here's one of these fine stories: Project Honeypot aims to trap spammers.
A blow-by-blow account of how one of the world's most prolific senders of spam email was tracked down and prosecuted had an audience of spam fighters on the edge of their seats last week.
After years developing anti-spam technology and drafting legislation to outlaw spammers, the delegates at MIT's annual Spam Conference in Boston, US, were overjoyed to see the culprit nailed. "A successful trial with all the time and resources we're spending on this issue just feels so good," says Jonathan Zdziarsky, an anti-spam software expert.
Jeremy Jaynes was found guilty last November by a state court in Leesburg, Virginia, of sending more than 10 million unsolicited emails a day. He was hawking pornography, work-at-home schemes and stock-picking software.
The spams are estimated to have earned him around $750,000 a month. He is now on $1 million bail, forbidden from using the internet and will be sentenced this month. The jury has recommended he gets a nine-year jail term. [continue]
From CNET: Computer system said to help stop drowning.
A man swimming in a pool near Paris almost drowned last week but was rescued with the help of a computer vision surveillance system, the maker of the system said. The Poseidon drowning-detection system also helped lifeguards save the life of a teenager in France who nearly drowned in 2000, and last year it helped lifeguards in Germany rescue an elderly man who nearly drowned after a heart attack, said Poseidon's maker, Vision IQ.
"Health organizations worldwide document hundreds of drownings and near drownings every year, many in pools staffed with professional, certified lifeguards. It is virtually impossible for lifeguards to see everything that is happening in the pool all of the time," Olivier Fulconis, Vision IQ's chief operating officer, said in a statement last week.
The latest close call occurred Jan. 26 at the municipal pool in Sceaux, a Paris suburb, according to Vision IQ. The company said an athletic young man suddenly felt faint during his regular swim session, and sunk to the bottom of the deep end of the pool. Ten seconds later, the Poseidon system detected him and sounded the alarm to the lifeguard on duty, who pulled the victim out of the water, Vision IQ said. The victim was resuscitated and taken to a hospital, where he fully recovered, according to the company. [continue]
Hmmm. Maybe the Vancouver pool where I swim will spring for this system. They certainly ought to, because their lifeguards read books and do their fingernails while on duty.
Related:
Poseidon Tech: computer-aided drowning detection systems - poseidon-tech.com
Who are those annoying people who fill up the comments section of blogs with links advertising other sites? The Register tracked down one link spammer, and interviewed him.
Sam - let's call our interviewee Sam, it's suitably anonymous - lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But "it's not not all rock and roll and big money", says Sam. What isn't? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos), that's what.
For that's what Sam does, pretty much all day long. He - we'll use the male notation, it's easier - would do this anyway for fun, but it's more than fun; he says he can earn seven-figure sums doing this. Sam is a link spammer. He's unapologetic about it. Skilled in Perl, LWP and PHP, Sam's first professional programming was done aged 13, when he sold some code to a gaming company. He's 32 now, and spoke to The Register on condition of anonymity.
So how and why do "link spammers" - as they generically call themselves - do it? Are they the same as the email spammers? What do they think of what they do, ethically? And what can stop them? If you're affected by this spam, say because you run a blog, or a website, or like the other 99.9 per cent of Net users just come across the stuff, Sam explain the important thing to remember is it's nothing personal. They're not targeting you personally. They're just exploiting a weakness in a system which blossomed just at the time that Google cracked down on the previous method that spammers used, where huge "link farms" of their own web sites pointed circularly to each other to boost each others' ranking. [continue]
Ever wondered why Mirabilis.ca doesn't have comments enabled? These annoying bottom-dwellers are part of the reason.
If you lug a laptop computer with you when you travel, you might want to take a look at this article from the New York Times: Finding the Right Balance Between Power and Weight. It includes some tips I'd never thought of, like getting one power adaptor that can recharge your laptop, PDA, and cellphone.
Also, who knew about this?
To make sure she gets a seat with an outlet, even though she typically flies coach, Ms. Hall said that as she is booking her flight she pulls up SeatGuru.com, a Web site that displays annotated diagrams of the planes nearly two dozen airlines fly. Travelers can see not only which seats have power outlets (and what type), but also find out which seats offer extra legroom, lack overhead storage or do not recline.
I'll check out SeatGuru when planning my next trip.
My only complaint about the article is that the information on wireless hotspot detectors isn't quite up to date.
...these Wi-Fi locators fit onto a keychain and, at the push of a button, light up to indicate whether there is a hotspot nearby and how strong the signal is — saving harried travelers the frustration of powering up a laptop in a hotel or airport, only to find out there is no wireless network around.
"The downside of these things is you don't know if it's a free network or a paid network or whose network it is," Mr. Ellison said. "But for just a real quick and dirty ‘is there a wireless network here?’ check, those devices do a pretty good job."
There are now hotspot detectors that do give more details, such as this one.
You can read the full article here at the New York Times website, but you'll probably need a password. You may prefer the no-hassle reprinted version of the same article here at the Taipei Times.
If your email address appears on the web, you're bound to get spam; those nasty email harvesting robots go about the web, grabbing every email address in sight. Infuriating, isn't it? But look, a bit of hope from this article at SecurityFocus:
Anti-spammers have a new weapon in their arms race with the spammers. A robot recently rummaged through Mike Wendland's website, harvesting email addresses to spam. But, as a participant of Project Honeypot, Wendland was prepared with an anti-spam honeypot. (Project Honeypot is coordinated by Matthew Prince, CEO of unspam.) The script automatically generates bogus web pages (like this) that contain a control email address for the robot to collect. Project Honeypot both records the robot's IP address, the date and time the bogus web page is downloaded, and also receives any email sent to the control email address. The control email addresses are unique, so the Project can positively correlate a robot's IP address and time-stamp with any spam sent to the control email addresses. The end result: Wendland was able to identify the illicit harvester, an ostensibly legitimate marketing company. [continue]
Found at Slashdot: A Pizza Box for Your Laptop.
Dark Twonky writes "Human Beans is selling the perfect gift for the geek who has everything. It's the PowerPizza, a pizza box for transporting your precious laptop in. From the web site: "Desirable laptops are desirable to thieves too. Disguise your laptop with a PowerPizza and reduce the risk of getting it nicked."
It's the day for making resolutions, you know, so I thought I'd tell you about a software program that might help you keep them. And for those of you who've been diligently reading Getting Things Done — this is for you, too.
The program I love is called Life Balance, and I don't know what I'd do without it. The Life Balance website introduces the program:
Life Balance is award winning coaching software that provides a dynamically ordered To Do List driven by the importance of your goals, your desired allocation of time and effort, and feedback from what you get done each day.
Life Balance is a time and task management program that helps you focus on what's really important to you and actively balance the often conflicting demands of career and personal life. Life Balance emphasizes the intrinsic importance that you've assigned to your projects and life goals, rather than arbitrarily filling every slot in your calendar. This helps you to spend your time and energy on what matters to you the most. You can be self-directed, and know that you are working toward long term goals while still managing your day to day routine.
Some of the features that set Life Balance apart from most to-do list software are: [continue]
Life Balance is commercial software, available for Palm, Windows, and Mac platforms. (I use the Palm version; one day I hope they'll add a Linux version.) Why don't you download the 30 day free trial version and see what you think?
I don't get paid a cent for telling you about the program, and I'll get no benefit whatever if you buy a copy. I'm just mentioning this because I think the program is fantastic, and I recommend it to all the people I care about.
Are you an iPod user? Then take a look at this article, which explains how to upgrade your iPod's software. You can keep the original software and make the device into a dual boot beast that also runs Linux. If I had an iPod, I'd give it a try.
(I don't have an iPod because this would make me grumpy, and I want a device that plays Ogg Vorbis files as well as .mp3s.)
Article link found at here at Linux Today.
In other iPod news, there's this from the Globe and Mail: School says iPod is a must-have.
Related:
Hardware Ogg Vorbis support - Ars Technica
Hmmm, this could be useful. Do you ever need to share a calendar with a group of people? Maybe it's a soccer schedule, a list of upcoming book club events, due dates and assignment details for the class you teach... you know, something like that.
RSS Calendar gives you an easy way to publish that schedule. You create an account (it's free) and add your events to the calendar. Then you create an RSS channel, and the folks in your group use an RSS Aggregator (like Bloglines, for example) to subscribe to your calendar feed.
Of course, you might have to spend a few minutes explaining RSS to your group, but I bet they'll love the convenience of the thing, if they're the sort of folks who spend time online anyway.
(For those of you who have never heard of RSS, you might want to read this and subscribe to the Mirabilis.ca RSS feed to see how the whole RSS thing works.)
And no, I haven't tried RSS Calendar. If you do, please let me know what you think of it.
This is a public service announcement for Windows users who would like some free (and excellent) software.
TheOpenCD website explains:
TheOpenCD is a collection of high quality Free and Open Source Software. The programs run in Windows and cover the most common tasks such as word processing, presentations, e-mail, web browsing, web design, and image manipulation. We include only the highest quality programs, which have been carefully tested for stability and which we consider appropriate for a wide audience. [continue]
An encouraging story from the Beeb: An e-mail saved this boy's life.
From the front room of their home near Canterbury, Lord and Lady Swinfen mastermind an e-mail system that puts hospitals in the developing world in touch with the best surgeons in their field.
The project ensures that whatever the time of day or night and whatever the time zone there is always someone available to answer pleas for help and trigger a response. [continue]
Related:
Swinfen Charitable Trust
I gave up on Microsoft Office products years ago, and have been using free alternatives ever since. I've got OpenOffice and AbiWord, which are just fine for my needs. Documents created in my free word processors can be read by Word users, and vice versa. And free — did I mention that AbiWord and OpenOffice are free?
AbiWord has just come out with version 2.2, so this would be a great time to download your free copy. Give it a try and see what you think! AbiWord is available for users of these operating systems: Windows, Mac, Linux, QNX, FreeBSD and Solaris.
(News about this AbiWord release found here at Slashdot.)
From Reuters: Don't Dump Your Old PDA, Donate It!
A mobile medical information company is collecting used personal digital assistants (PDAs) to send to doctors in Africa, and outfitting the devices with the latest, up-to-date health information. [continue]
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Donate your old PDA
Simputer
Here's good news for people who want better email software: Thunderbird.
Thunderbird is free, easy to install, and will import all your mail from the program you're using now. Oh, and it's cross-platform and open source, too. It's made by Mozilla, the folks who make the lovely Firefox browser — so that says something positive right there, I think.
And why should you bother to switch? Darren Adams puts it nicely:
You got Windows? Okay, you've got Outlook Express. This mail client is the butt of a number of jokes. It's been called a "virus delivery system". Recently I heard someone say that, rather than Outlook, it should be called "Lookout" as in "look out, another virus". But does it deserve all this flak? The answer: yes. But despite the security holes and the lack of innovative features, it remains the most popular home-user e-mail client. But could that be about to change? It should do.
Like Firefox, Thunderbird is free and open source. It doesn't suffer from the virus penetration problems or security issues, and it's got a load of new funky features to address the needs of the world's unfortunate spam-infested e-mail users. Read on... [continue]
(Mac and Linux users: there are Thunderbird versions for you, too.)
Also see 18 reasons why Thunderbird is better than Outlook Express.
So anyway, I suggest that you go download a copy of Thunderbird and try it out. (Or get the program on CD, if you prefer.)
Related:
An Introduction to Thunderbird - nidelven-it.no
Thunderbird FAQ - texturizer.net
Thunderbird - reclaim your inbox! - PCMechanic
Thunderbird help - texturizer.net
Keyboard shortcuts for Thunderbird -texturizer.net
Thunderbird - importing Outlook emails and address books - real-time.com
From Outlook Express to Thunderbird (how to set up Thunderbird and activate the junk mail filtering) - jamie.typepad.com
Safe Hex: safe computing tips to defend against viruses, worms, trojans, and other malware - claymania.com
How to protect your Windows computer from viruses and spyware for free - talmir.com
From csmonitor.com: In Chile, instant web feedback creates the next day's paper.
It was 102 years old, boring, unpopular, and basically, as economist Marta Lagos puts it, "a middle-of-the-road piece of nothing."
Now, it's a phenomenon. Las Ultimas Noticias (LUN) — The Latest News — is Chile's most widely read newspaper today, setting tongues wagging, talk-show hosts chatting, celebrities and politicians denying, serious folks wailing, and advertisers calling.
No, it's not a tabloid, insist the employees at the slightly shabby downtown newsroom. Rather, they say, it's a revolution in journalism, a reader-driven product that reflects the changing values and interests of a postdictatorship public that grew up on a diet of establishment news and now wants more. Or, as some say — because of the often low-brow content — less.
This revolution has occurred, says the paper's publisher Augustine Edwards, thanks to his decision to listen to "the people." Three years ago, under Mr. Edwards's guidance, LUN installed a system whereby all clicks onto its website (www.lun.com) were recorded for all in the newsroom to see. Those clicks — and the changing tastes and desires they represent — drive the entire print content of LUN. If a certain story gets a lot of clicks, for example, that is a signal to Edwards and his team that the story should be followed up, and similar ones should be sought for the next day. If a story gets only a few clicks, it is killed. The system offers a direct barometer of public opinion, much like the TV rating system - but unique to print media. [continue]
Remember reading about augmented reality at archaeological sites? Here's more about that from Swissinfo.org: Swiss help bring Roman Pompeii back to life.
Visitors to Pompeii will now be able to see and hear life as it unfolded in Roman times, thanks to a computer project spearheaded by Geneva University.
The LifePlus programme takes real images of the ruined Italian city and adds the life that is missing, including simulated animals, plants, and humans.The ruins of a bar come to life as visitors wearing 3D glasses watch the waiter pouring out spiced wine for customers. In a nearby room, a beautiful woman reclines on a couch as she is wooed by a handsome centurion. Meanwhile, two women in Roman garb have a heated discussion as they wander through a leafy arbour.
With the prototype, images are supplied by a computer carried in visitors' rucksacks, but eventually they could be sent from a tiny computational device fitted to the headset. [continue]
Spotted at here at Metafilter:
Stand on the shoulders of giants. Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.
So you know I'm addicted to Firefox, yes? Firefox is the free web browser I use constantly — I love features like popup-blocking, tabbed browsing and improved security.
Today is the official release date of Firefox 1.0. If you haven't already tried this amazing program, take a moment to go and get Firefox.
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Firefox 1.0 PR
Browse happy
Urgent: dump Internet Explorer
Firefox 0.9
News articles about the Firefox 1.0 release:
Web power to the people - Boston Globe
Firefox browser takes on Microsoft - BBC
Firefox browser fully released - Reuters
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Released - MozillaZine
Mozilla releases Firefox 1.0 - CNET
Firefox 1.0 fans clog Mozilla site - CNET
Thinking about getting a new backpack? Gizmodo points to a solar powered backpack, which can re-charge all those electronic things you carry about.
How many times have you visited some historical site and carried an audio tour headset with you? You've listened to taped explanations and background information as you wandered around.
OK, now imagine having that system replaced with one that provides computer-generated images as you tour the site, so you'd see ancient people walking about the ruins. Could be interesting, although I suspect it would feel like a computer game come to life. Anyway, such a system is under consideration. From the BBC: Pompeii gets digital make-over.
A European Union-funded project is looking at providing tourists with computer-augmented versions of archaeological attractions.
It would allow visitors a glimpse of life as it was originally lived in places such as Pompeii.
The Lifeplus project is part of the EU's Information Society Technologies initiative aimed at promoting user-friendly technology and enhancing European cultural heritage.
Engineers and researchers working in the Europe-wide consortium have come up with a prototype augmented-reality system.
It would require the visitor to wear a head-mounted display with a miniature camera and a backpack computer.
The camera captures the view and feeds it to software on the computer where the visitor's viewpoint is combined with animated virtual elements.
At Pompeii for example, the visitor would not just see the frescos, taverns and villas that have been excavated, but also people going about their daily life. [continue]
After you've read the article, you might want to visit the Miralab website, which includes web specials and films. The Virtual Hagia Sophia Reconstruction is worth a look.
Related:
Hagia Sophia - Wikipedia
Considering problems with the iPod like this, and now Cory's observation that "Apple's spending money seeing to it that features are removed from your iPod" — well, why buy an iPod when good alternatives exist? I'm looking around at .mp3 players, and this one looks pretty good.
UPDATE: Apple steals iTunes customers' paid-for rights to stream - BoingBoing, March 16th, 2005.
Related:
Consumer Search: mp3 players - reviews several models
From The Guardian: Who knows?
There have been no shortage of insane, over ambitious ideas on the internet. Most of them never make it further than the pub they are conceived in. Some generate hype but quickly fall flat on their face. Others survive, but prove to be minnows rather than the giants they set out to be. However, every so often, one sneaks through.
Wikipedia is one of the rare ones that made it. Even by the admission of its founder, the 38-year-old technology entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, it was a "completely insane idea": a free online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to and anyone can edit. There is no editor, no army of proof readers and fact checkers; in fact, no full-time staff at all. It is, in other words, about as far from the traditional idea of an encyclopedia as you can get.
There are dozens of reasons why it shouldn't work, and it is still far from perfect, but in less than four years, it has grown to have more than 1 million entries written in 100 languages from Albanian to Zulu. [continue}
Related:
Wikipedia
From nature.com: Paralysed man sends e-mail by thought.
An pill-sized brain chip has allowed a quadriplegic man to check e-mail and play computer games using his thoughts. The device can tap into a hundred neurons at a time, and is the most sophisticated such implant tested in humans so far.
Many paralysed people control computers with their eyes or tongue. But muscle function limits these techniques, and they require a lot of training. For over a decade researchers have been trying to find a way to tap directly into thoughts.
In June 2004, surgeons implanted a device containing 100 electrodes into the motor cortex of a 24-year-old quadriplegic. The device, called the BrainGate, was developed by the company Cyberkinetics, based in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Each electrode taps into a neuron in the patient's brain. [continue]
From the CBC: Nose-controlled device may replace computer mouse.
A Canadian inventor has designed a computer mouse steered by movements of the nose and eyelids.
The invention, dubbed a "Nouse," is meant to help people with a disability use a computer.
Users would move a cursor around a computer screen by moving their nose and blinking instead of clicking a conventional mouse. [continue].
From the BBC: Wi-fi device aims to free web radio.
A device which allows people to listen to internet radio without a PC has been developed by a UK company.
The radio, currently a working prototype, makes online radio easier to use, and could change listening habits.
When a wireless network is available, the radio connects to the internet, making thousands of stations available at the touch of a button. [continue]
You could always build a virtual window, which is what Ryan Hoagland did with a bunch of 15 inch LED panels. His step-by-step photos are fascinating, if you like this kind of thing.
Hey, there's a new pre-release version of the Firefox web browser available today. It's free, 100 gazillion times better than Internet Explorer, and full of good features like popup blocking, tabbed browsing, and more.
You might like the feature called live bookmarks, which is a handy way to read RSS feeds. Here are more of the new Firefox features.
Related:
Urgent: Dump Internet Explorer
Browse Happy
From the Berkeley College of Engineering Lab Notes: Wireless Ways to Go Green.
Sitting down on a Sunday morning with a hot cup of coffee and the New York Times may save a tremendous amount of wear-and-tear on the environment — as long as you're reading all the news that's fit to print on your personal digital assistant. In a new study, UC Berkeley researchers report that receiving your news wirelessly on a PDA instead of delivered to your door requires up to 140 times less carbon dioxide, several orders of magnitude less greenhouse gases, and the consumption of 26 to 67 times less water. [continue].
Well, there's some happy news! I read a bunch of newspapers and websites on my Palm Pilot every day.
If you're a PDA user you can read Mirabilis.ca on your handheld computer. The methods I've outlined for doing that will work with any other handheld-friendly website, too. (Should I give you a list of PDA-friendly websites?)
(Link to the article above found at Taint.org.)
Don't you hate it when a news website wants you to register before you can read one teensy little article? BugMeNot is a good work-around; it provides usernames and passwords for all sorts of sites. I use BugMeNot almost every day.
So what could be handier than the BugMeNot website? A
If you use Firefox as your browser, just motor your way over here to install the BugMeNot extension. It'll take all of two mouse clicks and five seconds, and the handy feature I've described will work as soon as you re-start your browser.
Thanks to Groovy Links for mentioning this.
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Firefox 0.9
Urgent: dump Internet Explorer
Browse Happy
Elsewhere:
Extensions - This page explains what extensions are, and provides links to oodles of them.
From Browse Happy:
Internet Explorer can make your computer unsafe. Why not switch to a browser that's more secure?
Many already have. Read their stories, and choose a browser that's right for you.
(Link found here at Slashdot.)
Related content on Mirabilis.ca:
Urgent: dump Internet Explorer
Firefox 0.9
Safe browsing with Microsoft
From this post at Darren Barefoot's blog:
That's fun. If you use Netscape or Mozilla, type about:mozilla in the address bar and press Enter. Maybe everybody on the planet knew about this but me, but it's still amusing.
I didn't know — did you? Once you've tried about:mozilla, you might want to read the Book of Mozilla entry at Wikipedia.
(And of course anybody who's still using Internet Explorer should read this and download Mozilla Firefox.)
From The Herald: Hi-tech Scots stand guard over herald of the gods.
A team of Scottish experts have used the latest computer technology to protect a priceless 2300-year-old Greek statue.
Hermes of Praxiteles, the sole surviving work of one of classical Greece's finest sculptors, was threatened by earthquakes as it stood in the country's most important archaeological museum in Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic games.
However, pioneering work by computer experts from Glasgow, which involved scanning the statue, creating 3D models and pinpointing break lines, will now safeguard it from potentially catastrophic seismic activity.
Alistair Carty is technical director of Archaeoptics, a Glasgow-based 3D laser-scanning bureau operating in the archaeology and heritage sector, which carried out the research.
He said his team's work will be used to create a structure to protect the statue, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of ancient Greek art. [continue]
You've probably already heard that Internet Explorer lacks features and is a terrible security risk. Now that a particularly nasty Internet Explorer security hole has come to light, all sorts of people are recommending that Internet Explorer users switch to some other browser right away. An eWeek article warns that Internet Explorer is too dangerous to keep using. An article at Security Focus says it's time to dump Internet Explorer.
Dear hearts: if you're using Internet Explorer at home or at work, it's time to educate yourself about the problems this could cause for you. (See links above and below.) This would be a really good time to switch to Firefox. It's free, very cool, and it isn't a security problem.
While you're at it, consider the excellent Thunderbird email software. It's a very fine program — also free — and has none of the security problems one finds in Outlook.
Related:
Why you should dump Internet Explorer
Dump Internet Explorer - SpywareInfo.com
Infectious Web sites attack through Microsoft browser
CERT recommends anything but IE ("US CERT (the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team), is advising people to ditch Internet Explorer and use a different browser after the latest security vulnerability in the software was exposed.")
Switching from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox - help page from Mozilla.org
From nature.com: Could laptops run on spinach?
Spinach power is not just for Popeye, it could work for computers too. US researchers have made electrical cells that are powered by plant proteins.
The biologically based solar cells, which convert light into electrical energy, should be efficient and cheap to manufacture, says co-creator Marc Baldo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They could even be used to coat and power laptops, providing a portable source of green energy. [continue]
From the BBC: Boy inspires cancer video game.
A nine-year-old boy with leukaemia has inspired a video game to help children understand and deal with cancer.
In many ways, Ben Duskin is a typical American nine-year-old, playing video games whenever time, or his mother, will allow.
But Ben is also unusual, because he is able to say he has designed one of his very own.
When Ben was five, he was diagnosed with leukaemia, and his mother tried to explain his treatment by likening it to the classic Pac Man video game, gobbling up the bad cancer cells.
But the problem was that Ben had never played Pac Man, and so he decided a new game was needed for children with cancer, to help them understand and deal with their illness. [continue]
From Wired: Breeding Race Cars to Win.
A technology that allows robots to rebuild themselves and computer programs to evolve and become better on their own is now being used to breed super-fast Formula One race cars.
F1 cars, which can hit speeds of 150 mph on a curvy track, are open-cockpit, single-seat vehicles. Racing teams invest millions each year in each car to install the latest technology and to fine-tune the machines' performance.
Even minor changes — in things like the cars' wing height (F1 cars rely heavily on aerodynamics), suspension stiffness or type of tire rubber used on a particular day at a particular track — can give a car a fraction of a second's edge in speed, which often means the difference between a win and a loss.
Formula One teams pride themselves on their mechanical tweaking skills. But the Digital Biology Interest Group at University College London discovered that they can boost performance by using computers to "breed" the cars. [continue].
Ooooh! There's a new version of my favourite web browser, Firefox. It's free, ever so lovely, and offers features like popup blocking, tabbed browsing, and lots of other stuff as well. If you're still using Internet Explorer, I dare you to try Firefox instead. I bet you'll never go back to IE.
Why you should dump Internet Explorer (Thanks to adot's notblog for pointing out this page.)
Why you should switch to the Mozilla Firefox browser
Opera 7.50 - another fine browser
From Wired: Solar-Powered Gadgets on the Move.
Gadget lovers are using solar panels to power their toys in the remotest places — like Mt. Everest, altitude 29,029 feet.
"The sun was so bright at 18,000 feet that it wasn't a problem at all," said Sean Burch, who climbed the world's highest peak alone last year, the 50th anniversary of the first climb, and did not have the human power to bring along hundred-pound batteries like bigger crews do.
In the wilds or on the road, solar panels that fold into notebook-size cases are charging everything from notebook computers to cameras and Palm Pilots. [continue]
Dear Sony,
My Sony Vaio's screen died, just three days after the computer's warranty ended. Three days! You charged me $75.00 just to have somebody give me an estimate on repairs. (How long did that take? 5 minutes?) And this is really rich: you want to charge me $1,225.00 to fix the screen. Wow. Guess whose products I'll avoid when I buy my next notebook computer?
Harrumph.
What a brilliant idea! The (Anglican) Diocese of Oxford is offering news via RSS feeds. This seems like the sort of thing every diocese should do.
(If you don't know what RSS news feeds and aggregators are, start with this and this.)
Link found at Library Stuff.
From Wired: Green Tea Good for Hard Drives.
For years, green tea has been believed by some to lower cholesterol, prevent rheumatoid arthritis and even stave off cancer. Now scientists think the warm green stuff has yet another benefit: the potential to save hard-drive manufacturers millions of dollars.
A team of researchers based in Tucson, Arizona, announced Monday that a study of the use of green tea extracts for polishing the magnetic heads in hard-disk drives has yielded a compound that works three to four times faster than conventional compounds. If the findings can be reproduced in an industrial setting, the compound could reduce the cost and environmental impact of hard-drive manufacturing, the researchers said. [continue]
The folks at Opera have come out with a new version of their excellent web browser. Opera 7.50 is now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. Whee!
Things I love about Opera:
tabbed browsing
popup adverts are automatically blocked
full screen view (F11)
keyboard shortcuts for everything
zoom
handy features for web designers
other cool features
still more cool features
This new version of Opera has a built-in RSS aggregator. (If you haven't discovered how handy RSS is for keeping up with lots of websites, read this). To get to the RSS aggregator within Opera 7.50: click the mail icon on the left of the screen. In the mail panel, click newsfeeds.
Related:
Opera's new features - opera.com
My other favourite web browser, also available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms:
Mozilla Firefox
From Wired.com: Winemakers Get Juiced About Tech.
Once, wine meant horse-drawn plows and barefoot workers stomping in a tub. These days, winemakers are more likely to depend on the juice running through their personal computers as they turn grapes into premium vintages.
From software in the cellar to GPS-equipped tractors in the vineyard, a new crop of vintners are getting wired, and shortening their learning curves.
"I don't have hundreds and hundreds of years," says Bill Murphy, who has installed several high-tech tools of the wine trade at his Clos LaChance winery. "The technology allows you to learn and understand about the terroir faster.
"It's the big guy upstairs that's still in charge of all this stuff," he added. "Our idea is to be able to learn about it as fast as we can — to measure as many things as we can, to control the things we can control and understand the things we can't control." [continue]
It's been a while since I've mentioned RSS, so I thought I'd point out this article from Wired: Why RSS Is Everywhere.
So many blogs, so little time. If you want to stay at the top of the information food chain, you gotta read 'em - lots of 'em. And you have to do it every day. But as that list of must-read blogs grows, hunting and gathering the latest posts becomes a daily drain. You could hire an assistant to read them for you. Or tap into RSS. (...)
With RSS, visitors can access multiple sites without having to go to each one. You subscribe to the RSS feeds of sites you like, and voilà: The content comes to you by way of an aggregator, which sends headlines and links to a browser or a downloadable news reader on your mobile device or desktop. [continue]
Not a bad into article, although the list of aggregators they provide is absurdly short. Here's my list of RSS aggregators for you to try, which has many more suggestions. (Because I can't help myself.) Oh, and here's another explanation of RSS. Finally, the Mirabilis.ca rss feed is at http://www.mirabilis.ca/index.xml .
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Aggregators to the rescue! - August 18th, 2003
News aggregators - August 19th, 2002
Online aggregators - August 21st, 2003
RSS FAQ
I already mentioned the problem with Plaxo. If you're using Plaxo to keep your contact list up to date, please read this and reconsider.
Online contacts management company Plaxo plugged a serious security hole in its Web site on Monday that left its members' contact lists vulnerable to be stolen, modified or deleted.
With more than two million users, Plaxo is one of the most popular online address book companies. It stores its members' contacts in a central database and provides access to them over the Internet. The service allows its members to invite contacts to update their own information, helpings users keep their address books up to date.
The security flaw, which was discovered by Web application security company Lodoga, was reported to Plaxo on Monday evening. Lodoga's security test engineer Jeremy Wood told ZDNet UK it took him less than an hour after discovering the weakness to build an attack script that could exploit the vulnerability.
Wood demonstrated the attack script to ZDNet UK. Using the live Plaxo Web site, Wood's script added an additional layer over the username and password box. With this layer in place, if a user typed in their access details, the information would first be sent to the attacker's Web site and then to Plaxo to log the user in. Users would have had no idea their details had been taken. [continue]
If I'm in your address book and you plan to use Plaxo, please delete my contact information before you do so.
Note: The Plaxo website opt-out page says you can "opt-out of receiving all Plaxo e-mails". While this should stop the annoying email from Plaxo, it doesn' t address the privacy concerns. Any friends of yours who use Plaxo will still be adding all sorts of personal information about you to Plaxo's database.
Related:
PLAXO: is that a cure or a disease? - securityfocus.com
How to avoid Plaxo - Loose Wire
Plaxo evil? - meskill.net
Is Plaxo legal? - commsworld.com.au
Had enough of Plaxo, et al - nwfusion.com
To Plaxo, Or Not To Plaxo?
From New Scientist: Software agent targets chatroom paedophiles.
Paedophiles attempting to "groom" children in internet chatrooms can now be detected by a computer program.
The program works by putting on a convincing impression of a young person taking part in a chatroom conversation. At the same time it analyses the behaviour of the person it is chatting with, looking for classic signs of grooming: paedophiles pose as children as they attempt to arrange meetings with the children they befriend.
Called ChatNannies, the software was developed in the UK by Jim Wightman, an IT consultant from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. It creates thousands of sub-programs, called nanniebots, which log on to different chatrooms and strike up conversations with users and groups of users.
If a nanniebot detects suspicious activity it sends an alert to Wightman and emails a transcript of the conversation. If he considers the transcript suspicious, he contacts the relevant police force, giving them the internet address of the suspect user. [continue]
From Aftenposten: Murder fears after computer trouble.
Frightened neighbors heard such violent noises from an adjacent apartment that they called police and warned that a possible murder was in progress. Law enforcement arrived and found a red-faced man who had just had one problem too many when installing a new computer.
Many can sympathize with the man's troubles. After buying a new computer and assorted peripherals, arranging cables and wiring, setting up all his equipment and plugging everything in, the excitable neighbor thought his stressful installation job was over.
With all systems apparently go, the man prepared to install software needed to connect to the Internet, but got a shock when he unwrapped the package from Telenor.
"The CD was broken in two. That was when I got a bit annoyed. But no one got hurt," the man told Aftenposten's evening edition.
This discovery was too much after the day's exertions, and he blew his top. After shrieking furiously at some equipment, he took his frustration out on bookshelves, furniture and walls. [continue]
Is it robot news theme week or something? I already mentioned the robotic conductor and the house-building robot - now these articles have appeared as well:
From Wired: Robot Designers Get in the Swim.
In the warm waters of the Barbados Islands recently, swimmers had some six-legged robotic company.
It wasn't an alien invasion, but an invasion of scientists from Montreal's McGill University. They put Aqua, a Canadian-built, microwave oven-sized submersible, through its paces for the first time early this year, sending the robot 25 feet down into the Caribbean water. There, they tested Aqua's most unique feature, six individually controlled flippers which allow the robot to swim, dive, walk and stand nearly motionless on the bottom of the sea floor. [continue]
From Ananova: Toyota unveils trumpet-playing robot.
A trumpet-playing robot has made its musical debut in Japan.
The robot swayed to the rhythm during its rendition of When You Wish Upon A Star. (...) It boasts a lung function and mechanical lips that allow it to blow the instrument, and dexterous fingers to pick out the correct notes. [full article]
Thanks to Lorna for telling me about the trumpet-playing robot.
Related:
Robot trumpets Toyota's know-how - BBC
Oh, how sad. The Guardian has been one of my favourite news websites for years, in part because they've never hassled readers with any of that "please register to read this article" nonsense. Today The Guardian announced that users will be required to register before viewing articles in the MediaGuardian portion of their site.
*sigh*
Meanwhile, Bug Me Not keeps increasing in popularity. It's a password sharing site for those who want to avoid registering for access to sites like The Guardian and The New York Times.
Related:
Guardian Unlimited introduces registration - The Registers
From NewScientist.com: Robot builder could ‘print’ houses.
A robot for "printing" houses is to be trialled by the construction industry. It takes instructions directly from an architect's computerised drawings and then squirts successive layers of concrete on top of one other to build up vertical walls and domed roofs.
The precision automaton could revolutionise building sites. It can work round the clock, in darkness and without tea breaks. It needs only power and a constant feed of semi-liquid construction material.
The key to the technology is a computer-guided nozzle that deposits a line of wet concrete, like toothpaste being squeezed onto a table. Two trowels attached to the nozzle then move to shape the deposit. The robot repeats its journey many times to raise the height and builds hollow walls before returning to fill them. [continue]
OK, this you have to see. From violinist.com, a photo of the Sony QRIO robot conducting the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra.
Related:
Sony Qrio - sony.net
Sony Robot Conducts Performance of Beethoven's Fifth - miami.com
HardForum.com has the story of an unusual marriage proposal. A geek built a computer for his beloved, modifying the case in a rather dramatic way:
I envisioned making an all white PC with "bridal" accents for her, and using that as a visual aid for the proposal. I planned out all the stuff I was thinking on the train and got to work."
Read the rest here; we know you can't resist clicking a link like that, then scrolling down to see the photos.
Link found at Linkfilter.
Do you join those social networking websites, like Friendster, Linked In, a zillion others, and now the new one, Orkut? Not me; I could never see the point. I was amused by A Dork's View of Orkut at Dervala.net, though. Dervala writes:
Orkut is the private bootstrap project of a Google engineer, which was enough to start buzz when it launched last month. Cunningly, at launch it was invitation-only, creating further ripples of vanity. I don't know how the original Orkut Mayflower community was chosen, but here’s how it works now:
Someone lists you as their friend on Orkut. You get an email asking you to visit the site and acknowledge that person. "Is Chris Locke your friend?" Orkut asks, like MacCarthy's Senate committee. Shyly, I admit that he might be. "Are you sure Chris Locke is your friend?" it demands. Oh God. When I was seven, the wrong answer to that kind of question meant social death. It still gives me the playground heebie-jeebies. I press on, hoping the world won't shun me.
Invitation in hand, I now create my own Orkut profile. I puzzle out the Brand Called Me with the help of leading questions. Which religion are you? What ethnicity are you? List your favourite books, movies, and music. Have kids? Do they live with you? Check boxes to describe your sense of humour. (There is no box for ‘None’.) What lesson did you learn from previous relationships? Orkut, it seems, is the hectoring date I'd send straight to voicemail the next day. [continue]
Today's chuckle comes from Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing: MSFT: don't click on links, type them in by hand.
Microsoft's crapware browser, Explorer, has more security vulnerabilities than my block has dope-dealers, but this is ridiculous. MSFT now advises its users to not click links, but rather to type them in by hand:
The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.
Hahahahaha!
Or, you could, you know, just Download Moz. Link
Good advice, although I'd go for Mozilla's Firebird browser. Here are some of the reasons why you should switch to Mozilla Firebird.
Anyway, back to BoingBoing. While you're there, see Protect your investment: buy open - another of Cory's entries. I love the stuff Cory posts. He's annoyed about many of the same things that tick me off, and he takes the time to blog about them. Most refreshing.
On a long wilderness trip far from electical outlets, how're you gonna keep your techno-gadgets charged up? A gadget jacket charged by the sun might be the answer. From Wired:
Seemingly aimed at the technophile environmentalist on the go, the jacket has integrated solar panels that charge cell phones, PDAs, Game Boys, MP3 players and most any other mobile device its wearer slides into its multitude of interior pockets.
And despite its gadget-oriented accommodations, the jacket's style resembles those worn at the slopes or on the hiking trails. Fashionista outdoorsy types are assured of cloaking their geek status as they lug Palms, iPods and cell phones into the wilderness without losing power.
"As we move to an always-on environment, how can people depend on their device if in three to four hours they are going to lose their charge?" said Scott Jordan, CEO of ScotteVest, which designed the jacket and its wiring technology.
The jacket has two small snap-on photovoltaic panels that fit onto its shoulders. These charcoal-gray solar panels convert the sun's rays into energy, which then feed a hidden battery pack about the size of a deck of cards. The batteries are wired to all the pockets, which can have almost any mobile devices plugged into them.
The PAN, or Personal Area Network, used by ScotteVest's Technology Enabled Clothing division provides jacket-pocket holes and fabric conduits that connect all the gadgets to each other without exposing any wires. So what appears to be an unassuming anorak jacket is really a web of wires and technology in disguise.
Inspector Gadget, James Bond and GI Joe fans: Please convene in the outerwear department. [continue]
Related:
Scott eVest sports jacket
Simple Computers for Hard Lives. From wired.com:
HYDERABAD, India -- Postal workers in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan will bring modern technology to remote villages by carrying an Indian-designed handheld computer on their rounds, the manufacturer said Monday.
The project is part of an International Telecommunication Union plan to use the Simputer to spread the benefits of computer use in poor countries, said Vinay Deshpande, founder and chairman of Encore Technologies.
Desphande said his company had signed an agreement with the Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency, and the project would start in a couple months.
The first initiative will be in Bhutan, where 50 Simputers will be given to postal workers who will take the computers on their delivery rounds. People living in remote villages, who have little access to information, will be able to look up things like the crop prices and health information on the computer, Deshpande said. [continue]
Here's more info about the Simputer.
From Ananova: Remote jungle tribe.com.
A remote tribe in the Brazilian jungle are now online after a charity gave them five battery-powered computers.
The Guarani tribe who live deep in the Atlantic jungle, near Angra dos Reis, have even come up with their own word for the internet.
The word they created, in their Tupi language, translates as "where you can put words, documents and knowledge". [continue]
Related:
Guarani - wikipedia.org
Syrians ‘click’ via a rolling Internet cafe. From csmonitor.com:
MARRANE, SYRIA — At the edge of this tiny western village, where newspapers aren't delivered, 15 Syrians are stuck for two hours on a parked bus. To their left are brown hills with rows of olive, apple, and date trees. On their right sit a few modest cement homes.
And directly in front of each villager is a sleek wooden desk, a flat screen computer, and an ergonomic mouse. Here by choice, these mothers, high school students, teachers, and farmers are the recent beneficiaries of a Syrian initiative to bring information technology to the country's remotest parts.
The Mobile Information Centre, or MIC, is a former long-haul passenger bus refitted with 18 computer stations and a server. It hops between remote villages offering basic computer training and Internet access for $3 per course. [continue]
A friend told me about Shoutcast.com the other day - is it ever cool! If you're online and you've got some software that plays .mp3s, check this out - Shoutcast links to stations offering streaming .mp3s.
I typed "baroque" into the search box at Shoutcast, which led me to Magnatune.com... another excellent discovery. Here's a bit from the Magnatune site:
We're a record label. But we're not evil.
We call it "try before you buy." It's the shareware model applied to music.
Listen to hundreds of MP3'd albums from our artists. Or try our genre-based radio stations.
If you like what you hear, buy our music online for as little as $5 an album or license our music for commercial use.
Artists get a full 50% of the purchase price. And unlike most record labels, our artists keep the rights to their music.
Founded by musicians, for musicians.
No major label connections.
We are not evil.
Who knew this existed?
They've got lots of genre pages: classical, electronica, metal & punk, new age, rock, world, and others. I've been playing some excellent stuff from their classical page, and I'm a happy camper.
From a New York Times article reprinted at CNET, Stealth PCs all the rage.
Mike Chin's eureka moment came in an Ikea store, on a spring day in 2002.
Chin, a technology writer in Vancouver, British Columbia, had just gotten a tiny motherboard from a Taiwanese chipmaker, and he had been growling that he could not find a similarly small case so that he could build the computer he had promised to a friend's daughter.
Then his eyes fell on a blue plastic Ikea breadbox--the "perfect marriage of cheap modern art, chintziness and utility," he said.
The fully functional breadbox PC that he then built and described on the Web was among the first to spring from an idea that has become a raging obsession in a far-flung community of electronic do-it-yourselfers: the stealth computer.
Across Europe, the United States and the Far East, hobbyists have been stuffing the works of personal computers into toasters, humidors, biscuit tins, lampshades, even a plush E.T. doll.
"It's tiny, it's wonderful, it's all integrated, it's extremely low power, and it fits almost anywhere," said Chin of the Mini-ITX motherboard at the heart of his breadbox computer, which measures about 10 inches by 14 inches by 6 inches. [continue]
Related:
Mini-ITX Case Mods
PC in a Breadbox
Extreme Makeover - wired.com
From New Scientist: Advanced chip opens door to software choice.
A computer chip designed to run more than one operating system at a time could break Microsoft's stranglehold on PC software. Plans for the chip were announced last week by Intel, the world's largest maker of processor chips.
Due for launch within five years, the chip will allow future machines to run, say, Windows XP together with Linux or the Apple operating system as easily as today's Windows computers run Word and Internet Explorer simultaneously. Analysts are saying it could be one of the decade's most significant breakthroughs in computer technology. [continue]
Related links:
Linux Info
The typewriter-keyboard conversion is a fine bit of geekery from multipledigression.com.
My wife suffers from repetive stress problems in her fingers and wrists. Sometime in October we were talking about different keyboards on the market for people such as herself. In the course of the conversation she mentioned that she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards. Ah-hah, I think to myself! At last I know what I will give her for Christmas. The first weekend after Halloween I went out and found an old Smith-Corona and got to work.
The short how-to is thus: in a regular keyboard, each keypress completes a circuit. There's a little circuit board in there and I mapped all the connections from one terminal to another. This was then replicated inside the typewriter by wires going from the circuit board to strips of adhesive lamé, which contact their counterparts when a key is pressed. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that... [continue]
(Link via Idle Type)
And look, somebody else did a similar thing, and attached an old Underwood typewritter to a Macintosh computer.
I'd be a bit tempted to try something like this, except that my typewriter is too nice to mess with, and too hard to type on. I've got my grandpa's old Underwood Number 5.
I love my RSS news aggregators (see Aggregators to the rescue! from a few days ago), and I don't know how I managed to keep up with lots of websites without them. But the problem with that lovely software is that it's only on my home machine. "Wouldn't it be nice," I thought, "if I could get some rss aggregator thing to work on all the machines I might use?"
And so I've been trying out a few online aggregators. The one I've been using most so far is Bloglines, which introduces itself as follows:
Bloglines is a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. You can read the latest entries easily within Bloglines.
Unlike other aggregators which require you to download and install software, Bloglines runs on our servers and requires no installation. Because your Bloglines account is accessible through a web browser, you can access your account from any Internet-connected machine.
This is very cool. Now I have an easy way to check my favourite news feeds while I'm at work, or at some Internet cafe in Paris, (yeah, I wish) or, well, anywhere. And there's no software to download or install. And it's free.
There are several other online aggregators, too. The ones I know about are:
Bloglines
Feedster
Fresh News
FastBuzz
They're all free — for now, anyway — and some have impressive features. If you try one (or all of them), will you let me know what you think? I'd also like to hear about any other online aggregators.
(If you get a account at one of these places and want to subscribe to the Mirabilis.ca newsfeed, the URL you need is http://www.mirabilis.ca/index.xml )
If terms like aggregator, news feed, and RSS mean nothing to you, Wired.com has come to your aid. Here's the start of their Aggregators Attack Info Overload article.
Maniacally wired netizens who read a hundred blogs a day and just as many news sources are turning to a new breed of software, called newsreaders or aggregators, to help them manage information overload.
Many now say that their news aggregator is as indispensable as their e-mail client.
Aggregators, such as NewsGator and AmphetaDesk, allow users to subscribe to feeds from sources as diverse as the BBC, Sci-Fi Today, Slashdot and thousands of bloggers across the world. The services work by checking an Internet address at a regular interval, usually once an hour, to see if new content has been added.
The feeds are written according to one of a few competing shared specifications, which are collectively referred to as RSS, which stands, depending on who you talk to, for really simple syndication or rich site summary. [continue]
I think it ought to stand for Read Splendid Sites, but nobody asked me.
If you'd like to try an aggregator, check out this list of aggregators. There you'll find links to online aggregators, and to aggregator software for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Palm computers.
Oh, and by the way - the Mirabilis.ca RSS feed is at http://www.mirabilis.ca/index.xml (It will look awful if you view it in your web browser, but it works just fine in an aggregator.)
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
News aggregators
RSS FAQ
From Social Studies in today's Globe and Mail:
David Rea has designed a computer program that allows poems to evolve, reports The Boston Globe.
"Starting with 1,000 random words culled from Hamlet, Beowulf and the Iliad, among others, his program randomly assembles them to create a short verse. If you visit his Web site (www.codeasart.com/poetry/darwin.html), you are given two of these verses and you choose the one you like [better]. The unpopular ones are killed off, but the poems with the most votes get to ‘breed’ with each other, exchanging words like genes. Rea has also programmed in a mutation, where every new poem has a one-in-a-thousand chance of having a dropped or added word, or a word shifting its place."
Related link:
Poetry red in tooth and claw - Boston Globe article. (scroll down a bit.)
Oh, my programmer friends are going to enjoy this thing about primates programming in Visual Basic. Hee! Found at PeteBevin.com.
This is the sort of project I love to hear about: software to make the web more accessible for people in poor countries.
Software that speeds internet access by up to 35 times has been developed to help people in poor countries go online.
Aidbase, which currently exists as a working prototype, is one of a range of pieces of software under development by the Aidworld team, associated with Cambridge University.
"Aidworld is developing lightweight software to take the world wide web world wide," said Tom Corsellis, Aidworld's founder.
The Aidbase software, which will be free to use, is aimed at the vast majority of the world's population, well over 90%, not yet online.
A significant proportion of these people have access to a landline.
"We wanted to bridge the digital divide instead of talking about it," Dr Corsellis said.
The software, demonstrated at Aidworld's website, works by stripping out graphics and simplifying the format of web pages, leaving just the lightweight text.
It is designed for use on internet connections running either over satellite telephones, where connection costs are ruinously high, or poor-quality landlines, where the connection may break at any moment.
Aidworld hopes that by initially making the software available to aid workers, the technology will be adopted by others in the developing world who need access to web-based information. [continue]
Always wanted to join a mob? Maybe this Flash Mob thing is for you. From wired.com:
Flash mobs are performance art projects involving large groups of people. Mobilized by e-mail, a mob suddenly materializes in a public place, acts out according to some loose instructions, and then melts away as quickly as it formed.
In New York, the city's finest turned out in force to block the city's third mob gathering last Wednesday evening.Set to gather at 7 p.m. at Grand Central Station for what promised to be an elaborate "mob ballet," the crowd of about 250 was greeted by a "huge" police presence, according to the Mob Project's anonymous organizer known only as Bill.
Bill said the mob moved to the Grand Hyatt next door instead. The crowd walked quietly upstairs to the hotel's mezzanine and gathered shoulder-to-shoulder around the balcony."At 7:12, we burst into thunderous, screaming applause for 15 seconds, and then dispersed, just as police cars came screaming around the corner to where we were," said Bill. "It was fabulous." [continue]
Related link:
Flash mobs page at cheesebikini.com
Flash mobs: a new social phenomenon? - from abc.net.au
I already blogged about how the Vatican takes extra steps to protect its website from hackers. I guess they have to, eh? The Holy See would be a tempting target for so many hackers.
An article at Zenit relates a conversation with Bishop Claudio Maria Celli, secretary of the administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See:
"In fact, not all hackers are enemies," the bishop said. He recalled that on one occasion the Internet defense services intercepted a Franciscan who tried a whole night, without success, to break into the papal Web site. "Obviously, he couldn't sleep," Bishop Celli joked. [continue]
Also of interest: Vatican visionaries: Holy See's Web site overcomes humble beginnings.
From www.abc.net.au's Sci-Tech page: Pope moves against hackers.
The Vatican has revealed it has taken on a team of experts to protect the Pope's website which is attacked by some 10,000 viruses a month and at least 30 mainly American hackers every day.
"Fortunately, up to now no-one has managed to penetrate the Pope's site thanks to a highly efficient team of specialists charged with anti-virus protection who have always managed to block hackers' emails," said Archbishop Claudio Celli, secretary for the administration of the Holy See's heritage.
"Young Americans are the most common and aggressive of hackers around the world seeking to cross the Vatican's e-borders," he continued.
Pope John Paul II has on several occasions shown his support for the Internet, whilst warning against some of its specific uses, but for security reasons he has no personal email address.
Well-wishers' messages reach the pontiff through various other addresses which are filtered by Vatican staff. [full article]
Bloggers and website owners, listen up.
Microsoft is building a Web search engine, and they intend for it to become the industry standard. Given Microsoft's track record during the browser wars, there is every reason to believe the company will again use its monopoly power to eliminate competition by building a Web search service into the next version of Windows.
You can wait for the court challenge, or you can help make a difference now by declaring your site off-limits to the Microsoft crawler. All it takes is a file called robots.txt in your top-level directory, and these two lines:
User-agent: MSNBOT
Disallow: /
That's from the Boycott Microsoft Search! page at Idlewords. I'm glad somebody else feels as strongly about this as I do. If Microsoft wants to go ahead and do yet one more unethical thing . . . well, I can't stop them on a web-wide basis, but I can refuse to contribute the content on my own sites.
In April, I wrote to Microsoft to complain that their bot was not obeying robots.txt. I asked them to list all of the IP addresses the bot uses. They said the only IP address are these: " IPs in the range 131.107.163.46 through 131.107.163.50 and 131.107.137.47."
Recently the bot has changed its name, thus getting around the old version of my robots.txt file. (It even spidered directories that all bots are supposed to leave alone.) And oh, look, now it's using this IP: 131.107.163.58. I think I'll just simplify things and deny all requests from all of Microsoft's IP addresses. I'm banning everything from 131.107.
Harrumph, Microsoft.
I'll link to tutorial pages on robots.txt and on banning IP addresses below.
We now return to regularly scheduled programming.
Information on robots.txt:
Search Engine World's Robots.txt tutorial
ROBOTS.TXT Primer
Robots.txt
Robots.txt validator (use this to make sure your robots.txt file is correct.)
What's an IP address?
How stuff works: what is an IP address?
What's your IP address?
Find who belongs to a specific IP address
Information on banning IP addresses with .htaccess:
Lisa explains it all: ban IP addresses
HTMlite Tutorials: deny via IP
News and comments about Microsoft's bot:
MSN search bot a glimpse of ambitions - from news.com
Anonymous Source on MSNBot ("They have Google in their crosshairs.") - from Scripting News
Discussion about this bot at jeremy.zawodny.com
Update:
Microsoft, Google may go head-to-head. "Microsoft's path to expand the Windows empire is leading directly to search king Google. " - from news.com, June 25/03.
From the Digital Divide Network: India's Rural Masses Embrase Wi-Fi.
Over 200 rural villages in India's Maharashtra state have formed a wireless Internet cooperative, establishing 50 wi-fi "hotspots" in their communities. The co-op has managed to raise more than $400,000 (RS20 million) to expand the reach of wireless Internet locally. Maharashtra is not alone, however; communities across rural India have begun embracing wi-fi, recently legalized by India's government. At a recent technology conference in Bangalore, India, speakers suggested that these rural communities were actually ahead of the curve in terms of wi-fi deployment when compared to their urban Indian counterparts. Given the lack of communications infrastructure in much of rural India, wi-fi is quickly filling a niche as more villages desire to go online. [continue]
Oh, too funny. From silicon.com: House of Lords email debate reveals ‘spam’ confusion.
Fears that government may not have a finger on the pulse of modern technology were exposed in the House of Lords yesterday, as some Lords debated unsolicited spam email, while others discussed the tinned meat of the same name.
Lord Sainsbury headed the debate into draft regulations for the limitation of spam and may have muddied the waters somewhat, given his past as a supermarket baron.
However, confusion with the tinned meat appeared to be a genuine obstacle to serious discussion for some Lords in attendance. Lord Renton asked: "Will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food can become an unsolicited email, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an email?"
While Lord Sainsbury admitted to not knowing the answer to this question . . . .
Well, that's what Lord Sainsbury gets for not knowing enough Monty Python. Somebody tell this man about the spam sketch. and why spam is called spam.
(Link thanks to Geekpress.)
Related link:
Parliament.uk
Spam: Good lords
Another one from the Sydney Morning Herald: This is your life - snapped, stored and sent in a moment.
Next time you ask someone "what's been happening?", don't be surprised if they throw you their mobile phone and say: "See for yourself."
If mobile phone companies have their way, we will soon carry phones with in-built cameras everywhere we go - capturing the cheesy, touching, or just plain dumb moments of everyday life and instantly sending them to anyone willing to look.
Hayley Smithers, 30, is already doing it. Ms Smithers, a speech therapist, and her husband, Tim, bought camera phones three months ago and send snaps to their friends every day.
They are leading a trend that Daniel Palmer, a photography historian, says could mark a change in social record-keeping similar to the 1888 introduction of the Box Brownie, the first widely affordable camera. [continue]
Spotted at kongsgaard.com.
Who are the people who send you all that junk mail, anyway? Confessions of a former spammer profiles one guy who used to send spam full time, using a collection of computers and specialty software programs. Amazing. (Link found at Slashdot.)
Somebody at Slashdot has posted about that incredibly annoying printer ink problem: Ink Cartridges with Built-In Self-Destruct Dates.
Linker3000 writes "The Inquirer has an article about HP ink cartridges having a built-in expiry date that can cause them to become unusable even if they aren't empty! Another twist on the ‘chipped cartridge’ stories -- and also another kick in the teeth (and wallet) for the consumer methinks." This isn't really a new problem - here's a good piece about the problem.
Also of interest: Expiry on HP printer cartridges hacked.
There's a map of the world, and little dots appear on it, one by one. Each dot represents a blog in the corresponding location, and an excerpt from that blog shows up in a text box for a few seconds. Then another dot shows up somewhere else with another blog excerpt, and so on. Click on a dot and you'll go to the blog it represents. Pretty cool! It's the world as a blog, and it already led me to an interesting blog I probably never would have discovered otherwise.
If you've haven't tried the Mozilla browser yet, or if you haven't discovered its cooler features, go read Mozilla: Blogging's Killer App over at A Whole Lotta Nothing. It explains how to use the tabbed browsing feature, how to get rid of ads (oh, it's so nice once pop-ups and pop-unders are gone forever), and how Mozilla's sidebar is particularly handy for people who read lots of blogs.
And by the way, many of these same features are available in the ever-lovely Opera browser. Both Mozilla and Opera are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.
Did you see the MSN picking on Opera thing I blogged a couple of days ago? I love Opera's response:
Two weeks ago it was revealed that Microsoft's MSN portal targeted Opera users, by purposely provided them with a broken page. As a reply to MSN's treatment of its users, Opera Software today released a very special Bork edition of its Opera 7 for Windows browser. The Bork edition behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. Users accessing the MSN site will see the page transformed into the language of the famous Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show: Bork, Bork, Bork!
In October 2001, Opera users were blocked from the MSN site. The event caused an uproar among Web users and MSN was forced to change their policy. However, MSN continues a policy of singling out its Opera competitor by specifically instructing Opera to hide content from users.
"Hergee berger snooger bork," says Mary Lambert, product line manager desktop, Opera Software. "This is a joke. However, we are trying to make an important point. The MSN site is sending Opera users what appear to be intentionally distorted pages. The Bork edition illustrates how browsers could also distort content, as the Bork edition does. The real point here is that the success of the Web depends on software and Web site developers behaving well and rising above corporate rivalry." [continue]
If you use Moveable Type to run your blog, you might be interested in Phil Gyford's directions for removing evil image links from Movable Type. Phil gives a couple of reasons why a person might prefer to have a text-based menu, and then he explains how to achieve this. What a good idea.
I'm very fond of the Opera web browser for its mouse gestures, ability to block pop-up windows, the full screen display mode,... oh, I could go on and on. It's an outstanding browser, and a rather addictive one, too.
So when Microsoft goes to special trouble to make it look like Opera doesn't work on their MSN website, this is annoying. Why would they bother? Why don't they play fair, improve their own browser, and leave it at that? Instead, MSN is serving a special stylesheet to visitors who are using Opera 7. And that stylesheet seems to exist only to screw up the screen display for Opera users.
For the details about what's going on, see this page about why MSN doesn't work with Opera.
MSN.com won't play nice with others
MSN deliberately breaks Opera's browser, claims company
Opera: Microsoft is hurting our style
From news.com: Study: Office surfers aren't slackers.
A new study finds that employees may waste time surfing on the job, but they tend to make up for it by working from home in their off hours. (...) The survey found that people with Web access at home and at work spend an average of 3.7 hours per week surfing sites for personal use at work. But they spend more time, 5.9 hours per week, logging on from home so they can work.
"The survey suggests companies should accept some personal use of the Internet at work as not only inevitable, but as positive to the organization," Roland Rust, director of the business school's Center for e-Service, said in a statement. "Totally segregating work from personal activities might result in a net decline in work performed, not to mention lower workplace morale." [continue]
Do you ever wonder how fast your Internet connection really is? The Internet connection speedometer will tell you.
If you've ever been frustrated by a plethora of stupid Windows error messages, if your Windows computer drives you crazy, or if you've opted for another operating system altogether because Windows makes you grumpy.... well, go play with this bit of frivolity: Windows RG. Priceless. I found this at the Shifted Librarian, and I'll echo her advice: "make sure you click on everything!" Requires Flash.
The city of Houston wasn't impressed with Microsoft's expensive licensing strategy, so they've started using a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Office: SimDesk. A USA Today article about the switch, Microsoft loses showdown in Houston, says:
SimDesk delivers software over the Internet at a fraction of the cost of Microsoft's Office, a software suite used on 94% of America's office personal computers. Houston is giving SimDesk to tens of thousands of residents and businesses, free. And it has begun using SimDesk as an Office substitute on at least half the city's 13,000 PCs.
Houston's moves could have a profound impact not only on Microsoft, but on the computing industry. If SimDesk proves to be a cheaper, workable Office alternative here, it could help achieve what Microsoft's rivals and antitrust busters could not: puncture Microsoft's monopoly and give tech buyers more choices.
"It's very cool technology," says retired software analyst Peter Lowber, who led the Gartner research firm's review of SimDesk last fall. "It works." [continue]
Related page:
SimHouston Virtual Desktop Software Applications - Houston Public Library
Free or cheap alternatives to Microsoft Office:
Software 602 - Windows
Easy Office - Windows
SimDesk. (Works on many platforms.)
Star Office (Works on Linux and on Windows.)
Open Office (Works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Solaris.)
Ørjan Stokkeland noticed that strange things were happening to his computer. Programs would launch themsleves, text would suddenly appear in the wrong places, and so forth. Turns out that the problem was Ørjan's neighbour's cordless keyboard.
From Aftenposten, Rampant cordless keyboard strikes again:
His neighbor Wormnes works from home, and spends a lot of his time typing at his computer, causing Stokkeland almost constant problems.
"Finally I opened a Word document. There I saw the "virus" writing a letter to Telenor complaining about a bill. When I saw the sender's address I understood the connection. It's crazy. I could have just left the document open and read everything he wrote," Stokkeland said.
Wormnes rang up HP and was told that "this kind of thing could happen". Hewlett-Packard advised him to speak with all neighbors within a radius of 100 meters and switch his keyboard to a channel they weren't using.
"There must be 100 people in that area. It's impossible to talk with all of them," Wormnes said, and that is not even the worst of it.
"If a neighbor wants to listen in, there is no way to stop them. I got a message from HP that another alternative was "not to write any sensitive information". I think that's horrible. In practice the product is useless. They sell it without any mention of the danger," Wormnes said.
If I had a wireless keyboard, it would become a doorstop right about now.
Previous Mirabilis.ca posting on this topic:
Cordless keyboard misadventure - October 31st, 2002.
From 'Cleaned' hard drives reveal secrets at newscientist.com.
Discarded and recycled computer drives can reveal financial and personal information even when apparently wiped clean, MIT researchers have found.
Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat, graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analysed 158 second hand hard drives bought over the internet between November 2000 and August 2002. They were able to recover over 6000 credit card numbers, as well as email messages and pornographic images.
The pair wrote a program to scour the disk drives for any trace of credit card information. They found card numbers on 42 drives of the drives they bought.
One drive had previously been used in an ATM cash machine and contained 2868 different numbers, as well as account and transaction information. Another drive contained a credit card number within a cached web page. [continue]
Until now, my favourite Microsoft Windows error message was "keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue." But this treasure from the Microsoft Knowledge Base is even better:
Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords.
Found at Linkfilter.
From a techextreme.com article:
The miniature storage device measures roughly an inch-wide and functions exactly like traditional hard drives found in any computer. But by using advanced technology developed from IBM research, the Microdrive can store over four gigabytes of data on disks roughly the size of U.S. quarters.
Just imagine how useful this will be, particularly in handheld computing.
Wired has an article about privacy-invading software for employers. The program
... allows corporate IT folks to research employees' criminal histories, credit information, financial asset details, friends and associates.
That data can be combined with RedAlert's collection of internal data -- such as what files employees accessed, the contents of their e-mails and what company policies they violated -- to draw what Savvydata reps describe as a "clear picture that can be used in determining an employee's risk to your organization." [continue]
Sick, sick, sick. Being self-employed looks better and better, doesn't it?
For the second time in the last couple of months, I've been unable to blog anything for a 24 hour period due to problems with my web hosting company (Dreamhost). I'm annoyed, and thinking of moving to a different provider. If you run Moveable Type on a Linux or Unix webserver somewhere, and you're happy with your web hosting provider, could you let me know which company you use? Thanks.
UPDATE: I've found two excellent webhosting companies: Pair.com and TextDrive.
For more about Dreamhost and Moveable Type, see this posting.
Some pond-scum guy in Chicago has been buying computers on eBay, then paying for them with counterfeit cashier's cheques. He had quite the scam going there, until one of his victims got creative and tracked him down. See How I Caught a Counterfeiter with a Little Help from my Friends for the story. (Link found on the ever-interesting Stupidus.) Oh, and now Register has an article about it, too, Mac fraud bust: the Inside Story.
Developers at Google have come out with a couple of new things you might like to try. Google Webquotes results show quotations about your search term from other websites. Google Glossary turns Google results into a rather helpful dictionary. (Example: what is PGP?)
The weirdest new thing is Google Viewer, which gives a slideshow of screenshots from results pages.
The Detroit Free Press has brightened my day with Mike Wendland's article, Internet spammer can't take what he dishes out.
West Bloomfield bulk e-mailer Alan Ralsky, who just may be the world's biggest sender of Internet spam, is getting a taste of his own medicine.
Ever since I wrote a story on him a couple of weeks ago (www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_20021122.htm), he says he's been inundated with ads, catalogs and brochures delivered by the U.S. Postal Service to his brand-new $740,000 home.
It's all the result of a well-organized campaign by the anti-spam community, and Ralsky doesn't find it funny.
"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is," he told me. "These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me."
That they are. Gleefully. Almost 300 anti-Ralsky posts were made on the Slashdot.org Web site, where the plan was hatched after spam haters posted his address, even an aerial view of his neighborhood.
"Several tons of snail mail spam every day might just annoy him as much as his spam annoys me," wrote one of the anti- spammers.
Sometimes the news can be so cheering.
Related articles:
Inside the spammer's world
HOWTO: Annoy a Spammer
Spam King Lives Large off Others' E-Mail Troubles
Spamhaus.com on Alan Ralsky
Update:
Anti-spammer in car chase
You think you've dealt with weird computer problems? Match this, the case of the 500-mile email:
Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible... I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.
I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.
"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.
I choked on my latte. "Come again?"
"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther." [continue]
Perfect amusement for Unix geeks.
From the Sunday Herald: Egypt's secrets are revealed ... in five seconds.
Cracking the ancient code of hieroglyphics was once considered one of the greatest feats of cryptology. But thanks to a group of academics from Scotland the secrets of the Pharaohs are set to be revealed in a matter of seconds.
In a bid to replace the time- consuming techniques currently available to translate the ancient scripts, computer experts at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen are developing a program that will allow tourists and archaeologists to understand the texts from inside the tomb itself.
A digital photo of a hieroglyph can be taken with a mobile phone, sent to a computer and translated into English in seconds. Previously Egyptologists have had to manually match each hieroglyph with a translation using word-processing materials. Because there are more than 4700 known glyphs -- including almost 800 basic ones, of which some 400 are considered common -- this has always been a lengthy and laborious task.
'We are taking one of the oldest languages in the world and turning it into the newest -- that of the computer,' said Dr Nik Whitehead, head of the research team.'Once it is in the computer you can translate it instantly, making it accessible to everyone. The potential for academics -- or whetting people's appetite for ancient Egypt -- is huge,' she added. [continue]
Mark Pilgrim has provided us with a good blog-finding tool. At his Recommended Reading page, plug in the URL of some blog. Click the recommend button and - poof! - up will come a list of 20 blogs you might enjoy reading, based on the URL you specified. Every time you click an "already reading" or "not interested" link, the list will regenerate.
I tried this with Mirabilis.ca, and here's the list of blogs I got. I'd love to see the algorithm behind this thing. On what basis does the program choose its links?
Meanwhile, Google thinks these sites are similar to Mirabilis.ca.
The Register has an article about why SchoolNet Namibia has decided to turn down a donation from Microsoft and continue running the Linux operating system instead.
The African nation of Namibia is large in area and small in population with considerable distances between communities. Imagine the challenges of getting its schools wired to the Net. SchoolNet Namibia, a chiefly volunteer organization, struggles to do precisely that with a free ISP and numerous other initiatives to get the nation's schools, many of which lack any library resources at all, on-line.
Imagine the pleasure with which SchoolNet would initially have confronted a charitable overture from Microsoft involving free software. Now imagine the disappointment of learning that accepting the 'gift' would entail outlays of money in the range of fifteen times the value of the M$ Trojan horse.
Well, some donation.
From an Aftenposten article, Cordless keyboard wrote on neighbor's computer:
While a Stavanger man typed away at his desktop computer his text was also streaming in on his neighbor's machine in a building 150 meters away. Hewlett-Packard have never received a complaint like it.
Newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad had an inside track on the weird tech story since the incident involved two of their graphics workers.
Per Erik Helle got a jolt when his home computer suddenly seemed to develop a life of its own.
"About 10 pm I was sitting and watching TV when the computer, which was in sleep mode, suddenly began to buzz. I looked over and noticed it was waking up. I also saw a red light on the keyboard's receiver box blinking as if I was writing something," Helle said.
A game which he could not remember using that day appeared on the screen. When Helle went over to shut it off the screen displayed a message asking him if he "really wanted to delete this file?". Not knowing what it meant, he answered no to play it safe.
The machine was not finished. A series of beeps and clicks that hinted at error messages came so quickly that Helle again got the impression someone was writing. So he turned on his word processor.
He saw text ticking in live, and could tell from the message that it was his neighbor Per Arild Evjeberg, also his boss at Stavanger Aftenblad, who was writing. A phone call quickly confirmed that Helle was watching Evjeberg type live.
Related links:
Experts warn against cordless keyboards
Stavanger Aftenblad newspaper (in Norwegian)
Update:
Cordless keyboard woes continue
The Vatican is planning to make lots of material available in electronic form. Plans include a website for the Secret Archives, and some CDs that will contain archival materials related to prisoners of war during the WW2.
Here are some details from a Catholic news service article:
Scholars currently have access to Vatican archival material through the reign of Pope Benedict XV, who died in 1922. Cardinal Mejia noted that beginning next year the Vatican will make available documents regarding relations with Germany in 1922-39, the period of Pius XI's pontificate. In 2005, all documents from that period will be made available.
Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the office that oversees the Vatican Web site, said the addition of sections dedicated to the library and archive demonstrated a shift in the Web site's focus from providing strictly documentary material to also offering "cultural projects."
He said the Vatican also was studying plans to launch a "great Catholic portal" to provide an "encounter with the Catholic Church" to Web surfers, but he provided no details. In the past, Vatican Internet officials have talked about creating a more interactive site to complement its current site, dedicated primarily to church texts.
Related Links:
Vatican Secret Archives - current site
If you run a blog and keep an eye on your site stats, you might have noticed this:
Referral logs, intended to collect information on who visited a website and how they happened to arrive there, are being stuffed with bogus links. Curious bloggers who click on a logged link to see who visited their site are instead led to pornography or advertising sites.
Some bloggers publish a list that automatically updates links to sites that have linked to them. So visitors to spammed blogs who explore the link lists also find those sites full of porn and sales pitches.
In most cases the link spam appears to have been added to logs by one of several companies that are selling a service they describe as "referral marketing."
That's from a wired.com article, When the Spam Hits the Blogs.
What an annoying development.
(By the way: when you visit Mirabilis.ca, my site logs don't tell me who you are. All I see is that a visitor came here by clicking on a link at some other site, like Cranky Professor or Portage.)
Here's an interesting response to this kind of spam. Mo Morgan's Mastodonte Project page has a little form one can fill out. Whatever you put in the form will show up in the spammer's referral logs.
When I first wrote this entry, I mentioned how happy I was with Moveable Type, and with my Dreamhost webhosting account. That has all changed. Here's the update:
Moveable Type seemed like the best choice for blogging software back when I was setting up this blog, but it's not the best choice now. I've checked out some other blogging software, and both WordPress and TextPattern impress me way more than Moveable Type ever did. One of these days I will move my blog from Moveable Type to WordPress or TextPattern.
As for webhosting, I don't recommend Dreamhost to anybody. Dreamhost takes too long to respond to support requests, and support requests are necessary because my site goes down rather frequently with Dreamhost. They have been more like Nightmarehost to me. Responses from tech support are worrying. I write to say: "My site is down again. Could you please fix it and let me know what went wrong?" The response is often "It looks fine now." I get the impression they would never even know about the site outages if I didn't report them. What kind of service is that?
I use Pair.com for hosting many of my other domains. The service there has been absolutely perfect in every regard, and that's over a period of years. When I get around to moving this site, I'll probably move it to Pair. Another good option is Textdrive, which is run by a guy I respect a lot. Textdrive shows every sign of being excellent.
Maybe you've noticed, too. More and more websites are sporting those little orange XML buttons, or they have links saying "xml feed" or "syndicate this site" somewhere.
This is good news if you read lots of websites every day, and want an efficient way of keeping up with changes on those sites. If your 27 favourite blogs all have xml feeds, you can use news aggregator software to grab recent entries from all of those sites at once. The news aggregator combines all the new stuff for you, displaying an excerpt from each recent article. There's a link to click on if you want to read the whole posting.
Want to try an aggregator? Here's a list of aggregators for you. It includes online aggregators, and aggregators for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Palm users.
Oh, one more thing: if you want news aggregator software to display recent Mirabilis.ca entries, tell it to grab the http://www.mirabilis.ca/index.xml file.
The current issue of Fast Company has an article entitled La Dolce Vita, Internet Style. It's about Colletta di Castelbianco, a medieval town which has a super-fast Internet connection. Get this:
...on a rugged spur some 1,000 feet above sea level, the 13th-century village is about to complete a remarkable renaissance. Colletta has been restored as a haven for mobile knowledge workers who want to live in medieval Italy but also want to remain connected to the rest of the world. No urban congestion, no suburban sprawl. Just a view of the maritime Alps that hasn't changed in more than a thousand years -- plus a lightning-fast Internet connection.
Now that has possibilities.
If your domain registrar is Network Solutions/Verisign, take a look at Verisignoff, a "community resource created to help site owners move their domain names away from Verisign and its related companies (as well as illustrating why they should consider transferring)."
The Network Solutions Horror Stories website is also of interest, and so's the story of how the hoopla.com domain was stolen from its owner, thanks to Verisign's incompetence. (Update.)
I recommend Gandi for .com, .net, .org, and .info domain registrations; I hear Pairnic and Go Daddy are good, too. Transferring a domain from one registrar to another is pretty easy - here's an explanation of the process from Pairnic.
Related links:
Falling prey to the Verisign beast
Verisign sucks
Verisign accused of DNS slamming
BulkRegister sues Verisign for slamming
Verisign info from Kuro5hin
You know those Nigerian spam/scam letters? Wired.com has a new article about them. Some things I've learned recently about this scam are:
Related links:
Nigerian advance fee scheme
Six arrested over 'Nigerian email' frauds
Canadian Council of Better Business Bureaus: Nigerian (or African) Letter Scams
419 Coalition Website
Tonight I spotted a banner ad I would love to see on lots of websites: Hotmail. Now with free Microsoft spam! Ha! This and other fun banners are from Valley of the Geeks.
While checking out other pages at Valley of the Geeks, I found their Geekwear section. I'd like to order the lovely RTFM mug to take to work, although I suppose wouldn't be appreciated by the people who ought to RTFM.
A web developer in Toronto registered canadian.biz. Good for him, eh? First come, first serve. You'd think that would be that. But no, now the Molson beer company is taking the web developer to court over this domain name. Molson wants it, you see.
I suppose it might be a surprise to Molson, but there are actually - gasp! - a number of Canadian businesses in this teensy little country of ours.
Related:
ICANN Watch article about this dispute
The Simputer is a Linux-based handheld computer designed for poor and rural areas of India. Over the last year, there's been a lot of encouraging press about this unit. Here's part of an Asiaweek article: [update: Asiaweek article no longer available.]
When children in rural villages near Bangalore were shown the Simputer for the first time, their reaction was amazement. The few who had seen a computer before — locked away in a schoolroom — were astonished to find one small enough to fit in their palms. That wasn't all. It could talk! And in their own language!
The kids' excitement over the strange new device is just what the Simputer's inventors — a team of seven computer scientists and software engineers in Bangalore — would want. For the past couple of years, they've donated their time and expertise to developing a computer that's accessible to all. Their aim was to design a portable Internet device that is simple (hence the name Simputer, for "simple computer"), usable by the illiterate and no more than $200 in price.
Today CNN reports that the Simputer is almost ready. [Update: that page is no longer on the CNN site] CNN says that one of the comanies licensed to make Simputers has begun making a couple of hundred units, and expects that 50,000 units could be sold by the end of next year.
I'd love to sit and watch as people discover how to use these things.
Related links:
Simputer Trust - simputer.org
India to Compute on the Cheap - wired.com
Indian handheld to tackle digital divide - BBC
Simputer: the computer for the masses - rediff.com
How Can You Use A PC If You Can't Even Read? - Asiaweek.com
I think the Gator software is evil. It's often promoted as a helpful tool to fill out web forms for you, and save you so very much typing. (Really, how hard is it to fill in a form?) The promotions I've seen for Gator don't mention that the program causes annoying advertisements to pop up while you surf the web. Worse still, Gator might be bundled with software you did want to install, so you might have downloaded and installed Gator without realizing you did so.
News.com's reports that a group of web publishers are suing Gator over pop-ups. Here's part of the article:
"The suit was filed Tuesday in federal court in Alexandria, Va. The Washington Post, The New York Times, Dow Jones and seven other publishers allege that Gator's ads violate their copyrights and steal revenue.
Redwood City, Calif.-based Gator is "essentially a parasite on the Web that free rides on the hard work and the investments of plaintiffs and other Web site owners," according to the filing. "In short, Gator sells advertising space on the plaintiffs' Web sites without (their) authorization and pockets the profits from such sales."
I hope the plaintiffs win.
Think your computer might have Gator installed? The free Ad Aware program will scan your Windows machine and offer to remove all the spyware it finds.
Related Links:
"Spyware" piggybacks on Napster rivals
Tomcat list of spyware
Remember when Scientology threatened Google back in March? The Scientologists were annoyed because they didn't like the results that came up when people searched for Scientology at Google. So the Church of Scientology threatened Google with legal action, and Google removed some links from its database... for a while.
Well, it turns out that the folks at Google had a bit of fun with this. An article at law.com tells us how Google's director of legal affairs, Kulpreet Rana, reacted:
"Now, if a user finds one of the links that bothered the Scientologists, a message on Google.com encourages him to visit chillingeffects.org, a pro-First Amendment Web site founded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a handful of law school clinics. Posted on chillingeffects.org is the Scientologists' cease-and-desist letter to the search engine."
Not bad at all, Google.
Tonight in a search at Google for scientology, the top ten search results include Operation Clambake - The Fight Against The Church of Scientology on The Net and The Church of Scientology vs The Net, which are probably not pages that the Church of Scientology likes. So I wonder if Google has changed its policy again.
Related Links:
Google Yanks Anti-Church Sites
Google Restores Church Links
Scientology, Google and the First Amendment
Google Begins Making DMCA Takedowns Public
Scientologists gag Google
A company in Texas is trying to teach a computer named Cyc to use common sense. From a Register Guard article:
"They have been feeding a database named Cyc 1.4 million truths and generalities about daily life so it can automatically make assumptions humans make: Creatures that die stay dead. Dogs have spines. Scaling a cliff requires intense physical effort.
Though some critics question the potential of this painstaking effort, the inventors believe that Cyc will form the brains of computers with supercharged reasoning abilities - which could help us work more efficiently, make us understand each other better and even help us predict the previously unforeseeable."
This article about European police plans to spy on email is pretty depressing. I hope we can avoid this kind of insanity in Canada.
Looking at photos of Logitech's new Pocket Digital Camera, I think of all the times I left my camera at home because I didn't want to carry anything bulky. One of these new Pocket Digital things would be handy - they're about the size of a credit card, only a bit thicker. Here's a review of the camera from Hardwarecentral.
What do you do when you run a Norwegian language and culture centre, and find that you're missing the password for an important database? You ask hackers for help, of course, and they respond. [Update: article no longer available.]
Update: the password has been recovered.
"According to Aasen Centre information chief Torgeir Dimmen, the institute received a solution for their long-standing security headache within five hours of their Internet appeal." The BBC has more info: Simple password holds the key.
A June 2004 New York Times article tells a bit more:
When a man who maintained a database of 15,000 historical books at the Ivar Aasen Center of Language and Culture in Norway died suddenly a few years ago, other employees discovered that they could not gain access to the book list, which was on a computer disk. It seemed that the dead man had been the only person who knew the password to unlock the file. A team of computer technicians tried but failed to crack the password.
"I was frustrated and confused," the center's director, Ottar Grepstad, said in a telephone interview. "How could all this work be done with such bad security routines?"
So in a national radio broadcast, Mr. Grepstad appealed to hackers. Some 25,000 people worldwide responded, and one of them suggested the password in less than an hour: the deceased man's last name, only reversed. Employees now write their passwords on papers that are stored in the center's safe.
