Watch animations of two different types of cranes going up.

Core77 – Animation explaining how they erect cranes

Boston College: Illustration shows light propogating around the East Coast of the US according to instructions from the metamaterial device

Looking for an invisibility cloak or a car that blends right into its surroundings? Researchers at Boston College have managed to use what they call ‘metamaterials’ to instruct a beam of light to follow particular pathways.

The researchers accomplished their feat by developing a much more precise set of instructions, which create a grid-like roadmap capable of twisting and turning a beam of light around objects or space. Their discovery is an extension of earlier metamaterial “cloaking” techniques, which have conjured up images of the Harry Potter character disappearing beneath his invisibility cloak.

“Our method combines the novel effects of transformational optics with the practicality of dielectric construction,” Padilla and Landy report. “We show that our structures are capable of guiding light in an almost arbitrary fashion over an unprecedented range of frequencies.”

The process is definitely still in its early stages but the mere thought that such a thing is possible is quite incredible.

[via nanowerk.com]

(Source eartheasy.com)

With auto makers such as General Motors hesitant to adopt fuel efficient designs and paying dearly for it,  it’s time to start stepping up to do something about the problem.  Though gas prices have dropped down to a pretty reasonable level, the memory of prices greater than $4.00 a gallon is still all too sharp.  Here are a few things each of us can do to save money at the pump.  They really add up with just a little bit of effort.

Driving Habits:

1. Avoid hard breaking
2. Avoid quick acceleration 
   • Note: 1 and 2 increases travel time by 4% but can decrease consumption by 40% and reduce emissions to 1/5th.
3. Keep moving without coming to a complete stop
4. Drive between 5o and 60 mph when possible for most efficient performance
5. Anticipate stopping and just glide to a stop with less braking – breaking throws away energy
6. User higher gears if you have a choice
7. If stopped for more than 30 seconds, turn off the engine rather than idling
8. Use cruise control for long flat areas, it smooths out acceleration
9. Do not use cruise control in hilly areas
10. At speeds <40mph, crack windows instead of AC, (>10%)
11. At speeds >40mph, close windows
12. Draft behind larger vehicles – semis can’t slow down quickly so less following distance isn’t as dangerous

Car Maintenance:

1. Inflate tires properly
2. Change air filters regularly (clogged filters use 10% more fuel)
3. Change oil regularly (clean oil is more efficient)
4. Tighten gas cap (gas evaporates and escapes)

Trip Planning:

1. Remove unnecessary items from the car
2. Park in the shade to reduce need for AC and fuel evaporation
3. Use a block heater in the winter since fuel is more efficient when warmed up
4. Combine trips and errands
5. Telecommute when possible
6. Carpool or use mass transit
7. When choosing a route, avoid traffic, hills and construction
8. If you have a choice about when to go out, save driving for non-windy days

The project is located at: http://twitter.abrah.am/

The author is pretty careful to remind readers that the library is still in beta, incomplete and likely to change.  Nevertheless, his documentation, comments, and live examples make this library a must use.

As an option, though, what about implementing a ‘connectivity-free zone’ now and then to step back and consider the broad scope of a project, a relationship, an important decision, or life itself? Camping for a day, or even taking a day trip by bike without phone, iPod, email or so much as a newspaper might do the trick. Life these days is overwhelmed by the continuous flow of information.

The never-ending barrage is draining and we need ways to turn it off, recognizing and remembering that the world will be okay without us for awhile, and us without it.

I found a nice solution here on a forum, posted by user gl0rfindel.  Create a bookmark pointing to the url:

javascript:
timeout=prompt("Set timeout [s]");
current=location.href;
if(timeout>0)
  setTimeout('reload()',1000*timeout);
else
  location.replace(current);
function reload(){
  setTimeout('reload()',1000*timeout);
  fr4me='<frameset cols=\'*\'>\n<frame src=\''+current+'\'/>';
  fr4me+='</frameset>';
  with(document){write(fr4me);void(close())};
}

Clicking the bookmark will let you specify how regularly (in s) to refresh the current active tab.

Ever wanted to let a friend look through your iTunes music library remotely?   Dusty Tunes provides a quick and easy way to index and list your library online.  An easy alphabetical listing by Author allows anyone with the proper link to peruse your music collection.  Once there, guests can browse, search, and then preview or purchase  from iTunes individual songs in your collection.

The owner of the library creates a quick account and then points the site to the file iTunes Music Library.xml (typically located at My documents > My music > Itunes > iTunes Music Library.xml)

The owner can then point friends to the url (http://www.dustytunes.com/user/<owner_username>.php).  Mine is located here: http://www.dustytunes.com/user/nmeierpolys.php

I’m pretty sick of facebook’s mess of a website as they’ve added on more and more complex features.  I use Pidgin with this plugin to chat with Facebook friends without the hassle of navigating their site.

Facebook Chat Plugin for Pidgin

Autodesk Project Dragonfly provides a really nice way to lay things out and move them around spacially.  It gives you the same control to physically move things around the room without the hassle of physically doing so.

It’s not the fastest web application since there’s a lot of JavaScript updating to do in the background.  The options for furniture and customization are also somewhat limited at this early stage.  Nevertheless, Dragonfly gives some fantastic 3D views and layout tools for designing a room.

A cool Adobe Air application designed to display Google Reader posts in a clean 0SX-themed desktop client.  It’s not perfect yet (glitches, disappearing scrollbars on occasion) but it’s a project worth keeping an eye on.

Download at: http://code.google.com/p/readair/

(note: requires installation of Adobe Air)

Keyboard Shortcuts: Many of these are well known but they are all incredibly helpful

• CTRL-F6 or ALT-d: 
  • Select the URL in the address bar
• CTRL-SHIFT-N:  
  • New incognito window
• SHIFT-ESC:  
  • Open Chrome Task Manager
• CTRL-SHIFT-T:  
  • Open recently closed browser tab
• CTRL-Click on a link: 
  • Open this page in a new background tab
• CTRL-SHIFT-Click on a link: 
  • Open this page in a new tab and switch to this tab
• CTRL-TAB: 
  • Switch to the next tab
• CTRL-SHIFT-TAB: 
  • Switch to the previous tab
• CTRL-#: 
  • Switch to this tab

(Full listing available at: Explore Google Chrome Features)

Omnibar commands:

The Omnibar is Chrome’s address bar and search bar rolled into one thing.  Typing a URL goes to that site, typing a search query looks up results in Google Search.

In addition to those operations, Chrome allows access to some valuable information about the browser’s inner workings.

• ? <search-query>
  • search the item <search-query> in Google
• type a web address then hit TAB+<search-query>
  • allows searching of the query on that url’s domain
• about:memory
  • chrome process memory usage
• about:stats
  • load times for Chrome, Javascript
• about:network
  • behind-the-scenes network info
• about:dns
  • dns info, time, stats
• about:version
  • version, user-agent, etc.
• about:plugins
  • installed plugins
• about:cache
  • cached content
• view-cache:[URL]
  • specific content cache info (e.g. view-cache:http://www.thanscorner.info)
• view-source:[URL]
  • source of content (e.g. view-source:http://www.thanscorner.info)
• about:crash
  • crash the tab (just for fun!)

To try out the most recent development version of Chrome, you will need to make a few easy changes to your installation.

(img src: popandpolitics.com)

Instructions:

1. download the Chrome channel switcher here
2. after installing and running the program, select the ‘Dev’ channel
3. to enable plugins, right-click your chrome shortcut and select properties.
4. in the ‘Target:’  field, add  ’–enable-extensions’  to your path.  (e.g. ‘”<chrome-path>” –enable-extensions’)

This developer channel might be a bit buggy but it gives you the chance to try out the newest Chrome release.  A few notable features at the writing of this post:

• ability to edit starting page thumbnails
• support for extensions (.crx files)
• support for video tag

Info about current releases on each channel can be found on the updates blog for versions: stable, beta, and dev

Available Chrome extensions include:

• AdSweep strip ads from web pages (link).  
  • Provided by Adsweep.org
• Googlepedia (link).  
  • Provided by Chrome Plugins: Googlepedia extension for Chrome – Get Wikipedia articles along search results
• RSS Feed Subscribe (link) 
  • via Chromium Developer Documentation
• GMail Inbox + New Message Count (link) 
  • via Chromium Developer Documentation

Additional flags for adding functionality: (turn them on just as you did –enable-extensions)

• -omnibox-popup-count=10
  • specify the number of suggestions Chrome gives when typing in the omnibar
• -remote-shell-port=10
  • change the port for remote shell
• --single-process
  • run all chrome tabs within a single process (more info about Chrome processes: Chrome’s Process Model Explained)
• –process-per-site
  • run a separate chrome process for each site (2 google tabs will be within the same process)
• –process-per-tab
  • run a separate chrome process for each tab
• –enable-extensions  
  • turn on support for extensions (.crx)
• –proxy-server=PROXYSERVER:PORT
  • specify a proxy server
• –enable-user-scripts
  • turn on support for user scripts
• –enable-user-scripts –user-data-dir=”path\to\your\profile”
  • specify the directory for user data
• –enable-logging
  • turn on logging for developer use
• –enable-greasemonkey
  • enable greasemonkey (place scripts from Userscripts.org in the C:\scripts\ directory)
• –auto-spell-correct
  • enables fixing of little spelling issues automatically

It’s stupid but cute.  In the extended alphabet sets of, there is a vast selection of letters.  Among these are those that can be used to model normal english characters upside-down.  This site has a script for converting text and a key of each character’s representation.

How to type upside down text and letters in HTML

In order to catch these valuable bits, I use a modified to-do list.  I keep an email draft in my Gmail inbox and a notepad document up on the screen which together contain anything interesting I’ve encountered and have yet to process.

Say I’m reading a post about books and there are links to a good author.  I haven’t finished the first post yet so jumping in a new direction or opening a new tab in the background would leave me scattered.  I add the author’s name and a link to the book to my ‘buffer’ and finish where I was at. When I’ve got time, I can work through things on this list which aren’t dreaded tasks.  I perceive them as anticipated points of interest.

The list grows and shrinks according to my level of busyness but higher-priority items get picked off first and those that in hindsight don’t really matter can get periodically bumped off and out of the way.  So far, it’s been fantastic way to reign in my easily distracted mind to actually finish things in some semblance of order.

For example:

Blog posts

-10,000 year clock

-Map guy

-Photosynth of inauguration

-Post portfolio pieces

-Prairie Home Companion Streaming

-Books

-Buffer

guitar hero songs

research jboss

contribute to mediawiki

open filer

FreeNAS

pfSense

try systemBoot Disk

Pound – http load balancer

Ruby on rails with Bear

Ruby on rails book

try clonezilla disc

shorting stock

technology singularity

PKAL work  - images as headers, image upload issue

Try out OpenMeetings

Try out CloudVPN

This is ancient and probably old news to everyone out there, but I just discovered this text animation of Star Wars: A New Hope.  

It’s nothing incredibly special but I found it incredible that after more than 7 years they’re still hosting and running this server.

Click here to see the animation

If that doesn’t work:

1. Start Menu
2. Run
3. Enter: “telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl“
4. Click OK

So I found this site.  It’s a magazine me and my friends found and it basically has projects in which you use stuff you might find at home and MAKE it into something.  They give step-by-step instructions that have been helpful to me sometimes.  

You can got to their volumes and find an issue you might find interesting..yay?  Sadly there are only a small number of issues. This one Nathaniel would like.

Update: This is indeed something I enjoy.  Look to Instructables and Instuctables: MAKE group for more projects and detailed project instructions.

Be careful though – some of these delete metadata or files without much warning.  Make sure you’re doing what you intend to do.

Teridon’s site has a nice library of tools available in an executable package.

Apple released a few sample scripts with the iTunesCOMWindowsSDK  package of developer header files. 

• RemoveDeadTracks.js  -  I’ve found this one especially useful.
• CreateAlbumPlaylists.js
• RemoveUserPlaylists.js

Moreover, the methods for developing custom scripts are very approachable in case these scripts don’t do quite what you need.

A token of that unity is the CNN image taken by the GeoEye satellite of between one and two million people on the national mall to observe this inauguration, despite hours of security checks and frigid cold weather.

CNN: Satellite image of crowds on the mall   

To some degree I’m sure this is a reflection of the miserable general job market and the especially poor tech job market at the moment.  That’s to be expected.  There are nevertheless plenty of possible jobs listed.  It’s just that none of them are actually done by companies themselves.  At least 90% of all interesting job listings encountered are done by recruiters from staffing agencies looking to market me as a consultant.   

The decision by companies to look to consultants rather than individual job seekers probably comes down to a question of qualifications.   When a company or division is expanding or replacing someone on the team, someone in human resources is tasked with filling the spot.  These people are not necessarily informed enough to know that Ubuntu administration and linux administration skills overlap or that someone with Javascript expertise is qualified to some degree for AJAX.  Rather than go to the trouble of bothering the software guys in the company to screen applicants, they turn to staffing agencies to supply people, the same staffing agencies which, by the way, skim off a significant chunk of change for their services.  

This setup makes it quick and easy for HR people to fill developer slots, and maybe some developers with targeted skills can benefit from this matchup.  I am of the opinion, however, that a software company without the informed scrutiny to screen applicants on its own may not be as concerned about the quality of the employees it settles for, and may not care whether they’re happy enough to stick around for the long term.

These days, events on the order of a human lifetime are outside the scope of thought for this time and generation. The concept of seeing things in the context of a few years seems odd and even a year is difficult to approach. We in this world and time have accustomed ourselves to a life composed of moment to moment instantaneous experience. People follow one event to the next as if to blindly follow steps in the sequence without stepping back to consider the sequence itself.

This Fall found me working my way through Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which is another fantastic success from an author who understands this message. He and a growing community of similarly minded thinkers have come together to contribute to the Long Now Foundation. The foundation describes its purpose thus:

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

The foundation aims to further its goal through seminars, essays and projects serving to redirect attention towards more significant and deserving ends. Check out some of the plans, discussion, and images of the 10,000 year clock and take a minute to think about some of the ideas behind it.

Word on the Tweet

Windows – Backup to external hard drive: Backup Magic

Network Linux Box – Great article on network backups

Online options: Carbonite

Now, maybe it’s just me, but how far into debt can we go before people start wondering whether we’re worth the investment.  Just for the sake of context, in 2006 back when the debt was around $8.5 trillion, the US paid $406 Billion in interest on the debt.  Compare that to the roughly $95 billion we spent on education or the $60 billion we spent on transportation in the same year.  What will it take to turn this around?  How long can the country go before we realize the danger we’re in.

Courtesy of http://www.federalbudget.com/

…Providing a full range of services with Design of Experiment, including

• Six Sigma DMAIC Methodology
• Continuous Quality Improvement Team Facilitation
• Statistical Tools and Measurement
• Data Acquisition and Presentation 

Enjoy!
There are a few keywords that you can use in the search box at the top of the page

from:
to:
subject:
label:
after:
before:
in:
is:
has:

For the above, you could provide the following options as below

from:

from: {email address}
from: {name}

to:

to : {email address}
to : {name}

subject:

subject: {subject}

after:

after: {date in any known format} – For example : March 25, 10/10/2006, etc

before:

before: {date in any known format} – For example : March 25, 10/10/2006, etc

in:

in: inbox (Searches Inbox)
in: chat (Searches Chat)
in: drafts (Searches Drafts)
in: spam (Searches spam)
in: trash (Searches Trash)
in: anywhere (Searches All the Mail including Trash & Spam)
is:

is: starred (Searches Starred Mail)
is: sent (Searches Sent Mail)
is:read (Searches Read Mail)
is:unread (Searches Unread Mail)

has:

has:attachment (Checks for mail with Attachment)

label:

label: {label_name} (Checks in mail with Label name)

Other general options include

{search_keyword} and – {search_keyword} which means search for {search_keyword} or doesn’t have {search_keyword} in your mail
Example:

Find all mail which was addressed to techflock before 19th Dec 2006 and After 1st November 2006 and has networking but not basic in the mail with IMP as label

Your search query would be

before:2006/12/19 after:2006/11/01 to:techflock label:IMP in:anywhere networking -basic

For so long, gas prices in the US have been exceptionally low, kept down by government subsidies and protection of oil interests.  Check out this table comparing prices around the world.  We’ve been lucky to get along with such cheap fuel costs but when things get easy, people get lazy.  If it’s cheap to drive an hour to work every day, people have no reason to live closer, or invest in a bus or train route to fit the bill.  If it’s glamorous and profitable to push huge vehicles to consumers, there’s no incentive to develop efficient and sensible alternatives.

When times are easy, individuals and companies have no reason to invent and innovate and lead the world in developing new technologies.  We slip behind other countries because we’ve collectively forgotten what it means to strive desperately for the best.

High gas prices have forced us economically to do what we should have been doing on our own.  We’re facing the short-term shock that comes with a forced change in perspective.  Soon, though, the country will shift into gear and do what we do best.  The country should embrace this opportunity step it up and rediscover its place as a center of innovation and discovery.  I just hope we don’t forget the lesson when prices drop again.  SUV sales should never recover.

Check that hidden files are visible:

• In any folder, go to Tools -> Folder Options -> View tab
• ‘Show Hidden Files and Folders’ should be checked

Add shortcuts to the C:/Documents and Settings/<profile_name>/Send To folder.

Backup Magic automates and simplifies the process by allowing you to select certain folders to mirror on an external drive somewhere. I can set things up once and then periodically (or automatically on a cron job) run these backups. Just as easily, I can create another job to restore the backed up files/directories to their original location after a format (dead hard drive, sibling abuse, virus infestation, etc.).

Free to use. Pay if you really like it. Backup Magic

For example:

• how to make pad thai
• weather prediction
• barbeque
• the workings of nuclear power
• how plumbing works
• the art of the symphony
• early modes of transportation
• venture capital
• transatlantic ocean currents
• national parks of the us
• carrier-pidgeons

Often when I’m biking home from work, or falling asleep, or making dinner, etc. I think of things that would be worth knowing.  Sadly most of these thoughts are discarded and lost in the depths of my terrible terrible memory.

Try keeping a list – a leftover envelope, a notepad file, whatever – and take note of these things to look up later.  There’s the kind of knowledge we learn in classes where we memorize the names of elements in the periodic table, physics equations, dates of important events or classic novels.  Then there’s the kind of knowledge that really enriches the mind.

To fully digest something, it needs to be interesting enough to drive you to dig in and do move beyond memorization.  This list is my way of setting aside some time to set aside the stresses of life and immerse myself in things, random things, that enrich my view of the world.

I am a geek. I read technology blogs, carry an iPod, work for a tech company, receive regular tech support calls from family and friends and am never too far from internet access.

Lately, though, I’ve discovered a rather unexpected trend in my habits. Nearly all of the things I truly love to do for fun are conspicuously devoid of any technological component. It’s almost as if such routine exposure to technology drives me to places where I won’t be reminded of it at all. Strange, huh.

When I was younger, I was the kid who brought his laptop to the campfire circle while camping on the family trip in Canada. These days the thought of sitting in serene silence without any hint of developed civilization have replaced the need for constant connectivity to the outside world.

Contented shivers make their way up my spine at the thought of a week in the woods. I sit and wonder whether the constant drive to develop new more powerful forms of technology is the only way to improve civilization. After all, the capacity for happiness has existed way longer than the knowledge of electricity or industrialization.

The age of Web 2.0 has been dominating more clearly with every successfully integrated web app out there. Facebook apps dominate hours of time in the lives of people from all walks of life. The iPhone’s webapp integration is familiar to way more people than it should be, and high-speed internet has steadily grown in accessibility allowing more and more powerful web projects that are more application than web site.

Bungee Connect aims to provide a powerful portal to the design of highly integrated and exciting applications on the web. Now, I’ve just recently started an internship with the company Bungee Lab so I’m somewhat biased. That bias comes, however, in the form only of one who has had the opportunity to really see what this is all about.

The builder requires no downloaded software, relying on a browser-based interface. Developers can build AJAX-driven applications without the complicated and unpleasant detail management of the low-level message-passing involved.

In my opinion, however, the biggest feature offered by this development environment is its focus on integration with existing web services. Bungee Connect provides interfaces for handling the low-level communication between a Bungee app and other information sources on the web. This allows developers to automate the integrate of information like Google Calendar events, local weather details, RSS feeds or Facebook friend details without sorting through the nasty details of coding these connections by hand.

This is an entirely new way of approaching web design that opens doors to powerful applications. The novelty comes with a relatively steep learning curve, but the Bungee Connect team is committed to helping developers overcome difficulties along the way. Anyone is welcome to register and try out the service and I highly recommend taking advantage of this opportunity. The internet is an exciting place to be these days.

Bungee Connect

Why would you want to run IE when you don’t have to?  Some websites require particular browsers and web developers need to test for browser compatibility.   This link is for you.

IEs4Linux simplifies the process of installing several versions of Internet Explorer for linux distributions using Wine.  Download and run the script and it takes care of all the details

Since I always have trouble finding the thing every few months when I need it, now it’s documented and here to stay:  IIT – Connecting to Campus Servers

John McCain spoke yesterday afternoon on issues of foreign policy: Remarks Transcript

I side with the democratic viewpoint on most issues, advocating social programs, little religious involvement, protection of the environment, and unabashed use of taxes to pay for the programs we universally enjoy as an American public.  Though I disagree with McCain on a number of issues, I feel that when it really comes down to it, he has what it takes to pursue policy for selfless reasons based on experience and advice from different viewpoints.

 ”There is such a thing as international good citizenship. We need to be good stewards of our planet and join with other nations to help preserve our common home.”

“Our goal must be to win the “hearts and minds” of the vast majority of moderate Muslims who do not want their future controlled by a minority of violent extremists. In this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs.”

I’ve found it very easy to harbor burning hatred for the neoconservative republican attitude of the current administration and party leadership, but statements such as the above make it impossible for me to classify McCain as anything but a responsible politician.

Blogged with Flock

It’s so easy to forget that so many of these projects consist of components no more complicated than transistors, capacitors, and resistors combined in the right way.

What I need is a way to pull all of the physical files into one place from which I can organize and run backups on those files.  Accompanying those files, however, is a wealth of meta-information in the form of ratings, playlists, play counts and album information that I don’t want to lose.

Solution: iTunes now includes a “Consolidate Music” option under the “Advanced” tab.  Running this process will copy every file listed in your Music library to the home location (this setting: Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced tab).  In my case, I ran this process once, moving everything to an external hard drive, deleted the original copies of the music, and then running it a second time to copy everything back to a single folder on the local drive.

Update:  “Copying music failed. The file name was invalid or too long.”

• This is a result of filenames being too long, generally a result of artist and album information included directly within the file name.
• To get around this problem, open up the file My Documents/My Music/iTunes/Itunes Music Library.xml and search for the location of the directory you’re moving things from.  The first instance of this directory will be that associated with the file iTunes had trouble with.  Navigate to this file and shorten its name to something more appropriate.  Next, find the song in iTunes, double-click on it, choose “yes” and find the newly renamed file.  You can now resume the consolidation process, repeating these steps whenever iTunes has problems.
• The process may sound daunting but my collection includes ~6000 songs and encountered only 6 such errors.

In under 500 generations the robots evolved a method of communication using lights. Lights often signaled that the food resource had been found, but in trials where the robots were set to compete with each other (where only the top performers of a subset of the population were allowed to mate their programming with another robot and continue into the next generation) some of the robots developed an ability to trick the others by using the light signals to tell the others that the poison was food instead. Even more surprising, the robots were less likely to practice deception when communicating with robots that had programming more similar to their own, effectively contributing to the survival of kin.

More on this at:
The Biological Research Information Center

Mine include photography, writing, music (the listening of and the contribution to), crafts (building bookshelves, fixing a futon, making a longbow) cooking and reading, among others. So often I look at those around me and wonder what it is that makes them tick. What secretly gets their blood flowing…? Because it could not solely be their 9-5 job, or the essays they write, or the family to whom they go home at the end of the day. Politicians do not rely 100% on the extortion of good from their constituents. Even for them there must be something.

It’s sad how little these things come out. There is something truly good about these things that doesn’t depend on a meaning to life, but rather on the simple appreciation of those everyday aspects we would otherwise take for granted.

The thing that troubles me, though, is the lack of reason to this whole idea. I shouldn’t need anything more than a clear mind to experience happiness. Frankly, the most true and sincere joy I’ve felt, has come in the clarity after tossing away all thoughts of body or self and delving into experience.

I’m not sure when today, but for a few small moments, I was pondering this particular obstacle to happiness and it occurred to me that in times such as these when I fall into the trap of so desperately needing affirmation, there might be a better alternative. Maybe what I need to remember is that, given the time to think about it, there is no greater joy than at the thought of touching someone else in a powerful way.

I guess the lesson to myself is this: in times of self-doubt, loneliness and hardship, solace comes from the knowledge that I’ve given someone else the self-assurance they need to carry on in a difficult world. If I can’t come up with recent experiences fitting this description, then I have some work to do, and a clear and definite purpose to fulfill. And what could be more joyful than the knowledge of a clear and definite purpose.

Covering everything from basic topics such as shapes and colors all the way up to perspective changes, textures, and animations, these lessons help build up a solid and thorough understanding of OpenGL and Glut. To top it off, the videos are in flash and download pretty quickly.

Check them out: OpenGL Video Tutorials

Tags: Programming, OpenGL

IIT Documentation – Configuring a Proxy Server 

Automatic: http://www.stolaf.edu/proxy.pac

Manual:   www-proxy.stolaf.edu on port 8080

Prism makes strides to simplify the process of harnessing this web application -> desktop application capability. Once installed, opening Prism prompts for a web url and options to create Desktop, Quick Launch, or Start Menu icons. This new version also gives the users options allowing them to display a location bar, status messages, and navigation keys, should they so desire.

Mozilla Labs: Prism

The American Blog, seen by a relatively small percent of the American public, discusses the subtle politics involved with the Bush administration veto of defense policy legislation.  At the same time, a quick glance at cnn.com, touting “Breaking News” turns up no coverage whatsoever.  Now, I don’t expect people to pay attention to, or understand all of the subtleties involved in our government processes, but one would hope that people might consider the very real implications of the decisions being made.

The neoconservatives running the country can get away with a startling amount of manipulation when no one pays attention.  Government is accountable to its constituents, democrat and republican representatives alike.  Who’s to guarantee fair play, though, if the ref has his nose buried in the tabloids.

1. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
2. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
3. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
4. Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper by Peter Hill
5. The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
6. Enders Game by Orson Scott Card
7. Sailing Around the Room by Billy Collins
   
8. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet
9. Ilium by Dan Simmons
10. The Giver by Lois Lowry
11. Codex by Lev Grossman

If you’ve got an unreliable internet connection, it’s possible to build up remote desktop connections that don’t time out when they should, putting you in a rough position.  If you have access to another server machine, you can use the following commands to view and reset active connections.

> query session /server:servername

> reset session [ID] /server:servername

More information at: Command Line Hack for: “Terminal Server Has Exceeded the Maximum Number of Allowed Connections”

Update: In the syntax ‘/server:servername’  The ’server’ is explicitly the text ’server’.  For instance, if my server is at 192.168.1.104, the command would be: 

> query session /server:192.168.1.104

> reset session 2 /server:192.168.1.104

So if you’re looking for something a little bit different, you may find these books refreshing.

GuardianUnlimited: Top 20 Geek Novels

1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer — William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune — Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen – John Wyndham 21% (19)

This headline is way too familiar. Try changing one letter and you’re back 4 years ago debating the exact same issue. Intelligence agencies released the following long-awaited report on the nuclear capacities of Iran, finding that they stopped weapons development in 2003.

National Intelligence Estimate: Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities

A few highlights from the report:We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely.

• We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.
• We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.
• We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.

but…

• We judge with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015

Iran may eventually be a danger – and we’re not exactly taking action in the world to convince people we’re worth being friends with – but this is not an imminent threat to US security, and it worries me that Bush is slipping into the same rhetoric he displayed with respect to Iraq. This does not justify Bush saying things such as

Bush: But this — we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon… (Full transcript)

I see this as a good chance to check out my online image and to screen what others can see about me. Employers and contacts do check these kind of things to get a feel for what has done or what he or she is like. This is definitely something to take a look at.

• Pipl – personal sites, social networks, press releases, et.
• Zabasearch – phone numbers, addresses (often both unlisted and listed)
• Wink – Many social networking sites, including Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and Xanga
• Zoominfo – employment history and job titles
• Facebook – there are so many people on facebook.  This one goes without saying
• Who is this Person Firefox Extension – brings up people search engines from the right-click menu within firefox when clicking on a person’s name
• Google search tricks:

* Enclose the first and last name of the person you’re searching for in quotes when you enter it into the search box (like “John Smith”).
* Include other relevant words, like the person’s profession, employer, location, or screen name, too (like banker or Austin, Texas.)
* If the person you’re searching for is likely to appear on a particular web site–like a school–search only that site using the site:URL operator (like site:ucla.edu “John Smith”).
* To look up people by face, search for them on Google Images to get a quick visual–especially useful for people with common names, or to determine the gender of a name you never heard before.

Lifehacker: How to Track Anyone Down Online

Quick Firefox tip: The key combingation “Control-Shift-T” will restore the most recently closed tab.

1. Ask yourself: If I ran across this post without knowing the author, would I care?
2. Is this adding value to the wealth of information or the organization of the web?
3. No personal, isolated stories included simply for the sake of telling
4. Did some thought and effort go into the composition and actual text of this entry?
5. Are any scientific or concrete claims/statistics cited? You may have a great point, but if it’s based on stats that, for all I know, you arbitrarily dreamed up yourself, I don’t care.
6. Make connections between your article and other related or available info online. Nothing exists in isolation and every story benefits from some context. Even quote related material from other sources.
7. Copying someone else’s work, however, without a citation is not okay. Period.
8. Avoid personal isolated stories or anecdotes about personal life.
9. When commenting on the contributions of someone else, do so in a constructive manner. Far too often do we experience a battle of words between conflicting voices, which does nothing for the readership but polarize and interrupt valuable discussion.
10. Finally, seek out stories from less popular sources. There is so much interesting stuff out there that gets lost in the shuffle. These things deserve a little extra publicity and will break up the monotony of alternating links to Lifehacker and Engadget.

Consider each of your contributions not as a soapbox from which to rant about trivial things in your own life, or selfish goals, but rather a contribution for the benefit of others around you. Try not to pollute this thing we all depend on and love so much.

Okay, so I’ve read reports about the mostly cautionary purpose for this request, protecting against hypothetical interference with airplane-to-tower communication among other things (see CNET: Cell phones to take flight). Studies have shown that the tiny amount of power drawn by little iPods and DVD players is no threat to the massive equipment those planes pack.

Still, though, where I might have once rebelled and used my iPod anyway, I’ve changed my mind. I now agree wholeheartedly with the stewardess. Sitting in the back of Sun Country flight 395, I watched the passengers, previously distracted and occupied with music and games and news and movies from every direction, stop. The father points out the window at tiny rows of house lights, a new sight for the 6-year old peering out beside him. The mother sits and reads a novel with real words on real pages with a real story. Two strangers talk about Thanksgiving plans and family and kids and life, growing closer for an instant than many do living side-by-side amongst the business of connected, high-paced society, before flowing back apart to different destinations.

No ears are plugged; no eyes glued to the screen.

Every of us within this flying shell is hit with the majesty of existing actively in the world for a moment, and we’re always slightly surprised that it’s not as boring as we expected.

“Hey! We’re going to land!” pipes up the kid across the aisle.

And then we’re back on the ground – back in the real world.

“You may now turn on all portable electronic devices…..”

Apple uses a clever ad to make a reasonable point.  Vista is the new Millenium Edition, plagued by compatibility issues, bugs and resource-hogging tendencies, and it doesn’t present enough new features to justify the headache of dealing with an entirely new framework. 

Give Up on Vista

1. Those from which I can glean some value from, as an anonymous visitor, and
2. Those about which I couldn’t really care less, essentially consisting of a glorified journal entry by someone, somewhere, who assumes the rest of us care.

The web is the “wild, wild west” of information; a haven for free speech and expression as an open medium for the exploration and sharing of ideas and knowledge…

…But come on people. Those billions of “articles” from category 2 are hurting the greater good and dragging us all down into the shady realm of shoddy writing.

If you want a centralized place for friends to catch up on your recent activities, that’s fine. Just don’t publish to directories, and remove yourself from google. Believe it or not, most of us don’t actually care about your fender-bender this afternoon or the lousy guy you just spent the evening with.

We need an internet filter designed to cut through the crap and intercept the masses of junk floating around on the web before it can distract us from what we’re actually seeking.

The team working on the StupidFilter have a good start on this problem in the context of comments:

…an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in
written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or
similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam
detection engines.

Drop a note in the comments with any ideas on how to clean this all up.

Magic DVD Ripper provides the ability to rip copy-protected DVDs to disc in a variety of formats, including full DVD-video quality, mpeg, avi, and such, with options for Divx, Xvid and other such codecs.  DVDs can thus be saved in full-quality, or reduced to small 700mb files suitable for portable device viewing.

The biggest advantage I appreciated was the reliability of the process.  Often software packages work only with certain types of copy-protection or occasionally fail with ordinary processes.  I have backed up dozens of DVDs of different sorts via this method and in every case, the quality has been surprisingly good, and the experience pleasantly efficient and simple.  Give the trial a whirl and if backing up your movie collection is something you do regularly, the $34.97 price tag is quite reasonable.

Enter an url in the main page and it gives you a new window, skinned to look like a word document. The window then serves as a text-based browser which allows streamlined viewing of whatever site you give it. There’s even a “boss key” that hides your web browsing and ironically brings up a document on overcoming procrastination and time management.

This site is definitely worth checking out if only for the sake of its humor and simplicity.

How it’s done:

1. To set up forwarding from your St. Olaf account to Gmail:

• Go to https://www.stolaf.edu/stobase/
• Log in with your St. Olaf username and password
• Click “Set Up Forwarding or Vacation Replies”
• Enter your Gmail email address under “Forwarding Address”
• Uncheck “Deliver mail to your inbox” unless you want things showing up both in the st. olaf email client and Gmail.
• Scroll down and change the value of “Expires” to “never”

Your email should now be successfully forwarded to your Gmail account.

2. Once you’ve got a gmail account setup and you’re logged in:

• Go to Settings in the upper right corner
• Click Accounts
• Add another email address (under send mail as)
• Enter a Send As name and the email address, click next
• Click “Send Verification”
• Log into the email account you’re trying to add

• You will have received an email with a link to verify this email address. Click the link and you should now be able to send email from this address from within your Gmail account.

One word of caution. Gmail sends your replies to email received as part of an alias from your gmail account by default. Manually change the sender when you’re composing the message to prevent potentially confusing the recipient on the othe end.

Though large the span, no awful feat
for the small one to grasp such things so sweet
at the horizon’s edge for him to see,
a modest contented honey bee.

To his loyal peers, taking pause,
he speaks his joy, such urgent cause
of things to see, to know, to do
just beyond the rolling blue.

I’ll have you know, he booked a flight
and gathered those fellows without a fight.
They all were strapped in good and tight
and arrived contented that evening.

“Life is bitter, sweet and tough.”
Why believe that sour bluff?
Things are ours to love or hate.
Why turn down a happier state?

Living on a college campus and walking to class puts me outdoors a fair amount in a given day. So naturally, I’m one of those people who checks the weather forecast each morning as I get dressed.

For me, though, the actual forecasted highs and lows mean very little without some context. Is 60 degrees (F) warm enough for a t-shirt? Do I need to break out my winter coat? It’s all relative. Take a look at a comparison between today and yesterday, the idea being that I was outdoors yesterday, I know what the felt like.

Yesterday vs. Today Back to Back

Have you ever found yourself sitting in class, or reclining on a hillside beneath a beautiful sunny day, and realized the depth of things within which you were immersed? Walking along, deep in thought or worry about the difficulties of the day, it’s pretty easy to walk along a path or through a front yard, lost in the list of things to do.

But sitting among blades of grass spiraling up out of the earth, I look out around me and open my eyes. Life is sorted into layers upon layers; first details of the grass, before the grass itself, before blades together composing the field into which each is lost. Beyond that are the hills whose curves the field blankets before reaching to the trees just over the ridge, where shadows from clouds in the sky lazily skim across the horizon before getting lost in the curature of the earth itself.

What could be sorrowful in a world such as this? I imagine sitting there, camera raised up before my eye. I slowly cycle the lens, focusing close up and slowly panning out until those things nearby are lost in blurred fuzziness and the horizon is framed in crisp detail.

Does a stream of consciousness need explanation? Does an article need a title? Stop for a moment and try a new lens. There’s so much to see.

Perth Fun: The Right Brain vs Left Brain test

A friend of mine pointed out the above article about testing left-brain/right-brain dominance. The idea is that judgments can be made about hemispherical dominance according to which way someone perceives the spinning of the dancer. Those who see it as a clockwise rotation are right-brain dominant (feeling and big picture oriented) and those who see it as counter-clockwise are left-brain dominant (logical and detail oriented).

The thing I wonder about is the fact that throughout the course of reading the article, I found myself seeing it both ways, clockwise and counterclockwise. I really wish this article would provide more evidence for the claims it makes about the relationship between this image and right/left-brain dominance. If it’s true, it’s a pretty cool way to see how your mind works. Either way, though, it’s an interesting exercise to try switching back and forth between directions. (Hint: Cover most of the image and focus on her spinning leg)

Check out these two articles in that order. It’s amazing what people can do to science.

Junk Science: Hey Al Gore, We Want a Refund!

vs.

An ‘error’ is not the same thing as an error

London Justice Burton heard a case regarding the problems with presenting Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to classrooms across the UK. The justice acknowledged the value of the film as professionally produced and well-meaning but struck down 9 major errors in the presentation. These pertained to Hurricane Katrina’s path of destruction, melting snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and the loss of fish communities dependent on coral reefs, among other things.

In none of these cases does the justice find Al Gore’s assertions to be false. Rather, the claims he finds have to do with a lack of sufficient comprehensive evidence for global warming as a cause, and possible other factors potentially responsible for the discussed climate changes.

Frankly, Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Prize this past week not for incredible scientific discoveries on his part. He’s a smart guy but not by any means a leading expert in every one of these areas. The value of this film doesn’t depend on the simple mass of how many proofs it can come up with to advocate global warming. Global warming is almost universally recognized by the scientific community as a very real and important factor in how we interact with the environment around us. This film takes this absolute truth and portrays it in a way individuals can relate to. A film like this is important because it helps the public throw away the unsupported statements and censored reports coming out of the Bush administration.

Justice Burton didn’t call Gore’s statements untruths, simply not fully and completely proven so far, and even at that, the justice was only citing inconsistencies between the film and the current formally accepted body of scientific research. That’s a lot more than we can say for most of the arguments against global warming.

Justice Burton’s Judgement

Something I hadn’t realized until this morning, though, is the suite of applications they offer.  Open Source apps and frameworks such as Wordpress, Moodle, Drupal, Joomla and a collection of content management systems, wikis and eComerce solutions are all available from GoDaddy with every hosting account.

Once logged on to your account, one need only enter a few bits of information such as admin account login/password, and the location within the domain where each app should reside.  GoDaddy takes care of the rest and lets you know when the process is complete.  Now, of course each of these apps is something you could install and configure yourself with some work.  But where else are you going to find a system that gets a WordPress blog or Moodle server set up correctly and running in a sweet 5 minutes.

GoDaddy provides an all-around great web hosting resource for everyone, from basic users making family websites, to advanced users responsible for large servers and powerful applications.

A few things I would add to the list include warnings about cross-site scripting vulnerabilities involved in careless variable passing (explanation here), SQL injection in forms, and predictability in the locations you place important files (system, admin, or install files). All of these items open doors for malicious outsiders to learn how your system is set up and find ways to exploit it.

You may think you’re safe from hackers, spam or any sort of malicious activity, but this stuff happens all the time to all sorts of websites. All it takes is a small hole and a script-kiddie with too much time on his or her hands to turn your hard work into a nightmare.

Michael Sutton’s Blog: Top 10 Signs You Have an Insecure Web App

For the Frugal Mind: Cheapest Days to Shop

From lighting to composition to landscapes and portraits, there is a lot to be learned in a short period of time from this whirlwind tour of photography tips. These tips may not be applicable in all cases or true for everyone but know I personally get bored of taking the same kinds of shots over and over again. It’s a great starting point for some new ideas and tips to get the ball rolling.

Improve Your Photos in 60 Second (or slightly longer)

As things stand prior to the TLC, Costa Rican quality of life is fairly good. Education, government, environmental consideration, social life, and family life are all fairly high above our general stereotypes of what it means to live in a Latin American country.  As reasonable as some of these changes are as the logical progression of a small country in the modern globally connected world, it’s somewhat sad to think about the effects it will have on the country as a whole. This sort of thing is happening all over, as the pursuit of money and physical wealth dominates political and social thought.

Of course the article reads “Victory for Costa Rica.” The culture of our country is so completely dominated by commercialism that we cannot logical consider it in any other way. The World Bank recommends this course of action. Of course it must be right. But the thing we’re missing here is a consideration of the effects on the culture of every society it touches.

I spent a month in Costa Rica last year and I was struck most by was the strange ability of the Ticos to be simply content and happy with their lot in life. There isn’t the same drive to succeed and accomplish and accumulate wealth that dictates every aspect of American life. Connections to family and friends far outweigh career accomplishments. Happiness and success are related but not the same.

This victory for Costa Rican commerce and economy takes a step in the direction of sacrificing that Costa Rican ease of living. There is so much more to life than succeeding. It saddens me when the American way of life finds ways to corrupt the peace of such thoroughly advanced and sophisticated communities.

Check out articles and editorials in the national newspaper, LA NACIÓN for more perspectives on the issue. 51.1% is not unanimous.

I recently stumbled across MIT’s OpenCourseWare which hosts more than 1700 courses, fully accessible online complete with lecture notes and reading recommendations.  It’s a cool way to pursue a bit of directed independent study in an area where your expertise is lacking.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

Mozilla’s WebRunner is a streamlined version of the mozilla browser, designed to handle one web app within a window, without all the menus, bookmarks, and complications of a full browser. Profiles of the form <app_name>.webapp can be downloaded for different apps and placed on the desktop. The idea is that users open these apps much like one would a program on the computer itself.

There are a number of bundles out there for various web 2.0 applications. If one hasn’t been made yet, it’s pretty simple to do it yourself.

• Open a new text document in notepad.
• Modify the following code to fit the settings you want.  ‘id’ must be some unique id allowing WebRunner to keep track of multiple profiles.

• [Parameters]
  id=www.thanscorner.info
  uri=http://www.meebo.com
  status=yes
  location=no
  sidebar=no
  navigation=no

• Save the file as ‘webapp.ini’
• Right-click on the file, select ‘Send To’ -> ‘Compressed (zipped) folder’.  This will create a file called ‘webapp.zip’
• Rename ‘webapp.zip’ to ‘<app_name>.webapp’
• This file is now a shortcut to a streamlined version of that app.

Here is a bundle I made for the instant messaging app Meebo.

• Meebo.webapp

WebRunner is a project still under development.  With future additions such as support for work offline, spellcheck, extensions, and more customizable options on the way, this may be a nice solution for those apps otherwise sucking up memory all the time.

Yet, tossed among the rising seas of published knowledge, this book rests on the surface with few others worthy of our adoration. The young man passing his autumn afternoon in the cradling comfort of nature’s vitality could memorize a text book or skim the cliff notes of every honored classic. Educating himself thus he might be called learned; seen as respectable. He may claim this knowledge as his, but he does not absorb it; cannot so easily integrate the lessons into his flesh and soul.

There are those we encounter passing on the road who radiate wisdom. there are these who care in face more about the process of exploring and learning for the sake of itself than the information obtained. The wise need not speak, but embody themselves the wisdom they’ve gained.

Human life shuffles along in ebbs and flows while maneuver highs and lows as each soul searches for meaning and purpose. We cannot navigate struggle by simply grasping for achievement, in the same way success in knowledge doesn’t come from equations and aggregation of detached facts. A human soul embodying curiosity, a seeking consciousness and a loving heart, resting against the trunk of a solid oak doesn’t need the half-truths of ’success’.

By 12:30 p.m., hundreds of monks, students, and other Rangoon residents approached the police, stood in the road and began to pray. Then the soldiers and police began pulling monks from the crowd, targeting the leaders, striking both monks and ordinary people with canes. Several smoke bombs exploded and the riot police charged. The monks and others fought back with sticks and rocks. Many others ran, perhaps four or five of them bleeding from minor head wounds. A car was set alight — by the soldiers, some protesters claimed — and then there was the unmistakable crack of live ammunition: the soldiers were shooting into the air.

TIME Exclusive

BBC Report

I am by no means an expert on the situation in Burma, but I am familiar with a sense of decency. Nonviolent protest and the idea of calm prayerful opposition don’t warrant a violent response. Praying monks do not deserve a club to the back or a rifle-butt to the head. The image of a Buddhist monk’s shaved head, red with blood simply does not compute. This is not justice.

These reports are important for the fact that the correspondents feeding the information are doing so secretly under penalty of prosecution themselves. No one can get in to tell the world about events within this region.

The details described in article sound pretty bad. Worse, though, is the fact that these few bits of information are the only thing out there. Any situation in which the governing body is driven to covering up and keeping secrets cannot be good. 1o,000 monks and civilians are silently speaking out. Will we hear? And will we listen?

BBC: Accounts From Inside Burma

Alas, I can’t personally justify to myself the need for a smartphone, but if I could, I would totally take advantage of this SmartCam project. You install a server on your machine and then extract the client on your smarphone and voila! you have your very own portable webcam.

I could see this coming in handy for video bloggers or anyone wanting to run video on the fly. This sort of thing is going to become more and more mainstream over time as smartphones like the iPhone fall into the hands of the common consumer.

Solutions for my laziness? I could go through the trouble of setting up Linux on my machine, duel boot or otherwise, or I could use an SSH or VNC connection to log in remotely to the lab machines. Better though, is a program I just came across called Xming.

Xming is one of a number programs available that allow a windows machine to accept and display X11 window forwarding from a Linux machine.

Here’s how it’s done:

• Download and install Xming server
• Install the following font packages (without which programs like emacs have compatibility issues)
  • 75 dpi fonts
    
  • 100 dpi fonts
    
• Run Putty to connect to the Linux machine (check the “Enable X11 forwarding” under the left menu system SSH -> X11)

And with that, you’re done! Any windowed linux programs you open from the shell will be natively displayed on your windows machine. Other options such as Cygwin offer some of the same capabilities.

Sure beats the hell out of trekking across campus…

Peopledata.com supplements the information on Pipl, with current and previous addresses and phone numbers. All this info on the internets…

CAPTCHA describes a technique for restricting website access to spammers or bots by means of an image with scrambled letters that a human user should be able to recognize and authenticate. ReCAPTCHA combines a solution to this common problem with the ability to help scan and make digitally available the vast wealth of print media information in circulation.

How it works: Users are shown a background image with two words printed over it. One of these words is already known and understood by the computer but the other is one that it was unable to recognize when scanned off the page. The user then types in these words and is granted access if the response was correct. ReCAPTCHA benefits from providing the service because each time someone verifies him or herself this way, another previously unrecognized word is added to the project’s version of that text.

This morning, the White House released the mandatory assessment of Iraqi progress on a number of benchmarks. All-in-all, there has only been one additional ’satisfactory’ benchmark rating since the same assessment was made in July.

So, our ultimate purpose for military and political action in Iraq was to establish a stable diplomatic government capable of sustaining itself and maintaining order within the country. With that in mind, here we are – mission accomplished? I’d say, rather unfortunately, that going into this engagement, we naively thought these sort of goals easy and achievable with enough force. The military ‘coalition’ involved did nothing but tear down the current forces holding things in place.

We can’t force a people we don’t understand to live according to our beliefs about the world and society. Our leaders do not understand the values and general day-to-day life of a common Iraqi person. In such a volatile situation, with such a lack of experience, how can they expect to bring about such optimistically defined order?

This article is really a sweet tutorial for how to turn your (probably) neglected Xbox into a networked media center capable of running video, music, and additional applications off of its own hard drive or those of any PC on your network.

I look at this and see essentially an Apple TV with more user control. Well, perhaps my Xbox will be experiencing an overhaul over the weekend…

The ideas are good, like classifying tasks by importance, limiting email to a certain block of time, or restricting aspects of your life that eat away time. I feel, however, that, though implicit in these suggestions for life management, the most important message is missing.

We are independent beings, aware and in control of what we do and don’t do. Simple, right? Except that when you start running through your day-to-day actions and interactions, you begin to notice thoughts such as, “I can’t believe he’s making me do this.” or “if only I could sleep in a few more minutes.” We deceive ourselves, essentially shifting the blame for unpleasant realities upon the shoulders of other individuals, circumstances and fate…when really each and every bit of our lives is a choice made consciously or unconsciously by us.

Now, consider the potential liberty and empowerment accompanying this newfound power. Say you’re daydreaming in class because I’m tired and don’t want to be there. If I consciously engage in these moments and recognize that it is by my choice, not someone else’s, that I’m here, it becomes my time and my thing to be made the most of.

Daydreaming becomes time to process some interesting piece of the lecture, or planning time for the rest of the week. Hours stuck in traffic, related to my choice to drive to work (I could have biked, quit my job, or previously sought a job for which telecommuting was an option) becomes a time to mentally go through a presentation I’m giving that morning, a chance to get up to date on world affairs on the radio or podcast, or a time to get back in touch with friends and family.

We always have a choice. Let’s own these day-to-day choices and turn a dreadfully dull or painful experience into something that can enrich the day and teach something new.

Most exciting, however, is the release of the new iPod Touch. Design is almost identical to the iPhone and for all practical purposes, it can be considered the same device, minus the phone capability.

I wondered for quite some time about the incredible publicity of the iPhone when it was only really practical for a small portion of the population, and only targeted to the elite few with cash to burn and serious connectivity needs. And yet, kids, seniors, and the average citizen from every walk of life heard about it and knew what it was and what it could do.

Now, it’s all clear. The iPhone is not something the average person should care about. But it’s brother, the iPod Touch, most definitely is.

So many have failed trying to make a smart phone or palm device for the masses, but with this bold move, it is obvious that apple thinks it can succeed where others have failed. The iPhone hype gave people the dream of a device so beautiful, and the iPod Touch gave them a way to grasp that dream and move into the same plane of sophistication as those elite enough to own the iPhone itself.

Wow, apple. I’m impressed.

Now, financial analysts are screaming about the ‘disastrous’ $200 price cut so soon after the iPhone’s initial release. Yes, its price was initially way too high, but that price point placed it upon a pedestal, barely attainable, that fueled hype and intrigue. Jobs is giving a $100 store credit to those early adopters who were “cheated” by this price drop.

Apple will sell plenty of the iPod Touch to make up for the small bit of negative spin in the air now. Give it a month and no one will remember these stories of apple’s faux pas, and apple will be slowly taking over the portable device market, corner by corner.

I’ve always wondered if this sort of thing still happened in today’s modern world of high-level weapons and global surveillance. Well, it turns out some 200-300 pirate attacks are reported each year to the Piracy Reporting Center in Kuala Lumpur.

Long gone are the days of rope-swinging, eye-patched, parrot-adorned raiders, plundering the riches of the seven seas, but still survives the spirit of boarding thieves armed with grappling hooks and a slightly more advanced of rocket-powered grenades and automatic rifles.

Check out this truly wonderful and incredibly in-depth look at The Pirate Hunters and those they pursue.

The general background is that many many dynamic websites, including probably this one, use forms or variables in the url of the page to communicate information from one page to the next. This includes things like login information, page choice, and virtually any link that changes over time. (mousing over the “Most Recent Entries” links at the right gives ….?entry=entry839402874 and such)

This is hackable because, though my password might be unhackable, once I’m logged in to the admin or user-privaleged portion of a site, a hacker can send me to a site that essentially gets me to do their work for them. They do this by adding a tag to a page. Because the user is already logged in on their site, when this page opens the link within the tags, it allows things to go through, changing database entries, deleting pages, or even adding users with administrative privaleges.

If only the vulnerability stopped there….

Unfortunately, it’s also possible to create a form with default values that automatically submits itself to your password protected page when the hosting page loads. And, just as the URL-based hack works, this tricks the site into thinking it’s the authenticated user making the changes and gives a hacker essentially free reign if they know what they’re doing.

Now, this isn’t something that will just randomly happen to anyone – it relies on the hacker deliberately planting these or tags on a page and getting a logged in user to visit the page. Nevertheless, it’s striking how many seemingly secure sites are open to this type of attack.

What can you do? SESSION variables cannot be spoofed in the same way as these POST and GET variables can so using them protects you against this kind of issue. Additionally, there are a variety of frameworks such as xaraya and other tools that generate authentication codes to verify that indeed submitted forms came from a safe location.

It’s a crazy crazy world out there…

So I just want to say for the record, if you’re ever moving sql databases, use a migration and synchronization tool.

I tried shutting down the servers and copying data over. I tried using sql queries to do it. But no matter how careful you are, something will get corrupted, some constraints or dependencies will get lost. I used a free time-limited but fully-featured version of Red Gate SQL Professional Tools which made the process incredibly smooth and safe to do.

Oh, the things I wish I’d known before I began this endeavor.

So I heard about this a long time ago and liked it then and I recognize it’s nothing new to most. But everytime I come back to it, the idea behind it hits me a little bit harder.

Free hugs.

Simply the thought of a complete stranger in this hateful and isolating world, knowing nothing about my life or who I am, wanting nevertheless to reach out and make my day a little better…wow. And it’s not exactly a selfless act on their part either. You know the little-school sayings like “love grows when it’s shared” – however cheesy, this is the physical manifestation of that lesson.

What is the purpose in life? How about making everyone’s just a little bit better. Someday I’ll find myself a sign like that and a street corner all my own.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, give it a look.

Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open

AJAX restricts server-side requests to local servers to avoid security issues that would potentially allow javascript to make calls to hostile servers. This can also show up even within your own server if you’ve got a hard-wired path to the query page and the domain has been entered differently (http://www.mypage.com vs. http://mypage.com). Give relative paths, it makes everything more pleasant.

I’m not advocating reworking legislation or constitutional precedents upon which our entire understanding of government is founded. This issue isn’t about the dirty politicking that inevitably dictates the action of any campaign hoping to accomplish anything.

The phrase “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” represents the American dream and beliefs binding our nation’s populace. The words don’t, however, exactly model their original phrasing. Where our country has broadened matters to a pursuit of happiness, John Locke was originally speaking of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.”

Now there’s no surprise here that Locke’s capitalistically founded philosophy acknowledges propery and possessions as our mandate and ultimate object. The distinction is that America, champion of the free market economy and fair, democratic elections, is founded on the basis not of power, nor with the intent of securing wealth or objects in the name of its citizens. Our founding fathers spoke of a higher calling than these in the form of happiness.

Think for a moment of that playful child, gleaming smile spread across his face as he plays and experiences the world. This fact is universal and independent of all other things. Now look at government and the politics that dictate its movements. When did happiness fall by the wayside? When did we forget the meaning of freedom and the ideals we fight to maintain through diplomacy and military action around the world?

Perhaps the solution is not a challenge of our two-party system. Two opposing ends of the spectrum with their own extreme and moderate factions do have the potential to weigh benefits and costs of each decision and find some appropriate balance in the middle. The nature of our parties, not their existence, is the problem. I admit to party politics, broad generalizations of others I oppose, and a fascination with their downfall, whether by honest or dirty means. Still, I believe that with a change in tone we can make steps foreward rather than steps back.

Compassion. What would life be like with gleaming smiles dictating policy. I’m not suggesting throwing money at the poor or bailing people out to the point that they no longer feel the need to support themselves. What I am saying is that our existence as a respectable nation relies entirely on our respectful treatment of those within and without. People are entitled to different, even wrong opinions. They’re welcome to shout them from the rooftops and they’re welcome to argue them to no end with every individual they encounter. What we need is a dignity and recognition that dissent is okay and part of a decision-making process.

Our two parties exist to offset each other in a cooperative, not destructive manner. The system relies on the continued existence of these two parts. Can we not recognize the inevitability of this truth and take steps towards compassionate progress? Yes we can. But it better be soon because things are falling apart.

The issue is that google doesn’t like custom error pages and keeps them in their index without establishing that in fact they are bad pages that drag down the overall quality of a website. For a dynamic, database-driven site, inevitably the info on a website changes over time. Generating pages that forward on to the new version, or give an informative error message help visitors stay on track on the website without getting too terribly lost. The following line of code helps tell google that, whatever’s happened to the page it’s looking for, it’s not there now.

As long as you’re at it, you might as well have the page sending you a message about the error so you can go hunt it down and fix it for future users.

#arguments.errorText#

Page: #cgi.HTTP_USER_AGENT#

IP: #cgi.REMOTE_ADDR#

Offending Script: #cgi.SCRIPT_NAME#

Query Info: #cgi.QUERY_STRING#

Referring Page: #cgi.HTTP_REFERER#

Link to Homemade Ice Cream article

Well, I’ve moved to Washington DC now for the next month and a half to work for the organization Project Kaleidoscope doing web design. Taking advantage of the ideal location of my housing on GW campus, I went for a walk down the National Mall, taking some photos along the way (Photos here) and stumbled across a huge body of calmly marching individuals decorated in the colorful garb of what must have been traditional to their culture.

This is DC. Stuff like this happens all the time, yet something grabbed me and caused a pause in my thoughts and motion. They carried signs reading “The problem of humanity is Human Dignity” as these thousands of men and women of all walks of life marched past Smithsonian museums and sculpture gardens along the national mall, finally gathering together at the Washington Monument.

Now, given the magnitude of the event, I expected to find articles in the Washington Post or CNN but I had to search further within Google to find any mention of the event. This was a gathering of a group called Swadhyay Parivar of North America. I have never heard of this national organization and I’m guessing the same is true of most, and yet it exists as part of the constituency of our country. The signs they hold talk about human dignity and the ties the bind us all together under the label of “human”.

I don’t know much about the beliefs and history of this group beyond a few articles I’ve just glanced through this afternoon, but there’s something simply about this event that could benefit each of us to think about. Our nation is a cooperation of millions of individuals characterized by unique qualities and beliefs. A cooperation. Life in this city should not be dictated by disputes between republicans and remocrats, whites and African Americans, men and women, or “native” Americans and immigrants. It should be about finding ways to come together and address the “problem of humanity”: Human Dignity.

As the march wrapped up and I walked past, I noticed a small cluster of people on the sidewalk about 100 feet from the edge of the Swadhyay gathering. They bore their own signs, saying “Defend American Borders”, “Threats to america”, “Not another 9/11, No more aliens”. I think they knew, though, seeing thousands of peaceful, responsible individuals challenging their perspective of people different than them, that their cause was a bit foolish. I think they know deep down that the divisions between us are much less important than those signs show.

I host a personal coldfusion photo gallery with an online company Host Department and several times a week, one of the other users placed on the same server crashes it and it goes down for everyone. I’ve also been working on another ColdFusion driven website for a non-profit organization. In this case it dies about once a week or so without explanation or note in the logs. If the server simply restarted, that’d be one thing, but it stalls and can’t do anything to automatically fix itself.

Now, admittedly this is something that can be fixed in each of these cases, that is the role of those in charge of the server. It’s part of my job to set it up so it doesn’t break in these ways. That said, with the number of posts on this issue floating around the web, you’d think a more robust implementation would be possible.

ColdFusion is supposed to be simple and easy while retaining its power and flexibility. Dealing with server issues like this strike me as neither simple, nor powerful and send me looking for more stable alternatives.

At any rate, I’ve been tinkering with a variety of things during my two weeks of break before starting work in DC. First, I’ve been tweaking my photo gallery website (ThansCorner Gallery). Check it out – it’s nothing too incredibly special but it combines my interests in web design and photography and gives people a chance to keep in touch and see what I”m up to. Comment on pages if you’ve got something to say!

Beyond that, I’ve taken full advantage of one of my favorite summer activities – Spending an afternoon at a coffee shop. Lately the preference has been for a Caribou bundled with Brueggers bagels and I’ve made some good progress with my poetry collection. There is truly nothing better or more rewarding than sitting at a coffee shop, surrounded by interesting people, whilst pouring thoughts into words and plowing through work to be done. The $3.15 cost of beverage and $2.70 cost of lunch is made back in the first 5 minutes there…the rest is just bonus. Give it a shot – it’ll be well worth your while. At the very least it’s a way out of the house.

Apple uses a clever ad to make a reasonable point.  Vista is the new Millenium Edition, plagued by compatibility issues, bugs and resource-hogging tendencies, and it doesn’t present enough new features to justify the headache of dealing with an entirely new framework. 

Give Up on Vista