TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal self-contained web notebook (with design flair)...

Oh. Um yeah!! This is it. I think, in the future, each of us will have a Tiddly-Wiki that we carry around with us everywhere. The WikiOnAStick. So for a while, I have been running ComSwiki on my Redhat9 box, mostly serving up a 'Configurations' swiki that I try to document all the things I change about computers and networking gear at my house. The great thing about this is that it's server-less! It can run entirely on the client-side only, making it truly portable. This is all my various Swiki's along with the beautiful Cross Browser Extensions guy's X library that I always wanted to marry together. But yet, this is even better, in that it's a posting-style Blog that, if I could get the "Blog This" Google toolbar button for this going, I would use it for the rest of my life and never look back. I will have this.
Oh. And it also has inline Sparklines, as invented by one of my favorite people.

Writing a blog...

Is a dark, mysterious new artform that it seems, if you really work at it, and do some things right, you can actually make money. I suppose. Maybe over time, and if you can post regularly and stick to a central theme. That's obviously not what's going on here, but I could envision having several different blogs that are topic-specific and could work towards being some kind of authoritative. Or at least a coherant voice? In any event, obviously lots of people are talking about, thinking about, analyzing the minutia of, and blogging about the blogging phenomenon. But Seth Godin seems to have some good basic things to say about getting started. Check out his Who's There? (pdf), it looks like a pretty good distillation.

Thanks William S. Burroughs...

WSB's Thanksgiving wishes..(video/quicktime Object)

Holy crap!

This is the funniest thing I've ever seen! Ha! Ha ha!

Hysterical Chicken Singing!

Boing Boing: Sony Rootkit DRM Roundup Part III

I had not blogged about it yet but needless to say, I think Sony should have to pay massively for this little piece of BS. If you weren't aware, Sony BMG was caught installing root-kits on user's computers as part of the DRM software on many of the music CDs that they have released recently. And if you havent heard of this, you should probably read up on it. Its becoming another major battle in the anti-DRM fight. I will let boingboing do the roundup, they are a much better blog than me...

MERD | Panexa (Acidachrome Promanganate)

Ah, the drug we have all been waiting for. Just the thing for hypochondriac baby-boomers who want everything to come in pill form. I imagine this will do the trick for most people suffering from lack-of-Panexa related disorders and diseases. I can't wait to get up to Canada and get a great big batch of cheap Panexa to sell on the black market.

OMG! Take off your tin-foil helmet!

The effectiveness of aluminum helmets is called into question. This is crazy on so many levels, its hard to enumerate them all. Needless to say, the upshot of their research is thus:

...although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions ..., certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

Wow. Ground breaking research from MIT.

No Comment

I seem to be getting very few comments to my posts. Maybe it's to be expected, I suppose not that many people know about this blog.
Whatever.
Let's see if we can generate some. Here is a link to what is undoubtedly one of my favorite songs ever. And for sure, as apropos today as it was when it came out.
Some might be offended by the song itself. To you I say, go fuck yourself.
Some might decide that I am breaking copyright laws by posting a link to it. For sure, to them, I say go fuck yourself. And also that I downloaded it for free from sonewhere else, so go find that guy and bust him.
Some might just not like this post. To you I say, post a comment. Oh. And also, go fuck yourself!
Have a nice day!

Wired News: History's Worst Software Bugs

Wired News: History's Worst Software Bugs You gotta love this. Besides the historical footnote of where software bugs come from, just the fact that they continue to cause real, financial problems for the dumb-ass project managers (and the companies they work for) who allow them to go out the door as a product that some poor schlub has to pay for... The company I currently work for has a policy of having each employee's quarterly goals (and thus, bonus) include a "100% accuracy in changes" goal that, if you arent careful might actually affect your own bottom line. That is probably a good way to push that cost down onto the person that made the actual mistake.
And, who doesn't remember the infamous Pentium floating point divide error? Ha! Suckers! OK, anyway, funny stuff for us nerd-types...
FYI - The one about the RTM Worm in 1988 (1988 -- Buffer overflow in Berkeley Unix finger daemon) is a little misleading - Yes, the 'gets' function still exists in the standard libc functions "even today", but has been long since fixed in any but the most horrbly un-patched codebase (as in, who is still running code circa 1989?)... Just so you know.

FlightAware - The future of flight tracking...

Wow. One of the coolest new web apps I have seen in a while. Flight tracking, the way it should be. Looks like they use a combination of ACARS data, FAA-published IFR flight plans, and published airline data to show where all the planes in the air are. Way cool. And be sure to check out the animated day-in-the-life of North American airspace. Awesome!

Blue Ball Machine

Sweet! Not sure what this is but it reminds me of a game we used to play way back when called The Incredible Machine. It was a series of puzzles that you had to solve by creating these carzy-complex Rube Goldberg machines, given a limited set of (very ecclectic) parts.

Scale of Hurricane Katrina

This is a quick map I had put together in Streets & Trips about a month or so ago, just to try and understand the size. The center is about where I estimated it to have come ashore, and the 29.3-45 nm range would have been the size of the fastest moving winds. I think pretty much everything out to the 100nm mark would have received Catgory 2 or stronger winds at least for some amount of time, and everything out to the 200nm mark were heavily affected by the storm, but maybe with little or no damage. It really was quite big. Hard to imagine all the places that were devastated. Anyway, I wanted to get rid of the .est file, so I will post gist of it here and not have to keep it. Hmm.