Whew! After 6 weeks, Project Honeypot has identified a spam harvester trolling one of the sites I signed up with them. Considering it only took 3 days for them to hit some of the local spamtraps I set up at the same time, I’m surprised. I’m especially surprised that it was found on the least trafficked site.
I picked up a new mouse to use at work yesterday, mainly because I wanted a scroll wheel that actually turned. (The old one was jammed.) I figured I’d go optical as well, since I much prefer optical mice. I ended up getting a basic $15 Microsoft mouse, though I would have gone for a more expensive Logitech if I were getting one for home.
When I plugged it in this morning, I was surprised to find that it skipped all over the place. Not constantly, as if the KVM had gotten its signal mixed up, but enough that it would be a real pain to use. (Oddly, it worked more smoothly on my Linux box than the Windows box. I have no idea why.)
So I pulled out the manual, looking for a troubleshooting section. Something like “If your mouse skips, it may be caused by XYZ.” Nothing. The contents were:
Useful information to be sure, but not quite what I was looking for.
As it turns out, I just tossed away my mouse pad and tried the mouse directly on the desk. It works like a charm now. I guess the pad was too reflective or something.
In the tradition of the Evil Overlord List: How To Destroy the Earth.
The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
For the purposes of what I hope to be a technically and scientifically accurate document, I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to render the Earth into a form in which it may no longer be considered a planet. Such forms include, but are most definitely not limited to: two or more planets; any number of smaller asteroids; a quantum singularity; a dust cloud.
The site then goes on to list possible methods ranked by feasibility.
(via Cruel Site of the Day [archive.org])
Fallen Angel is ending with #20, and Babylon 5: The Memory of Shadows has fallen through.
However, JMS has always said, “If they can do a Brady Bunch movie, you
can be sure that sooner or later, somebody’s going to do a B5 movie.” Even better, it turns out that while Warner Bros. owns the B5 TV show lock, stock and barrel, JMS owns the movie rights…so he’s in a position to make sure that whoever does do a B5 movie will get it right. “To that end,” he says… “I can wait.”
As for Fallen Angel, I suspect the timing of the decision means DC either wasn’t waiting for sales after all, or was going on pre-orders from stores. Peter David cryptically remarks, “We are not, however, quite dead yet.” It’s not clear what he means, but the characters are creator-owned, and the series isn’t tied to the DC Universe, so it’s entirely possible for them to pop up again at another publisher. Only time will tell.
OK, this is bizarre. Apparently a Hong Kong software company is preparing to release a Virtual Girlfriend for high-res mobile phones. It—or I suppose I should say “she”—is structured as an online game, on the virtual pet model. (Remember the tamagotchi fad?) You hold conversations with “Vivienne,” give her virtual gifts, even work up to a virtual wedding—which adds a virtual mother-in-law to the game.
The graphics are nice, and apparently they’ve put together a very elaborate conversation engine, but I have to wonder who this will really appeal to. The way she’s described she’s pretty high-maintenance—why go to all that effort when you don’t get the benefit of a real person?
Of course, there are other possibilities for the technology:
Vivienne, for instance, will double as a translator for travelers. Type in the desired words in English while traveling and, with additional programming in the next few months, her synthesized voice will coo it back in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish or Italian.
Just as games have driven desktop computing to keep pushing the envelope, this could lead the way toward the conversational interfaces that are so prevalent in science-fiction.
Or rather, Firefox 1.0.1 has been released. It fixes several bugs and security holes found in the 1.0 release, including the frame/pop-up injection and a workaround for the the IDN (internationalized domain names) spoofing flaw (which I thought I’d posted about, but can’t find).
Anyone using Firefox should upgrade. Anyone curious about Firefox should check it out.
Update: Looks like the site’s getting swamped again. Continue reading
K-Squared Ramblings is now running on WordPress 1.5. I’ve let it use the new default template since a) I’ve been meaning to overhaul the layout anyway, b) the theme system is completely different, so I may as well start building a new one instead of trying to cram the old one into the new framework and c)…it looks nicer than the old layout.
I do plan on re-enabling things like related posts, recent comments, etc. as I learn my way around the new template, figure out what nifty new features are available, and figure out which plugins are still compatible.
Update 11:00: I’ve got a more personalized header up, and some of the basic add-in features like related posts and Gravatars. Categories appear hierarchical again, and the sidebar badges are back.
And best of all, Spam Karma is still standing guard.
Remember UnitedLinux? It was a consortium of Conectiva, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera to build a common distribution that could compete with Red Hat. That effort got derailed, in part because Caldera decided they could make more money by changing their name to SCO and extorting suing the market into oblivion. Now Novell owns SuSE, TurboLinux is facing competition from Red Flag, and Conectiva is merging with Mandrake.
Mandrake’s a nice OS. I keep trying to switch, but I keep coming back to Red Hat Fedora. While my own experience with Conectiva has been, shall we say, less than stellar, they did port Debian’s outstanding package manager APT to work with RPM, and started the development of Synaptic, which should (in my opinion) be the standard way to install and upgrade software on any package-based Linux distribution with a GUI.
For now it looks like they’ll be maintaining separate brands based on a common core (hmm, sounds familiar), but I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up merging the products in a few years.
Hey, if it means Mandrake replaces their clunky update system with APT and Synaptic, I’m all for it.
(See also CNET’s take.)
From the Astronomy Picture of the Day, it’s the remnants of a two-billion-year-old nuclear reactor discovered in 1972 in a mine in Oklo, Gabon.
Apparently in the old days there was enough uranium-235 in the Earth’s crust that, under the right conditions, nuclear fission could occur naturally. Over time the fuel was used up, and now uranium deposits are mostly 238U, so we don’t need to worry about any new nuclear reactors popping up without our help.
What’s really odd is that this reactor produced plutonium naturally. There’s still some there. Most periodic tables I’ve seen label plutonium as a synthetic element, so the idea of natural plutonium takes some getting used to.
Kind of like the idea of a natural nuclear reactor.
Buzz pointed me to an interesting ZDNet article on the future of web forms.
Let’s face it: 10 years in, forms on the web still suck.
Oh, sure, we’re used to it, but the tools for web-based forms are still light-years behind the tools for building them into actual Windows, Mac, or Unix applications. Developers either make do with what they have, or they put together a complicated, hard-to-maintain, incompatible mess to work around the shortcomings and give you something that works the way you might expect it to. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to just put a combo box on a page instead of having to use both a drop-down and a text box, then have the server try to figure out which value to accept.)
There are two main groups pushing for the next generation of website UI: XForms and Web Forms 2.0. The main difference is that XForms starts over from square one with an XML structure, while Web Forms 2.0 extends HTML. W3C has been working on XForms for at least three years, while Web Forms 2.0 is the first major project from WHATWG, a collaboration between Mozilla, Opera, and Apple, makers of the three main “alternative” web browsers. Continue reading
