...more recent posts
Sevencrabrangoon has got to be the deadpan funniest, solo geek personal site in the world. Check this one out. LOL, or whatever it is they say.
Random web quote of the day: "If we can make something decentralised, out of control, and of great simplicity, we must be prepared to be
astonished at whatever might grow out of that new medium." --Tim Berners-Lee
Neil Stephenson in negotiations to do consulting work on the live action movie version of the Batman Beyond cartoon?
Here's some information from nasa about when the new International Space Station is viewable with the naked eye. "As ISS assembly continues over the next four-five years,
the light dot will grow to a brilliant star in the morning or evening
skies, second only in brightness to the planet Venus, the brightest object
(besides the moon) in the morning or evening." For NYC, for the near future, we're talking:
| New York, NY |
22-Aug-2000 23-Aug-2000 24-Aug-2000 24-Aug-2000 25-Aug-2000 26-Aug-2000 27-Aug-2000 |
8:49 PM 9:19 PM 8:13 PM 9:49 PM 8:43 PM 9:13 PM 8:07 PM |
NW/ENE NW/NNE NW/ENE WNW/W NW/ENE WNW/SW NW/ESE |
Now that's some bird watching.
Here's an interesting discussion, between some interesting people, about (you guessed it) Napster, file sharing, and intellecutal property rights. David Gans, Scott Rosen, among others. Some musicians in the mix. Not all ranting; some actual conversation..
And I sort of liked Sony. Oh well. Where do they find these guys for all their middle management positions? Does he know what a computer is? How the internet works? One thing he obviously knows is how to piss people off. Here's the report on a speech given by Steve Heckler, senior vice president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.. And here is a little taste of the good part:
"Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop [Napster]," Heckler told the Summer Forty-Niner. "We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [Internet-service provider]. We will firewall it at your PC..."Huh? Sony is going to firewall my PC? Ummm, I don't think so. Somebody at Sony should get a clue and smack this guy down before he does them any more damage. Or maybe he's a double agent, and secretly working to rally the Gnutella forces?
(from here, picked up here, mentioned here, soon to be everywhere.)
Downloaded Netscape 4.75 today. It took me way too many steps to get AOL instant messenger off my system after I did a custom install without it, followed by checking no in a dialogue box when it seemed like it was going to install it anyway. I don't like when installers put things I don't want in my system folder (in 3 different places.) That's just not very polite. Anyway, this fixes the horrible Netscape Java security bug, although I still keep Java off all the time unless I really need it (and I never really need it.) Some people have been reporting more stable performance out of 4.75 (even one "much more stable" by someone probably too hopeful) so I'm going forward. I wish Mozilla would get better. I want to feel good about my browser.
David McCusker lays down the game rules for middlemen. I wish he was in charge of the game.
Really interesting story on the BBC Sci/Tech page today. Apparently some Canadian scientists have genetically modified a goat so that it will produce spider silk in its milk. Huh? In case you didn't know, spider silk is "[s]tronger and more flexible than steel... [it] offers a lightweight alternative to carbon fibre." Because Spiders are anti-social they could never be farmed, and hence this material could never be massed produced. Until now. I wonder if you could make one of those Clarke Space Elevators with this stuff? (a tether connecting the ground and a geostationary - Clarke orbit - sattelite.)
Well, that wasn't so hard after all. I guess it wasn't just a waste of space to actually repeat the database entry when building the comment pages. I wouldn't be surprised if this came in useful sometime in the future. Relational databases (we use MySQL) are incredibly cool. I'm totally blown away that something this powerful is available for free. If you are signed in, let me know if there is anything screwy with the new post/comment counts. I had to go directly into the database to fix this (which is what got me into trouble in the first place) so possibly there are some orphaned posts which might interfere with the counters. I can fix it if I know its happening. Thanks.