Here's another, thanks, as so many of them are, to Dan

Saturday, February 26, 2000 @ 04:17 p.m. - Comment

I want her on my tummy...

Saturday, February 26, 2000 @ 03:53 p.m. - Comment

"But, the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes, Mommy."

Thursday, February 24, 2000 @ 01:01 p.m. - Comment

Everyone keeps pointing to the open-source Jabber meessaging client -- a sort of coop-itor to ICQ and AIM (it works with them, but competes against the client).

Why am I the only one who thinks that the idea that Jabber keeps your contact list on someone else's server is right out?

Thursday, February 24, 2000 @ 11:59 a.m. - Comment

You know, the database people? They've decided to rip off a piece of the mobile market.

Apparently, they've forgotten that WAP sucks.

Remember, big companies are not on your side, unless you're a shareholder. Think for yourself.

Thursday, February 24, 2000 @ 11:47 a.m. - Comment

Jack Valenti sucks.

I wouldn't be a tad surprised to find out I meant that literally...

Thursday, February 24, 2000 @ 11:43 a.m. - Comment

Wanna run Linux on it?

Wednesday, February 23, 2000 @ 04:51 p.m. - Comment

Either take your government back from the idiots who are running it, or do not take pictures of your children.

This prosecutor has his own issues to get over.

[ In an amusing side note, note the date on the page. This is a RealAudio v1/2 clip; your player will probably want to download an update plugin. ]

Tuesday, February 22, 2000 @ 08:08 p.m. - Comment

In a story that will really only be funny to you if you've been paying attention, have a program, and know the players, OneSwellFoop covers the shutdown of The Bradlands by ... oh, some sort of federal agents.

Graham had been a key player in the recent weblog merger and acquisition madness, with his attempted hostile takeover of both Pyra.com Ltd. (NASDAQ: PYRA) and UserLand Software (NASDAQ: DAVE). Negotiations for the takeover had broken down when both Evan Williams of Pyra and Dave Winer of UserLand Software ran out of tequila. After the meeting, Graham was reportedly attacked by a small group flashing weblog gang signs and beaten senseless, a process that took very little effort. Afterwards, when Graham attempted to return home in his 1987 Hyundai Excel, a bomb wired to the ignition exploded. Witnesses claimed hearing the shouted words "It Worked!!" after the explosion, but the Bradlands CEO was mostly unharmed, it being a web-based bomb and relatively harmless.

<snicker>

Tuesday, February 22, 2000 @ 07:55 p.m. - Comment

I am extremely dumped. Mike hasn't updated in a week and a half.

Tuesday, February 22, 2000 @ 07:52 p.m. - Comment

that Newsweek can live in the past and the future at the same time. (Note the byline date. Note, also, that this story was covered months ago several other places...)

Tuesday, February 22, 2000 @ 07:49 p.m. - Comment

Go Back.

Tuesday, February 22, 2000 @ 07:46 p.m. - Comment

... the State Division of Employment. If you'd like a job as a phone sex operator, please press 1...

Tuesday, February 22, 2000 @ 05:43 p.m. - Comment

The Reaper was within one year of correct...

Wonder if he sews..?

Tuesday, February 22, 2000 @ 05:31 p.m. - Comment

Let's hope they climb on board the Clue Train pretty soon.

UPDATE: I went to Real's website, to find an address to which to send a pointer to this rant, they should know I was unhappy directly.

(Stop me if you'd already figured this out:) there isn't one. The 'Public Relations' address is only for the press; everything else on that page is either sales, technical support (for paying customers only, presumably), or comments... about the website. Nowhere that I could find was there a place to which to send comments about the company and it's products.

Of course not. I certainly wouldn't want to hear people bitch.

And, of course, just like eBay, finding those email addresses is next to impossible. I had to bounce over to the corporate website at realnetworks.com to find any contact information at all.

FURTHER UPDATE:

Why does RealPlayer keep telling me I only have an 8-bit video card? Not only did I already know that, but the "don't tell me this again button is checked.

<grrrr volume="high">

Tuesday, February 22, 2000 @ 03:24 p.m. - Comment

Or is it obvious? Maybe it's not, and that's why software sucks. Mark J. Minasi, a former editor of Byte Magazine, in it's dead-tree days, has written a new book on the topic, called The Software Conspiracy: Why Software Companies Put Out Faulty Products, How They Can Hurt You, and What You Can Do About It.

It explains why software sucks, why you should care that software sucks, and what you can do about it, even if you're not a programmer.

Jason Bennett has written a good review of the book, with his own opinions on the topic.

He also mentions, as does the book, UCITA...

Baad law; BAAAAAAAAAAD law!

Tuesday, February 22, 2000 @ 12:33 p.m. - Comment

I don't agree with everything he says, but he certainly says it lyrically, now, doesn't he?

Monday, February 21, 2000 @ 06:31 p.m. - Comment

... that Macintosh users are better at being childish than users of other types of computers...

Monday, February 21, 2000 @ 05:57 p.m. - Comment

In any event, the latest notable piece is on connection speeds from Tampa to the rest of the world:

To go from the Tampa computer to Internet retailer Buy.com in Santa Clara, Calif., the route included Tampa, Miami, Atlanta, Chicago and Santa Clara, passing 18 network nodes, or intersections, along the way. To go from Keynote's headquarters computer in San Mateo to Tampa, the route included San Mateo, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Atlanta, Orlando and Tampa, passing nine network nodes.

Traffic at any of those nodes can delay your request. One element determining the route is the carrier. Say a request to log onto a Web site starts on a network we'll call Sender and is destined for a site we'll call Receiver. Sender's Internet service provider carrier will work to transfer that request -- and the cost of carrying it -- to the Receiver network as soon as possible.

But none of the writers are talking about that, you'll notice...

Monday, February 21, 2000 @ 05:41 p.m. - Comment

Shi-Zhe Yung, of the Pratt Institute, New York, NY, has some ideas...

Monday, February 21, 2000 @ 05:34 p.m. - Comment

Neilsen, that is. The topic is the Stanford study everyone's logging about this week that suggests that the Internet is making people lonelier and less well socialized (approximately).

As you might expect if you saw the rebuttal stories, Jakob thinks this survey is bullshit... but not for the reasons you might think.

Interesting reading...

Monday, February 21, 2000 @ 04:25 p.m. - Comment

'The Reverend' Bob Crispen decided to sift through the pages of the various presidential campaign sites; the results vary between amusing and scary.

[ Thanks to some guy on Slashdot ]

Monday, February 21, 2000 @ 12:25 p.m. - Comment

I watched him, for a while, and thought, first to myself, and then to my friend Erin: "There's the next guy in the Martin-Baker..."

Sunday, February 20, 2000 @ 10:39 p.m. - Comment

In any event, if you're an adult, the odds are fairly good that you enjoy reading fiction intended for adult audiences, particularly erotica. If you do, then the alt.sex.stories Text Repository is a site you might enjoy. They are a volunteer site, and they pay the bills themselves, in consequence of which I will send you there via the donation beg page.

If you like it there, vote with your wallet.

I'm going to.

Sunday, February 20, 2000 @ 09:50 p.m. - Comment

Maybe it's because marriage hasn't changed much over the last 100 years... but Americans have. Weekly Planet writer Fred Branfman has the balls to consider that idea in this weeks issue (and I apologize to people reading this our of the archive if that link breaks; I have no way to know if it's permanent or not -- it does appear to be).

Only those willing to challenge the current orthodoxy and experiment with marriage offer any real hope of saving it. Marriage will fundamentally change or die in coming decades, and only those willing to change it can hope to preserve it.

It's so nice to see that this outlook has graduated from science fiction novels to the general (if not mainstream) press. No, that sort of approach to life is not easy -- it requires all the parties involved to actually be adults; you can't just pretend anymore -- but, as the old hit country song puts it: "Why do we have to hurt one to love another?"

Sunday, February 20, 2000 @ 09:26 p.m. - Comment

Read all about the CIA's new security software package called NetEraser.

"Come into my parlor", said the spider to the fly...

Sunday, February 20, 2000 @ 09:23 p.m. - Comment

It's about the intersection between the wires and the walls, and he's been kind enough to post some of his research data.

As of January 2000 there were 10,008,475
com, org, net and edu domains registered
worldwide. There are another 3,344,305
country code TLDs (.uk or .de) domains
registered as well. That's about 2.2
Intenet domains per 1000 people worldwide.
In the US, the figure is 25.2 domains per
1000 people.

CONCENTRATIONS OF DOMAIN NAMES

Combined (com, org, net, edu and country
code TLDs) there are 13.35 million
domains. They are distributed as follows….

 The US has 50.0 percent
     California has 11.5 percent
        Los Angeles (CMSA) has 5.6 percent
        San Francisco (CMSA) has 3.9 percent
     New York State has 4.3 percent
        New York (CMSA includes NJ and CT)
        has 5.9 percent
 Germany has 8.6 percent
 The UK has 8.5 percent

Friday, February 18, 2000 @ 05:55 p.m. - Comment

DO you own your email address?

This is not a new thing, people have had similar problems with phone numbers, particularly toll-free numbers, for many years.

The solution they chose, however, is completely useless:

NBC Internet's Snap.com and Xoom will be merging their membership databases on February 23rd, adding a .1 to user names on the Snap service. For example, if your Snap member name was user, you would now be user.1.

The only safe solution is to break everyone's email addresses and, of course, that won't happen, either.

Friday, February 18, 2000 @ 04:46 p.m. - Comment

on the sensuous pleasures of her new pen.

Alas, that link will break, because Lilly only NAMEtags stuff she thinks will be linkable. :-)

Friday, February 18, 2000 @ 04:38 p.m. - Comment

Like this Windows NT / CP/M comparison article.

Friday, February 18, 2000 @ 04:34 p.m. - Comment

What I found was this paper on Benford's Law. I was right. It's more interesting.

Dr. Hill is one of a growing number of statisticians, accountants and mathematicians who are convinced that an astonishing mathematical theorem known as Benford's Law is a powerful and relatively simple tool for pointing suspicion at frauds, embezzlers, tax evaders, sloppy accountants and even computer bugs.

Benford's Law is named for the late Dr. Frank Benford, a physicist at the General Electric Company. In 1938 he noticed that pages of logarithms corresponding to numbers starting with the numeral 1 were much dirtier and more worn than other pages.

Friday, February 18, 2000 @ 04:16 p.m. - Comment

The morning show on the country station to which I listen, WCTQ-FM in Sarasota, somehow got on to the topic of breast size.

Now, those who know me well know that this is a topic close to my heart (no pun intended...), but I had to profess to some surprise that, even though they are readers of Maxim Magazine, Rob and Mav both apparently missed the entry in "101 Things A Man Must Know" (or whatever they titled that story a couple months back) that said that one of those things was how to measure a woman for a bra.

Interestingly, I didn't hear a call from a single woman who knew, either.

Then, just to extend the topic a bit more, I ran across this piece, concerning the breasts of former Miss America Leanza Cornett, who co-hosted the "Who Wants to be a National Embarassment" thing on Fox the other night.

The story is, forgive me, a hoot.

And, of course, some caller made a comment to the effect of "have you ever seen a pair of perky D-cups?"

Yes, as a matter of fact; I have.

Friday, February 18, 2000 @ 01:10 p.m. - Comment

Unless it was a really weird looking car, you probably won't be able to relate to this story, but check the Advice Goddesses site out, anyway.

BEING A GIRL, I find in-person visits in such situations to be quite helpful. ("Hi, I have big breasts, will you find my car?") The first officer I spoke with, Clinton Dona, who happened to own a 1960 Rambler, was especially sympathetic. He and the officers behind the desk promised to tell the beat cops to watch for my Rambler. I felt re-energized, empowered; I was Nancy Drew! (as played by Pamela Anderson). I waved a flirty goodbye and trotted out to my roadster.

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 04:42 p.m. - Comment

Dr Bob Schwarz apparently disagrees.

Bob sent me two instructional videos, one for me, one for my wife. I hope it doesn’t make me as gay as the color mauve that I popped in both. First I watched the video “The Venus Butterfly Technique for Women,” which is actually intended for men to view and shows in graphic, up-close detail how to manipulate a girl’s man in the boat, her magic button, which Dr. Bob puts into strict scientific terms by comparing to a pencil eraser.

The video, just as he’d promised, is “one of the most explicit, graphic videos ever produced. It’s not pornographic. We’re very clear that it’s done very tastefully. But it’s a very hot subject.

“It may take you six months to actually see the end of the video” – here he laughed another perverse laugh – “’cause guys get really excited. We should’ve used less attractive couples.”

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 04:27 p.m. - Comment

This is so typical...

Apparently the people who booked Patrick Stewart for this launch presentation forgot to talk to the people who operate the real ships.

"Some of you might be asking: What does this actor know about the future?" Stewart said, pausing and beaming. "I've been there."

<yawn>

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 04:21 p.m. - Comment

Obviously, Dan Kusnetzky -- whose name would not have taken me three tries to get spelled right if the frigging morons at Infoworld hadn't disable copy and paste (how do they do that, anyway?) -- is not the guy you'd want picking a sunny day for your wedding...

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 04:14 p.m. - Comment

Lindsay scores a scoop with The Duct Tape Wallet.

I do have a birthday coming up... :-)

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 03:58 p.m. - Comment

It must be a slow news day at Wired.

[ Thanks to /usr/bin/girl -- I dunno. I thought it was a nice picture. Even though, as nice as she was to me on IRC two weeks ago, she's been ignoring my email since... ]

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 03:30 p.m. - Comment

Damn, but Salon gets some great writers...

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 12:32 p.m. - Comment

It's ok, though; it will give her time to work on her website (ok, hers and her boyfriends...) I described it as sort of "Gothdot", and they said that wasn't very far from wrong; it focuses on games like World of Darkness, Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling, and that sort of thing; if you like those, go there.

Oh, and to meet me for lunch. :-)

[ Editor's note: I see Netscape shares the "I don't understand that a hyphen is an acceptable place to word-wrap a line fault of most other word wrapping algorithms. Furrfu! ]

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 12:10 p.m. - Comment

From Computerworld, a piece concerning working with the FBI on computer and network attacks.

"I don't have that fear because I know how the FBI works," said Chesnut. They "can make sure they get the evidence they need in a way that doesn't interfere with our service." He believes companies can overcome their fears of working with law enforcement by meeting with them before problems occur. "You can break the ice by picking up the phone," he said.

Hmmm... I dunno. The consensus of the people on the NSP management mailing list I'm on is that the vast majority of the FBI's people are 99.44% clue-free on network attack issues, and the remaining .56 percent aren't interested unless the bill goes over $80k. We'll see...

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 11:50 a.m. - Comment

Brennan caught another good Salon piece, on Fox's silly-ass "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire" show last night. My favorite quote:

For one thing, the specter of "wholesome sex" clung to this sad parade like a silent fart in a crowded elevator. Why not just go all out? Call the show "People Will Do Anything for Money" or "America's Funniest Prostitutes"?

Great stuff.

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 10:07 a.m. - Comment

(gee, that sounds like a title for a musical, doesn't it?) has posted some interesting observations, with which I fully concur, concerning a New York Times story about how 'addiction to the net' is making people lonelier because they don't interact as much with 'real people'.

Bah.

I don't know about you, tovarishch, but the people in my addressbooks and ICQ and AIM buddy lists, and on my mailing lists and newsgroups are real. I haven't met most of them in person, some of them are jerks, and many of them need to grow up, but some of them are warm, witty, pretty, intelligent, and fun to hang out with.

Just like the people I've met in person.

So what's the difference?

In fact, being on line has some subtle advantages: you can have 6 private conversations simultaneously without offending anyone and still get work done, and you can *punctuate* things, exactly the way you want; you can even use semicolons. And ellipses...

:-)

Regulars will remember the piece I wrote last week about the way science fiction fans talk -- it applies to geeks, too.

And being a geek is becoming stylish.

That'll ruin it, of course.

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 09:53 a.m. - Comment

Traffic from Wes Felter's Hack The Planet (my favorite technical weblog -- where would we be without CS grad students? :-) about doubled my normal hit count yesterday.

Wes: you can link to me any old time you want. :-)

The mix here isn't nearly as technical as his, but there's an occasional spike. I treat this as kind of a continuous editorial column -- that's the description, anyway, that I tried to put into the listing at weblogs.com ... and you'd be able to see it there if I hadn't gotten a script error from the CGI. <sigh>

In any case, welcome aboard, and I hope you find something interesting enough to bring you back.

Thursday, February 17, 2000 @ 09:32 a.m. - Comment

But what about the servers!?

Wednesday, February 16, 2000 @ 05:41 p.m. - Comment

Cam, who was nice enough to fix the broken link, but not nice enough to thank me for pointing out the broken link ( Well, he has moved to New York... :-) notes this story, from beautiful downtown Tulsa, about a new process that allows moms to ask "one slice or two".

To quote those immortal words: I am not making this up.

Wednesday, February 16, 2000 @ 04:12 p.m. - Comment

Perhaps this one will fill your requirement.

This case is virtually new. It shows minor wear, a few scratches, from storage, does not appear to have actually been used, and can be converted to a variety of uses -- to carry and/or store computers, telephones, other electronic equipment, Pokemon cards, Barbie dolls, action figures, jewelry, firearms, bombs, drugs, cash, or whatever else you might have typed into the search engine to reach this ad.

Wimps.

Wednesday, February 16, 2000 @ 03:53 p.m. - Comment

Computerworld has this story about the "Joe's Apartment" memo -- "would you pay $500 for a program with 63,000 bugs?" -- which doesn't hearten me all that much.

"Our customers, analysts and technical reviewers say this product is rock solid," said [ Director of Windows Marketing Keith ] White. "This is the most reliable version of Windows ever."

And only install it on throwaway machines. Do not install this OS (and I use the term lightly) on a production machine for at least the next 3 months; 6 would be better.

Wednesday, February 16, 2000 @ 02:14 p.m. - Comment