BREAKING SURF
| Google Didn't Censor, but Stumbled |
| Sorry/Not Sorry |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Firefox 1.0 |
| New Apache 1.3.33 |
| The Language of Chaucer |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Microsoft Beta Launches New Search Engine
Microsoft has very quietly launched a beta test of its own search engine this week. Right now, Microsoft's MSN service uses Yahoo Search, but Microsoft no doubt wants its own solution in place. According to the company, the MSN Search beta has already indexed roughly 5 billion documents. Contrast this with Google, which just this week announced that it has doubled the size of its index to 8 billion documents. Microsoft also boasts that its search engine can understand natural language queries, like "What is the capital of South Dakota?" So, how does MSN Search compare to Google? Check out Seattlepi.com, which has convenient links to several online press sources that address this very question. Early feedback seems to conclude that while the engine performs reasonably well, it's not going to replace Google any time soon. The MSN Search developers are maintaining a weblog which will be of interest to search-engine junkies.MSN Search: http://beta.search.msn.com/
Seattlepi.com: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/003783.html
Weblog: http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch
Why is music important to so many people, and why does it light up the same brain pleasure centers that cocaine and sex affect? Every human culture has had music and anthropologists have found musical instruments more than 30,000 years old. There must be a reason for music's universality, yet no real consensus exists among the folks who study neurology, culture, physiology, and any number of related fields. Is music appreciation a trait selected for in evolution or is it a happy accident? Science marches on, and most of the folks tackling the issue have come to believe that music does have biological relevance and that the human brain is geared toward processing musical data. No one has yet established why, however. Scientific American has a marvelous look at music and humanity.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007D716-71A1-1179-AF8683414B7F0000
Is NASA adopting the X Prize approach? Well, it is, sort of. The agency has established the Centennial Challenge, which is a series of cash prizes the agency will award to private concerns that achieve certain milestones in space exploration. NASA wants to stimulate technological innovation in the private sector and to benefit from the results. The Centennial Challenge is still very much still on the trajectory from proposal to action, but it plans to award prizes in four categories, one of which, Quest Challenges, seems geared to K-12 education. You won't even need to touch space to win a prize. Of course, if you are able to send yourself into orbit to win one of these prizes, why do you need NASA?
http://exploration.nasa.gov/centennialchallenge/cc_index.html
Spotlight on Mac OS X Spotlight Search Technology
When Google recently released software to index and search certain types of files on your computer, a lot of people noted that Apple had already announced something similar for its next version of Mac OS X. The technology, called Spotlight, is indeed similar to Google's index, but it is also far more powerful, mostly due to its extensibility. Anybody could write software that plugs into Spotlight to provide you with just about any type of searchable data or meta-data about anything residing on your machine. What's more, all of this is lightning-fast because Spotlight is not just a crawler that periodically builds a searchable index on your hard disk - it updates an index in real time as files are created and destroyed. This is powerful stuff. Just how powerful probably is best appreciated by programmers who can glimpse how it works behind the scenes in Apple's technical description of Spotlight. For the rest of us, this looks like another one of those incredibly useful things that just work.http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight.html
Russia's decision to accept the Kyoto Protocol was a shock and disappointment to those who think the protocol is badly flawed, may do little to help the environment, and could kill the economy. For the protocol itself, however, Russia's decision was a lifesaver. The Kyoto Protocol goes into effect only if ratified by countries producing 55% of the world's greenhouse gases, and Russia put it past that threshold. For our money, the news coverage by Business Week and the AP (on Yahoo) stand among the best. Russia had been vacillating for quite some time about the Kyoto Protocol, with the Kremlin's chief economic advisor fiercely opposed. Business Week explains the deal-making that finally persuaded Putin to sign on. Proving that politics trumps science, the kicker for Russia was Europe's agreement to back its application to join the World Trade Organization. The AP provides a decidedly American point of view on Russia's decision. The protocol itself arose from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), available in six languages at the Web site, as is the 23-page Kyoto Protocol itself.
Business Week: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct2004/nf2004101_3878_db039.htm
AP: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041106/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_global_warming
UNFCCC: http://unfccc.int/resource/convkp.html
Secret Service Grabs Online Hive of Scum and Villainy
ShadowCrew was until recently a favored destination for those who wanted to learn more about stealing credit card numbers, forging documents, defeating alarms, and other nefarious tricks. On Oct. 28, however, the US Secret Service took control of the site and threatened to charge members with a variety of crimes right on the site. Oddly, the Secret Service left the ShadowCrew forums, where all the advice was, open for a week. SecurityFocus wonders why. We have to give the Secret Service style points for opting to modify the existing ShadowCrew home page instead of replacing it with a dull law-enforcement-style template or taking it offline altogether. On the other hand, we also have to take points away for this weak statement: "Contact your local United States Secret Service field office....before we contact you!!" That's neither convincing nor confidence-inspiring.ShadowCrew: http://www.shadowcrew.com/
SecurityFocus: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/9866
Shirky Looks at Social Implications in Software Design
Clay Shirky is one of the brightest people to muse about software in the broadest sense. His recent, excellent essay, "Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software", postulates that software designers have failed to assess how the social world is embedded in their designs. For example, mailing lists were an early form of social software, but the folks who designed them failed to appreciate that flaming was a logical consequence of the human factor rather than an unfortunate side effect of the design. Shirky analyzes the design of software to account for human factors, and points to community-controlled moderation as a fix that only makes sense in a community context - no one designing software for individual use would include such a feature. As usual, Shirky makes the mundane thought-provoking while providing insights that might yet produce more interesting social software.http://shirky.com/writings/group_user.html
Schneier on Electronic Voting Machines
Bruce Schneier lucidly summarizes the key issues with using electronic voting machines to accurately translate voter intent into the results of an election. Schneier has a knack for cutting through to the heart of many computer-security issues, and this piece is as good a take on this issue as we've seen - and we've seen a lot of electronic-voting stories this season. Schneier identifies four key characteristics of modern voting systems: accuracy; anonymity; scalability; and speed. He argues that the key issue is accuracy, and in improving the other attributes, modern electronic voting systems have sacrificed accuracy. This is not necessarily fatal as long as the errors are evenly spread out among the candidates and outright hacking is not involved. Schneier goes on to identify the key flaws of modern electronic voting systems, and again reiterates the two major reforms which every computer scientist is calling for: paper ballot trails and open-source voting software. He's written a great e-voting post mortem.http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/11/the_problem_wit.html
A number of professional pollsters and amateur bloggers tried to predict who would win the recent Presidential election. Evidence suggests that campaigns might be better off following bettors. Many online betting sites pegged the election results, easily beating both pre-election surveys and exit polls in forecasting accuracy. Bloggers were all over the map; CNET reports that the risk of financial loss seems to focus the mind more sharply than the risk of public embarrassment. Political futures markets have a track record of beating pollsters, pundits, and prognosticators. Migrating such systems to the Web merely makes it easier for people to participate and guess at outcomes. It's like a huge distributed computing project based on wetware. The Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), a research and teaching program at the University of Iowa, is one such online betting system, and it offers its own results and much more on the phenomenon.
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5437706.html
IEM: http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
A tidal wave of online activity is drowning the old ways of doing political business. An essay on this phenomenon of open source politics in the Nation makes for heady reading if you'd like to blow the cobwebs off old-fashioned politicking. Blogs, Web sites, and ubiquitous access to the online world make it possible for ordinary voters to get involved directly with candidates and other voters in a way that's personal, engaging, and direct. So far, the Web has mainly reworked fund raising, but its potential to draw people more directly into the political process means that it has plenty of room to grow. Not surprisingly, old-style politics is having a hard time adjusting to the new reality. Top-down politics, with candidates remote and isolated from the electorate and issues and speeches worked out in secret by back-room policy wonks, isn't going to just fade away. Although the new tools of participation and involvement are potent, there's a potentially dark side to them. For one thing, it's not entirely clear whether or not an intimately engaged electorate necessarily makes for an enlightened electorate.http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041122&s=sifry
Duelling Bin Laden Video Translations
Cryptome has collected several translations of the most recent Osama Bin Laden video as an exercise in analyzing how various media sites presented his speech to the public. Cryptome found clear differences in the transcripts provided by different news organizations. For example, CNN and Al Jazeera published slightly different texts - but that's hardly shocking. We always urge you to seek out primary source material, but this collection of translations indicates that even this exercise is fraught with uncertainty if you have to rely on a translator. Source material found online can be, and often is, pigmented with different shades of objective truth as seen by different news providers.http://cryptome.org/us-eu-gap.htm
This week, TOP500 released its semi-annual list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. The supercomputing crown was recaptured by the US, specifically the IBM BlueGene/L, which helped knock Japan's Earth Simulator, champ for the last couple of years, to number three on the list. A NASA supercomputer called Columbia finished second. IBM installations accounted for 43.2% of systems and 49.3% of installed performance of machines on the list. The aggregate computing power of all the systems on the list for the first time exceeded 1 petaflop per second, coming in at 1.127 Pflop/s. The number of supercomputers in Asian countries outside Japan is rising at a steady pace, probably reflecting the growing affluence and technical capability of China and the Asian tiger economies. Read the list highlights for more trends and significant statistics.
TOP500: http://www.top500.org/lists/2004/11/
BlueGene/L: http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/index.html
NSA's Mac OS X Security Configuration Guide
The US intelligence establishment wants you to have a really, really secure Macintosh. That's why the NSA, the spooks who listen in on your phone calls and who have jurisdiction over this kind of thing, published this guide to locking down your Mac OS X system. As you'd expect, the guide is rather draconian, and in addition to all the usual caveats about turning off services and shutting down certain ports, it recommends removing many useful applications such as iChat, iTunes, and QuickTime. While OS X is generally more secure than Windows, it still has many things to worry about, especially for the ultra-paranoid spy type users. This is worth having if you're a serious Mac user.http://www.nsa.gov/snac/os/applemac/osx_client_final_v.1.pdf
ONLINE CULTURE
Google Didn't Censor, but Stumbled
Google isn't perfect. A recent misunderstanding over the inability to find the famous images of prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in a Google image search led some to accuse Google of censoring its results. A Google representative sheepishly admitted that the real problem was Google's infrequent trolling for images. Slashdot hosted the discussion, which indicated that Google had fallen about seven months behind in updating its image database. Some of the Slashdot comments reveal much of how various search engines update their indices. In what has to be a coincidence given the time constraint, three days after Google admitted to its image lag, the company announced in its Google Blog that it doubled the number of pages in its Web database to 8 billion.Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/11/07/2043207.shtml
Google Blog: http://www.google.com/googleblog/2004/11/googles-index-nearly-doubles.html
It's no secret that the result of the recent US Presidential election was greeted in certain quarters with some dismay. Some Americans feel a need to apologize to the rest of the world for those results. You can probably see where this is heading. At the Sorry Everybody site, Americans submit photographs of themselves with written apologies to the rest of the world. At press time, the site had over 2,600 pictures. Sadly, the webmasters have declined to share the "scads of uproarious hate mail" they have received despite the entertainment value of the flaming diatribes that we all love so much. Sure enough, a rival site, We're Not Sorry, has found its way online, although it contains only a tiny fraction of the number of photos at Sorry Everybody. Alarmingly, many of the We're Not Sorry photos feature scary looking people brandishing large guns.
Sorry Everybody: http://www.sorryeverybody.com/
We're Not Sorry: http://www.werenotsorry.com/
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The Cult of Mac
The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns
OPUS: 25 Years of His Sunday Best
Smart Home HacksSURFING SITES
Improv Everywhere's Breaching Experiments
Have you ever heard of a breaching experiment? This form of sociological experimentation peaked in popularity in the '60s and '70s. "Breaching" refers to breaching social norms. These experiments consist of an agent acting in a socially inappropriate way in order to ignite and record the reactions of others. Sniggle.net has some examples. Improv Everywhere is a group in new York City that plans and enacts like-minded experiments on a grand scale. Hit the Conquests page for a record of past events. Nearly every event offers something, but we especially like Ted's Birthday and The Moebius. Ted's Birthday sounds like one heck of a practical joke. We wish we'd been there.Sniggle.net: http://www.sniggle.net/breaching.php
Improv Everywhere: http://www.improveverywhere.com/
Vote on Opinions or Submit Your Own
How many times have you ranted and raved about what is wrong with the world and how you would fix it? How many times have you claimed you could do a better job than the current batch of leaders? Well, now's your chance to put your keyboard where your mouth is. ChangeThis, in the interest of promoting optimistic debate on changing the world for the better in either small or large steps, presents user-submitted manifestos on everything from how to improve your Web site in one minute to same-sex marriages. The opinions are, surprisingly, generally well written. ChangeThis not only lets you read and submit opinions, but you can also vote on proposals. Submit your manifesto and watch it spread via word of mouth or Net. Wise people have said that the world would be a better place if we all listened to and learned from each other, and this goes triple in an era when argument consists mostly of parroting broadcast rhetoric. This is a step in the right direction.http://www.changethis.com/
Gauge the Spread of Street Memes
The term "meme" was first coined by Richard Dawkins to describe the phenomenon of a self-replicating idea - as a gene is to genetics, a meme is to culture. The expression of an idea can take many forms, and Streetmemes explores the occurrence and spread of memes around the world. this site defines a "street meme" as a stencil, sticker or poster that can be easily copied to further its spread - sort of adhesive graffiti. The site presents images of some of the most sighted street memes throughout the globe. You can also upload images of street memes in your hood. Dawkins's concept of memes is further explored via an external link available on the homepage.http://www.streetmemes.com/
Comparing Star Wars Trilogy Releases
The original Star Wars trilogy has been out for years on DVD, and as you likely know, Lucas can't help but putz with the footage - which led to a re-release of the movies a couple of months ago. Take a look at the alterations to the footage through DVDAnswer.com's eyes. Its comprehensive little piece of work comes replete with screenshots for easy comparison. The digital enhancement found in the 2004 release is astounding. Many interesting details emerge as you cruise through the stills from the original, 2002 Special Edition, and 2004 Trilogy releases - as an example, the landspeeder moving through Mos Eisley in "Star Wars" sports a strange orange glow beneath. The Web site identifies this as Vaseline, smeared onto the camera lens to obscure the wheels of the prop speeder. Whether you love or hate Star Wars films is immaterial; fans will love obsessing over the details, and non-fans will spend some time scrolling back and forth among the images, marvelling at the changes that technology has brought forth. DVDAnswers.com's Part One looks at "Star Wars", Part Two at "The Empire Strikes Back", and Part Three at "Return of the Jedi".Part One: http://www.dvdanswers.com/index.php?r=0&s=8&c=28
Part Two: http://www.dvdanswers.com/index.php?r=0&s=8&c=29
Part Three: http://www.dvdanswers.com/index.php?r=0&s=8&c=7867673
What with the release of "Revenge of the Sith" due in six months and the remastered original Star Wars Trilogy DVDs selling like hotcakes, now may be a good time to review your basic Jedi lore at the Jedi Archives, a fan site dedicated to the arcane order of heroes who defended truth and justice a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Serious Star Wars fans can investigate and view every Jedi seen or mentioned in the series, but watch out for spoilers from the upcoming movie. You can find out about a Jedi's origins, species, fighting techniques, and role in the saga. Of course, if you're interested in honing your own Jedi skills - and who isn't? - you'll want to study the sections on Jedi training, fighting tactics, and weapons. Auxiliary sections include a vast forum, downloads, model customization tips, and much more. In short, there's everything you could need for your Jedi Knight-related surfing pleasure. Just remember, the Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.
http://jediarchives.bejedi.com/
British radio comedies often have a hard time making the transition to TV, though "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "On the Hour" (which became "The Day Today" on the small screen) show how it can be done supremely. "Dead Ringers", an up-to-the-minute satire featuring some fine impersonators, was an extremely funny radio show that became a rather hit-or-miss TV show. But the clip we link to here is a hit. One of the cast, as Alec Guinness's Obi Wan Kenobi, tries to buy a used car. The real star of this clip is the hapless car salesman who doesn't seem to realize quite what is going on, and bravely tries to field questions like "Could it outrun an Imperial vessel?" and "Could it resist a tractor beam?" The penny only drops when Darth Vader turns up to battle with the old Jedi master with crossed baguettes.
http://www.acc.umu.se/~klabbe/star_wars_joke.wmv
Yes, you can get inured to the Windows XP interface, and no, you can't really love it. The Mac OS X interface is another story. Apple designed it from the ground up to be user friendly. The Win XP interface was designed to be not the Mac interface. Of course, there are a few reasons to use Windows. If only you could somehow skin the Mac interface onto Win XP.... Guess what? Oh, we thought it would be a surprise. Anyway.... You need at least a moderately high-performance Windows box, but with the instructions at Engadget, the recommended shareware, and a few hours, you can supply your Windows XP with an interface that pretty much looks and works just like OS X. We did this. It works.
http://www.engadget.com/entry/8828351836181248/
You may remember from NSD 8.22 our review of Kartoo, a search engine which displays results graphically in a sort of networked relationship web. Musicplasma has implemented a similar interface for its music recommendations engine. The site's help paragraphs aren't all that helpful, so heed us: basically, Musicplasma seems to relate musical groups or individuals of similar style and display them nearer to each other. Uncovering the logic behind it would be interesting, but we might just be saying that because we're still lamenting the untimely demise of Firefly lo these many years ago.
http://www.musicplasma.com/
Automated Historical Fact Finder
H-Bot, an automated historical fact finder, is the product of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM). It's in its infancy and is pretty much currently limited to answering "When did X happen?" questions. The CHNM plans to grow H-Bot into a total historical trivia-answering machine. The interface is as simple as can be: type in a question and hit the button. You either get your answer or an apology from H-Bot that says it cannot answer your question. Stick to H-Bot's limits, for now, and it's impressive. As it grows, it will become an extremely useful tool. Our reviewer did not know that Anne Boleyn died May 19, 1536. H-Bot did. Did you?http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/h-bot/
Stuffed, sauteed, or floating in a creamy soup, mushrooms are a delicacy reserved for the most discerning of taste buds, like those on the tongue of Aaron Sherman. Sherman has taken his love of fungi to new extremes with a Web site on which he records his mushroom-seeking walking tours of the greater Boston area. While most people are familiar with your garden-variety edible fungi, Sherman explores the toxic and exotic varieties he finds in parks and forests. Follow him and other fungi aficionados as they archive their nighttime pursuits of the often misunderstood mushroom. Be sure to visit the Gallery, which boasts some remarkable photographs of these fascinating non-plants. By the way, that's the most clever headline we've ever written.
http://mush.ajs.com/news/
Never Be at a Loss for Lunch Again
If your office becomes a dialectic of "You choose," "No, you choose," each lunch time, solve the problem with Lunch Slots. Give the site your ZIP Code, spin the wheels, and Lunch Slots will pull up three random nearby eating establishments. It's possible that this nifty idea will soon present results driven by advertising, but for now, it looks pretty random. Unfortunately, the e-mail notification feature doesn't automatically send the address of the restaurant, so be sure to manually include it with your invitation message so that your co-worker doesn't end up at the wrong Denny's.http://www.lunchslots.com/
The Zoological Influence on Pokemon
What do a Ninjask, Vibrava, and Shuckle have in common? Besides being phonetically silly, these are all creatures from the wildly popular Pokemon franchise. They also, like many Pokemon, possess some similarity to real-world organisms extant or extinct. Mudkip, for example, is modeled after the mudskipper, a fish that can walk on land - and thus a natural inspiration for a cartoon. Another Pokemon, Anorith, is a dead ringer for Anomalocaris from the Burgess Shale. The Biology of Pokemon site looks at far too few of these Pokemon-nature relationships, but what it does offer can at times astonish you if you're only familiar with the cartoon versions. Check out Vileplume.http://www.bogleech.com/pokemonzoo.html
By now, you should've at least heard of Ashlee Simpson's Oct. 23 "Saturday Night Live" (SNL) performance fiasco. If you haven't, here's the low-down on the hoe-down. She sang "Pieces of Me" her first time on stage, and as she started her second performance, "Autobiography" this time, the audience heard "Pieces of Me" again, complete with vocals. However, Simpson wasn't singing at all and had her microphone by her waist. Simpson spent an unbearable half-minute on stage attempting to cover for the apparent technical glitch with some sort of Riverdance-style jig before running off stage. She later blamed her band, technical problems, and acid reflux. This has blown up into the biggest lip-synching scandal since Milli Vanilli, and it's all because Simpson a few months ago said "I'm totally against (lip-synching) and offended by it. I'm going out to let my real talent show, not to just stand there and dance around. Personally, I'd never lip-synch. It's just not me." All the news, satire, and video can be found at LipSync.us.
http://www.lipsync.us/
Europe has a new superhero, Captain Euro, who, together with his trusty sidekicks Europa and Lupo the wolf, are new ambassadors for global peace and the European message. What are his powers? Adamantium claws? Fists of iron? Laser-emitting eyes? No. This superhero resolves conflict without violence - his powers are fluency in several languages and international savoir faire. But superheroes are supposed to kick ass, we hear you complain, and we wholeheartedly agree. The two Captain Euro adventures on the site are comically and embarrassingly lame (or like, totally gay to use the comic-book aficionados' technical phrase). The first explores his origins, and the second, "The Grand Canal", has him rescuing the city of Venice after the evil D. Vider drains its canals. "The team has decided that you are working too hard... you need a break," Europa advises Captain Euro at the beginning of the second story. Having read the first, we were surprised she didn't then set out in detail the provisions of Articles Four to Seven of the European Working Time Directive 1993. File under "so bad it's good".
http://www.captaineuro.com/index.htm
Build a Rubik's Cube out of Lego
You no longer need to have an actual Rubik's cube. Maarten Steurbaut will teach you how to build your own Rubik's cube out of Lego worth a fraction of the price of real thing (of course, that fraction has a much bigger numerator than denominator). Albeit a little unwieldy at 6 lbs and somewhat fragile (Steurbaut suggests using straps to hold each plane together as you turn it), it's definitely a fun creation. Now, just hook it up to a JP Brown's Lego Rubik's cube solver, and you'll have a homing beacon that will draw geeks from light-years away.Steurbaut: http://users.skynet.be/maarten.steurbaut/Rubik_Cube.htm
Brown: http://jpbrown.i8.com/cubesolver.html
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Elite designer Van Den Puup has a few unkind words to say about the shackles of Ikea's affordably good design. Yeah, it's viral marketing and we're nothing but tools for calling it to your attention, but it is funny and that's our excuse.http://elitedesigners.org/
Straight Male Seeks Bush Supporter for Physical Relationship
This is surely a candidate for the "Best of Craigslist" personals category. We'd also nominate it for "Best Expression of Political Anger in a Post-Election Rage Situation".http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/47785163.html
Presidential-Election Cartograms
We brought you a bunch of election maps in the last NSD, but this collection happens to include several good cartograms - maps distorted according to population - which show the outcome of the election on various scales.http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/
This map of the new North America is a gross exaggeration, ignorant, and clearly unfair given the US electoral maps we pointed you at last week. It's funny, though.
http://www.echoditto.com/node/view/294
Terry looking for frog. Him name is Hopkin green frog. Terry will find his frog. Click image for more frog.
http://lostfrog.org/index.html
Yet another Windows vs. Linux shootout, but this time it's a contest to see which one is easier to totally destroy with one command. Geek entertainment at its finest.
http://hohle.net/scrap_post.php?post=23
Is this the first step to Apple, the clothing company? So far they're only making clothing for their hardware, but it's only a small step to outfitting teenage girls in iPod pastels.
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore?productLearnMore=M9720G/A
Jesus had the principle down - turn something cheap (water) into something a bit more potably exciting (wine). Three brave "scienticians" tried to use a Brita water filter to improve Vladimir vodka. Follow their delicate experiment.
http://www.ohmygoditburns.com/
Really. Says so right in the Bible. Leviticus 11:9-12 and Deuteronomy 14:9-10. This clearly has profound implications for certain popular restaurant chains.
http://www.godhatesshrimp.com/
A Story About the Google of the Future
It's no secret that Google wants to index everything on the face of the Earth. This short, short story takes the idea to its logical extreme and speculates what Googlebots of the future might be up to. Funny.http://www.ftrain.com/robot_exclusion_protocol.html
Most discussion boards and some instant-messaging clients let you use an icon to illustrate your persona. Portrait Illustration Maker helps you design a cartoon portrait of yourself via a series of drop-down menus. It's meant for MSN Messenger, but the images will work anywhere.
http://illustmaker.abi-station.com/index_en.shtml
Not as challenging as Where's Waldo, the Find Hitler game forces you to race the clock as you attempt to pick out der Fuhrer in some grainy photos. Hint: he's usually the one with the small moustache. Obviously, if having any fun with the Third Reich strikes you as tasteless, don't go here.
http://alexanderband.1go.dk/
SOFTWARE
The release of Firefox 1.0 is a major milestone in the Mozilla project. The open-source browser has been steadily gaining fans, due largely to its excellent performance, adherence to standards, and good security. While Firefox is not yet giving Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) a run for its money, the browser is nevertheless the primary alternative. Depending on who you ask, Gecko engine browsers, of which Firefox is one, own roughly 5% of the browser share, with IE at around 80% or more (check out Browser News to see just how we've grossly simplified - nay, abused - these numbers). Firefox has been a stable browsing platform for quite a while, and the symbolic 1.0 release has only minor usability changes and a small selection of bug fixes. Check out the Unofficial Firefox 1.0 Changelog for details.Firefox 1.0: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox
Browser News: http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
Changelog: http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.0.html
The Apache Foundation recently released Apache 1.3.33. These days, a new version of Apache is always newsworthy, particularly the 1.3 series since the 1.3 versions are stable and only updated to fix serious bugs and/or security issues. This release is no different, addressing two security problems and fixing annoying bugs in several modules. Read the announcement for details.
httpd/Announcement.html
CORRECTIONS
We like to think we're pretty smart, so it's a kick to the groinage to find out we made a foolish mistake. Literally - it's why Arthur wears steel-toed high-tops. Last issue, we erred in telling y'all that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in Old English when in fact he wrote in Middle English. A number of readers, by some freak of the universe all named David, called us on that. We apologize from the bottom of our reverse hernias, and our copy editor adds, "Damn it, I knew that. I should have caught it." The URL below, by the way, is a word translator of Modern English to Old English and vice versa. (For the record, our staff is utterly blameless of any mistakes they may occasionally make, since it was clearly a failure of leadership on my part. I shall be plunging a quill pen into my bosom forthwith. The steel-toed high-tops however are strictly an affectation and should not be construed as a management tool. - A)http://forrest.cx/projects/oe-dict/