More Signal, Less Noise
Monday, March 14, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 10 Monday, March 14, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Trouble in Mozilla Land: Mozilla 1.8 Cancelled, Firefox Development Problems Serious problems loom in the development process of the Mozilla Foundation's flagship products, the Firefox browser and the Mozilla integrated application suite. One of Firefox's lead developers voiced his concern about the speed of progress and the high barriers to entry for interested outside developers. That discussion spilled over into a larger debate about the future of the Mozilla suite, a future which was abruptly chilled with the announcement of the cancellation of Mozilla version 1.8. The Mozilla Foundation is in effect pulling the plug on the Mozilla suite, and now only promises to provide security updates for the current 1.7 version. Acknowledging the widespread user interest in the Mozilla suite, the foundation announced a transition of the project to a community-supported effort codenamed Seamonkey. Mozilla is a far more mature and sophisticated product than Firefox, which makes this turn of events rather disturbing to the huge user base of Mozilla products. The best way to follow the story is to read this sequence of Slashdot threads, which contain links to the relevant primary sources and a representative slice of opinion from worried users.Slashdot 1: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/06/2232211 Slashdot 2: http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/05/03/10/146234.shtml Slashdot 3: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/11/0021202 Flores Man Brain More Apelike Than Human Last October, paleontologists announced the discovery of tiny hominids and associated tools on the small Indonesian island of Flores and dubbed the find Flores Man, Homo floresiensis, in spite of evidence that the only fossil skull was female. Most amazingly, volcanic dating put the remains at a mere 18,000 years old. Since the discovery, debate has raged over just what Flores Man was. Was it a pygmy human? A pygmy H. erectus? Microencephalic or normal? Examination of the lone skull with CT scans has revealed that Flores man had a brain-to-body-mass relationship closer to simian than to Homo. A few odd things are going on structurally, as well. It's possible that Flores Man is not a miniature H. erectus, but is representative of an earlier lineage, possibly even Australopithecine. The study has been published in Science, but without a subscription, you can only see a few images and charts. Carl Zimmer puts the brain evidence in context, while Nature well covered the original discovery.Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/1109727/DC1 Zimmer: http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/2005/03/03/the_hobbits_brain.php Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/specials/flores/index.html Terrorism is online and US citizens are playing a role in tracking down its Web affiliates. Internet Haganah (Haganah is Hebrew for "defense" and, ironically, was also the name of the military arm of the Jewish independence movement in British Mandatory Palestine) is a group of people who seek out ISPs that host terrorism and other offensive (to them) sites and either purchase the domain or have the provider close the offending group's domain. This doesn't close the Web to terrorists, it just makes them move to new hosts and/or registrars. While most everyone would agree that terrorists are evil, it isn't entirely clear that closing their Web sites is the best way to fight them. As this Wired article makes clear, there is a substantial benefit in having these sites in plain sight for all to see. Wired doesn't address why it is that a private group is engaging in this behavior. We suspect that free-speech issues prevent the US government from cracking down. In Canada, in a contrasting example, hate speech is criminal. http://wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,66708,00.html "Happiness Is Iraq - in My Rearview Mirror" We first linked to Gunner Palace, the site for the documentary of the same name, in NSD 10.32, but there's a bit more to add, so indulge us the duplication. The filmmakers literally followed American soldiers in Iraq in 2003-2004. The resulting 85-minute documentary is playing in a few US movie theaters. It's not anything you'll be seeing on the nightly news. Check out the trailers. If they don't send a shiver up your spine, you likely don't have one. Apple offers more - likely because the film was put together using a couple of PowerBooks and desktop Macs, with Final Cut Pro for editing. It's all worth a look, especially if the film is unavailable to you locally.Gunner Palace: http://www.gunnerpalace.com/content/index.php Apple: http://www.apple.com/pro/video/tucker/ New "Dr. Who" Series Episode Leaked Fans of campy British science fiction were delighted to find that a new "Dr. Who" series was in the works. Now, they're even more delighted to find that the very first episode of the new series has been leaked to the Internet. Copies of the program have been spotted on the alt.binaries.drwho newsgroup and numerous torrents show up at several torrent catalogue sites - search for "Dr. Who" and you can't miss it. The episode, starring Christopher Eccleston as a youngish Doctor and Billie Piper as his latest companion, will air on the BBC Mar. 26. The BBC has the story about the leak of its own series, complete with numerous related links."Dr. Who": http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/ BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4326005.stm All of South by Southwest Music Every year, Austin, Tex. hosts the South by Southwest music conference, showcasing hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on 50 stages in the city's downtown. The conference attempts to share as much of the music as possible in innovative ways. Last year, for example, South by Southwest shared all the demo songs by participating bands as iTunes playlists at Internet cafes around the city. This year, the conference organizers are once again making the music available, this time to a global audience. You can download over 750 showcase songs from participating bands via BitTorrent. That's roughly 2.6 GB of absolutely free and often very good music. The songs are also available on the South by Southwest Web site, though it's a lot less convenient to browse through them than it is to download the one big BitTorrent compilation.http://2005.sxsw.com/music/showcases/ The Story and People Behind Wikipedia Wikipedia, the huge and apparently self-repairing Internet encyclopedia, is mostly the product of amateurs. They're dedicated amateurs, though, and global. Wired presents an informative look at how Wikipedia got started, why it got started, who's involved, and how damage-control works in this more or less open-source compendium of human knowledge. Can you trust it? That depends. Do you trust the experts at Microsoft and use their browser? Or do you go with Firefox? Do you trust the experts and use Windows, or have you tried Linux? Or Mac OS X? You always have options, and this is another one, in the field of human knowledge.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html Forbes Picks the Top Corporate Hate Sites If you're an abnormal disgruntled customer, you take your disgruntlement to the next level: you build a Web site 'cause you're really ticked off. This happens more frequently than you might think. Two NSD issues ago, we covered Mark Perkel's PayPal Sucks site. Forbes has picked up that ball and run with it, putting together a great article on the top corporate-hate Web sites. Forbes names names, and pulls no punches. The haters also pull no punches. Forbes gave the targeted companies a chance to rebut, but it all boils down to just a lot of spin - there's a distinct smell of burning rubber in the air.NSD 11.08: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.08.html#SS13 Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/technology/2005/03/07/cx_cw_0308hate.html Online Gaming, Offline Gaming, and Advertising Marketing knows no boundaries, and that statement probably lies behind Perplex City, a new alternate-reality game that is slowly unfolding in both the online and the material worlds. The premise is that a civilization in a parallel universe has lost some kind of valuable cube in our world, and players help find it. Alternate-reality gaming, which mixes the ability to decode complicated online puzzles along with equally difficult puzzles in the real world, might be the next great form of advertising in which regular people become the strongest sellers of something, a something they create buzz for without knowing what the product actually is. Spielberg's "Artificial Intelligence: AI" and the game Halo 2 both made use of such campaigns, which were entertaining and successful. CNET looks at this new style of hype. Sign up at Perplex City and see what happens. Remember, someone else is going to make money out of your enthusiasm.Perplex City: http://www.perplexcity.com/ CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5590956.html Mobile Social Software Growing in Popularity Social software is going mobile, according to this informative Wired article. MoSoSo, an abbreviation of "mobile social software", takes advantage of text messaging and your mobile phone to link you up with people of similar interests. MoSoSo is the genre, not a brand or product - Wired links to a few examples of MoSoSo services. MoSoSo is bigger in Europe than in North America at the moment, but it is growing in popularity west of the Atlantic. Dodgeball.com, the current market leader for American MoSoSo, operates in 22 cities, so odds are it's available near you if you're an American. Check it out, especially if you are great at texting.http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66813,00.html Why the New York Times Bought About.com So, why did the New York Times pay $410 million for About.com? Read this Online Journalism Review article and learn that the Times got a bargain. About.com, for those who don't know, is a site made up of guides who specialize in particular subjects - a long, long time ago, it was called the Mining Company. If you have an interest, About.com probably has a guide who can help you deepen your knowledge or make a decision. For the Times, this is a way to strengthen and broaden its online presence and, if this article is even partially correct, it will be a big boost for the Gray Lady.http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050307glaser/ Mount St. Helens Lets off Some Steam and Ash Thar she blows, again! Mount St. Helens, awakening again in southwest Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest, belched a seven-mile-high cloud of steam and ash around 5:27 p.m. PST on Mar. 8. Nobody was killed or injured, but the clear weather provided great viewing for those in the area. Images are starting to move across the Net, and the USGS has some nifty close-ups and explanation. The Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam site says the folks there are in the process of stitching together a small movie from cam shots. Flickr hosts a nice set of photos and MSNBC has more.USGS: http://tinyurl.com/6cavg VolcanoCam: http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/ Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmacphotos/6164187/ MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7132927/ You can now customize the Google News page, and create sections that reflect your own personal interests. You can also rearrange the News page to your liking by mixing and matching standard sections - for example, from the different regional editions. You can also create your own standard sections with saved custom news searches. You want more? There's also a way to share your customized news page with others. Click the "Customize this page" link in the box at the upper right of the Google News page to access the new features. Google offers a FAQ to guide you. Google News: http://news.google.com/ FAQ: http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/about_customized_news.html Make Your Own Annotated Multimedia Google-Style Map One of the neat things about the technology behind Google Maps is that it is easily hacked. With a little effort, you can combine Google's map data with just about any other kind of information you wish to overlay on top of it. This detailed set of instructions shows you how to create an annotated interactive map for presentation on the Web. It works just like Google Maps, except you can click on a predefined point and get any kind of annotation, picture, or even media clip you want to associate with that point. For example, this can be used to create your own annotated tour of a city. This example perfectly illustrates how you can use Google data as an enabling technology.http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000917034960/ ONLINE CULTURE An Experiment in Preventing Comment Spam Comment spam is the scourge of the blogosphere, so bloggers widely pounce upon any technique that claims to reduce it. In this blog entry, Simon Goodway presents the results of his experiments in preventing comment spam with six relatively simple methods: renaming the comment posting form, inserting dummy forms into his weblog page code, adding hidden fields, turning the Submit button into an image, and logging the number of keypresses when a comment is submitted. He implemented all those methods and counted the number of spam/non-spam comments on several blogs. The simplest and best performing method? Renaming the default comment-posting Web page, which defeats the many automated spambots that target popular blogging software packages.http://www.simong.org/index.php?p=739
SURFING SITES The first volunteer firefighting company in Los Angeles formed in 1871, organized by George M. Fall, then County Clerk. The company's firefighting apparatus was pulled to fires by hand. When the firefighters asked the city in 1874 to purchase them horses, the City Council refused and the company disbanded. From such humble beginnings sprang the glorious history of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) and this site lovingly recounts its story. The site portrays the development of the firefighting service from its volunteer-based origins. In 1886, it transformed into a professional full-time service, protecting the city's 35,000 residents with horse-drawn equipment. In 1921, the LAFD became fully motorized. While much of the site is concerned with the gear the LAFD has used over the years, social history is not ignored. The site looks at how black firefighters first served under racial segregation, and at the eventual integration of the LAFD. There are oodles of enlargeable historic photographs, articles on various topics relating to the historical LAFD, and lists of major incidents and of the firefighters who gave their lives in the line of duty.http://www.lafire.com/ History of The Temperance Movement in Documents The Temperance Movement, the movement to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol in the US, is almost as old as the country itself; the first known article on the subject was written in 1805 by Benjamin Rush. From that time on, the proponents of prohibition produced a constant stream of anti-liquor propaganda, which included scientific articles, songs and poems, pamphlets for children, and religious tracts. Hundreds of these items have been digitized and placed online by the Brown University Library and the collection, called Alcohol, Temperance & Prohibition, features written materials up to 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition. The online documents are scanned originals which the reader can browse by title, author, or publisher, or search with multiple keywords. Serious researchers will probably want to start with the lengthy essay on the history of the styles and uses of temperance propaganda. This is a fascinating look at the history of a multifaceted ideological movement and is, perhaps, a lesson in the dangers of social engineering.http://dl.lib.brown.edu/temperance/ Originating in the student-protest movements that swept Western Europe in 1968, the Baader-Meinhof Gang was West Germany's own home-grown terrorist movement, carrying out hundreds of attacks and killing many innocent people until its members were captured or killed in the mid-1970s. The group was communist in ideological orientation and was dedicated to overthrowing the West German government and attacking Americans in that country. The This is Baader-Meinhof site traces the origins, activities, and eventual destruction of this gang of ideological criminals. Richard Huffman, the site's creator, has gathered a vast amount of written and visual material to create an online historical account of this sad, sick chapter of German history. While there is certainly plenty to see and study here, we should note that this is not a well organized site, so one should take some time to become familiar with its structure, if that's the right word, before delving deeply into the content. Don't expect any help from the intro video; it's more like an MTV clip. A proper menu and perhaps a search feature would also be helpful. All that said, anyone who is researching Baader-Meinhof in particular or modern left-wing terrorism in general will find this site essential. http://www.baader-meinhof.com/ The Museum of Bad Album Covers Collections of bad album covers come and go periodically on the Net, much like the tides, but the Museum of Bad Album Covers (MBAC) is both large (107 covers) and very good - or, rather, very bad. Based on some 1,000 votes by visitors to the site, the list of these covers features some that may already be familiar to fans of bad album art - expect to see Joyce and John Bult - but there's still a lot of amusing content left to be mined. Some real gems include the rare Beatles cover of "Yesterday and Today" with the dismembered baby, withdrawn shortly after release (yesterday), and changing hands for around $10,000 among collectors (today). The top ten seem to be dominated by themes of religion and bad sex, which may reflect the common traumatic experiences of the people who vote for these sorts of things. Try to view these somewhere where people won't be spooked by your periodic explosive snorts of laughter. As a bonus, we provide the Pork Tornado tale of one man who found his grandfather's album on such a siteMBAC: http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/index.htm Pork Tornado: http://porktornado.diaryland.com/jimpost.html For the price of free registration, Tech Support Guy answers a lot of your computer questions. Software and hardware, operating systems, internet issues - the site's forums cover all this and more. What's nice is that Tech Support Guy doesn't seem to discriminate - this isn't just for Windows users. Linux/Unix and Mac issues are addressed here as well. You may want to consider bookmarking the place. That's our polite way of telling you that you're an idiot if you don't. http://forums.techguy.org/ The Blog of Latigo Flint, Quickest Quickdraw in the World Last we checked, there were around 8 million blogs on the Net - but this one's kinda special. Latigo Flint is a legend, the greatest quickdraw the world has ever known. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't - but he did meet his New Year's resolution of breaking the sound barrier with a quickdraw. The last time one of our reviewers tried to whip a pistol out of a holster, he shot his own big toe damn near off and had the whole place running for cover - so we're impressed. Now, if he could make that fetching barista come around. Maybe if he used more Western lore....http://anewwordforfast.blogspot.com/ 09h09 is a photoblog with an intriguing theme. Every day since September 2002, Parisian Jean-Michel has taken a self-portrait with his digital camera at 09h09 (that's 9:09 a.m. to anglophones) and uploaded it onto his blog. Those who buy into the stereotype of French working culture's short hours may be surprised to learn that this Frenchman is actually at work at this time on most days, but you can also see him skiing, eating breakfast, and on Sundays groggily peering out from underneath the bed covers. We never get to know what Jean-Michel does for the other 1,439 minutes of the day but we do get a surprisingly rounded insight into his life from this narrow perspective. His life certainly holds more than the standard Parisian lot of metro (subway), boulot (work), et dodo (sleep). http://www.09h09.com/ Animation is a complicated art. It requires lots of images, each slightly different from those that come before and after it. Single-pixel animation wouldn't seem to leave much room for creativity, since there's an extremely limited amount of detail one can pack into a single pixel. The FleaCircus site has 75 tiny animations. Most use multiple single pixels, but there's no shading or any other detail. The stunts - most contributed by site viewers - range from neat to really, really cool. The bottom line is this is truly a flea circus, but one that's well worth the price of a visit. http://www.fabuland.de/fleacircus/ On days when your creative juices seem tapped out, pay a visit to this site to help get them flowing freely again. The concept is simple - view a photograph and write a caption for it in 60 seconds or less. You'll need to register to create captions, but you can instead opt to just check out what other folks have written for the handful of photographs posted. Some clever captions we found: "Unfortunately, the German silkscreen printer could only spell phonetically," and "The inventors of rocket skis regret their invention." We can't show you the photos, so until you pay a visit to the site yourself, you'll just have to trust us on these. http://www.onecaption.com/ Archive of Apple Commercials and More Apple Computer has aired some memorable commercials over the years. >From the original "1984" commercial to the recent silhouetted dancers against multicolored backgrounds that hawk the iPods, the company's on-air advertisements have secured a place in the pop-culture hall of fame. Gary Gray, a professor of engineering rather than of communications, has at his Web site loads of great Apple commercials, as well as a handful of other advertisements and short films. Aside from Mac commercials, he offers video clips of Steve Jobs speaking at the 1984 launch of the Macintosh computer and Bill Gates praising the Macintosh. Of course, if you want to view these videos, you'll need QuickTime installed on your computer.http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/movies.html Get your mind out of the gutter. Wood and Wood Products magazine each month describes in great detail a type of commercially usable wood. Even better, it keeps an archive of woods it has covered in the past. The descriptions are useful for people who want to know more about some wood they have. They're also useful for project planning. Sidebars give the technical details while the main body of each article is descriptive. The articles include quotes from various wood experts, like Albert Constantine Jr. in his "Know Your Woods", and most suggest possible sources for readers wishing to acquire that particular wood. The monthly addition of a wood has been going on for quite a while: well over 100 woods are profiled. The rest of the Wood and Wood Products site and the site of parent Industrial Strength Woodworking are also neat, although at times totally commercial. http://www.iswonline.com/wwp/wom/index.cfm Create Your Virtual Model for Shopping My Virtual Model (MVM) is a service that many online sellers of clothing and home items use to let you visualize their products on an animated model that is easily customized to look as much like you as possible (or as unlike, in case you want to see the influence of a different hair color or style or a significant weight gain or loss). The system is now available on many sites including Sears (home decor) and L. L. Bean (clothing). Not every item can be modeled and the models all have perfect vision (i.e. no glasses). In most cases, the results are useful. The MVM site has links to all sites that use its services.http://www.mvm.com/mvmhome/jsp/home.jsp The rules of the Petals around the Rose dice game are simple: newcomers are told the name of the game and the answer to any given throw of five dice. In trying to decipher how the game works, newcomers should bear in mind its simplicity and should not overcomplicate matters; it is said that the smarter you are, the longer it takes you to work out. Once you do fathom the game's secret, you are officially a Potentate of the Rose and you can register at the Fraternity of Petals around the Rose as long as you swear not to divulge the mysteries of the game. It's like a geeky Fight Club, really. If you spend hours playing this game online, slapping your forehead as you consistently get the answers wrong, take comfort in the fact that it's allegedly the smart people who don't get it. We figured it out in three rolls. You can read at the fraternity site how Bill Gates, smarter than most by some accounts, approached the problem when he was first introduced to the game back in 1997. Chances are that he took longer than you will to get it right. Petals around the Rose: http://crux.baker.edu/cdavis09/roses.html Fraternity: http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-frat.htm FLOTSAM & JETSAM PalmBeachPost.com presents nearly 27 minutes of video, "scenes in Iraq captured by members of the West Palm Beach-based Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 124th Infantry Regiment. The scenes range from routine to poignant to macabre."http://tinyurl.com/5493m "You can call me Amy.... I'm looking for a crew of approximately four. Crack commando experience a plus." An ad in the Los Angeles Craigslist calls for a foursome that sounds suspiciously like the A-Team. The responses are by turns hysterical, clueless, and scary - just like the original A-Team. Ad: http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/a-team-finding.htm/printable A-Team: http://www.ateamshrine.co.uk/ We all get the occasional urge to alter the Earth's orbit just a bit. But how many of us actually do something about it? These guys have a cunning plan. http://www.worldjumpday.org/ The Institute of Backup Trauma This ad features the hilarious John Cleese at his ranting best. The premise is that if you back up your data to tape, you're risking madness. It's a bit overlong, but you can't really go wrong with Cleese (Michael Dorn also has a small role). Remember, whatever you do, don't press the third button!http://www.backuptrauma.com/video/default2.aspx Citizen-Journalist Starter Pack The ever amusing Mr. Sun put together this a propos collection of products every aspiring citizen journalist (a.k.a. pajama-clad blogger) should own.http://mrsun.us/2005/03/mr-sun-citizen-journalist-starter-pack.html A Concise Guide to Major Internet Bodies Quick, what's the difference between ISOC and IETF? Ever heard of the IRSG? Those are just three of the ten major organizations that loosely govern the Internet. This concise guide sorts them all out, and even alludes to political differences between them that prevented it from being published as an RFC.http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i5_simoneli.html Blogs exist for various daft and valid reasons. The Versus Page definitely leans daftward. It takes two individuals (Seabiscuit and Mr. Ed, for example) or groups and compares them to produce a winner. Think Celebrity Death Match, think daft, and enjoy. http://theversuspage.blogspot.com/ How can you tell that the Beatles are more popular than the Rolling Stones? The Fab Four generates more hits on the Web's most popular search engine. This cool little app takes any two search terms, Googles them, and returns the results of each as a competition. The "pen" is indeed mighter than the "sword". http://www.googlefight.com/index.php Make Yourself a South Park Kid If you had a guest spot on South Park, what would your animated character look like? Design yourself here.http://www.planearium.de/flash/spstudio.html SOFTWARE iFlix: iTunes-like Interface for Your Video iFlix is still up, but it's not healthy. The software, for a wide variety of operating systems, lets you catalogue and download TV shows, movies, or any video. The cataloguing is straightforward - it's the downloading that's the somewhat contentious capability. In addition to displaying a library of your video in an extremely iTunes-like manner, iFlix has a built-in BitTorrent client that you can set to automatically search for and download TV shows or movies of a specified genre. With the crackdown on torrent trackers, the iFlix gang has stopped development of their baby, but fortunately there's still a lot of good to be grabbed from their site.http://www.i-flix.com/index.jsp Google Desktop 1.0, Now with Plug-in Support This week, Google removed the beta designation from its desktop search product. The free program lets you search a wide variety of files on your computer - e-mail, application files, media, Web history, chats - in the trademark simple Google way. With this release, the company developers offer an API for creating plug-ins, which can extend the search interface to even more file types. Developers can also now directly integrate a Google search bar within their own applications. The development interface is available for Visual Studio .NET, Java, Perl, Python, and any language that supports COM and XML.http://desktop.google.com/ Everybody's favorite peer-to-peer file-sharing application has a major new revision. Version 4.0.0 has a completely revamped user interface, can remember and resume what it was doing across shutdowns, and includes a new torrent-creation function. Behind the scenes, BitTorrent packets are now marked as bulk data "to make traffic shaping easier." That's either good (if you're a sysadmin) or bad (if you're a user who always wants as much bandwidth as possible). The Mac OS X version is stuck on version 3.4.2, by the way. http://www.bittorrent.com/ |
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