More Signal, Less Noise
Monday, April 18, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 15 Monday, April 18, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF By the time you read this, a new Pope may already be elected. How likely is it that the election of the next Pope will be rigged? Bruce Schneier asks that question, and dissects the papal election process in detail, noting how and if it may be vulnerable to vote fraud. After analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the process, Schneier concludes that "when an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good." His piece has a link to the official rules for papal election at the Vatican. There's also a link to photos of the outfits the cardinals wear for the occasion, since clothing does matter when there's potential for sleight-of-hand ballot hanky-panky. Reader comments expand on Schneier's observations, one astutely noting that the elaborate voting system would not exist were there not at least a perceived threat - by implication or perhaps based on historical fact - of vote-rigging among the cardinals. Cynics!http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/04/hacking_the_pap.html Google Video Lets You Upload, Sell Videos A beta version of Google Video let you search through descriptions and transcripts of video broadcasts. Now, it lets you upload your own videos to make them available to anybody. You can start uploading right now, but Google has not yet enabled a service to let people view the uploaded videos. In the FAQ, Google notes that video owners can not only make the videos available for free or can charge for access, with Google getting a cut of the transaction. Obviously, you must own the rights to any video you upload and Google reserves the right to preview all video. Google permits any content, with the exception of porn or obscene material. You can sign up on the Video Upload Program page, while the FAQ has all the details. Video Upload Program: https://upload.video.google.com/ FAQ: https://upload.video.google.com/video_faq.htmlThe UK Creative Archive Licence Group The BBC and other British organizations have begun to provide access to a wide variety of public-service audio and video archives. They specifically invite you to rip, mix, and share at the Creative Archive Licence Group (CALG). Don't get too excited just yet - there's no material to play with at the moment. What you do get now is the UK-centric licensing framework and explanations of how it will work and why the BBC and other organizations are doing this. The CALG plans to make the material available only to UK users, and the BBC plans to filter IP numbers to make sure nobody outside of the UK can download the goods. That plan is doomed to fail; we wonder why the CALG would bother with silly, ineffective restrictions like that. Incidentally, the BBC dismissed the Creative Commons licenses to allow for specific UK-centric requirements. For example, some UK entities do not want to allow CALG material to be used for political, charitable, or other causes, and some don't want to allow the material to be used outside of the UK. And yes, eventually "Dr. Who" episodes will be made available.http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/ Environmental Sex Site Has Trouble Donating Money Tommy and Leona run a sex Web site, but it's no ordinary sex site. Tommy and Leona and their friends film themselves in the buff and/or having sex on behalf of the trees. The Norwegian couple use proceeds from their explicit Fuck for Forest site for environmental causes. This clever idea and some on-stage antics at a rock concert made them famous online and off. They've managed to raise a fair amount of cash from fans eager to support wood and watch them and their post-modern hippie friends have fun for the camera. The only problem is that nobody seems to want their money. Major environmental organizations like the World Wildlife Fund don't want anything to do with Tommy and Leona for fear of contamination by association with - gasp! - attractive young people having sex outdoors for a good cause. SF Gate has Tommy and Leona's inspiring story, while the Fuck for Forest site has the stuff you really want to see. Burning Man-esque is a fitting adjectival phrase.Fuck for Forest: http://www.fuckforforest.com/ SF Gate: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/04/13/gree.DTL Google's innovative implementation of its Google Maps service (see NSD 11.06) opened the way to clever third-party applications. You can combine Google Maps with other geographic data to display a geographic database over Google Maps maps. Perhaps the most spectacular example so far is Paul Rademacher's combination of data from Google Maps with data from Craigslist housing listings. Choose a city and the price range of the house you're looking for and Rademacher's code will overlay matching listings from Craigslist on a Google map of your city, fully zoomable and everything, along with data scraped from the listing. Click on one of the flags and you'll get a link to the Craigslist posting and in many cases actual photos of the house, again scraped from Craigslist. The implementation is absolutely impeccable, and one of the best examples of a geographic database we've ever seen. In addition to the link in our original item, Engadget has another good tutorial on how to do this kind of thing. NSD 11.06: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.06.html#BS5 Rademacher: http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/ Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000917034960/ Intel Offers $10,000 for Magazine with "Moore's Law" Article Just about everybody who works with computers is familiar with Moore's Law, which states that transistor density on integrated circuits doubles about every two years. This trend has held true since 1965, when Gordon Moore first formulated the rule of thumb in the pages of Electronics magazine. His law is justly famous, but neither he nor Intel (which he co-founded) has a copy of the magazine. Intel offered $10,000 on eBay for a mint-condition copy of that Apr. 1965 issue. Intel's eBay ad no longer shows up, but you can read about it at Slashdot, or read a PDF of the 1965 paper at Intel's Moore's Law page. Newsday.com has an Associated Press article on the trouble Intel's offer caused libraries. Moore himself is now retired and in a TechWorld article he states the obvious, that Moore's Law can't continue forever.Slashdot: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/12/2234251 Moore's Law: http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm Newsday.com: http://tinyurl.com/bwpj9 Techworld: http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=3477 Meetup.com is a site useful for arranging face-to-face meetings of just about any sort of like-minded group. The service found extraordinary popularity during the last Presidential campaign as political interest groups chose it to round up supporters. Until now, Meetup.com was free to use, but we suspected that could not last. Starting May 1, meeting organizers will have to pay up to $19 a month to continue using the site, although a grandfather clause allows groups that start paying in April to pay only $9 a month for the rest of the year. The Meetup.com staff is quite up front about why they think their service is worth the money as opposed to, say, starting your own free mailing list. Besides, group organizers can always ask their group's members to kick in some cash. The move makes financial sense, and Meetup.com's features actually are quite useful for their narrow purpose. The site's fee notice is a model of how to announce this kind of change to a user community. http://www.meetup.com/changes/ Grat.uito.us Tracks Your Wishes Del.icio.us is the Web site where you share your bookmarks - and grat.uito.us is a Web site where you can share your wishes. The tagline for the site is "social wishing". You sign up, for free, and keep a list of things you'd like to have. Once you get your family and friends to sign up, in theory all of you can happily suggest gift ideas for each other. There is a strong social networking component. If you lack friends in meatspace, you can invite other users to become "friends", thus allowing them to view, edit, and comment on your wish lists. It sounds like the beginning of a consumer pit trap, meant to capture naive consumers for marketing purposes, although for all we know the site creator may be perfectly sincere in his desire to help wishes come true. A glance at recent wishes reveals a bunch of links to products at online e-commerce sites, in sequences which look suspiciously like commercial spam attempts. In short, it's a cute one-trick pony, but looks like it may already be abused.http://grat.uito.us/ Conference Accepts Randomly Generated Computer-Science Paper Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn, and Dan Aguayo, three MIT graduate students, wrote a program to generate nonsensical computer-science research papers. Their SCIgen program is based on research into context-free grammars, a complex linguistic concept that lets you do fun stuff like generate plausible text. The program performs so well that one of its fake papers was accepted for presentation at the WMSCI 2005 computer-science conference, apparently because nobody bothered to try to understand it. The students justify SCIgen as a response to "fake" conferences that exist only to rake in conference fees like, they say, WMSCI. On hearing of the acceptance, the three students solicited donations to let them make the trip to present their paper. Alas, once the WMSCI people got wind, they rescinded their acceptance of the paper and the associated invitation to speak - but not before the three gathered some $2,300 in donations. They still hope to sneak into the conference to present their paper. SCIgen is open source and available for download.SCIgen: http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/ Context-Free Grammar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar Encarta Encourages Reader Critiques With a clear eye on the success of the open-content Wikipedia, Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia is now encouraging user feedback on its articles with the aim of improving the quality of its content. Unlike Wikipedia, where user submitted changes show up immediately, Encarta has editors who will review feedback and fact-check it before they incorporate it into the Encarta database. Since it's difficult for Encarta's staff to keep up with and maintain its thousands of articles, this is a good, cheap way for them to improve the quality of their information.http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/support/encartafeedback.aspx Microsoft Views on Stopping Spam Everyone who uses e-mail knows all too well about spam. Torrents of unsolicited messages clog the Internet, amounting by some accounts to as much as two-thirds of all traffic. Phishing attacks have converted what was once merely a nuisance into a serious security risk. So, who's going to win this tussle: spammers or us? In an article in Scientific American, three researchers from Microsoft express the view that spammers will eventually succumb to a combination of sophisticated filtering techniques and ways to challenge questionable messages with computational puzzles or billing for illegitimate e-mail. Reducing the spam torrent to a minor ripple on the waters of legitimate electronic communication won't be easy, however. Spammers have shown an ability to adapt quickly to attempts to quell spam, and designing countermeasures is complicated by the difficulty of defining exactly what spam is. The authors discuss the latest salvos for the good guys in this ongoing battle and provide an intriguing glimpse of the strategies they think will win the war.http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3A4B-BF70-1238-BF7083414B7FFE9F Buzztracker Visualizes News by Geography Buzztracker visualizes the relationships between geographic locations and the frequency thereof in the Google News feed. It analyzes Google News and maps locations mentioned in the news on a projection of the world. Locations associated with each other in the news - for example, Cairo and Washington D.C. - are connected by lines. The size of a location's circle reflects how often that place appears in that day's news stories. You can get a very good idea of what the global media thinks are the important geographic hot spots on any given day. Cut and paste code allows you to include a thumbnail of the Buzztracker map on your own Web site.http://www.buzztracker.org/ Broadcast Ratings in the Age of Technology Television networks are keenly aware that sweeps time approaches, and that means that they will do whatever it takes to win eye-share. Higher Nielsen ratings translate directly into higher ad revenues, so they are really very important. The problem is, they shouldn't be. The suits in the industry have been slow to recognize that everything changed some time ago. The VCR breached the wall, which crumbled increasingly quickly with advances in technology. What with digital recording systems, the Internet, and even mobile phones, considerably fewer people watch TV the old-fashioned way. Nielsen may have been fairly reliable back when you had to get out of your chair to change the channel, but in an age of remotes and channel-surfing, the ratings paradigm suffers a credibility gap. Enter Arbitron. The company is developing a pager-sized monitor that reads codes embedded in broadcasts. Tooling down the freeway, it can tell when you switch from talk radio to classic rock. At home, it can tell when you switch from a local broadcast to video-on-demand. And it may bring some actual scientific relevance back into audience monitoring. The New York Times looks into the field.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/magazine/10NIELSENS.html The Kottke Micropatron Report on Making a Blog Pay Here's a useful discussion of what happened when Jason Kottke, a modestly successful blogger, tried to raise enough money to support himself for a year by asking readers to contribute. Fewer than one in 300 of his daily visitors decided to pay, but that was sufficient to nearly match a third of the his previous salary. Although he wasn't really keen on fund raising and claims little effort in that direction, he was gratified with the results. Now he can concentrate on running the site for a year. Next year, though, he fears he may not do as well if he decides to go the fund-raising route again. He discusses the implications of seeking funds this way and its inevitable influence on the direction and emphasis of running the site. He also offers some well thought out advice for other folks keen to make enough to blog for a living. The main recommendation is to accept ads because the advertising underpinning to media is everywhere and it's a hard business model to avoid, with few viable alternatives.http://www.kottke.org/05/04/micropatron-report/ In Canada, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) is conducting a campaign similar to that waged by the RIAA and MPAA in the US, claiming a need for greater copyright control and an end to peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. As with their American counterparts, however, the CRIA's aggressive claims tend to be short on facts and long on self-serving rhetoric. Michael Geist, a Canadian Internet and e-commerce researcher, shows in First Monday that neither Canadian industry figures nor international data support the CRIA's doom-laced talk. He argues that the CRIA's claim that the decline in CD sales is entirely attributable to illegal copying is bilge. Other forces account for much of the decrease, including DVD sales, less time spent listening to music, and changes in the retail environment, including more competitive pricing. The Copyright Board of Canada and the Canadian courts consider that private copying under the personal-use provision of the Copyright Act includes P2P downloading. To compensate artists for lost royalties from that right, however, consumers are charged a levy on blank recording media and devices (see NSD 9.48). Geist concludes that Canadian artists in particular have not been harmed by the decline in music sales and that the levy provides adequate compensation for private copying. NSD 9.48: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v09/nsd.09.48.html#BS3 First Monday: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_4/geist/ RIAA Lawyers Crack Down on Internet2 That Internet2 thing is a real problem. Throw a bunch of college kids into its lightning-fast stream, and what do you think happens? They start trading movies and songs. The entertainment industries had better get their lawyers moving on it - oh, wait, they have. The RIAA moved on Apr. 13 to file copyright infringement suits against 405 students on 18 campuses. Using i2Hub, a file-sharing application, a movie can be transferred over Internet2 bandwidth in as little as five minutes, a song in 20 seconds. And the college kids thought they were so smart - maybe they thought they couldn't be detected because Internet2 is a closed environment. Ah, naive youth.... CNET and MSNBC have more.RIAA: http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/041205.asp CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5667385.html MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7476835/ Where to Shop for Digital Music Which (commercial) music-download service do you use? Have you even considered anything besides the iTunes Music Store (iTMS)? This ExtremeTech article compares the biggest of the (commercial) downloadable-music sites, including iTMS, Napster, Wal-Mart Music Downloads Store, and a few others. The results are enlightening. Apple's iTMS has the biggest library of available music and the ExtremeTech people could find nearly all the music they wanted in that store's database. Of course, to make that music mobile, you either need to use an iPod or jump some low technical hurdles to turn the files into MP3s. We don't mind that too much, but others might. We wish the article had compared commercial downloads with shared illegal files. The closest it got was AllofMP3, a Russian site that adds no digital-rights management to its files, but which the RIAA should shut down in 5, 4, 3....http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1784304,00.asp Certain NSDers high on the beastly NSD totem pole think that: a) the British scene of the 1980s was a golden age of music; b) not because of Morrissey, although partly because of Johnny Marr; and c) that "24 Hour Party People" was a brilliant film, one of the top music movies of all time. The legions - naturally, there would be many of you - of readers who share our exquisite taste have at least one New Order album in their music collections and often will have three or more. All such readers should up their New Order album count by one. The band has just released its new iPod fodder, Waiting for the Sirens' Call. Let us, students of the genre, let you know that this new album peaks with the best the band has ever put out - it's a must for every listener the band touches. If you're hooked on video, check out the video to "Krafty". By the way, you can cite Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe and argue that the 1980s started in 1977; we won't argue. "24 Hour Party People": http://www.partypeoplemovie.com/ Waiting for the Sirens' Call: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0007WFYD4/netsurferdigest "Krafty": http://www.animero.com/warner/neworder/cdon/neworder.html The Hitchhiker's Guide to a Disappointing Movie We are fans of Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series, and we've been waiting for the feature film due the end of this month. Needless to say, our enthusiasm has been tempered by this negative review from MJ Simpson, a biographer of Adams's and a serious fan of his work. What makes this review - of a press pre-screening - worth reading is that Simpson expresses a level of betrayal that's all too rare in contemporary criticism. He certainly doesn't think the filmmakers need to recapitulate the book, but he does believe that they should not have made a movie that he feels resembles the book in title alone. It's a thoughtful review, but beware that the longer version has a great many spoilers. One review does not a bomb make, however, and we'll still go see the film when it opens.http://www.planetmagrathea.com/shortreview.html Xeni Jardin, is a past punk, a self-taught coder, and a trained journalist. The Los Angeles Times dubs her "the wizard of blogs". Co-editor of Boing Boing, among other accomplishments, she claims she just wants "to see how far I can push it before they realize I'm a nerd." Definitely our kinda gal! Tech culture commentator for ABC, CNN, and Fox, contributing writer for Wired magazine - clearly, this is talent worth a read. The Los Angeles Times thought so, too. http://www.xeni.net/lat/041005.htm Online Journalism Review Reviews RSS-Ware Having a hard time keeping up with your blogs? Find the RSS feeds just too overwhelming? This fine article from Online Journalism Review reviews several different blog aggregators. The article clearly relates the different strengths of all the contenders in the field. Figuring out which to use might even be as challenging to you as knowing which blogs to read.http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050405glaser/ ONLINE CULTURE Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote a funny column addressed to the "Imprisoned Citizens of the United States". He wrote it as if from the fictional Unitarian Jihad (UJ), and it was a satirical call for greater tolerance and moderation in the face of extremist thought. Unitarianism is an offshoot of Christianity famous for its liberalism, tolerance, and humanism. Some of the things that made Carroll's column so funny were the names he gave to the operatives of the UJ - Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation, Sister Hand Grenade of Love, and others of that ilk made their views known through the Unitarian Jihad press release. Literally within hours of the release of Carroll's piece, not one but two separate Web sites sprang up with UJ name generators that offer products like Howitzer of Enlightenment and Brother Spikey Mace of Sweet Reason. The Your Unitarian Jihad Name site and the First Reformed Unitarian Jihad Name Generator are boons to sig lovers everywhere.Carroll: http://tinyurl.com/6valr Unitarianism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian Your Unitarian Jihad Name: http://homepage.mac.com/whump/ujname.html First Reformed Unitarian Jihad Name Generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/jihad If you have an MP3 player, you probably know that a vast array of audio content is available all over the Web. Because many people download these self-contained files to their MP3 players, and because so many MP3 players are iPods, these audio files have become known as podcasts. No, you don't have to own an iPod to listen to them - you don't even need any other MP3 player. The files will play on just about any audio player, be it software or hardware. That said, the inadequately titled iPodder site tracks thousands of podcasts on the Net, 5,007 of them at press time, in categories ranging from Agriculture to Women. Handy links will further explain podcasting to you, should you so desire. Otherwise, open your ears and dive on in. http://www.ipodder.org/ ONLINE TRAVEL Some people walk for exercise, others for fun. Caleb Smith seems to walk because of a librarian's compulsion for comprehension, in the sense of both understanding and completeness. Smith walked all of Manhattan, over 700 miles, starting in May 2002 and completing his task at the base of the Empire State Building on Dec. 19, 2004. His site, New York City Walk, includes some amazing photographs of his journey, but the best part is his My Favorite Streets interactive map, which is basically a collection of small walking tours for those just starting out. Can the other boroughs be far behind?http://www.newyorkcitywalk.com/ Fotos & Photos is an online collaboration of two travel photographers, Rachel Canto and Steve Schleifer. The two of them currently offer 12 galleries to the visitor, the galleries established by themes like Childhood, Nocturne, and Nature - Wildlife. Canto and Schleifer, professional photographers, say they travel about five months of each year. They head out all over the globe and capture images that depict the world's diverse cultures and natural beauty. In addition to the galleries, they also offer two screensavers for download. The Fading Light screensaver is a collection of photographs taken in low light; Nature's Way is a collection of nature photos. http://www.fotosphotos.com/index.htm ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Painting and Selling a Painting a Day Duane Keiser is an artist with the simplest idea for selling his oils. He's started a blog on which he posts one postcard-sized painting daily. The small paintings are quick to create and we think each is a bargain at $100, given the price of original artwork these days. Sure enough, nearly every painting Keiser has posted has sold, and they often sell quickly. Everybody has space to hang a painting of postcard size, and Keiser's subjects are diverse enough to please most tastes, eventually - he sometimes tends to follow a single theme for a while. He also paints larger works but thanks just to this one idea, it looks like he'll make enough cash this year to keep himself out of the poverty that can dog artists. He aims to paint predominantly everyday objects, and subjects vary from oozing peanut-butter sandwiches to a milkweed seed pod, but all reveal their beauty under his capable brush.http://duanekeiser.blogspot.com/ Spring has sprung in the northern hemisphere, and since few cities in the southern hemisphere get the kind of snow the top-siders do, this Web site of the 2005 International Snow Sculpture Championships is a tad unseasonable. So be it. We've decided to hit you with a bit more winter with this collection of photographs from the contest held in Breckenridge, Colo. this past January. The site has two pages of photographs from the 2005 championships and several more pages of past championships. The masterpieces the snow-sculptors create at these championships put any ordinary snowman to shame. From the Chinese sculpture of lovers turned to butterflies to the winning Nautilus, these sculptures will take your breath away. Take a minute from your day to see the beauty of the winter months that often seem unbearable. http://www.themoens.com/Photos/Events/snowSculpture/y2005/main.htm Right out of the gate, let's get it straight: you need broadband for "THX 1138". If you have it, get ready to go. It reminds us of Kubrick - it's George Lucas, though. Our rhymes are terrific, our meter is loose, we'll now stop channeling the late Dr. Seuss. As trailer sites go, this is mesmerizing - and even though "THX 1138" first saw the dark of theaters in 1971, this is indeed a trailer site, meant for last year's release of the film on DVD. If this is the future, it's a sterile and scary place. Check the readout from the camera in the bathroom medicine cabinet: "Subject - number. Diagnosis: chemical imbalance. Reusable Parts: organs compatible with clinic type. Defects: left kidney; see index." This is straight out of what is sometimes referred to as "strip-mining for body parts". Think it can't happen? Plan to spend a lot of time here. Oh, there's wallpaper and stuff that you can download, but we never got around to that. The rest of the material's just too addictive. http://www.thx1138movie.com/ NYU student Brian Sandro and his buddies have a little hobby: they pirate movies. TheScene is a work in progress that describes what they're doing. You can find it online through BitTorrent or other means. It's a lot of content, so you might plan on doing the downloading while you sleep. The file-sharers seem pretty unrepentant and brazen about the scope of their illegal activity, but you might feel the same way if you were as fictional as they are. TheScene is a TV series that's not on TV. It's free to download and watch. Not all shared files break copyright, you know. http://www.welcometothescene.com/index.shtml BOOKS & E-ZINES
http://a23.com/babesinspace/ The Academy for Ancient Texts hopes to become the largest online library of ancient texts. It combines materials from a number of sites and sources into one approachable location. It's an ambitious project, translating or providing English-language transcriptions of such arcane material as the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Celtic adventures of Art, son of Conn. Admittedly, much of this may not be relevant to the average Joe, but for scholars and others with odd interests, this place is eminently bookmarkable already. http://www.ancienttexts.org/index.html SURFING SCIENCE The Alarm Clock You Have to Hunt and Kill The boffins at MIT continue to burn the midnight oil, and one of the latest results of their brainpower is Clocky. Clocky is a clock meant to wake the folks who just keep hitting the snooze bar from their slumber, literally and figuratively. Once Clocky's alarm goes off, the foam-and-carpet-covered device gives you one free whack at the snooze bar. Then the chase is on. When you hit the ol' snooze bar, Clocky leaps off the nightstand and rolls around until it finds a hiding place. You're going to have to haul your buns out of bed and hunt the thing down to shut off the alarm on the next go-around. Result: you're awake. Clocky remains an item of academic research; it's not on the market yet. Too bad - it might be fun to see how a dog would react.http://web.media.mit.edu/~nanda/projects/clocky.html The Non-Mythical Solar Death Ray The "Mythbusters" TV show once tried to use a huge array of mirrors to focus sunlight and ignite things. They ruled that such a contraption had to be a myth, but maybe their scale was just too large. To build a functional solar death ray, mount 112 small mirrors on a wooden platform, each angled to reflect sunlight to a spot some five feet away - like the guy who posted the Solar Death Ray site did. This baby is capable of heating a target object to around 600 degrees Celsius. You can check out the site to learn the science behind the contraption, but those who as children amused themselves by zapping ants with magnifying glasses will head straight for the Target Gallery to see photographic evidence of its awesome destructive power. Watch as Hootie and the Blowfish tapes liquefy, Oreos reduce to smoking cookie slag, and AOL CDs get their just desserts. The Solar Death Ray's creator describes his experiments with playful wit ("While I was pleased at how easily the crayons were dispatched, I was a bit disappointed that I had failed to learn the location of their rebel base."), and will even take requests for future targets.http://www.solardeathray.com/ SOFTWARE Greasemonkey Plug-in Gives Ultimate Control over Browsing Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that lets you alter the functionality of any Web page on the fly. It does this by allowing you to interpret Web pages through a DHTML script of your choice before Firefox displays the page. The Greasemonkey page compares the plug-in to user CSS, which also let you override how Web sites look in your browser. With Greasemonkey, for example, you can make all Amazon.com links incorporate your affiliate ID. Or you can remove the advertising column on CNN's site. Or add links to the Internet Movie Database to each movie page at Netflix. The possibilities are endless, and the Greasemonkey Script Repository already has user-written scripts for around 80 different Web sites. The plug-in puts vast power in the hands of users who want to experience Web sites their own way instead of in the often restrictive ways the designers present them.Greasemonkey: http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ Greasemonkey Script Repository: http://dunck.us/collab/GreaseMonkeyUserScripts Greasemonkey and Lickr Remove Flash from Flickr If you use Flickr for photo sharing, you know that it uses Flash to at least feebly try to keep people from stealing images. With Firefox, Greasemonkey (see above), and Lickr, you can get rid of the Flash and replace it with faster-loading HTML and Javascript. As Lickr developer Neil Kandalgaonkar notes, you may have several good reasons to want to replace Flickr's perfectly good Flash interface. Perhaps Kandalgaonkar's most interesting statement is that he considers Lickr "an experiment in Web politics. Exactly how far can the users go in controlling a Web site?" He adds that he plans to stop trying to duplicate Flickr, and move on to expanding Lickr's abilities. Call it Firefox's Greasemonkey revolution, in which users take control of Web-site functionality away from the developers.http://brevity.org/code/mozilla/greasemonkey/lickr/ Security Updates to Firefox and Mozilla Both the Firefox 1.0.3 and Mozilla 1.7.7 updates are security fixes with no new features. There's not much more to add, other than to remind you that Mozilla is at the end of its Mozilla.org development cycle. Any new features for the Mozilla codebase will have to come from the user-driven Project Sea Monkey.Firefox 1.0.3: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Mozilla 1.7.7: http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/ Sea Monkey: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/ |
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