More Signal, Less Noise
Monday, May 09, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 18 Monday, May 09, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Slowly, carefully, Deep Impact is preparing for the next phase of its mission. It can now see its objective - just a few pixels worth, but an image all the same. With fewer than 60 days to go and its target still 60 million kilometers away, the heavily instrumented spacecraft prepares to fire a high-speed projectile designed to smash into its target at 23,000 mph and create a crater that the probe will study from a safe distance. This is a NASA mission we're talking about, not some futuristic warbot. Deep Impact will study comet Tempel 1 in a uniquely violent way. Scientists hope the impact, scheduled to occur July 4, will yield useful information about the make-up of the comet. In the usual excellent NASA way, the Deep Impact Web site provides a slew of information about the mission, the spacecraft, and how to incorporate the experiment into learning programs. It will probably carry some spectacular images as well as the distance closes and the impactor approaches its target.http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/ Google Web Accelerator Can Cause Serious Problems The Google Web Accelerator is nothing more than an intelligent Web spider. When you visit a page, the accelerator goes ping and pre-fetches and caches every link on the page you're on - essentially clicking every link beforehand. This makes subsequent Web page views appear more quickly in your browser. The problem is that if you're viewing some Web application, the accelerator will blithely pre-fetch links, essentially clicking them, even those that hold special status as an "OK" or "Delete" or some potentially destructive action. That can really screw things up. The Signal vs. Noise blog has a more technical description of the problem. Google Web Accelerator also has raised privacy concerns since it acts basically like a browser cache, but without the cache-purging controls you find on modern browsers.Google Web Accelerator: http://webaccelerator.google.com/ Signal vs. Noise: http://tinyurl.com/7chxc OS X's Dashboard Vulnerable to Abuse The Safari browser in the Tiger operating system allows the download of mini-applications called Dashboard widgets by default. If you visit a Web page that presents a widget, Safari will invisibly download and install it. Such widgets can do almost anything and are potentially malicious - they can show unrequested ads or automatically redirect your browser to misleading sites, for example. It's also possible that such widgets can be used in social engineering attacks to make users reveal their passwords. Zaptastic has a live demo of the problem in action. When you visit that site with the default installation of Safari on the recently released Tiger version of OS X, the page will install a harmless widget. Fortunately, it also explains the problem and tells you how to remove the widget. Other browsers display a request to download a file, which you can safely and prudently decline (Safari in OS 10.3 downloads the widget folder, which just sits there). The general consensus is that allowing any applications to be downloaded and automatically installed through a Web browser is a Very Bad Thing, and that Apple should have never gone down that road.Dashboard: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/ Zaptastic: http://stephan.com/widgets/zaptastic/ Newly released analysis provides hardly startling information about the behavior of online shoppers, if you're an online shopper. The new study confirms what those of us who buy online already know, that we spend a long time comparing, moving from site to site, and often abandoning online shopping carts in the process. The data shows, however, that abandoned carts don't necessarily mean lost sales. In many cases, shoppers who abandon carts return, often days later, to make a purchase. The message for online merchants is that they need to make it easier for shoppers to comparison shop and ensure that shoppers can readily pick up where they left off when they return. More useful than Market Wire's press release on the info is the informative discussion on Slashdot about why shoppers leave sites, with a great deal of specific criticism aimed at virtual retailers who make it hard to discover the costs of merchandise and shipping. Although it lacks the blended results of the survey, the discussion provides considerable insight into consumer behavior. Market Wire: http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=85896 Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/03/1627234 Morse Code vs. SMS: the Speed Test An Australian museum pitted 93-year-old telegraph operator Gordon Hill against 13-year-old Brittany Devlin, a mobile phone, and her rich vocabulary of text-message shorthand. They competed to see who could more quickly send this message: "Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing." Devlin encoded it: "hey gf u can txt ur best pals 2 tel them wot u r doing, where ur going and wot u r wearing." Hill and his dots and dashes won, as the Times Online reports. He learned his Morse code way back in 1927 when he joined Australia Post (as it's now known). The White River Valley Museum (WRVM) has a nifty page on Morse code,Times Online: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-2-1571664,00.html Australia Post: http://www.auspost.com.au/ WRVM: http://www.wrvmuseum.org/morsecode/morsecodehistory.htm AOL Launches Blog Site Integrated with Chat Anybody registered with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) can now start their own free blog at AOL's AIM Blogs site. AOL has allowed its members to have their own blogs at AOL Journals for some time, but AIM Blogs makes the same ability available to anybody who has an AIM screen name. The site is a fairly typical blog host, with the added benefit that it lets you submit your weblog entries via instant messages. You can keep your blog private and invisible to the public Internet. The site offers facilities for notifying you when various events occur, for example when a new blog starts or a comment arrives. Note that AOL Journals has a restrictive content policy; the company does not permit blogs with sexual content or hate speech. Nor can you embed non-AOL-generated advertising in your pages.http://pc.channel.aol.com/aimblogs Google No Longer Warm and Fuzzy to All Advertisers People who decide where to place their advertising dollars would be well advised to take a look at some of the latest material involving that Internet darling, Google. By some estimates, Google is falling behind in some of the most important arenas: responsiveness to customers and accessibility. Has rapid growth and market saturation led to advertisers' higher expectations, or is Google succumbing to success? It looks like the latter. It may not be a killer, because many media buyers recognize that Google has long been positioned as a technology company and is only now coming to grips with its status as a media company. Mistakes happen. We don't know Jack Myers, but the material on his site seems to be the fodder for CNN's story. Interestingly, a recent Forrester study indicates that about half of US marketers plan to cut spending in traditional media in order to divert monies to online advertising. And search engine marketing revenue is projected to increase by a third, to around $11.6 billion, by the year 2010. Google's share seems to depend on how quickly it can get its act together.Myers: http://jackmyers.com/jmr/2005/04/27/jmr-04-27-05/ CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/03/technology/google_adsurvey/index.htm Forrester: http://www.forrester.com/ER/Press/Release/0,1769,1003,00.html Engadget offers up a two-part interview with Bill Gates. Unsurprisingly, the first query out of the box is about the next Xbox, or, as Gates calls it, Xenon. He wants more women and older people to play games, so Microsoft is planning games that are more sociable and will try "contests and spectators and ratings and talking to your friends...." Yeah, that'll do it. On a brighter note, Gates also discusses Windows Mobile, and how that works in the phone and PDA milieu. On the subject of the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD battle of media formats, Gates is a bit more circumspect. Clearly, it would be in his company's best interest for one format to dominate, but he seems to be hedging on the issue. It's easy to understand why: Beta or VHS? http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000440041962/ Blog Revolt Overthrows Los Alamos Chief Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), birthplace of the atomic bomb, is supposed to be one of the most secret places on Earth, but employees and others interested in the facility have their own blog, LANL: The Real Story, for site-related comments and venting. The past few years at LANL have been hard ones, given the Wen Ho Lee debacle and more recent security scandals. The LANL blog, run by an employee, appears to fulfill a valid function, but there is much vitriol on the site as well, most directed at LANL's freshly resigned director. CNET offers a New York Times pickup that gives the blog's background, but nothing beats reading the site for yourself. Just don't expect to find any classified data.LANL: http://lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com/ CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5692542.html Faster "back" and "forward" button performance, improved rendering time on Linux, faster tab handling, and better page-rendering for certain quirky layouts are all nice, but probably the most important change in Firefox 1.1 will be the inclusion of a "sanitize" feature, which will scrub your profile of sensitive information like saved passwords and your browser history. Firefox 1.1 should be out within six months. The Fedora Core Linux Blog (FCLB) has more details, and user reactions in the comments. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for a new Firefox release that addresses a serious security problem - it should be out by the time you read this. Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ FCLB: http://fedoracoreblog.blogspot.com/2005/05/firefox-11-preview.html It's been 16 months since the US CAN-SPAM legislation became law. Has it had any effect? The Pew Internet and American Life Project has new survey results regarding spam and phishing. Porn spam is down, but phishing e-mail is up and enticing people into revealing personal information. Pew's report is a mixed bag; fewer people blame spam for degrading their online experience, but plenty of people still find their mailboxes flooded with junk. Maybe they've just grown used to it. One thing is for sure, legislation isn't going to end spam. http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/155/report_display.asp Graphics Help Mediate Webserver Attacks and Traffic Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks are nasty, brutish, and often long. A technical paper from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory proposes and analyzes a new method of fighting such attacks called Kill-Bots. Like a few other solutions, Kill-Bots relies on the presentation of a graphical puzzle to browsers that desire to download a Web page. The strategy resembles those programs that use graphical input to deter robot form fillers and the like. You've probably encountered these graphical puzzles when registering for something or other - they ask you to type in a series of characters from an often semi-obscured image. What separates Kill-Bots from other cures is that it can block IP addresses that fail to acknowledge the test, with a few other technical innovations as well. Kill-Bots can regulate Web traffic during a DoS attack or even during a spontaneous flash mob of browsers, such as the Slashdot effect.http://www.sds.lcs.mit.edu/papers/index.php?detail=125 Linux Distribution Preferences An online poll that DesktopLinux.com wrapped up in mid-January gives information on which Linux distributions are user favorites. Mandrake, SuSE, and Red Hat top the list in that order, with Debian close behind. The number of pure Debian users seems to have dropped by more than half, relatively, from the 2003 survey. It fell from 34% to about 15%, possibly due to Debian's glacial pace of releases. On the other hand, several popular modern distributions such as Knoppix, Ubuntu, and Linspire are heavily based on Debian, and if you combine them all, they actually top the market with a share of about 24%. In addition to the Linux distribution data, DesktopLinux.com also has numbers on which Windows emulators people are running under Linux, and which window managers, e-mail clients, and Web browsers are most popular. As the write-up itself suggests, Web surveys should be taken with a grain of salt, but this one is probably fairly close to the truth.http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT2127420238.html If you have a small business, you could win 10 million ads on the Yahoo system - all you need to do is convince the folks at Yahoo and Sir Richard Branson that your business deserves the prize. What could possibly go wrong? Be sure to read the fine print. The contest is only open to individuals and businesses in the US. The winning business must have a Web site and must be willing to place Yahoo tags on the site, and so on. The business can't be seasonal or travel-related, among other restrictions, and you must be available to travel to New York City between June 12 and 16, 2005 - no official word yet on who pays for the travel and accommodations. Go for it, Arthur! http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/scp/viewer/index.php?client_id=1173&event_id=15422 Desperately Seeking EverQuest Babe Sony wants to find a real life woman who looks like Antonia Bayle, the EverQuest II game character voiced by Heather Graham. Finding someone who resembles the image of the striking, stacked brunette may not be easy, but starting May 17 would-be winners can send their photos to the Quest for Antonia contest Web site. Sponsored by the men's magazine Stuff, the competition will last until Aug. 13. Online voting will narrow down the field to a group of semi-finalists, from which five finalists will be chosen to travel to Las Vegas for the crowning of the winner. The prize? Other than a goodly dose of nerd fame, the winner will receive a one-year modeling contract and a photo spread in Stuff. This sounds like a good reason to be in Vegas in August. CNET has a bit more.Quest for Antonia: http://www.questforantonia.com/ CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-5694316.html ONLINE CULTURE May is International Masturbation Month, a whole month devoted to self-pleasure. Good Vibrations, the famous co-op sex shop in San Francisco, whipped up the idea a decade ago. While the celebration was originally a tongue-in-cheek way to bump up vibrator sales, nowadays many organizations are taking the opportunity to raise money in creative ways, which frequently involve group activities. Around the world, several sex shops and other groups are hosting masturbate-a-thons; A Toronto sex shop, for example, is hosting one to raise funds for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. Good Vibrations has a press release, while Wired has a quick survey of related goings on around the Net.Good Vibrations: http://www.goodvibes.com/ Wired: http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67439,00.html
SURFING SITES Acoustic Locaters of the '30s and Other Retro Tech Whether you're a military historian or a technology buff, Douglas Self's Museum of Retro Tech displays the best systems you've never heard of. Acoustic locators, one featured technology, was a fantastic targeting system in the early days of anti-air warfare. Military aircraft were a potent threat as of World War I and engineers rigged acoustic locators to find approaching aircraft by engine sound. Triangulating the data from several locators helped searchlights and gun crews do their jobs. Every second of early warning counted. The systems grew more sophisticated after the war and by 1930 were well established on the battlefield. Self has tracked down photos of actual acoustic locators in operation by several powers' forces. He describes the operation of the systems and shows how their crews detected bearing and azimuth of approaching aircraft from miles away. The Americans even tried to deceive the Germans by publicizing US acoustic systems in popular magazines long after radar had taken over the job of early warning. After browsing this exhibit, stroll through the rest of Self's online museum and tell your boss you're researching your next project.http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/museum.htm In 2004, the last surviving widow of a US Civil War veteran died - or maybe not, as another potential widow surfaced amid the hoopla (see Infoplease). It's hard to believe a war that ended 140 years ago could still have any living connections today. To get an idea of how current this war is, listen to this recording of a 98-year-old Civil War veteran made in 1944, available at Virginia's Pilot Online. That veteran, Julius Franklin Howell, died just 57 years ago, in 1948, at the age of 102. On these tapes, potentially from Howell's appearance before Congress in 1944, you can hear him clearly describe the action he saw in 1864, 80 years earlier. Captured in April 1865, he was sent to the Union prison in Point Lookout, Md., where he heard others saying "there must be some big Yankee dead." That "big Yankee" was President Abraham Lincoln. Infoplease: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908934.html Pilot Online: http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=84525&ran=187608 This sounds a little creepy. Scan your skin? It's fairly benign, though - ScanYourSkin just wants to build a huge database of human skin tones, which it calls HumanTone. The site prefers that you prepare a JPEG of your skin - you don't need to cut off an actual slice and mail it in. Just take a shot of, say, your arm with a digital camera, or use a scanner. Drop it into a JPEG file at 300 dpi, save, and send. It couldn't be easier. Alternatively, you could probably just sit on a color Xerox, and scan the output. Seriously, although this is a nifty concept, we worry about the ultimate accuracy given no forethought to white balance or other color correction. http://www.scan-skin.org/index.htm Gleaning the Rules to Calvinball Many Netsurfers still mourn the absence from the comic pages of Bill Watterson's hyperactive Calvin. We're not alone, and Simply Calvin and Hobbes pays no heed to copyright as it brings netsurfers a hefty dose of the classic comic strip. One premium page answers every intellectual's burning Calvinball questions in an attempt to pin down the rules. Of course the first rule is "This rulebook is not required, nor necessary to play Calvinball," and remember that the rules can be changed or dismissed by any player. But where else can we find the plans for a Calvinball mask? What other equipment do we need? How do we build our own field? What exactly is a score of "Nosebleed to Trousers"? Where does Sam Ryan possibly find the time to research this arcane trivia? While you're resting between games, reminisce with Ryan's collection of Calvin and Hobbes characters and themes.Simply Calvin and Hobbes: http://www.simplych.com/ Calvinball: http://www.simplych.com/cb_rules.htm Robert Kiyosaki makes it sound so easy - just follow his Rich Dad program and soon you'll be rich, too! The only problem is that many people, including real-estate guru John Reed, can't find any evidence that Kiyosaki's Rich Dad ever existed. Reed's Web site dissects dozens of get-rich-quick gurus but he thinks Kiyosaki is the worst. Kiyosaki's misdirection and bad advice inspired Reed to place Kiyosaki at the top, meaning bottom, of the class. He tracks Kiyosaki's history back to his childhood home in Hawaii, from high school through college, and from military service to his early businesses. Sidebars show how Kiyosaki's books contradict one fact after another or skip facts completely. Other Reed research reveals that Kiyosaki either never made the deals in the manner he claims or that he just made them up. If you've recently emerged from decades of isolation but still have a tolerance for scams, see what all the fuss is about. Reed: http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html Rich Dad, Poor Dad: http://www.richdad.com/ Unless you feed birds or grow tulips, squirrels are undeniably cute. It should come as no surprise that they are sought-after models for photography. But did you know that one squirrel in particular has cornered the market? She throws fewer tantrums than the average supermodel, her hairstyle rarely changes, and while you may not see her on a catwalk anytime soon, she's a gorgeous creature all the same. In fact, in keeping with the long tradition of beauty pageant queens everywhere, Sugar Bush Squirrel seeks world peace, (that's a very important comma right there) one nut at a time. Unlike the average model, she's doing it kung fu style, hunting down Osama Bin Laden and promoting prayer in schools. You may not agree with her political aspirations, but you've got to admire any squirrel who claims to own 1,000 outfits and has no problem posing in her very own stretch limo. http://www.sugarbushsquirrel.com/index.html Fitting Fashion Right out of SF Straight from science fiction, Intellifit introduces a body scanner designed to help consumers find clothes that fit and to help manufacturers create clothing that fits consumers. A ten-second scan in a radio-wave booth collects data points that measure the consumer's body. How many data points can be gathered in a ten-second spin? About 200,000. After stepping out of the booth, the shopper receives a printout of those items on site that would fit best. Spooky, yet cool. Already up and running, this system is a hit. Clients already include After Hours Formal Wear, Federated Department Stores (Macy's and Bloomingdale's), and Levi Strauss. Retailers can use the Intellifit system results to help them match their stock to the body demographics of their customers, which should result in sales boosts.http://www.intellifit.com/site/index.html Hot or Not-Style Rater Rates by Couple At Buttercouple, you can try your hand at matchmaking, of a sort. This quirky spin on the popular Hot or Not ratings places images of a male and a female side by side and asks visitors whether or not the couple is a good match. Although it seems shallow - heck, it is shallow - the site in some way tests the notion that human beings of roughly equivalent pulchritude and opposite sex tend to couple up. You don't get personal details on the people whose photos are posted at Buttercouple, but you do get a clever social examination on just how much looks really count. The brave can submit their own photos for analysis by the masses.http://www.buttercouple.com/ Traditional weddings are so second millennium. How can you make your modern nuptials stand out from the crowd? Start with a Lego wedding cake. For a reasonable fee, not that he has any competition, Eric Harshbarger will craft your wedding dreams from low-carb blocks. We visited Harshbarger two years ago (see NSD 9.04), but we think this cake is newer. This Lego rendering includes a miniature bride and groom, four different colors of flowers, and even yellow "cake" beneath the white "icing". This project wasn't exactly a cakewalk - close-up photos document the construction from base to top tier in detail from the inside out. Harshbarger built thousands of Legos into 20 pounds of infrastructure. If your wedding coordinator can't stomach a cake of Lego, you can always try one on some other occasion. Harshbarger has also built a birthday Lego cake, complete with candles topped by Lego flames. Harshbarger: http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/wedding_cake.html NSD 9.04: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/nsd.09.04.html#SS9 The Design and History of Candy-Bar Wrappers As much a history of candy bars and marketing as anything else, "A Century of Candy Bars" tells the story of candy-bar wrappers. Nestled in the PDF are hard facts about why the major bar makers were based in northern cities like Minneapolis and Chicago (hint: It's hotter down south) and how many peanuts a Snickers bar must have on top to escape rejection (15). There's a lot here to digest, from the standpoints of marketing, branding, and nostalgia, and the case study of the new Hershey's wrapper is probably the best example of how the wrapper of a candy bar is designed to speak to all our senses. Elsewhere on the Under Consideration site that hosts the file is a good collection of angry posts about people up in arms about changes to the Hershey bar wrapper."A Century of Candy Bars": http://tinyurl.com/8h3jy Under Consideration: http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/001639.html Old arcade games and refurbished pinball machines are a booming collectors' market these days. Finding a machine to refurbish is really the only option for people of lesser means, although even that endeavor can be costly. Maybe Tim Hunkin has the answer: build your own. His Under the Pier Show site catalogues his do-it-yourself collection of arcade machines. Hunkin has combined a cartoonist's sensibilities with an engineer's knack and devised an arcade with games that run the gamut from the Frisker ("Technically the most interesting thing about the machine is the blower-sucker unit...") to Microbreak ("Sit in the chair and travel on holiday, moved by the magic carpet"). Elsewhere on the site, Hunkin provides instructions for making your own arcade games. Anyone he hooks on the hobby would appreciate a visit to the Build Your Own Arcade Controls for its instructions and help. Under the Pier: http://www.underthepier.com/ Build Your Own Arcade Controls: http://arcadecontrols.com/arcade.htm In the 1980s, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game console took over households with a vengeance. The ability to guide the adventures and misadventures of two animated plumbers, Mario and Luigi, at home quickly captivated the young and the young at heart and doomed the pioneering Atari 2600. Since then, numerous game consoles have made their way into the home-entertainment market, but there's little doubt for the game collector at NEScapades which console is tops. At the site, you'll find an online tribute to the NES, but you will also get a glimpse at a host of other, lesser gaming consoles. NEScapades has a large compilation of consoles and games as a peek at My Game Room will reveal. You won't find much in the way of history and information on the NES, but the site's host, Gibby, does provide a lengthy list of desired games. Perhaps that dusty console and accompanying games in your closet might just fetch you more than a few cents at your next garage sale, especially if Gibby lives nearby. http://www.nescapades.com/ Remember the three little pigs? Their building materials were fairly standard. In fact, the use of straw in construction is gaining momentum in some places thanks to ecological concerns. Straw, wood, and brick are all fine, but what about money - no, not the cost, but as a building material? You can construct detailed, stable structures using the humble penny. This site proves it with images and instructions on how to build bridges, domes, walls, and other architectural features using only the circular copper cents. There's no mortar or glue needed and the projects all demonstrate sound engineering principles, as they should because the photos of penny construction started life as a technical presentation by a civil engineering student. http://www.fincher.org/Misc/Pennies/ Geocentrism Raises Its Flat Head If you've begun to suspect that the Earth is neither rotating nor orbiting the Sun, do we have a place for you. The universe is not even one ten-trillionth the size scientists tell us it is, according to the The Earth Is Not Moving site - and that's wonderful news indeed for folks who want to day-hike to another planet and back. You're going to love this place, and as the site itself advises, you should take your time here. Explore. There's a lot of territory to be covered. Note how "today's cosmology fulfills an anti-Bible religious plan disguised as 'science'." This is a wonderful place for conspiracy theorists. NASA is just one part of the conspiracy, and you won't believe what these folks have been up to. Or maybe you will.http://www.fixedearth.com/ FLOTSAM & JETSAM The tagline for this video reads "an animated film inspired by the Persian architecture". It's a beautiful tour through a computer-rendered building - a temple, according to the official five-year-old NSD Age of Mythology player - accompanied by a haunting score. Nice.http://www.etereaestudios.com/docs_html/isfahan_htm/isfahan_movie_index.htm We've covered this amazing site in NSD 9.20, but the site has since vastly expanded. These scale drawings of spaceships derive from just about any work of SF, as well as models of real spaceships. Compare and contrast. A real treat to anybody who loves SF. http://www.merzo.net/ Luke, I am your blogger. Darth Vader's blog is not much of a joke but, as they say, it's all in the execution. (Execution. Get it?) Whoever is writing it is really into Star Wars, which is not necessarily a bad thing, and is often amusing. http://darthside.blogspot.com/ A Brief History of the Linux Kernel Archives If you've ever been curious about what it takes to host and maintain the Linux Kernel Archives, this KernelTrap.org article will tell you all you want to know. It's a short history of the archive, and an explanation of where it's hosted, how it's partitioned, and its general operating structure.Linux Kernel Archives: http://www.kernel.org/ KernelTrap.org: http://kerneltrap.org/node/5070 Matching Volunteers and Causes Add a little philanthropic good will to your life at VolunteerMatch. The site helps people looking to perform some good deeds find a worthy organization, while organizations that need a helping hand find that giving soul.http://www.volunteermatch.org/ SOFTWARE Music Plug-in for MP3 Player Classifies, Recommends Music You might remember Firefly, the old music-recommendation engine, embraced and smothered by Microsoft in 1999. A few other projects have followed the same idea, but none so elegantly as Audioscrobbler. To use Audioscrobbler, download and install the plug-in for your favorite MP3 software. It's open source, so it pretty much has a plug-in for every MP3 player and platform. The plug-in records which songs you listen to and relays the info to the Audioscrobbler Web site. Audioscrobbler creates a page for you, which lists your music-listening history and a neighborhood of people with similar tastes. It then surveys your neighborhood to find artists to recommend to you. The server is sometimes slow, but the site population is booming. If you want to see it in action, see our esteemed editor's page.Audioscrobbler: http://www.audioscrobbler.com/ Esteemed editor: http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/Webs-101 AOL Beta Tests Next-Generation Internet Chat Client Last week, AOL unleashed a public beta test for Triton, its next-generation chat client, which is set to replace the current AIM chat client. Triton tries to better integrate services like audio chat, online games, and file sharing with traditional chat. The application has a slightly different look and feel from AIM. It includes a unified chat box and tabs to navigate different conversations. You can download Triton to test it out with your existing AIM screen name, although be aware that the beta client is still limited in several features. For example, you can't yet transfer files or start a live video connection.http://beta.aol.com/projects/tritonbeta/ Beginning Mac OS X Software Development With the Macintosh generating much buzz among the geek community of late, the higher level geeks have been demanding information on how to develop applications under OS X. Justin Williams at MacZealots has put together a good guide on programming for the Mac using Apple's excellent - and free - development tools. This article will not teach you how to program nor how to create a specific application. Rather, it is a link-filled guide to all the resources both online and off and an outline of how to go about mastering Apple tools. It's also a good introduction to the terminology used in the Mac OS X software-development community. The many resources linked here are an excellent guide for anybody who wants to get started on developing programs for the Mac.http://maczealots.com/articles/development/ |
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