More Signal, Less Noise
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 22 Tuesday, June 07, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Apple Switching to Intel Processors First, the Red Sox won the World Series. Deep Throat shed his anonymity. Microsoft is using PowerPC CPUs in its Xbox 360. And now Steve Jobs has announced that the company will be moving its computers to Intel CPUs. Ladies and gentlemen, Armageddon is nigh. Currently, Macs run on PowerPC processors made by IBM. Jobs said the transition is based on the need to run faster - while PowerPCs do more per Hertz than Intel CPUs, IBM has been unable to deliver the 3.0 GHz PowerPC processors Jobs promised last year. In his speech at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs confirmed what has been rumored for a long time: Apple has had Mac OS X running on the Intel architecture for a while, a fact he underscored with a live demo on a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4. Developers have access to the Intel version of OS X and porting tools now, and Apple promises the new Intel Macs for this time next year. Apple says it will not allow OS X to run on non-Apple hardware. We have press releases from Apple and Intel and a transcript and a video of the keynote. Slashdot and MacRumors have the huge discussions.Apple: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html Intel: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20050606corp.htm Jobs transcript: http://www4.macnn.com/macnn/wwdc/05/ Jobs video: http://stream.apple.akadns.net/ Slashdot: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/06/06/1752234.shtml MacRumors: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=130651 For those of us around at the time, the Watergate affair and its stench of government corruption were really big news. At first, the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex seemed the action of overzealous functionaries, but the finger of suspicion soon pointed at the Oval Office. Using a steady stream of info revealed at clandestine meetings by an anonymous insider known as Deep Throat, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post exposed the dirty tricks the Nixon administration used to try to quash the FBI's investigation of the break-in and to discredit its opponents. Thanks to this inside testimony, the political uproar eventually became so loud that Nixon resigned rather than face more serious consequences. For decades, many have speculated about the identity of Deep Throat. Some had suspected Mark Felt, once Hoover's right hand man, was the snoop, but Felt long denied it. Now 91, he has finally confessed. The motives of the unsung hero are poignant, and the dark lessons about how power can seduce the powerful into confusing ambition with the national interest, into placing themselves above the law, remain pertinent and always will. Vanity Fair first broke the story, and the Washington Post confirmed it. For primary sources, check out the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers (WBWP) archive. Vanity Fair: http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/050530roco02/ Post: http://tinyurl.com/ah3fb WBWP: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/online/woodstein/ Largest Ever Simulation of Cosmic Evolution The Virgo Consortium (VC) of scientists has run and released the results of largest simulation to date of the evolution of cosmic structure. The Millennium Simulation tracked more than 10 billion particles of matter to trace the evolution of matter distribution in a cubic region of space over 2 billion light-years on a side. The simulation took over a month of supercomputing time and produced 25 terabytes of data. The simulations incorporated recent observational results in cosmology, including the latest data on the abundance of dark energy and dark matter. In addition to shedding light on at least one observational puzzle - the presence of massive black holes very early in the Universe's history - the simulations also suggest new avenues of research on the imprinting of early matter distribution on the current microwave background radiation. Read the VC's press release for background and the scientific paper for technical details - and be sure not to miss the spectacular movies and images that accompany the paper.VC: http://www.virgo.dur.ac.uk/ VC press release: http://tinyurl.com/b35xh Paper: http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/millennium/ Law Enforcement's Hacker Hunters Last fall, agents of the US Secret Service and the FBI busted a cybercrime gang calling itself the ShadowCrew and made numerous arrests. This Operation Firewall revealed 1.7 million stolen credit-card numbers, more than 18 million compromised e-mail accounts, and identity thefts, including counterfeit passports and driver's licenses, in the thousands. BusinessWeek describes Operation Firewall and similar efforts from the perspective of law enforcement, noting that both the Secret Service and the FBI are aggressively lobbying Congress for more money to deal with cybercrime, and that "the Secret Service and Justice Dept. wanted to publicize a still-rare victory." Given that the article's stats are probably based mostly on law-enforcement press releases, it's wise to be cautious about the numbers, such as ShadowCrew's alleged 4,000 members - a number we suspect is just a count of logins at the gang's Web site. Such caveats aside, the story does provide a glimpse of the relative size and sophistication of cybercriminal gangs, of the tools authorities use to bring them to justice (e.g. informers and wiretaps), and of the obstacles authorities face in doing so (e.g. international borders in a borderless network).http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_22/b3935001_mz001.htm Disney Opens Gates to Virtual Magic Kingdom It's either the beginning or the end of an era. Disney has entered cyberspace with a beta of a huge virtual-reality game. Ever since EverQuest - a.k.a. EverCrack for its all-nighter-inducing quality - demonstrated the potential fortunes to be made in online gaming, several companies have attempted to mine virtual communities - for example, There. However, save for the recent World of Warcraft, the genre has seen few hits with longevity. Disney hopes its Virtual Magic Kingdom will leverage its theme parks, and vice versa, but it's not certain this type of synergy is viable. Parents should feel free to check out the site. We think it's child-friendly, possibly too much so. We don't think many adults are going to feel at home here. CNET has more.Disney: http://vmk.disney.go.com/vmk/en_US/index?name=VMKHomePage CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-5722198.html Pew Reports on Use of Online Health Info What would we do without the Pew Internet and American Life Project? (That's rhetorical, although it is fun to speculate.) Imagine if the modern, sophisticated US Census Bureau had followed the 19th-century expansion of the American West and you can grasp how the Pew project produces such amazing information, this time on how individuals use the Net to research health matters. It turns out that women use the Net more than men to learn about nutrition and exercise as well as specific diseases and therapies. More striking is the ongoing presence of a Matthew effect - those who have more, get more. People with broadband connections who spend most time online go on to spend even more time online, demonstrating that broadband connections make the Internet an information utility and that users come to rely upon it more and more.Pew: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/156/report_display.asp Matthew effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matthew_Effect Google Releases Sitemaps Protocol for Collaborative Web-Crawling Google Sitemaps is an attempt to engage webmasters in keeping Google informed about their Web pages and updates and in increasing the coverage of their pages in the Google index. The mechanism works similarly to an RSS feed. You place a Sitemap-formatted file on your Web site and update it whenever your site changes. Google's spiders then use that Sitemaps file when they crawl through your site to efficiently produce its index and keep bandwidth usage to a minimum. Google is releasing the Sitemaps protocol under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license, and is hoping that in time all the other search engines and webservers will support it natively. A bunch of documentation at the Sitemaps site explains this important new Web technology.http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ Want to learn more about Google and how it works as both a search engine and a firm? Check out this webcast of what Google calls a Factory Tour, but we recommend you have a fast connection before you try. Of course, this isn't a real factory like those we read about in history books. Instead, it's a set of related video presentations that look behind the scenes at Google - and we still don't know how many servers the company runs. We do learn a bit about Google's upcoming translation application and how it may change how we make sense of the Web in languages other than English. Put simply, Google is translating texts based on a Rosetta stone approach; it compares the text to be translated to other translations of similar texts. The non-Google Google Blogoscoped blog has one post on the Factory Tour and another on Google Translator and what will happen when it gets online. Factory Tour: http://www.google.com/press/factorytour.html Google Blogoscoped 1: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-05-19-html#n90 Google Blogoscoped 2: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-05-22-n83.html The BBC offers a quick glimpse of the technology and infrastructure it uses to run a global news organization's Web site. The massive operation serves 3 million users and 24 million page impressions every day, rising to over 4 million users and 50 million page impressions on big news days, like the recent British election. The BBC article talks about its server farms in London and New York, and about the stripped down Linux/Apache technology that powers its Web site. While most of the techniques described are already familiar to webmasters who run high-volume Web sites, the brief write-up and overview of the BBC's network is useful for curious non-techie types. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4606719.stm ICANN Approves .xxx Top Level Domain After long years of hard consideration, the body in charge of the Internet's domain-name system, ICANN, has finally approved the .xxx top-level domain (TLD). Domain names in the .xxx TLD should be on sale by the end of the year - and should sell out about five minutes later. The approval of the new domain is sure to create pressure to pass laws which will mandate the migration of all explicit sexual content into the new TLD, particularly from various parties interested in filtering Internet content. ICANN has the announcement.http://icann.org/announcements/announcement-01jun05.htm Roadcasting Wants to Bring Music and Info-Sharing to Highways You can bet that Clear Channel isn't going to be too happy with Roadcasting. Still in the theoretical stage, the concept would allow folks to stream and receive MP3 broadcasts within about a 30-mile range. The reason the researchers call the proposal "Roadcasting" is that they have received a commission from a major auto company and they are developing the technology on the 802.11p wireless standard, one meant for vehicles. In theory, listeners only have to hear stuff they like - it's tweakable tech. Even better, the ad hoc networks could let drivers know of pile-ups or other delays ahead - broadcast first by some poor sucker that's stuck there. It's about time traffic reports advanced beyond the 1960s. Now, how do you get past the RIAA? That might be easy - the streams can't be captured onto semipermanent media. Yet. Wired has the story.Roadcasting: http://roadcasting.org/ Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67653,00.html Now that it's corporate, blogging can be said to have truly hit the mainstream. Companies are hiring people and giving them nameplates with titles such as Chief Blogger and paying them decent bucks to just sit and write every day. Talk about the dream job! What are these companies looking for? As one CEO notes in the Wall Street Journal, "You have to be conversational, and that sounds simple, but it's not." And how true is that? (We spoil you, you know.) Accuracy also helps. What's implied, by the article's quotes and, well, by the paper it appears in, is that for corporate America blogging equates with marketing. Even for a yogurt company. http://tinyurl.com/bccg5 LA Times Adopts Blogs, Craigslist Style The Los Angeles Times has just relaunched Latimes.com, and the Web site is now heavy on blogs. Is it the new journalism, or just a desperate attempt to keep up with the, er, times? Only time will tell. In the meantime, the paper has made its Calendarlive.com accessible to the public - and this was formerly an option available only to subscribers. It's hardly altruistic; the newspaper has been seeing growth in online ads, so this is a way to position itself for advantage. Driving it in this direction, in part, is the Craigslist model. Many would argue that Craigslist has been pretty successful, so it isn't entirely unexpected that some in the print media might follow the lead. Online Journalism Review (OJR) analyzes the move.Latimes.com: http://www.latimes.com/ Calendarlive.com: http://calendarlive.com/ OJR: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050526colombo/ ONLINE CULTURE Google Summer of Code Internships Google is attempting to reach student programmers with its new Summer of Code program. The company will provide a small cash stipend to students who create new open-source programs or who help code existing open-source projects. Google teamed up with a number of established open-source organizations like the Perl Foundation, Ubuntu, and the Python Foundation, who will serve as direct sponsors of individual students. Summer of Code has 500 open slots. Stipends amount to $4,000 each for completed projects, as judged by the sponsoring organizations. The application period ends July 14. The Summer of Code Web site has a FAQ and application information.http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html Triggered by previews of the next generation of game consoles, someone who's probably played way too many games has spewed out this tirade about 20 things wrong with modern video games. The rant has a point - er, 20 points. What the author really wants is originality, a break from tired traditions of game design, but it should be no surprise that games, like movies and TV, rarely break new ground. There's simply too much money and commercial risk to allow publishers to venture too far from well trodden paths. Still, many of the 20 points raised should make designers think a bit. What's unreasonable about asking for intelligent AI? For female characters who aren't simply fodder for adolescent wet dreams? For more practical save points? Other ideas are more debatable - like no crates, because - well, gee, we hate to admit it, but this reviewer kind of likes crates. Overall, the essay is overwrought, but the demand that game designers abandon lazy solutions is reasonable, and the list deserves to be pinned to cubicle walls in game companies to inspire creativity. http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/manifesto.html
SURFING SITES Remember. No matter how difficult, no matter how sickening, no matter how depressing, we all must remember what happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II because, if for no other reason, their experience warns us just how thin the veneer of civilization is, despite how strong it seems. The crime of the Jews was simply existence, well before they could be accused of "occupation" or "colonialism", not that those are legitimate excuses. Their testimonies seem to come from another planet but, no, remember: this was civilized Europe a short 60-odd years ago. Ada Holtzman has compiled a series of eyewitness accounts of a few of those people who passed through the flames of the Holocaust and provides us with short and terrible glimpses of the transports, the ghettos, the camps, and all the other trappings of suffering and death. Take the time to read them. And remember.http://www.zchor.org/testimon/testimon.htm The Taxonomy of Very Small Objects To the long list of classification systems, from those of the Library of Congress to Dewey to Linnaeus, must now be added the Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects. Brian Collier's taxonomy is intended for very small objects (VSOs), so long as they are dead or were never alive in the first place. The rules, examples, and process for classifying VSOs are clearly spelled out in the attractive Web site, but any system that produces such absurdities as Nelifrag Machapplielectro redecylisharpeotherlik or Onlifrag Housaripest orangecircubritl(otherlik) is anything but elegant. Let's face it, the whole system is in fact gloriously pointless and absurd until you realize that heck, it's art! Some might say it's a grand example of how corrupt art has become, abandoning its roots in representation, glorification, or moral instruction and venturing into clever but ultimately pointless and sterile displays. If that seems unduly harsh, the graphic design of the classification document is very fine, and the frankly amusing seriousness with which this nonsense is brought off is worthy of applause. Have a look for yourself. And where the heck are the forams?http://www.verysmallobjects.com/ Uncyclopedia is a wiki that certainly owes a debt to Wikipedia, in name and style, but unlike the latter serious open-content encyclopedia, anything goes in Uncyclopedia - and the funnier, the better. Uncyclopedia's sheer quantity of information makes the words "parody" and "sarcasm" seem wholly inadequate. Much of this information is made up, all in the name of comedy. There are thousands of entries on topics such as the Russian Ocean ("For many years now there have been plans to dig up the large and mostly pointless country of Russia to form a new ocean. This ocean will be the envy of all the World, and all the dolphins will flock to it.") and the Slim Shady Algorithm ("The algorithm is applied by simply announcing 'Will the real X please stand up' over and over again..."). It's just funny enough to be worth reading, but from the lack of discussion on most of the 6,308 entries (or so they say), it doesn't appear that this stuff is funny as a result of planning. If you're unfamiliar with wikis and how they work, you can always visit Wikipedia for a definition and way too much discussion. Will the real wiki encyclopedia please stand up? Uncyclopedia: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki People all across the Internet are latching on to cat buckaroo, a game in which you test how many things you can stack on your cats before the animals decide they've had enough. The trick is to snap a photo of the collection on your feline foundation before the Great Stalking Off. Note that you should never stack anything on your cat that might injure it; this has been known to cause litterbox non-compliance. The game seems to have been invented at the Halfbakery blog two years ago, but has risen to prominence after one MrA posted a set of cat buckaroo pics to his blog. Stuffonmycat.com is just waiting for the idea to explode, and strats off with the bound-to-be-classic photo of Jason the baby on top of Rosco the cat. Halfbakery: http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Cat_20Buckaroo MrA: http://www.ashearer.f2s.com/blog/?p=2 Stuffonmycat.com: http://www.stuffonmycat.com/ Hilarious Fashion-Pattern Mockery The Threadbared.com site is a marriage of fondness for vintage sewing patterns and the need that Kimberly Wrenn and Mary Watkins have to be bitchy, mean, and cruel. However, since they say they are nice girls, too nice for that kind of behavior towards people, they created a blog to express their feelings toward inanimate objects: sewing pattern wrappers and related ads. The human models for these things appear to have never let go of the '70s, although if that's because these are all from the '70s, we wouldn't know it. The targets of scorn include many based on the best-loved movies and plays of the last century. (There's a Yoda in there, so it can't be all '70s....) The women use the marketing art to tell stories that are alternately hysterically funny and incredibly, to use their term, snarky. Both claim to be unable to sew a stitch, and you don't have to know how to get a real kick out of this blog.http://www.threadbared.com/ Odd is the best way to describe the most reasonable of the 34 "food products" featured at KookyChow.com. "It has to be a hoax" describes many of the featured items. Even allowing for cultural differences, the site has some truly weird items on exhibit. Google searches of some of the more outrageous did find sources offering them for sale, so the examples at KookyChow.com are probably real. Still, just the thought of ingesting the "mechanically separated (or compressed) chicken" should serve as an effective diet tool. Alas, our reviewer could not find a source for the Morton House One Whole Chicken. Possibly the compressor failed, as it is no longer in Morton House's line of canned foods. http://kookychow.com/kookychow/ Super and Super-Simple Site Design Wins Webby Tyler Morgan's Rtm86 site is the 2005 Webby winner for personal Web sites. As long as you have a reasonably fast connection, it's brilliant (site requirements, specifically screen resolution and connection, are clearly linked to at the outset). Morgan is a Web designer and photographer, and he has designed his site to make his photos accessible and appealing. Most of the site is composed of images and image maps, strikingly and inventively of photos of pieces of paper. What's so nice about the site is that it not only presents the primary content in this appealing and effective manner, but also gets all the little details (navigation, colors, fonts, etc) exactly right. It's well worth visiting, and if you create personal sites, well worth studying.http://www.rtm86.com/ A Leader in the "Say Wha'?" industry You may suspect your company has already hired Huh's consultants if it sends out marketing documents full of e-speak and stock photos of attractive individuals. The Huh Corporation's Web site only has seven pages (but with a cool logo), but its outreach is expansive - you've heard their jargon in every marathon meeting. The company has a motto - "We do stuff" - and refers to employees as "e-movers". Its solutions include Global Awareness Paradigms. Every page has been lovingly crafted to display the latest buzzwords. If you're burned out on a bad workday, a quick browse will restore your faith in the corporate soul. The site is full-bore, maximum cynicism, an atmosphere that is accented almost beyond belief by the legit Google Ads ads that appear on the pages, drawn in by the jargonese keywords.http://www.huhcorp.com/ All-American Girls Professional Baseball League During World War II, as American men were mobilized by the millions to serve, many minor-league baseball teams were disbanding. The baseball business worried about interest in baseball in medium-sized markets, so a group of sports and business leaders, led by Phillip Wrigley of chewing-gum fame, established the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). Drawing on a pool of woman athletes who were mostly semi-pro softball players, the AAGPBL grew from its start in 1943 to eventually play in major-league parks (when the major-league teams were on the road). The league eventually included eight teams, all in the upper Midwest. Attendance peaked in 1948 at 910,000. The players were not only fine athletes, but were expected to conform to strict behavioral standards and to make sure their appearances complied with the norms of that era's femininity. The AAGPBL finally disbanded in 1954, probably because of a loss of local fan bases due to the advent of games on TV. Here at the AAGPBL's official site, you can learn about the league's history, rules, and the players who led American women into the limelight of pro sports. Not much Geena Davis, though....http://www.aagpbl.org/ Are you a diehard fan who still thinks that professional baseball is a sport? Lose that ballcap and put on your accountant's eyeshade. The co-chairs of the Society for American Baseball Research's Business of Baseball Committee have put online a detailed tour of their mandate. Start with their site's History section and the player's strike of 1889 (not a typo - 116 years ago). Between this week's games, browse the Reading section for essays on 20th-century labor relations and the inner workings of baseball's modern front office. The site even archives historical documents like the "1905 World Series Rules and Regulations". Impressive, but save your quality time for the Data section where you can download over a century of attendance figures, decades of broadcaster's names and assignments, and 20 years of player's salaries. You'll be winning bar bets for months. http://www.businessofbaseball.com/ Is the fact that a musician is also a beautiful woman helpful to her career? If the issue sets your teeth on edge, perhaps you should skip Beauty in Music.... On the other hand, anyone in advertising, and plenty who aren't, will tell you that sex sells and that to ignore this is simply to bury one's head in the sand. The classical-music business is not an easy one, and if a woman's physical appearance will help her get gigs and sell records, who are we to tell her not to pose for photographs? Why should pop stars have all the fun and money? The truth is that our reviewer found the photo of Vanessa Mae so captivating that he surfed right to Amazon.com to order one of her CDs. The artist pages on Beauty in Music are arranged by specialty; each includes photographs, tidbits of text, and links to home pages. While the site sorely lacks a search feature (and so we provide you with a link to Mae's online home), it's elegant and as easy on the eyes as are the musicians themselves. Beauty in music doesn't stop at the ears. Beauty in Music: http://www.beautyinmusic.com/index.htm Mae: http://www.vanessa-mae.com/ Font of Fountain-Pen Knowledge If the pen is mightier than the sword, does this fountain pen collection qualify as militaria? Regardless, you won't find this in a military museum. It's called Penoply, where one enthusiastic collector of ink tools shares images of pens up to 80 years old, along with a history of their technology from quills through bladders to the modern revival of interest in fountain pens by those bored with tickling keyboards all day. At the site, you can get tips on how to wash out ink stains, learn how to break in a scratchy nib, and browse a gallery of advertising images from the early 20th century. We love the mania of the Pen Geek Quiz and hope that anybody with a crusty old pen in their desk will take it to one of the pen-repair contacts listed at the site and get it back fighting those swords.http://www.rickconner.net/penoply/ Using a straightforward hyperlink format, the Color Television Revolution site makes it easy to learn more about the evolution of television from black and white to color. Through the links branching off the home page, you get a real feel for the jarring and spectacular change television underwent as it moved from grays and off-whites to vibrant color. Site designer Kris Trexler himself snapped many of the photos he has put on the site as a 14-year-old on a visit to a local TV station in 1954. Trexler's love of TV is understandable; he's an award-winning TV editor with credits ranging from "All in the Family" to MTV. http://www.ev1.pair.com/colorTV/ The term "personal digital assistant" or PDA is only about 15 years old, but the concept is much older. Evan Koblentz's Evolution of the PDA 1975-1995 page is a fairly dense and academic review of the idea and the products it spawned. If you believe that Apple's Newton was the first PDA, you're wrong (but if you want a Newton, our reviewer has several). In a technology for which generations often last less than a year, history can be easily confused with hype, but this site clears out a lot of PDA smoke. At times, it seems slightly political in its views (no friend of Apple), but it's a good, basic source. The links are copious and excellent; always click on the illustrations for added perspective and input. http://www.snarc.net/pda/pda-treatise.htm The Internet seems to breed experts even faster than it does viruses or hackers. There's a butler for a search engine, numerous sites that claim to be definitive resources for everything from anxiety disorder to ISPs, and even the Encyclopaedia Britannica is online. But there's a new kid on the knowledge block, and he's a geek so he must know what he's talking about. wiseGEEK may not be a superhero or understand capitalization, but we love the site's clear design and even clearer information. When we popped by, its Todays Top Ten Articles (OK, it doesn't know apostrophes, either) advised us that brown cars are more likely to be involved in an accident, that smudging is ritual purification by smoke, and that the US consumes 25% of the world's oil (presumably with all those brown cars). Despite the geek monicker, the site covers topics in a comprehensive and logical arrangement of categories. If you've ever wondering why the sky is blue, ask the wise-but-grammatically-challengedGEEK. http://www.wisegeek.com/ Tim Carter's Superb Home-Maintenance Site With at least two channels on most cable and satellite TV systems devoted strictly to do-it-yourself (DIY) projects, it's not a surprise that there are so many Web sites like Tim Carter's Ask the Builder. Ask The Builder serves as an example for most of the other sites, though. There you'll find information from Carter's syndicated newspaper columns in question-and-answer format, as well as brief summaries of certain projects, such as driveway resurfacing. The site is light on the step-by-step procedures and detailed pictures that make DIY projects possible, but more about that in a moment. The site offers a user forum in which Carter regularly responds to posted questions, which is a great plus for this site over most others. In the spirit of the modern Web, visitors will find plenty of things to buy at the site, including eBooks, PDF checklists for projects like hiring a plumber, and, of course, a premium membership for $20 per month that gets you triple the content of the free site, including 400 of those all important step-by-step guides.http://www.askthebuilder.com/ These Are Not the Droids We Are Looking for, Baby" Since we first heard of him, we thought the Elvis Trooper was a paragon among men, but his recent rave review of "Return of the Sith" makes us think he might be pursuing the metaphor a little too closely and partaking of those happy pills the King was fond of in his later days. The idea of Elvis as a Stormtrooper is a blast. The fact that Ken Tarleton pulls it off with such panache is even more impressive. Pore through the photo galleries to discover other Elvis incarnations.http://www.elvistrooper.com/ FLOTSAM & JETSAM Hufu, for All Your Vegan Cannibal Needs Hufu is the tasty vegan alternative to human flesh, designed to feel and taste just like the real thing. Well, it sure doesn't look like you can buy any at the moment, but you can certainly buy T-shirts and chef's aprons with the Hufu logo. If the site's a joke, they don't let on.http://www.eathufu.com/ Video of Collings Foundation Bombers For those of you who are fans of World War II heavy bombers (and who isn't?), here's a series of short films by the Collings Foundation on the flights of their restored B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator. The video is a tribute to the planes and the men who flew them.http://www.endorphin.com/stories/bombers_01.php?section=national Your mission, should you choose to accept it: build a human-powered amphibious vehicle and test it in front of thousands of spectators. It's the Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race, and we're briefing you on it in time to get your craft together for next year's race. Wacky is good; capsizing is not. http://www.kineticbaltimore.com/ It seems that the Star Wars epic is a battleground for your very soul, a fiendish plot by Satan's demons to distract you from your true mission in life. Who knew? http://ooze.com/toolofsatan/ The Future of Television (as Seen by Conan O'Brien) Late-night talkshow host and funny guy Conan O'Brian penned this hilarious piece about what the future holds for television. It offers the typical O'Brien wit - remember that he used to write for "The Simpsons" - and includes a funny closing bite at the Newsweek hand that feeds him.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7935916/site/newsweek/ The trade organization Magazine Publishers of America is trying to convince you to read more magazines. This may or may not be something you want to do, but their Flash ad campaign shows what magazine covers might look like in the future and is certainly worth checking out. http://www.magazine.org/readon/ SOFTWARE Alpha Release of Next Firefox Browser The Mozilla Foundation has released an alpha version of the next generation of the Firefox browser, code-named Deer Park. There are many new features in this release: a "sanitize" privacy feature that allows quick removal of all privacy and personal data from cookies and caches; faster back/forward navigation; instantly applied preferences on Linux and Mac; a searchable cookie manager; and several Mac-specific improvements. Read the release documentation for the full list, and download the code if you want to help test it.http://www.mozilla.org/projects/deerpark/releases/alpha1.html Rodi: Testbed for Advanced P2P File-Trading Clients Rodi is a tiny (300 Kb) Java P2P client/host. While we don't expect Rodi to conquer the heights of file-trading popularity any time soon, it is important in that in one package it seeks to address many of the problems of modern P2P clients like BitTorrent and KaZaa. Rodi features in-content search on multiple versions of a file, encryption both for privacy and to foil "deep pocket inspection" firewalls, support for multiple bouncers to aid anonymity, and facilities for identifying trusted content publishers. Think of Rodi as a glimpse into the future of P2P file-trading networks, as programmers struggle to adjust to the various demands placed on sharing software by users, network hazards, and legal matters.http://larytet.sourceforge.net/btRat.shtml |
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Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way
The Sky's the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan
Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly
The Art of Project Management