Month: December 2002

biased? Who, me?

Communications From Elsewhere

According to the hidden bias tests at tolerance.org, I have a slight association between the sciences and males, and a slight preference for thin people over fat people. Apparently I don’t associate “good” or “bad” with “straight” or “gay” or with “young” or “old”.

Interesting stuff. What kind of biases do you have?

“tornado in a can”

A Mighty Wind Against Waste (washingtonpost.com)

“The possibilities inspire the imagination,” said Lewis Carr, a University of Maryland agricultural scientist who oversaw tests of an earlier prototype at the Salisbury campus on the Eastern Shore. “I expect to see this in the future. The question is how quickly it’s going to get to the future.”

Polifka calls his creation a “tornado in a can,” though the official name painted on the side of the cone is Windhexe — a branding inspired by the devil winds that sweep the Kansas plains that the 73-year-old Polifka has farmed all his life.

close to breaking my vow

TeledyN

Sorry, madam, but this isn’t a school. It’s just a training center for churning out well-behaved consumers, grooming them from Kindergarten age to adolescence to obediently learn to buy Microsoft. Now this is funny too: If you go to their ‘system requirements’ page, message tells you they won’t tell you unless you come back with the right O/S!

This sums up my opinion on computers in school quite nicely. See here for more. The thread was a good one.

old wine in a new bottle

Vorsite Corporation – Content Management Solution Specialists

DPVStore extends SPS and enables content contributors to auto-populate meta-data information entered during the check-in process. The add-in helps to simplify the check-in process, decreasing time to market and promoting fresh content. System administrators can install DPVStore in a matter of minutes with minimal configuration.

“Content contributors can quickly tag their documents with previously saved personalized data within seconds, decreasing the amount of time it takes to complete the check-in process and increasing employee productivity,” said Diane Gallagher, Vice President and co-founder. “We are dedicated to providing the business community with tools to increase productivity and decrease time to market.”

So how does creating additional work — tagging documents with “appropriate” tags — increase productivity? What’s needed is something that eliminates tagging, meta-data, or any other kludges and can derive thematic information from the untreated content.

I wasn’t aware anyone was still working this old notion.

two approaches to online business

Google is growing, AOL not so much. Perhaps these articles give a clue why that’s so.

Free Content Online? Publishers Are Divided

AOL, [AOL’s Jonathan Miller] argued, had a great opportunity to act as a “toll booth,” gathering these services and selling them to members, adding the cost to their monthly AOL bills, and collecting a percentage.

Sites Become Dependent on Google

Think of it as the Google economy. Much as eBay spawned an army of entrepreneurial auctioneers, Google has become enough of a Web gatekeeper that its leads now prop up plenty of commercial sites.

My generation’s “Great Depression?”

Nicest of the Damned

Frank noted this story: it’s about the last thing I wanted to read today. After almost two years feeling much the same as the folks interviewed for this article, I’m trying to figure out what my next career will be. Or will it just be a job with no measurable trajectory? Not that it makes much difference to me. Career-type opportunities might pay more, but the uncertainty, especially as the whole economic infrastructure seems to be re-inventing itself, isn’t worth it.

The most promising leads I have now are far removed from my days of bit-wrangling and cat-herding: on the upside, a Commercial Drivers License can be useful.

if you’re buying, I’m selling

Amazon.com:

In the general belt-tightening around here, I am selling some well cared for technical books. I have this title, plus a second edition, a Perl Cookbook, Mastering Algorithms with perl, and a couple of others.

I may even turn my bike into cash: I’m not riding it now and I’m not sure if I’ll do much before springtime. $100 or so (what I would hope to get for it) would help more than having it hanging in my garage.

when hackers have a sense of humor

libpr0n FAQ


Why the name “libpr0n”?
The main goal of the library is to render pornographic images in an efficient way. Plus, the name “imglib2” is boring.

Saw the libprOn tree go by as I was wrestling with Mozilla . . . . what the . . . ? A quick Google search later, I found this site. Evidently, these guys know what most browsers are used for.