Month: January 2004

tonight’s entertainment: raccoons fighting in a tree, 30 feet up

Apparently a mother with two cubs large raccoon of indeterminate gender felt crowded by another ‘coon and applied its considerable powers of persuasion (screeching and clawing, mostly) to make the point. Got me and my neighbors outside to see what the ruckus was (I had never heard anything like it, though I have seen some of the masked bandits about).

I brought out a really bright halogen worklight that picked them out quite easily: the victor was quite a specimen and clearly wasn’t going anywhere. The vanquished, smaller but still a good size, backed down the tree and around the side of our house, in search of unprotected cat and dog food dishes.

A good story for school tomorrow . . .

[Posted with ecto]
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the thin edge of the wedge

P-I Focus: Farming is a net-loss proposition — ecologically, socially, and economically:
“The moral of this story resonates far beyond the farm salmon debate, coloring all of industrial agriculture: There are no shortcuts. So long as market forces alone shape how our food is produced, we will be faced with similar reality checks with increasing frequency and magnitude. Market forces only work when truthful product labeling and public understanding of all the costs accompany them.

Indeed, the current crop of toxic farm salmon stories appearing in this paper compete for page space with mad cow disease coverage, transgenic crops and the like — all born of the shortsighted demand for more with less.”

Who knows what foods will even be around in 100 years, at this rate?

And as I increasingly find, I have thought and written about this before.

[Posted with ecto]

could SCO sue MSFT over MyDoom?

The mass-mailing MyDoom virus has become the fastest spreading program to date and the damage could continue for months or years.
[ . . . ]
When opened, the virus installs a stealth program on the victim’s computer that opens up a software “back door.” Attackers can then bypass the PC’s security and turn the system into a bounce point, or proxy, for any network-based attack.
[ . . . ]
The virus has programmed infected PCs to send data to the SCO Group’s Web server between Feb. 1 and Feb. 12.

So what if SCO, litigious as they seem to be, decided to sue MSFT for any costs associated with the DoS attack, since MSFT operating systems’ well-known security issues made it possible? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they tried to get PC owners names from ISPs, based on the source addresses of the packets, forged or not. But one target looms larger than any other . . . . .

[Posted with ecto]

experimenting with Google AdSense

I decided to give up on ads on the home page of this weblog: I realized the content was too varied to allow any hope of targeting anything useful. So that cleaned things up a little bit.

Now, with any luck, the ads that do appear on the archive pages will be relevant.

My click-through to impression ratio look better than usual so far today, so it might be helping.

[Posted with ecto]

conflict of interest?

Harpers.org:

“Vice President Dick Cheney defended Halliburton, which continues to pay him a salary, from what he said were “desperate attacks” by opponents of the Bush Administration. “They’re rendering great service,” he said. “They do it because they’re good at it, because they won the contract to do it. And frankly the company takes a certain amount of pride in rendering this kind of service to U.S. military forces.” Halliburton, which received most of its Iraq contracts by administrative fiat rather than through a competitive bidding process, admitted that its employees in Iraq have accepted $6.3 million in kickbacks.”

Unlike Jimmy Carter:

While he was president, Carter’s investments had been placed in a blind trust managed beyond his control to avoid any conflict of interest.

I think taking a salary from any entity during fulltime public service is a breach of faith, and for it to come from a company that by all accounts is engaged in war profiteering really stinks.

[Posted with ecto]

the best system monitoring widget I’ve seen so far

These two screen grabs are from MenuMeters, a very nice little extension that displays CPU, RAM, disk usage, and network statistics, all in a very small (but configurable for those of us with 19 inch displays) amount real estate.

cpu-graph mem-menu

And almost as cool was the simplicity of how you capture images like this. Grab for the screen capture, Preview to crop and save as a jpeg, ecto to post, and we’re done.

[Posted with ecto]

someone’s cracked one-click newsfeed subscriptions . . .

Hats off to LocalFeeds . . . .

Subscription Options : cloudy, chance of sun breaks:

1-Click Subscriptions:
If you use one of the tools listed below, you can subscribe with one click:

  • AmphetaDesk
  • Awasu
  • Bloglines
  • BottomFeeder
  • FeedDemon
  • Fyuze
  • HeadlineViewer
  • MobileRss
  • MyWireService
  • NetNewsWire
  • NewsIsFree
  • NewsMonster
  • nntp//rss
  • Radio UserLand
  • NewsIsFree
  • SharpReader
  • Syndirella
  • VoxLite
  • Wildgrape Newsdesk
  • WinRSS

[Posted with ecto]

adding insult to injury

From Adsense Charts

Also, we have recently discovered that our script cannot handle days with $0.00 – we are working on this now and will resolve it shortly. In the meantime, you can solve this problem by replacing all $0.00 with $0.01

it’s bad enough to have days when I make $0.00, but to think that breaks their charting apparatus . . .

<sigh>

[posted with ecto