Category: it could be called work

shiny, fast, and mine

Apple – Power Mac G4

Goodbye to all that. I picked up my G4 today, set it up, and it’s all good. I’m out of the office tomorrow and had hoped to work on it some, but it went to sleep. I may have to stop in the office and turn off the power management stuff, or at least get the MAC address so I can wake it with a “magic packet.”

The U Bookstore has the 17 inch powerbook on display and it was surprising how normal it looks. I expected it to just be freakish in proportions, but it looks fine — just very wide. I think a 10 key pad would have been a useful addition (was that a pun?) given the size of the thing.

With the QuickSilver G4 (which needs a name), I bought DreamWeaver, FileMaker, InDesign and Office:X, so I should be set. PageMaker is not going to make it to OS X: InDesign is its replacement, and I’d rather not run Classic if I can help it.

suspicions confirmed: how spammer get your email address

Why Am I Getting All This Spam?

Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial e-mails (UCE), known popularly as “spam.” Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others are so overwhelmed with spam that they are forced to switch e-mail addresses. This has led many Internet users to wonder: How did these people get my e-mail address?

Also some tips on how to prevent them from making you a victim.

I’m glad IIS didn’t work for me

U.S. military computer attacked

The flaw allows an attacker to break into computers running Microsoftt’s Windows 2000 operating system and Microsoft’s Internet Information Service Web server product — probably the most popular configuration for Web servers running Microsoft software, Rouland said. All machines are vulnerable by default.

Ponder that last sentence. You’re at risk unless you specifically address security issues you may not understand. This is innovation?

printing: how hard?

I fixed the printer on my desktop today: I had to. I needed to do some manual feed printing and there was no reliable to do that with a printer on another floor.

So I removed the printer from my list of printers, re-cabled it, watched the “plug and pray” process happen. Of course, it wouldn’t install it, so I did it manually, or more accurately, non-automatically: I chose the port and the driver. Still no joy. The printer is still believed to be “out of paper.”

So I opened it up and found that it wasn’t out of paper, but rather, too full: it had a sheet jammed in its works. How hard would it be for the driver to report back that it couldn’t complete its self-test and perhaps clearing the paper feed path would be a useful thing to try?

XML-RPC added to WayPath

I am testing an XML-RPC interface to the WayPath engine I use to display thematically relevant links to my posts. So far, it seems to work quite well: the results are as good as ever, but they come back quicker and that’s always good.

I have no idea how many lines of code were required on the server side, but client side, it’s very short. The comments outweigh the code . . . . and there’s none too many of them.

Democracy in action

The FCC field hearing went off quite well today. The auditorium was full, which I didn’t expect, and the crowd was engaged and vocal in its opinions. Your humble scribe was quoted in the UW student paper, as well.

I was amazed at the quality of the panelists the FCC assembled and the wide range of points of view they brought to the debate. If I had been undecided when I arrived, I wouldn’t have been when I left.

It would have been better (or I would feel better about it) had we videotaped it: the production crew I booked never showed up but there were other crews there. I have asked for a tape for the FCC’s records and our own use from one of the videographers.

Observations: one station manager from Belo, the media conglomerate, who was on the news panel said that as a news director, he had never had his editorial policy challenged by his corporate bosses. While the audience hissed (this is polite Seattle, after all: we don’t boo anyone), it struck me that I would be happier if he had been challenged. Otherwise, how can we be sure he’s not self-censoring his own efforts?

And I found my eyes drawn to an immaculately groomed, patrician-looking fellow standing in the back near me: dark blue suit, handkerchief points in his breast pocket, tassel loafers. I assumed he was some player or other. Later I saw him leave with the Belo station manager from the news panel, the subordinate walking like a kid on his way to the principal’s office.

Frank Blethen of the Seattle Times gave a variation on the speech he gave at the Richmond hearing and the crowd roared its approval of his “public watchdogs turned to corporate lapdogs” line.

Everyone seemed to understand that news organizations with a media outlet cost money and are therefore the first thing to cut when a new owner without a stake in local news takes over. It was good to see that: we’ve seen that at the network level for years:”Friends” sells more ads that “Nightline” and can be syndicated for years to come, so which one will make the shareholders more money?

But a more pernicious aspect I hadn’t given much thought to was the siphoning off off of local dollars to out of town pockets. When some national company sells ads on its farflung affiliates, those dollars don’t stay in the community where they originated: they fly home to corporate and stay there. There are similar threads in the articles linked from Rebecca Blood.

A great experience, well worth taking part in. I’m glad so many “average citizens” (their words, not mine) felt it was worth their time.

convergence

University Week – Vol. 20, No. 15 – DSpace to provide easy access to digital scholarship

The UW Libraries has joined an ambitious effort to create an electronic repository of digital scholarly materials produced by UW faculty and students.
[ . . . .]
DSpace potentially represents a convergence between two traditional functions of libraries — archiving information that will be historically useful, and providing a large, accessible and searchable body of current information.