Category: obscure pursuits

No, not the tool. I have found myself learning how to make fruit leather for my kids these past couple of days. The serendipitous combination of lots of ripe fruit and a rarely used food dehydrator has kept me busy making concoctions ranging from wild blackberry, complete with seeds, to strawberry/banana and a medley of blackberry, raspberry and blueberry.

It’s easy and gives good results, which is all I ask of any new task. As with most things kids like, it takes more time to prepare than to eat, so I need to find more/cheaper suppliers of ingredients.

Parish-Larios wedding
My former workmate and current fellow UW employee and the love of his life [photos] are Making It Official in a few days.

I’m most impressed with the registry, divided into three categories: Intangibles, Charitables, and Tangibles. Naturally, the first category displayed is the Charitables — gifts for others, ranging from the local, like the Seattle Public Library, to the global, like EFF. But even the Tangibles and Intangibles are solid, practical things, consistent with people who are going about building a life together in a generous and inclusive way.

Thoughtful, individual, and unique, just like the celebrants themselves.

I bought some RAM ( 2 64 Mb DIMMs, supposedly Gateway surplus or pulled parts) on eBay, but the box doesn’t recognize either as good. It doesn’t hang or complain, it just ignores them completely.

One reason to recommend buy a PC with a Dell or Gateway brandname — even if you buy it used and let someone take that initial loss of value — is you can use the serial number/production tag to find out what kind of parts are/were in it and what you need to upgrade. That was a big help to me as I tried to work why kind of RAM this machine needs and was why I was confident the DIMMs I found would work.

Trouble is, I don’t want to buy more than I need: you can buy 32 Mb or 128 Mb, but not 64. If you install in pairs, as the docs suggest, that means I can either double or quintuple the RAM. I was looking for triple by adding the two 64s.

Now of course since there are pulled parts (and were shipped in bubblewrap in a paper envelope, not an anti-static bag or anything) there are no refunds, just returns and exchanges.

I got a welcome phone call from one Officer DeJesus of the University Police Department: my stolen bike has been found. It was sold to a bike shop about 5 minutes walk from where it was stolen the very same day, and it was coming out of its one month “hold before re-sale.” Sadly, the bike shop is out the money they paid the thief. I’m hoping to provide enough detail about the various aftermarket additions to the bike to allow the police to make a case.

The shop keeps bikes it takes in for cash or trade in quarantine, but they’re retrieving mine tomorrow so I can see if there’s any damage. At the very least, they’ll get to do a service on it: it was due anyway.

Now it looks like I need to refund contributions from my supporters, but I sure don’t mind.

Mozilla Public License v1.1, annotated

Asian Law Center: Home

online activism

a sampling of some of the things I have been working on. s’funny, but web development (beyond updating an existing website that didn’t exist in its present form) wasn’t covered in my job description.

I’m not complaining: it keeps me from getting bored 😉

Sound And Vision Magazine

He makes two key assertions: 1) that the labels raised CD prices during a down economy, and 2) that they slashed the number of new releases by almost 25% during the past three years. He says that these factors, and not downloading, are responsible for sluggish CD sales.

OK, class, let’s review.

• We raise the price of an increasingly less-expensive commodity — the CD media itself — no matter what the economy’s doing
• we give the consumer fewer opportunities to buy what we actually produce — music recordings — even as the times and places they listen to music expand: portable players now make it possible to listen to recorded music every waking minute of the day
• the kinds of music available and the tastes of our audience both explode in a variety of directions but we pay no attention to that. radio ownership is so concentrated, we can’t sell that stuff to advertisers, so let’s pretend it isn’t there

Great article: it fights FUD with facts, some of which the RIAA has been trying to hide (why else would they stop releasing information about how many new titles they release in 2001, just as the allegations about piracy became widely discussed?).

Not that I’ve bought any lately, but I may just cancel any planned CD purchases until they wake up.

This pathetic business of unsecured Windows PCs littering my logfiles with bogus porn referers should stop today. I’ll still get the requests and the bandwidth waste will continue, but at least I won’t have to look at it everyday. If you’re being troubled by this, you’re welcome to use the Apache config snippets below. I *hope* this works: it’s hard to tell if you’ve been successful when you’re trying to make something invisible.
Continue reading “removing porn referer spam”

Cocoa Dev Central: MyOneLineOfCodeBrowser using Cocoa and WebKit 1.0

One of the best features of Safari 1.0 is the Web Kit SDK (v1.0). This new Cocoa framework allows you to write a powerful browser with light and simple code. This easy tutorial will guide you in the making of a browser with only one line of Objective-C code.

I haven’t tried this so see if it’s really as easy as all that (if it works for me, it will work for anyone). But I like the idea of this: complete functions that anyone can use to build their own applications.

Hackers Hijack PC’s for Sex Sites

[M]ore than a thousand unsuspecting Internet users around the world have recently had their computers hijacked by hackers, who computer security experts say are using them for pornographic Web sites.

The hijacked computers, which are chosen by the hackers apparently because they have high-speed connections to the Internet, are secretly loaded with software that makes them send explicit Web pages advertising pornographic sites and offer to sign visitors up as customers.

[ . . . . ]
Computer owners can protect themselves by using firewall software or hardware, which prevent unauthorized entry and use of computers, Mr. Smith said. The rogue program does not affect the Apple Macintosh line of computers or computers running variants of the Unix operating system.

So what operating systems are affected?

I finished Harry Potter 5 last night, and am pleased that the depth and strength of the story continues to build. Sorry, no spoilers: you need to look elsewhere or read the book yourself if you want to know what happens.

If you found The Goblet of Fire to be heavy going or too intense, you may want to put this one aside. Sadly, now we face another 1-2 year wait for book 6 and then another for book 7. It’s like an elaborate meal: hours or days in the preparation, a fraction of that in the eating. I only started the book Thursday morning, just to ‘see what it was like’ and then ended up putting everything else aside to finish it.

<UPDATE>
Just a reminder that JK Rowling isn’t likely to see any of the tributes posted here: I don’t mind them being posted here, but I’m not forwarding any of this stuff on (even if I knew her address).

Thanks.