“Mayor Resigns, Claims Abduction By Satan Worshippers”
Abduction and brain-washing by a Satanic cult… it’s all just too eighties for me.
“Well, It IS The Home of the Creation Museum, After All”
“The Kentucky legislature holds hearings on global warming, and forgets to invite any actual scientists.” Un-freakin’-believable.
“Japanese “melody roads” play tunes as you drive over them”
When I was a child, one of our family’s vacations required driving through Nashville, Tennessee. That was the first place I encountered grooved pavement; my mother said to be quiet and listen, because the road was singing to us (which earned her about three minutes of golden near-silence from myself and my two sisters).
It wasn’t, of course, but it seems that someone in Japan — where else? — has taken the idea and run with it.
CygWin Woes
After trying for a couple days to get the Squid http proxy software installed on my office CygWin system (to bypass the hotel’s blocking system, so that I can get a secure connection over their open wireless system), I’ve given up on it. I don’t know of any way to have the office machine download the several-megabyte source-code tarball without me manually typing in a dozen or so FTP commands (which isn’t possible in the time I have before my SSH connection is interrupted).
As I still can’t avoid Windows on that machine (due to the VTech Skype phones that only work with Windows 2000 or XP), I’ve decided to create a VMware virtual box on it, running Ubuntu Linux, purely as an SSH server. That way, I’ll have a real Linux system to work with in the future, with useful utilities like wget (which would have solved this problem quite neatly).
Fortunately, this is the last night we’ll be at this hotel. Hopefully the other two on our itinerary won’t be running such a brain-dead system.
And a Happy Turkey Day to our US readers. 🙂
“Who else is laughing at the music industry?”
“Freelance technology journalist” Don Reisinger has an interesting article here:
As music downloading (and dare I say illegal downloading) continues to rise, these music companies bury their heads in the sand and blow policy out the other end. Instead of understanding customers and realizing that what we want is readily available music without DRM, Warner and its friends have decided to bully us in the hopes we’ll stop. We won’t.
Much more elegantly put (I love the visual metaphor), but the sentiment is exactly what I’ve been saying for nearly a decade.
“What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?”
The title says it all. 🙂
“Blame game: My name made me do it”
There certainly may be something to this. My initials spell a very positive go-get-’em word, and I’ve always felt that I can do anything if I put my mind to it. I’ve managed some things that many people certainly thought weren’t possible, though I suspect they were due to my sheer stubbornness dogged persistence more than anything else.
Or maybe this is just another piece of evidence that we’re all just simulations in a big computer run by the descendants of the people we’re modeled after, and this is a kind of programmer’s shortcut. 🙂
(I originally wrote this several days ago, planning to post it while I was on the road if I was too busy to write anything new. Since then, Scott Adams has picked it up too.)
Thou Shalt Not Do Anything That We Can’t Spy On
As described yesterday, I talked someone at the office through the process of punching a hole in our firewall for the secure HTTP port this morning, then changed the SSH server to use that port instead. It didn’t solve the problem; apparently Cox already thought of that, and they’re only allowing legitimate HTTPS packets on port 443. (Joshua suggested that might be the case yesterday, but I scoffed at it… sorry Josh, you were right.)
There’s apparently a way to work around this too, involving putting an actual mini-HTTPS server program on the office machine, which redirects information coming into it to the SSH port. We’re going to be at this hotel for several more days, so I’ve got plenty of time to work on that.
“Vista SP1 a Performance Dud”
Everyone has been waiting for Vista SP1 to come out, thinking that surely it will fix all of the problems that Vista has (like running many programs at half the speed on the same hardware). Well, it doesn’t seem to make a lick of difference:
Bottom Line: If you’ve been disappointed with the performance of Windows Vista to date, get used to it. SP1 is simply not the panacea that many predicted. In the end, it’s Vista’s architecture – not a lack of tuning or bug fixes – that makes it perform so poorly on systems that were “barn-burners” under Windows XP.
Oh, Mr. Jobs… there’s an opportunity here, if you’re not too busy concentrating on the iPhone and iPod… hint, hint… 😉