Early review of a stinking Web module
DigiScents, the company that promises to leave your e-mail smelling fresh as a daisy, showed off its technology at Comdex this week. Ars Technica has a review (scroll down a couple screens):
The rep opened an email with a scented attachment, which was supposed to smell like roses. When he clicked on the roses, I got a slight gust of ostensibly rose-scented air in my face from the little box in front of me. It was rose-scented in the same way that those things you hang in your car are, meaning you can see where it sort of smells somewhat like a rose if you know that that's what it's supposed to be, but the overall impression was of a pleasant artificial air-freshener type scent.
Keep reading the review for a great dialog on "rank odors like rotting flesh, flatulence, etc" and how DigiScents claims hackers won't be able to send them around the 'Net.
Plagiarism search engine
FindSame lets you input some text from a Web page and then see if there are other pages out there with the same text on them. Handy for finding people ripping off your content, no? It might also be useful to find articles from which you have an excerpt - if it works right, it should find just those articles, rather than 1,656,712 documents that happen to use one of the words in that snippet.First spotted on Memepool
.coop?
It's one of the new top-level domains approved by ICANN this week. How long before somebody registers chicken.coop?
11/17/00
Taking 'IP everywhere' a bit too literally
A British company has started installing IP-enabled video monitors above urinals that download ads via the Internet.Captive View says the men's room is "one of the most direct person-to-person places you can be as an advertiser." Hence, the Viewrinal, which uses an unspecified streaming format to beam stereo surround-sound ads to its, um, captive audience. Advertisers will pay about $35 a month for the UK-only service.
Women software engineers
NetSlaves today starts a series of essays by Emily Dresner-Thornber on how she and a few other women became software engineers:
Why would I, or any woman in her right mind, want to join the neurotic, maladjusted, causally abusive and brutally cruel world of software engineering where she is going to be used, abused, horribly maligned and causally cast aside? Why would a woman, faced with other career choices, want to leap feet first into a pack of frothing dogs, ready to tear her apart? Why would any woman strap on a compiler and head into the madhouse?
Checking the spell checker
Dick Teresi of Forbes FYI runs various documents through the spell checker in Word and comes up with the kind of silly things you expect when translating something from English to German and back again on Babelfish:I submitted a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece I had written to the scrutiny of Word's grammar-check. It was unimpressed. Microsoft, of all entities, criticized me for using the word "interface," calling it "jargon." Nice job, Word. Other advice was less helpful. Halley's Comet, for instance, became Haley's Comet, Word obviously confusing Bill Haley's 1950s rock band with Edmund Halley's actual comet. Again, Microsoft confused it's with its, and suggested I replace faux with fax. I declined. I was referring to a phony. I didn't necessarily wish to communicate with him via facsimile. Word had a terrible time with subject/verb agreement, suggesting, for example, "critics is" rather than my original "critics are." My article was judged to be of eighth-grade quality. Perhaps because of the dearth of faxes.
11/15/00
User to Dell: Build a better Web site, will ya?
Joel Spolsky doesn't like Dell's Web site.It is, he writes, poorly designed and impossible to navigate.
His annoyance starts when goes to the site to buy a PC but is first forced to declare whether he's a home user, a small business or an enterprise.
I don't know what I am! I guess I'm a small business, but home systems are usually cheaper, and I usually like to buy top of the line PCs, so maybe I need the Big Business section. This distinction is completely lost on me.I want a PC. What difference does it make whether I'm a home buyer or a small business buyer? I suspect that they are asking me this because they want to charge businesses more than homes, and large businesses even more. To defeat their system, I choose "home."
But it gets worse. Read Spolsky's saga of trying to find a Dell box that comes with Linux. You'd think it would be easy. It wasn't.
A real hard-drive crash
This page shows exciting picture of a 17-gig hard drive being run over by a tank.11/14/00
Real men use telnet - and like it
Thomas Kephart wins today's Cranky Curmudgeon award. In this OSOpinion piece, he spits his disgust for the way kids these days use their browsers instead of a POP3 client to read e-mail. He also gets royally put out by the way newbies discuss the day's events in HTTP-based Web forums instead of NNTP-based newsreaders (like rn, no doubt). "Dammit, Jim, I'm a multi-protocol network, not an advertising channel," he'd whine if he were an Internet:HTTP is not the e-mail protocols, SMTP & POP3 are.I bet he yells at kids to get off his lawn, too.
HTTP is not the file transfer protocol, FTP is.
HTTP is not the message board protocol, NNTP is.
Sad fall of a browser
Remember when people eagerly awaited - and then quickly downloaded - the newest version of Netscape's browser?Netscape 6 is, finally, out. To try to drum up business, though, the AOL subsidiary is resorting to a cash giveaway (void where prohibited, of course).
First noted on MetaFilter
Today's complete waste of time
This time, it's not something you'll waste any real time on, but one of those sites that makes you shake your head in disbelief that somebody else could waste all that time on it:It's the definitive listing of Love Boat guest stars who are now dead, from Ray Milland (cancer) to Sonny Bono (tree).
First spotted on Wannabe Weblog.
11/13/00
How far would you go for a free computer?
Would you eat three Wendy's Triple Cheeseburgers in less than an hour?Corey Hart did. To win a bet (technically, just for a 450-MHz Pentium III processor and a heat sink, but you know how those hardware geeks are), he consumed the burgers, each of which consists of
- 3 3 Quarter Pound Patties Per Burger
- 1 Slice of American Cheese Per Burger
- 1 56 Gram Hamburger Buns Per Burger
- 970 Calories Per Sandwich
- 59.5 Grams of Fat Per Sandwich
- Total Calorie intake 2910
- Total Fat 178.5
Urp (first seen on Fark).
Network admins: No more professional than auto mechanics?
It's the question posed in a discussion on Kuro5hin:I've often said a trained monkey (read: idiot MCSE) could do my job (managing a relatively small segment of a network that's part of a larger enterprise environment), to which people tend to laugh, as if they think I'm just being jokingly modest. What is it about working with cards, CAT5, and operating systems that makes it different from working with pistons, manifolds, and gaskets?
Questions about this guy's self esteeem aside, what do you think?
RELATED LINKS
Compendium archive: Week of 01/21/02 Week of 01/14/02 Week of 01/07/02 Week of 01/02/02 Week of 12/03/01 Week of 11/26/01 Week of 11/19/01 Week of 11/12/01 Week of 11/05/01 Week of 10/29/01 Week of 10/22/01 Week of 10/15/01 Week of 10/08/01 Week of 10/01/01 Week of 9/24/01 Weeks of 9/10/01 - 9/17/01 Week of 9/3/01 Week of 8/27/01 Week of 8/20/01 Week of 8/13/01 Week of 8/6/01 Note: Compendium's entire staff took the week of 7/30 off. Week of 7/23/01 Week of 7/16/01 Week of 7/9/01 Week of 7/2/01 Week of 6/25/01 Week of 6/18/01 Week of 6/11/01 Week of 6/4/01
Tracking down a stolen Mac; Dead C Scrolls; Googlewhacking; How bad is it in the Valley?; Storage lessons from the Wayback Machine; The pub-seeking handheld; Internet gang wars; Outlook XP breaks MIME.
Why should iMac owners have all the eye candy?; Luxo Redux; So you think your job is bad; Google as a DNS replacement? Not so fast; Nokia exec cites stock plunge in speeding-fine appeal; The tragedy of the .coms; The Google parlor game; Some people *like* Steve the Dell Guy; Ban all Microsoft attachments?
Dot-com to bare all; iMac Dance; Wendy's remembers Dave; Search engine bites the dust; Wendy's Web site ignores Dave's death; Geek comic strip; Youngest security expert ever; Spam poetry; Confessions of a hacker; Breathless Apple; Dave Barry does Windows XP.
Dropping everything to vote; The best Apple rumors, ever; Guess Steve Case isn't getting into Harvard; Make your own O'Reilly cover; Boosting your wireless juice; Telnet lives!
This space intentionally left blank (vacation).
The most useless software ever; Is Microsoft getting ready to squash PC vendors?; Excite@Home: The Watergate of the New Economy?; No more 3Com Park. Is CMGI Field next?; Are you an e-bore?; This site'll have you coming and going; Entertainment Weekly's loss of innocence; Ensign Crusher as Entertainer of the Year; Oh, for the old days.
The Museum of Broken Packets; Just in time for Thanksgiving; Tourist Guy found; Why virtual offices suck; A domain ruling that sucks; Hacking the iPod.
Why you shouldn't ship computers via UPS; When .Net requires Java; High-tech grafitti artists; Spam from beyond the grave; New group tries to oversee the whole Internet; Paging Dick Tracy; Students use PDAs to cheat; Windaz for Aussies, Newfies; Another alternative to Passport; A virtual honeynet
Bill Gates: Father of open source; Verizon exec: Monopoly is good; Weird molecule names; E-mail: too much of a good thing?; A cluster of one; More woes for dot-bombers; Spam as weapon in the war on crime; Just when you think the Web can't get any better; Just when you think the Web can't get any worse; More proof I shouldn't be a wiseass; Using your Web logs to ID hacker attacks; Help save the FAQs; Who do you trust, baby?; Powerpuff Girls powerless against virus; Big IP pipe between US, Europe.
The profit of turning thugs into programmers; Work Name Generator; A programmer's lament; The world's best ATM; Are anti-spammers killing people?; Web services and storage; Get your Aerons here; Perl for the XXI-imum century; Microsoft's blocking of non-IE browsers.
Government info taken off the Web since 9/11; Beware hackers who talk too much; A contest you can enter sitting down; Now don't try this in the office; Bob Patterson must die; Finally, a useful 404 page; Tech calls from hell; Teletubbies XP; More XP fun; Anthrax and e-mail; Larry's ID card; World's longest gum-wrapper chain.
Let's drop PDAs on Afghanistan; Voice control? Try grunt control; Spam gets back to business; A content-management portal; Share your system tray with the world; Would you let the recording industry onto your network?; Al Queda's low-tech high tech; 9/11 archive; Shoe company gets open source after all; Pod people, coming soon to a cube near you.
Larry and Scott's dueling ID cards; Cringely: Broadband is dead; The dangers of Photoshop; The dangers of copy protection; Microsoft mining whois for telephone solicitations?; How to REALLY throw a LAN party; Good fences don't make good 'Net neighbors; How Google adapted to 9/11 news; Web services as over-hyped hooey; Why shoe guys shouldn't do open source; Online air hockey.
AT&T waives 9/11 wireless charges for some; Shifting gears; Craig Burton on the Novell/Microsoft suit; In search of the post-PC interface; Vibrating PDAs and wearable phones; Gary Condit's Web site; No, that isn't a real photo of a WTC tourist; How to throw a LAN party; How sucky is your intranet?
For grizzled 'Net veterans; UK ISP forced to pull deceptive ads; Pretty Good encryption controversy; Are you as smart as Miss America?; Really securing your computer; Still lots of insecure IIS servers; Kids, don't try this at home; Anthrax Kills; Larry's national database; Nimda hysteria?
Attack and post-attack items.
999,999,999 bottles of beer on the wall; Finally, a wind-up cell phone; Enough with the ringing!; The VoIP calculator; 802.11b insecurity; Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf explains IOS DHCP; Is ENUM the mark of the devil?; AOL gives user permanent demerit; The Ballmer music video; Cleveland news flash: Y2K was last year.
Re-routing around censorship; Us vs. them in scripting; The boss button; Fighting off the hackers for fun; Peer computing as a weapon of war; Unix poetry; The Windows Fatal Exception Decoder; New Fusion widget: Getting rid of spyware; The sound of 200 cell phones going off at once; Taleban Web site hacked; Hey, sysadmin, remember Sircam?
On the importance of flame wars; Bill Gates sees dead people?; A markup language for grunts and groans; Is Microsoft leaking those Ballmer dance videos?; Good Samaritan not so good?; Steve Ballmer works up a sweat; Open-source wireless cracking; When technology goes too far; Another dumb computer arrest?; Is Cisco Communist?
Moron marketers threaten 'Net users; Finding free wireless access; Complete wastes of time; OS holy war flares in North Carolina; Are programmers weird?; Somebody actually buys an X10 camera; We're number, uh, two!; Those after-hours computer discussions; An entire city running on Linux; Distributed spam fighter under development; Could a Warhol virus infect the entire 'Net in 15 minutes?; Tell AOL what to do with its CDs.
Fusion shatters a myth; Bridging .Net and Java?; AT&T Broadband cuts off non-IIS servers to fight Code Red; Bluetoothless; Tennessee town bites into Apple; And you thought TI-99/4A fans were over the edge; Biometrics coming to your local supermarket; Steve Ballmer a-hootin' and a-hollerin'; Speaking of Web images; Just how far PC prices have fallen; Does Starbucks' CEO get his own wireless strategy?
Crackers getting more sophisticated; Sex and Microsoft Office; The wonders of science, part MXXII; Finally, a useful virus; A shocking game controller; Big Ball of Mud school of programming; Two vitally important new resources; Adobe: Ooops; Eudora Welty, dead at 92; Centralizing Unix administration in Perl; Spellchecking the entire Web.
Worm turns on Microsoft Web servers; The day the ISP died; Cell-phone users have no shame; Even Internet consultants can screw up the 'Net; Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers; The ultimate cup of coffee; The solar-powered ISP; Everhost; Internet VCer: Oops; The Lego Palm and the pink fuzzy laptop; The Microsoft-English dictionary; Putting a loved one in the home.
Saving those all important VoIP calls; This site is a bright idea; Could wireless end messy divorces?; How much will that software really cost you?; Ghosts of failed dot-coms; The spy's guide to securing your Cisco routers; Oprah for Internet czarina?; What's Microsoft doing at an open-source conference?; Like a big pizza pi; Cyber-bullies; Better check your phone bill; Have some birthday pi.
How HP wastes energy to save energy; New toy for the bored and lonely; Weird programming languages; When sponsors are speakers; The case of the disturbing backwards monitor; Congress to ICANN: Drop dead; Yet another video game made into a movie; Smile, you're on Candid (Police) Camera; High-speed hotels; Network Solutions blocking name transfers?
One of the fathers of Usenet dead at 45; Are you ready for insta-spam?; Diary of a site collapse; Skirting the issue; Assimiliating the Web; Trolling for help; Software wars; Rating the rater; True tales from the help desk; How about spam embedded in your mail?
Unix diapers; A beautiful waste of time; A P2P taxonomy; This page is too stupid; Homeless dot-commer bogus?; Whee, Linux is fun!; Blue Screens everywhere; Forget viruses: This fungus eats CDs; Microsoft revises Smart Tags a bit; Homeless dot-commers.
Slashdot crashes the NSA; They may be Smart Tags, but they're not Original Tags; What open source and California wines have in common; Jakob Nielsen no tyro; How to make Windows 2000 really, really secure; Where the Internet begins; A useful computer bug; The clothes make the geek; The end of the Internet; Why PDF bites; Novel use of a wireless phone; Hidden info; When Web sites tell too much.
DSL modems are so '90s; Bye-bye Netscape; Get ready to upgrade those mail servers; The anti-.Net; The real reason to buy a Palm; Anatomy of a DDoS attack; Pain is good.
