His PC drives him to drink
Proving once again man's ceaseless creativity, James Sharman has converted an old Pentium clone into a still.
The basics of distillation are simple, you heat alcoholic fluid until the alcohol starts to evaporate, then you cool it so it condenses elsewhere into pure alcohol. To put it simply, the key components are a heating device and a cooling device. Now the average PC, has both a heating device (The processor) and a cooling device (The fan). The question we asked was "By separating the processor from its fan and adding a few small components, could we convince an ordinary PC to distil alcohol?"And that answer was:A lazy Saturday afternoon, a quick trip to the model shop and I discovered the answer.
After an hour of running the collection bottle contained about 2ml of clear fluid, a quick taste test revealed it was pretty strong.Sharman provides detailed (and copiously illustrated) instructions.
Fiat lux
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day is well, exactly what it sounds like. This image shows what the earth would look like if it were night everywhere at once and there weren't any clouds (it's a composite of hundreds of photos; for the really amazing image, though, click for the big 534k version).
12/14/00
Some real bird-brained users
Interpet Explorer is an MIT project seeking to train parrots to use computers.Like human children, parrots are intelligent, curious, and thrive on social interaction. Given these traits, we are confident we will be able to construct tools to allow parrots to participate in the monumental technological progress of the past 20 years.
Two goals: Find ways to relieve the boredom and social isolation faced by millions of pet birds and looking at ways to apply the research to human-computer interface design.
Deja.vu
Deja.com has gone back to its original mission of archiving Usenet postings. The company's sold off its "precision buying" stuff (i.e., all those annoying ratings) to Half.com.Yay!
12/13/00
More on IT fundamentalism
Reader Stephen Wyman took a look at Bryan Wilhite's IT Fundamentalist essay and says he largely agrees:Recently, I was reading through another computer industry publication when I chanced upon an article entitled, "Companies Don't Learn From Previous IT Snafus." I worked in a different department at AMR when the fiasco mentioned in the article was in the final, crash and burn stage. It was reasonably simple to see why the project was failing, although as a non-managerial person I apparently, "didn't understand the inherent complexity..."Read more about Wyman's experience - and why he's still tilting at windmills in IT.
Another reader took it even more harshly:
It makes me wonder if it will still be worth programming or even working in IT if this is still the case in a few years.What do you think? Post your thoughts
12/12/00
Oh, @&%$!.com
A New Hampshire judge has ruled that domain names are not protected by the First Amendment.Federal Judge Steven McAuliffe, ruled in Concord, N.H. that domain names are purely navigational aides, not efforts at making a point. His ruling came in a case involving a New Hampshire entrepreneur who wanted Network Solutions to give him a series of obscene domain names for, well, you can guess.
McAuliffe doesn't seem to have heard of sites such as bellatlanticpathetic.com, whose very names are, indeed making a point. And let's not even discuss IP numbers, which really are for (computer-to-computer) navigation...
Dot-commers party with a purpose now
Time was, you got laid off, you got depressed and you moped before pulling yourself together and getting on with life.OK, so people who used to work at once high-flying dot-coms do that, too. But out in San Francisco, at least, they also go out to parties looking for work. SF Gate reports:
Now the events are far more likely to have a dismal tone similar in theme to Nero's famous fiddling. Groups like the Association of Internet Professionals have meetings like "Inside the Failed Dot Coms - How to identify and avoid them," Similarly, digi-entertainment list serve Pho throws a Party's Over Party "in honor of the NASDAQ downturn and a farewell to 20x revenues valuations," and SFGirl.com throws a Pink Slip Happy Hour, which proved so popular that it plans to host them every month.San Francisco is still partying, schmoozing, drinking and networking -- but this time there's a deadly seriousness as attendees with desperate hopes of keeping themselves afloat in the most expensive region in America meet and mingle as if this holiday season is their last chance.
12/11/00
An IT fundamentalist speaks
Is Bryan Wilhite the Diogenes of the IT department, forever condemned to wander the earth in search of a competent IT manager?In an essay, Wilhite says he has yet to run into a competent IT manager after four years in the field. Instead, he says, he ony finds chaos, from Mystery Code to inappropriate use of slang:
There is no effort to come up with a standardized way of naming database tables, stored procedures, computers, etc. because "hey, guy, join the party—put on your giant, faux afro wig and get with it!"
He follows up with tips to fight back the chaos, mostly management tips, such as holding quarterly "cleanup" efforts to documenting everything to making sure you actually know how to use basic software like e-mail. And he concludes that the future is in adopting open-source techniques.
Read the essay, then tell us what you think. And keep in mind that Diogenes actually didn't spend a lot of time wandering - he spent most of his time living in a tub.
UPCs are not the mark of the devil
At least, not according to George Laurer, who invented them. He's set up a page to deny that he is doing Satan's work:Yes, they do RESEMBLE the code for a six. An even parity 6 is:
1 module wide black bar
1 module wide white space
1 module wide black bar
4 module wide white space
There is nothing sinister about this nor does it have anything to do with the Bible's "mark of the beast" (The New Testament, The Revelation, Chapter 13, paragraph 18). It is simply a coincidence like the fact that my first, middle, and last name all have 6 letters. There is no connection with an international money code either.
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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.
