NOSes /

The Windows 2000 glossary

By Adam Gaffin
Network World Fusion, 09/21/01

Windows2K Entries is an alphabetical listing of what seems to be every possible facet and module of Windows 2000 - along with links to papers and site for more info on each thing.

Via Linkfilter.

News knocks sex off search-engine top spot

Reuters reports that "sex" dropped off the top-10 most-searched-word list at Google following last week's terrorist attacks.

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09/20/01

Time for a bit of silliness

No question, the last week has been a rough one. But let's take just a quick break:

Toddler on a string is basically just a cartoon image of a laughing toddler that you can move around your screen. Turn on your sound and call it up in Internet Explorer.

Advertisement:

Via MetaFilter.

This page describes one of the best tourist attractions in St. Croix - the beer-drinking pigs of the Mt. Pellier Domino Club.

Refurbished screw for sale. Dell will sell you one for just five cents.

Via Anil Dash.

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07/19/01

No plans for candle pictures from space

Yesterday, it was that Nostradamus "prediction." Today, it's the e-mail you probably saw about fifty gazillion times (while you weren't busy readying urgent warnings about the Nimda worm, that is) about how we're all supposed to go out tonight and hold a candle so the government can take a picture of us all for posterity.

As the busy Urban Legends site notes:

Unless every city in the country is going to extinguish all of its artificial lighting at just the right time, a satellite photo simply isn't going to pick up candlelight (and even then it's unlikely we could muster enough candles to produce light visible to an orbiting satellite). Go ahead and light a candle tonight, but don't feel you need to say "cheese" -- you won't be on a candid satellite camera.

Speaking of attack-related spam

Gartner has an interesting little piece about e-mail etiquette when discussing disaster (click on the link on the right). Basically, "occupational spam" (i.e., employees sending missives to everybody in the company) has surged over the past week. That's OK, except people are sometimes sending giant attachments: "Gartner has seen one PowerPoint presentation about the disaster nearly a megabyte in size."

How to deal? Gartner's recommendations:

For their part, enterprises shouldn't legislate against such conversations or send messages such as "Let's get back to work, folks!" which may seem insensitive. ... Gartner recommends that enterprises create a place where people can share their feelings and opinions outside of the normal flow of business e-mail. For example, a Web discussion site on the corporate intranet would help take this conversation out of people's inboxes yet would also acknowledge the legitimate need to discuss the tragedy.

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09/18/01

That Nostradamus prediction? Bogus

OK, you're intelligent folks. So you're probably not among the people who have driven videos about Nostradamus to the top of the Amazon.com Top Sellers list.

Just in case you get Yet Another E-mail about how Nostradamus predicted last week's attacks, though, you might want to point the sender to this Urban Legends page about the story (side thought: What good is a prediction if you can only figure it out after the fact?):

It originated with a student at Brock University in Canada in the 1990s, appearing on a web page essay on Nostradamus. That particular quatrain was offered by the page's author, Neil Marshall, as a fabricated example to illustrate how easily an important-sounding prophecy can be crafted through the use of abstract imagery. He pointed out how the terms he used were so deliberately vague they could be interpreted to fit any number of cataclysmic events.

Marshall himself has gotten so many hits to that page that he's taken it down.

You can read more about the hoax here. One giveaway: The bogus prediction has a 1654 date. Nostradamus died in 1566.

Building a 9-11 Web archive

WebArchivist.org is trying to build a collection of Web sites - in particular those with personal accounts - related to the events of that day. Go to its site and you can download a small JavaScript for your browser toolbar that lets you easily notify it of any relevant sites: When you run across one, click on the link in your toolbar and a note is sent to it.

Bombing ISPs back to the Stone Age?

John Keegan, defence correspondent for the London Telegraph, is convinced the Internet had something to do with last week's attacks. In an opinion piece in the paper, he writes the Americans should destroy any foreign ISPs found to have helped the attackers:

Uncompliant providers on foreign territory should expect their buildings to be destroyed by cruise missiles. Once the internet is implicated in the killing of Americans, its high-rolling days may be reckoned to be over.

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09/17/01

Getting back to normal?

Fark is one of those sites that suddenly seemed to become completely irrelevant last week: It exists to link users to weird, funny and obnoxious news stories and Web sites.

Only it didn't. With major news sites effectively inaccessible for a good part of Tuesday, Fark turned itself into an impromptu news site, gathering reports from everywhere and re-posting them - and becoming a place where users could discuss what it all meant.

On Saturday, head Farker Drew Curtis posted this:

We're all deeply affected by what happened, no matter what country we may live in. I'm still gripped by an incredible sadness, as are probably many of you. However, it does the dead no good for us to continue to wallow in depression any longer than we absolutely have to.

He called for users to submit their favorite dumb Web sites and stories of all time. On Sunday, the site began running them. If you like the absurd and need a break today, head to Fark.

First-person accounts

People who survived or witnessed the World Trade Center attacks are posting their accounts online:

Escape from the subway
"People were shouting at us: Get out of the station! Get off the trains! There's been a terrorist attack!"

Nearby resident
I saw the second plane hit the building as I was on the phone with my wife who was staying at her parents with my 3 week old son. I saw debris fly everywhere and a huge fireball. At that time I told my wife I love her and ran to put on some clothes and flee my apartment. ... Everyone was getting as far away as possible. As I walked I saw people jumping or falling from the building's upper floors. I will never forget that sight for as long as I live.

Taking refuge
One Asian lady had apparently breathed in a large amount of the overpowering cloud, and was not able to breathe. We carried her inside the building, and someone who had medical training took over trying to help her. She coughed up some very horrible things, and then seemed to die.

Living four blocks away Everything was covered in a snow of dust a few centimeters high. Papers from all sorts of businesses were strewn across the street. There was a stark silence, broken by a few officers in the area. Looking up towards the WTC, I could see nothing but a brown cloud. I started heading North on Broadway. Even with the mask I was wearing, it was getting hard to breath and my eyes were stinging.

Links to photos and first-person accounts

Probably more photos and video clips than you want to see at once

User Friendly on the attacks

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09/12/01

The aftermath

What can one say? Nothing is the same. I wake up this morning, shower, go down to take out the trash. A jet roars overhead. Then another. Nothing unusual in my neighborhood 10 miles from Logan Airport. But they're fighter jets. And one seems to be making wide circles around the neighborhood.

Doc Searls has been posting his thoughts on his Weblog:

Walking back from a meeting at school this evening, Jeffrey and I looked up at the sky, as always. But it was ... different. What was that behind the high branches of an Oak tree? A star or an — no, it couldn't be an airplane. There were no airplanes in the sky tonight. Only stars: a condition we haven't seen in nearly a century.

"Why aren't the planes flying, Papa?" Jeffrey asked. I explained. He asked again. I explained again. I stopped the questioning when the count got to four.

But it won't stop.

One thing that's needed is blood. You can call the Red Cross at (800) GIVE-LIFE, but don't be surprised if the number is busy. In addition to the Red Cross, many hospitals run blood-donation programs, so check with your local hospital if you can't get through to the Red Cross.

You can make an online donation to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund via PayPal.

This site is a place to tell the world you're OK - or look for somebody you haven't been able to contact.

One thing that isn't needed is spam trying to capitalize on the tragedy. So to all you vendors out there trying to sell stuff by sending out spam (like the one Dave Kearns just got from some sleeze outfit selling American flags), don't even think about it.

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09/11/01

Microsoft's error redirects

John Rohdes really doesn't like the way you now get redirected to a Microsoft page if you misspell a URL or get a DNS error in Internet Explorer. He really, really doesn't.

Sure, he could solve the problem by switching to Opera or Netscape.

But Rohdes has another solution: Get Google to build its own search client:

The more important idea is much more subtle. Think about how you use your web browser. You probably think that you are just visiting web pages. However, what you are really doing is searching for information, buying things, listening to music, downloading tools, and so forth. Just as the web is not the internet, the browser is not the web.

That is a powerful idea. Think about it. The browser is not the web.

What if Google built something that was very much like a browser but was mainly used for searching for information. What if they built a tool that was focused on searching for answers to your questions first, and looking at web pages second. Wrap your head around that.

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09/10/01

The Bard as programmer

You might think the idea of creating a programming language out of the plays of William Shakespeare is the sort of thing only some sleep-deprived programmers would come up with. And you'd be right.

The Shakespeare Programming Language features characters in the roles of variables (you must define, um, introduce them, right at the beginning) and assigns numeric variables to nouns, depending on how nice they are (so "flowers" would be +1, while "pigs" would be -1, because the authors think all pigs are dirty).

Gotos

A sentence like "Let us return to scene III" means simply "goto scene III". Instead of "let us", you may use "we shall" or "we must", and instead of "return to", you may use "proceed to". If you specify a scene, it refers to that scene in the current act. There is no way to refer to a specific scene in another act - you have to settle for jumping to the act itself.

Conditional statements

Conditional statements come in two easy steps, as illustrated by the following code fragment:

Juliet:
Am I better than you?

Hamlet:
If so, let us proceed to scene III.

The site has a number of example programs, including one that prints "Hello World" to the screen (of course!) and another that asks the user to input a number, then displays all the prime numbers equal to or less than that number. The latter's a five-act play.

Novel way to get the attention of the authorities

Brendon Wilson got a bit frustrated when he tried to bring a matter to the attention of his local member of parliament (he's Canadian) and the guy never responded to his e-mail.

So he decided to see if other MPs were any better. He composed a short e-mail message designed to elicit a response and then sent it to every MP he could find an e-mail address for.

He details his experiences, which included the following:

Two days after sending the email request, I was contacted by the National Security Investigations Section of the RCMP; apparently, an unidentified MPs office has become suspicious of the email and its contents. Constable Bill Jost, and Constable Mitch Rasche questioned me on my intentions on sending the email; I answered honestly, stating that the email was sent as a part of an experiment to research how 'wired' our MP offices were.

One question, "Why did you send your resume along with the email?", disturbed me greatly. One of the MP offices that responded noted that it had found my web site (in the email headers); what's disturbing is that either the RCMP, or the MP Office itself, couldn't tell the difference between the contents of an email, and a separate web site. Even funnier was a comment from the RCMP noting they had difficulty finding my apartment; I informed them that if they had the original email, then they had my web site address, which has a map to my apartment.

Via Politech.