• DxF Design Exercise: Google’s Search Results (Part II)
• Ed Felten asks: which five science and technology books you would have every student read?
• Why hasn’t Yahoo! gotten on the social software bandwagon?
• Very Scary Shit About John Ashcroft – “JOHN ASHCROFT’S PATRIOT GAMES” from Feb 2004 Vanity Fair
• Product Review: ASUS Pocket Wireless Access Point (WL-330) – if it had power-via-USB and a pigtail it’d be perfect; as it is, still incredibly cool
• Gothamist Interviews: Paul Ford, Writer/Programmer
  

  2. Would you be so kind as to write a political cartoon
  (sans cartoon) for this site? Please use the word aperient or distrait,
  if you’d like; your choice.
  Panel 1: The president and his father are at the eye doctor’s, looking at eye charts. The optometrist says, “looks fine so far.”

  Panel 2: The optometrist switches the chart to a map of the Middle East. Both Georges squint.

  Panel 3: The optometrist says, “Here’s your problem. You’re both incredibly nearsighted.”

  Panel 4: The younger George says to older, “well, it seems distrait is inherited.”

  Hilarity in the comments.

• The Spam-Filtering Accuracy Plateau at 99.9% Accuracy and How to Get Past It. [PDF] – better (markovian) weighting, innoculation, minefields
• Bayesian Dobly: Noise Reduction for Statistical Filters – BNR, a noise reduction algorithm for featureset analysis
• CRYPTOGRAPHY: Frequently Asked Questions
• Cryptology and Information Security Group Research Project:
  Zero-Knowledge Proofs
• How to construct zero-knowledge proof systems for NP
• bsy’s Explanation of Zero Knowledge Proofs
• Elliptic Curve Cryptography
• Handbook of Applied Cryptography
• Encryption and Security Tutorial
• Cryptography for encryption, digital signatures and authentication
• Experimental Reference Center for Cryptographic Data Protection
• munitions – Cryptographic Software for Linux

Between school, work and more work I’ve been MIA lately. But, can’t miss Grey Tuesday.

Others have and continue to wax on about the ongoing philosophical and moral vicissitudes of copyright. And rightly so. It’s certainly something I’ve given a lot of thought to over the past few years, but I’ll pass this time around. Well, maybe I’ll indulge a little bit… It’s interesting, the cultural works which we consider most transgressive, against which the most drastic punitive measures are taken. While not always the case, often-times, it is this illegal art that speaks the most about our society.

(For those w/ the libjpeg programs installed, greyscaling your images is a jpegtran (-grayscale) away.)

Andy’s tracking this all.

(Update: the EFF has posted up an analysis of the copyright laws involved: Grey Tuesday: A Quick Overview of the Legal Terrain)

• eBay: WRT54G
• Sveasoft: Forums, WRT54G Discussion – Firmware versions w/ QoS

There’s not a lot of open source (or any, actually) systems that facilitate easy creation of multiple adhoc communities. Anyone know of any offhand?

• Ramius CommunityZero
• LiveJournal – but journal centric
• OpenACS 4 Groups Design
• myBrandeis Club Center – built on ACS
• Berkleemusic.com – not really related, but just wanted to point out an OpenACS site that actually looks good, a rare thing apparently
• More great stuff from University of Bristol’s Pilot Portal Project:
  • Groups Directory Service – Overview
  • Requirements for a Groups Service
  • Requirements for a Groups Directory Service – integrates most of the above

• Russell Beattie complains about Atom:
  • Atom Again
  • Hypocrisy: RDF and the Atom API

  After reading both (extremely long) threads, I’ll have to say that the Atom spec’s use of REST is the proper way to do it, although there should probably be GET/POST fallback (dealing w/ HTML forms seems like it’d be an issue, same w/ J2ME and Flash as Russ has mentioned)

• RDF Triples in XML
• Blogxter: blogging with xml-services
• Ken MacLeod has some interesting posts
  • Blog comments now FOAF-only
  • XML vs. RDF :: N × M vs. N + M
  • Is a Feed the right place for your Data?
• Tim Bray on HTTP-RSS last year
• Joe Gregorio comments on Web Forms 2.0

• Grey Tuesday – Feb 24, coordinated civil disobedience to put the Grey Album online
• The special effect of physics
  

  From a physics point of view we would also like to leave geometric optics behind and use the wave nature of light rays instead. As well as allowing us to simulate the visual effects of interference, this opens up the possibility of simulating sound waves in complex geometries. Architects, for example, might eventually be able to use such software to optimize noise pollution in their buildings.

• Photon Mapping on Programmable Graphics Hardware
  

  We present a modified photon mapping algorithm capable of running entirely on GPUs. Our implementation uses breadth-first photon tracing to distribute photons using the GPU.

• Henrik Wann Jensen – research on Global Illumination using Photon Maps
• Global Illumination Compendium
• Validation Proposal for Global Illumination and Rendering Techniques
• Special Topics in Computer Graphics: Global Illumination
• Global Illumination
• Paul Debevec
• Acquiring the Reflectance Field of a Human Face – zowie
• The Tragedy of Colin Powell: How the Bush presidency destroyed him
  

  Powell’s outburst is a textbook sign of overwhelming stress. Maybe he was just having a bad day. Then again, he’s also been having a bad three years.

• Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Porn – Xeni interviews Larry Flynt
• ZUG: The Viagra Prank – OK, I can’t advocate supporting spammers, but this is funny

Wow, tonight, while avoiding writing a paper, I found a mirror of The Final Pathetic Bleatings of the Forum. Turns out that there’s an entire mirrored copy of Forum 3000 there, something that Archive.org didn’t have. This is stupendously awesome. I’ve been looking for this on and off for a while now. (now mirrored locally for posterity).

TODO: set up local squid-proxying, search to avoid having this problem in the future

Pages on the search:

• Metafilter: On Becoming a Randroid
• The Floating Head of Ayn Rand :: A Timeline
• Objectivism Mockery Page
• Forum 2010: I just realized something! You guys aren’t nearly as bad as the Conversatron… you’re, like, the best ripoff of forum3000 there is.
• End of an Era: Forum 2000 Closes
• Become an Objectivist in Ten Easy Steps (with illustrations), part of Andrej Bauer’s site
• How Forum 2000 Works
• About the Forum x network

The launch of Mediachest.com may knock another longstanding todo off of my list. That’d be a good thing.

• Today We’re Selling Digital Rights Management, Tomorrow We’re Making Water Run Uphill
• Betamax: Back to the Future
• Why wireless will end ‘piracy’ and doom DRM and TCPA – Jim Griffin
• Scary-cool: Decompression bombs, see also Mobile Water Bombs
• Python on Nokia w/ SCREENSHOTS, see also Python on the S60 — where’s the high level scripting for PalmOS?
• Candy Science: M&Ms pack more tightly than spheres
• Will the real Detroit skyline please stand up?
• Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters – lots of good tips
• max-width in Internet Explorer
• XML Benchmark Results 08.02.2004 – saucy, libxml kicks butt
• The Mobile Consolidation Begins – Cingular agrees to buy AT&T Wireless
• Harnessing the Hacker’s HeckleBot – Justin writes about back/side-channel comm @ ETECH
• Ultimate Boot CD – chock full of diagnostics
• Linux Test Project – for testing teh lunix
• AIDA32 – Windows system diagnostic
• F.I.R.E. – Forensic and Incident Response Environment Bootable CD
• BootPart 2.50: Boot Partitions for WinNT
• DFSee – I used this tool once to recover my disk after Partition Magic killed my partition tables
• Anti-spam software – notably normalizemime.cc which truncates binary attachments, etc.
• Gallery of network images
• alienRAID.org – Xserve RAID in non-Apple environments (configuration)