- Checking Your Bill for a New Charge Called ‘Oops’ – David Pogue writes about ‘stealth inflation’ via miscellaneous fees
- – Facing jail because his house is filled to the brim, a hoarder finds hope in a woman with a talent for organizing — and a big heart (lablogs/lablogs)
- Re: [SLUG] migrating accounts
- Re: [Lias] migrating users and their passwords
- Keep the Sex R-Rated, N.Y.U. Tells Film Students – “My thing is how we censor ourselves during the day when we’re not having sex.” — I guess the NYU administration felt the same way
- The Bad Sex award shortlisted passages – oh man, some great ones
- Remote Central: Universal Remote Control Reviews – there are some really tempting gee-whiz all-in-one remotes. The Proton iRemote iR800 is pretty neat looking, although pretty pricy (and w/ a funky screen apparently). The URC-8910 is a lot cheaper, and with JP1 programming could probably do all the wacky complex stuff as well
- Speaking of expensive electronic doo-dads, quite tempted to pick up a Squeezebox wi-fi MP3 player
Category: Legacy
Infrequent posting while schedule crushes me. Some shameless stolen links:
- For others that are interested in the Sun ONE software – including information + PHP script on letting iCal access the Sun Calendar
- Dating Design Patterns – I think is the nerdiest thing I’m likeliest to see today
- Teen dances to record after partner’s stumble – record breaking 37.5hrs of DDR
- tunA – a handheld ad-hoc radio device for local music sharing; social walkman; interesting
- MIT Media Lab: Research Areas
- flavorpill LA – arts events
- blogs@nifty – love that weird bear character sitting there
- The Back of the New $20
- Missing! – 5 pager on Bill Watterson (toread)
- The Twisted Network Framework – hmm, now a Freenet protocol implementation would be interesting…
For those interested, here’s what I presented in class last night: Next-Generation Distributed Social Software Networks: Designs and Applications
The numbers are a bit off. If I got a friend or two and we dropped everything else we were doing, we could probably make a working prototype in less than a year; most of the tech components are already there (dev in Twisted most likely)
The days blend together when you aren’t sleeping regularly. I’m currently doing some sort of schedule-enforced polyphasic sleep. Things will return to sanity after this week I hope.
- taint.org: Using a Web of Trust to stop spam
- Eric writes on open issues for DSS systems – yes, we’ve coined a TLA; I’ll be throwing in thoughts on segmented trust soon (rings, circles, pipes, wee!)
- PeopleAggregator Intranet
- Publishers bet on Friendster-like service – 2003-11-25 social networking funding update
Outsourcing to India in Business Week and at MIT… – now this is some harsh practical education…
The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show. A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them. The answer: “We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren’t worth considering.”
Students began to wake up.
A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word “Delhi”. It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT’s main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.
Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers.
- Friendster Usability Analysis – This is a usability analysis of the Friendster Internet service, collaboratively created by the students of MIT course 6.171 in November 2003.
- Where Are The Founders Of The Dial-Up Revolution? – /. discussion on the Hayes article
- Yahoo! Photos redesign – what Ernie’s been working on the past couple of months; OK, working, just intermittent server wonkiness
- Good lord that’s a huge DSL bill – and for transferring only 24.5Gb? That’s pathetic
- John Levine: Challenge-response systems are as harmful as spam – John is correct, C-R is useless without digitally signed envelopes. Although using a CA system could work, so could a simpler solution involving PGP/GPG signatures. PTP verification would probably be computationally prohibitive, but some sort of distributed or transitive trust model might be adequate
- Digital Sundials International – ok, this is even cooler than the Pimp Watch
- Unusable Web – D. Keith Robinson on bad web design
A New Website for Harper’s Magazine – Paul Ford describes launching the new Harpers.org website, talks about why it looks so similar to Ftrain, and building a Semantic Web taxonomy. Exciting stuff.
A new month, a new file. I’ll try to get back to a non-prehistoric system over winter break, although other things may take precedence.
- Fantastic Pimp Watch – “trip the light fantastic” indeed – if I didn’t just blow my wad I’d pick one up… heck maybe I will anyway
- Alphabet 26 – Bradbury Thompson’s proposal for simplifying the alphabet
- 1976design w/ the latest iteration of Nice Titles
- America Tunes In for the Money Shot – Frank Rich sums up the MJ coverage; I’m so glad I don’t watch TV
- Firebird Ext – RSS reader Panel – eh, works so so
- GNUpod – GNUpod is a collection of Perl-Scripts wich allow you to use your iPod under GNU/Linux and many other Operating Systems with a useable Version of Perl 5 (+Modules).
- PodWorks – song copier w/ GUI
- Crooked Fingers: The Sounds – really good stuff; playing w/ Azure Ray this week; Ogg Vorbis downloads, cool
- Simon on PostgreSQL 7.4