Go Maciej!

• What’s New in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther – pretty comprehensive
• How good is Google? – the Economist on Google’s IPO
• How to Take Your Number With You – NYTimes on WLNP. see also: NumberPortability.com
• How Cell Phone companies are fleecing us? – the 10 largest wireless carriers have taken in $629 million from the consumers… see my rant from around this time last year
• The Road to Babylon – Searching for targets in Iraq; from Dec 2002, a comparison of the Iraq quagmire to the Peloponnesian War
• Whose War? – a Pat Buchanan (!) article from Mar 2003 that names names, tracing neocon ties
• After the Flood – article on how China’s Three Gorges dam is affecting the country

I’ve long thought about programming some airtime usage calculators. There’s some out there (DialStat, Comet, Treo Call Log), but it’d probably be a worthwhile learning experience to program my own.

Capturing entire tapes certainly makes the whole process easier. Much faster to go back and subclip online than shuttling tape back and forth.

• Ordered to Love – teen-age girls forced to submit in secret nazi mating camps; my new desktop image
• Oh yeah! – see mefi discussion, photo in yahoo news (fwiw, it doesn’t appear to be overly photomanipulated – be sure to take a look at the MPEG on Sea Sheperd page )
• HotelChatter – Rusty’s new site; reviewing hotels
• Long Wait for Taste of Home
  

  Hoping to capitalize on this phenomenon, the chain opened restaurants in Los Angeles and Houston last year. The first outlet in Los Angeles did $1 million of business its first seven weeks, the company said. Barahona said she expects $1 million in sales after five weeks.

  Hmm, looks like there’s one at Olympic and Union. That’s really close, will have to check it out sometime.

• Friendster Spurns Google – interesting…
• Pumpkin Carving DRM
• Inside Fox News. Charlie Reina, employed by Fox News from 1997 to 2003, tells it like it is.
• Better iTunes handling of M3U playlists – haven’t figure out why iTunes handles m3us (especially streaming ones) so badly; I’ll take WinAMP over iTunes any day

I did my first Panther install last night. First thing I noticed, bootups are significantly faster, going from three or four times slower than my PC to probably 2x faster. Also, the Panther upgrade CDs I had required a previous OS X install… As the 2x800MHz system I was upgrading was running Gentoo, this presented a problem. I was about to break out the Jaguar CDs (tedium), but the Netboot servers that we (USC ISD) run came in supa-handy. Hoo-ray.

(Originally, this Quicksilver machine was running OS X server as our workgroup file server. This caused no end of problems, and I inherited it and threw Gentoo on it. Better, but Linux PPC definitely has some issues; I just got a replacement IBM x335 running Debian in our rack set up, using this machine now for editing while my 12″ PB is in the shop. Having 135GB of 10K SCSI-2 RAID-0 goodness is definitely good fun)

• PC Gamer interview: Half-Life 2 – interesting interview w/ Valve’s Doug Lombardi on how various game elements emerged from user testing, derived behaviors (physics, ai)
• EOS 10D 2.0.0 Firmware – getcha firmware right heah
• Reboot an iPod
• Hercules USB DJ Console Reviewed – whoa, looks cool; wonder how well it’d work for video?
• Yahoo Groups: LAVA, Los Angeles area Video Artists – site soon @ la-va.org
• The Best Page in the Universe – via Intellectual Whores (hmm, Ladder Theory)
• Apple previews Java 3D, Advanced Imaging APIs
• Q: What’s a good halloween costume that will get lots of attention? – definitely NSFW, not for the prudish
• Zimran on Longhorn/WinFX
• check out rc3.org for continuing good stuff
• Sony news: 20,000 layoffs, including 7,000 in Japan, 25% 3rd quarter drops, not as bad as the 98% plunge last quarter
• Linux Media Arts – LMA is building its entire product line of broadcasting and film software and hardware products to be optimized on the AMD OPTERON and ATHLON 64 bit processor technologies.
• Cinelerra – will need to give it a spin sometime (see also Kino, etc)
• Voicemail: don’t phone home – from Telepocalypse, Telecom strategy in the age of end-to-end networks
• Everything in Moderation – Creative ways to manage online communities and user-generated content. Wow, times are good when you find a new blog dedicated to an area of interest
• 1-800-Annoy me now – 12 ways to get out of recorded-message hell and get a live customer service rep. A CNN/Money article that’s useful, wow, thanks boingboing
• Mac DVD software: iRipDVD, DVDibbler, D-Vision, OXEx
• Setting the Record Straight: An Analysis of the Justice Department’s PATRIOT Act Website

• BoingBoing – temp IP (see also: Cory’s post on mefi)
• Cory’s iCal rant (time zones)
• Mitch Kapor on iCal pub/sub weaknesses – I encountered a similar issue, will be working around w/ convoluted diffing/synchronization plans – may be even more complex than that though…
• Google: samba configuration testing smbclient

Yay WMD: U.S. Continues Biological Warfare Research. From the New Scientist writeup:

Now Buller has engineered a mousepox strain that kills 100 per cent of vaccinated mice, even when they were also treated with the antiviral drug cidofovir. A monoclonal antibody that mops up IL-4 did save some, however.

smart keyboard flip: