This guy Ruben Fleischer has some great videos on his site. boingboing just linked to the DJ Format – We Know Something video with fursuits, but he also has a bunch of other cool videos including some great Gold Chains videos like this I Come from SF one.

This hasn’t been a very good week for me with computers. One of my RAID parititions keeled over the other day, and then yesterday, after flashing my motherboard BIOS yesterday, my system flaked after CMOS setup and would simply blank out and die. Apparently, this has been known to happen, in fact, for the BIOS I’ve been updating from revision, it’s a known problem with the A7V333 and their update tools. Of course there’s no warning from ASUS. Gee thanks, ASUS!

Fortunately, my BIOS wasn’t corrupted enough that I wasn’t able to get to the built in POST flash and reload, so I guess that’s one good thing. So, my system is back up and running (albiet running at a 100MHz bus right now), and the Promise controller which drove me to upgrade my BIOS in the first place is also running. Hmm, perhaps I should get a BIOS Savior or something just in case…

Courtesy of the ACME Heart Maker

Today was a research sort of day. Did some capturing of security resources/code that I didn’t properly record/document when I was doing coding a few months back. Also, did some searching for outputting/reflowing to multiple columns.

Since CSS3 Multi-column layout is far far away, I had to look elsewhere. IHT’s implementation popped into mind as an option, probably the most viable one. John Weir has this code available for download at smokinggun: sg_layout. What’s interesting is that it replicates the full data for each column div and then replicates and calculates offsets. It seems weird at first, but I suppose this is probably the best way to do it considering what a pain in the ass it’d be to juggle in and out text in nodes. (Noticed that he has some nice bookmarklets too)

Hey, it’s too bad multicol never caught on, huh? I’m sort of surprised how little code there is out there that can emulate that functionality. You can also sort of emulate it server-side, but since so much of it can be based on font/final rendering geometry, it can be really hard to do exactly (you can do an approximate pretty easily based on line #s of chars I suppose). Of course it doesn’t really reflow or have real flexibility, but well, them are the breaks I suppose.

• PHP/PDF multi-column layout example code
• HTML_ToPDF 2.0

DevEdge redesigned and has articles about it:

• Redesign Overview
• About the CSS
• About the CSS/JavaScript Menus

An interesting note is that Netscape 7 is clocking in at over 15 million downloads. Related: Mozilla, Gecko, Netscape, and the future in AOL

It occurred to me that I don’t personally know a single person who’s for war in Iraq. In fact, from everything I’ve read and heard, there’s barely anyone in the media who’s for it. So what is this? Where’s the popular support? And if it’s not there, why does it seem that war is inevitable when no one (not at home or in the international community) wants it?

(although at this point, having stripped all our civil rights anyway, I suppose we can stop pretending that we live in any sort of representative country)

One of the Fujitsu SCA drives I picked up a while ago died on me yesterday. Which is fine, that’s why they’re RAIDed. Unfortunately, although it’d start ok, halfway through bootup the ipsraidn.sys RAID driver was invariably causing kernel exceptions. Not much use RAID mirroring if you can’t reboot if a partition goes down.

So, I’m now running Windows XP, which I threw on a spare old IDE drive I have lying around. I just installed a dual DVI Gainward card (GF4) so the switch was pretty much inevitable anyway. Matrox was the only company that bothered to implement dual monitors correctly on W2K. I’m probably going to be laying down for a pay of LCD screens soon.

Now that I have a running system, I decided to put the new video card through it’s paces. Since even with BitTorrent, 3DMark03 is still a few hours away (apparently just released with all the servers completely swamped), I decided to hit up demoo and check out some of the latest demos (still waiting for my Mindcandy DVD). 4X AA and 8x anistropic filtering is nice.

Windows Update: 32 Critical Updates and Service Packs

Recently I’ve been getting around to reading some books that I’ve never got around to reading. I just finished Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine this weekend. One thing I’m always interested in is the ‘where are they now’ type followups (After watching Barry Blaustein’s Beyond the Mat earlier this weekend, I actually went online to see how a bunch of those guys were doing). Suffice to say, when doing these type of things, Google is your friend.

• O’ Engineers! – Dec 2000 follow-up article in Wired (w Eagle team photo w/ current status)
• Tom West: The Soul of a Development Manager – 1996 writeup on Tom West
• DATA GENERAL PUSHES FOR FASTER PROGRESS ON THIN CLIENTS – little blurb on management ignoring West on thin clients (mentioned in Wired article)
• EMC squares up to storage costs and reputation – mention of what some of what West did later on w/ Data General (bought in 1999 for $1.1B by EMC)
• The Machine Room: Data General
• Novas are Forever
• jassamyn.com: Tracy Kidder, BookPage Interview, In His Element: Tracy Kidder

I wasn’t able to find an actual picture of the Eclipse MV/8000 (Eagle).

• Justice Dept. Drafts Sweeping Expansion of Anti-Terrorism Act
• Yahoo! News – N.C. Congressman OK With Internment Camps
• Bill O’Reilly is full of shit
• Bill Moyers interviews Chuck Lewis, also see: breaking news

CAPTCHA – Telling Humans and Computers Apart (Automatically)