I didn’t even notice that Yahoo put up their new redesign this week until I read another article on it today. Speaking of articles, there’s a neat article entitled Hi-fi:Back to the future which talks about all kinds of neat stereo equipment that I have absolutely no need for and shouldn’t be even thinking about buying.

I was hunting down a little hang I was getting (for a site I had done for work) when rsslib is grabbing the remote rdf file (anytime it has to refresh it’s cache). The hang seemed longer than it should be, but in any case, it only happens when it needs to remotely pull the file. My original approach to trying to get rid of this hang was to display the old file and then call the refreshing getrdf() function. Unfortunately, that was still hanging the end of the page, so I moved the function call to the end of the page. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way in PHP for a script to close the HTTP connection to the client but still continue processing. Without that option, I started working on calling the the refresh functions in a seperate file. I just wanted to do a simple touch. I started working with the CURL functions, but that ended up being too much of a pain, then tried fopen(), which gave the same execution blocking problem (since it had to wait for the refreshes to finish for the connection to complete, and then the socket functions – which weren’t working on the build of PHP I’m working on at work (Mark Liyanage’s OSX binary). I finally ended up trying out fsockopen(), which ended up working. The end solution of course totals to 3 lines of code (opening the socket, sending a GET string, and closing the socket). But it took me a damn long time to get such a simple thing working. Well, now I know I guess.

R.I.P. Audiogalaxy – this K5 submission gives an inside look and some post mortem on Audiogalaxy. They made some mistakes, and the spyware they installed turned me off on the service for a while, but it was unique, and of al the p2p services so far, I think it was the best at encouraging true music communities and exploration. Here’s hoping that there are second generation systems that can improve on Audiogalaxy’s strengths and learn from their mistakes.

SCSI can be extremely confusing, and the SCSI Trade Association’s explanation of connectors is not very helpful, but doing some searching today, I some great explanations at transintl.com, specifically their Understanding SCSI Specifications and SCA SCSI Adapters pages. I had bought a pair of 5GB Fujitsu drives on clearance that had these SCA connectors, and hadn’t known what they were until today. I ended up ordering the connectors from PC Pitstop, which had the best price that a quick pricewatch/google search turned up.

Staggering AIDS Report From U.N. – It appears we are living through the the greatest single assault on humankind that we’ve ever known. Quite sobering.

In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where experts hoped the epidemic had reached a “natural limit” beyond which it could not grow, HIV is infecting as many as 39 percent of adults in some countries, according to UNAIDS, the international agency charged with monitoring the disease.

If there is a limit on HIV’s ability to spread, officials are uncertain what it is, said Neff Walker, a senior epidemiologist at UNAIDS.

Early this morning I was bugged enough to finally write a script to cull and reverse chronologically list referers, and well, like many things, I have no idea why I put it off so long. It took about 15 minutes to write. (open the file, move the pointer to near the end, parse into an associative array keyed to url, reverse, and display). I suppose I could turn into some functions / a class for future use. Includes, XML feeds, and the like.

I was feeling sort of patriotic today, so I celebrated Independence Day by contributing to the EFF.

I haven’t been reading Mark Pilgrim’s 30 days to a more accssible weblog, but I should be. The title is sort of a misnomer as the tips and information in this series (on Day 18 right now) are applicable to any web sites. As the de facto ‘S.508 guy’ for USCweb at the moment, this may be a good thing to keep in mind. Into the wiki it goes.

You know, when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d get the trifecta.

Cam posted this MSNBC editorial which blasts Bush for the Trifecta one-liner he’s been throwing around. The author centers on the fact that Bush has been using Sept. 11 to cover for many of the administration’s failure. He also notes that no one can pinpoint when he had ever make the original remark while campaigning. Perhaps the final irony is that the Washington Post has in fact discovered the originator of the quote: Al Gore. (discussion @ mefi)

Business 2.0 has an article entitled Are Holograms Finally for Real? that highlights Ford’s use of Zebra Imaging‘s digitally mastered holgram technology. Now, while it’s no doubt cool (check out the gallery), I question Zebra’s claim that the stuff their doing are today the most advanced, most unique, and, we believe, the most wildly dazzling holographic images in the world. It seems that the volumetric displays that Actuality Systems are cooler (there’s no polymer film involved), and the fog display WAVE beats the pants of both of those as far as coolness factor goes. Of course, there might be much less of a demand for these holographic projection techniques if augmented reality and retinal lasers get to market first (which looks to be making good progress).

Here’s a page with a list of Advanced 3D Displays.