• Microsoft Research DRM talk – Cory gave this talk in Redmond the other day (doesn’t mention trusted computing)
  

  Here are the two most important things to know about computers
  and the Internet:

  1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits

  2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to
  another very cheaply and quickly

  Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with computers
  will embrace these two facts, not regret them. A newspaper press
  is a machine for spitting out cheap and smeary newsprint at
  speed: if you try to make it output fine art lithos, you’ll get
  junk. If you try to make it output newspapers, you’ll get the
  basis for a free society.

  And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday of Napster, record
  execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that
  Napster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s
  with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata.

  Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll
  listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s
  bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book
  looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is
  to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like
  the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to
  sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will
  really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the
  actors out for an encore when the film’s run out. Or that what
  the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with
  facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read
  aloud from your personal Word of God.

• The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution [DOC]
• A Survey of Complex Object Technologies for Digital Libraries [PDF] – coming outtta NASA
• Adaptive Networks of Smart Objects. [PDF] – related
• LocustWorld – mesh networking hardware and software

• Re:Counter-Strike- (Score:5, Interesting) – every once in a while you’ll come upon a random thread that totally defies your expectations
• Joel on Web Application technology – right on. Joel is on a roll, I agree w/ just about all of this. A lot of times, I think how much more I could get done if I could just have inline/automatic streaming of queries/data. The kicker? 90% of this could be done now
• Bikes Against Bush – so cool. I met Yuri at SXSW. Guess these bike artists stick together. 🙂

MySQL < 4.1 doesn’t support subqueries. The manual suggests ‘easily’ using a temporary table and a join. Here’s a solution based on joins:


SELECT node.id,node.version,node.title,node.body,node.date
FROM node INNER JOIN node AS n2 ON node.id = n2.id
WHERE node.status='publish'
GROUP BY node.id, node.version
HAVING node.version = max(n2.version)


What this should do is return node information for published nodes with the latest version (primary key(id, version)). It seems to work.

This guy built a uber-cheap 1.2TB RAID system for $1,600. I spent $2,500 for my 0.75TB system back in December, but I’ve been very happy with it. Extra money was spent on getting a decent UPS, a real hardware RAID controller, and a hot-swap case w/ a sizable power supply.

Looking back, I would have spent an extra $100 for an even better case, gotten the 3Ware 8506 card instead of the LSI MegaRAID 150, and gotten a motherboard w/ 64-bit PCI (bought one on-sale that didn’t have that, oops).

Anyway, I figure I’ll be good for at least another year or two, at which point I’ll probably swap out my array w/ 1-2TB drives.

Today I went to an interesting presentation on Smart Objects (in data repositories). It was interesting seeing the data/metadata from a research/library-oriented perspective. I should follow-up with writeups and citations, but I need a better way to organize all of this data.

(model w/ Drupal’s centralized taxonomy?)

• mathowie’s contacts – Matt has built in some relationship management/filtering tools into mefi
• clevercactus share is now public (updates on cactus log
• the new MT pricing makes a lot more sense. hoo-ray
• SFX – context-sensitive link server based on the OpenURL standard (overview)
• making vim functional on os x – useful
• Stupid Vim Tricks – also useful

• 9/11 panel: No al Qaeda cooperation with Iraq – front-page news everywhere but on Fox News
• Travesty of Justice – No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.
• Media starts to catch on that Ashcroft is a total douche bag
• Jose Padilla: Convicted without a hearing
  

  Padilla is functionally a convicted terrorist, first imprisoned and now thoroughly stigmatized, without benefit of any of the constitutional safeguards embodied in the Bill of Rights. He has not had the right to remain silent; he has not had access to his lawyer; he has not been allowed to cross-examine witnesses or even to know who they are.

• OLC’s Aug. 1, 2002 Torture Memo (“the Bybee Memo”) – excellent review of the memo

CVS web tools:

• CVS Monitor – tracks and creates graphs for modules; RSS support
• CIA Open Source Notification System – 3rd party open-source project cvs tracking
• Chora CVS Viewer – is this the best web CVS interface?

simple assitance for code management: description, notes, fm ping/integration for releases?

Note to self: switch from OmniOutliner to something that has crash recovery as to not lose lots of text (back to TVO I think?)

The Prodigle Child

In recent decades, children of Indian (or perhaps South Asian) origin have become to the spelling bee what Kenyans are to the marathon, albeit on a smaller, slightly less dominating scale.