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Somehow, while I recognize the whole WorldCom thing to be a really bad thing, it doesn’t seem that important to my life. Perhaps it has to do with the level of cynicism I already harbor with regards to the current state of the global economy and financial systems, or perhaps simply its lack of relevance and direct impact on my existence (especially with the hours I’ve been putting recently at work).

I’m not quite sure where my time is going now adays. I’m not really browsing the web as much as I used to. I’ve weaned myself off of boingboing, mefi, and just about everything else. I absolutely have no life to speak of, and even though I’m pulling some long hours, there are still large chunks of time that seem missing.

Before I get back to work (deadlines), here’s some random crap I’ve found over the past few weeks (I’ve been really lazy about getting these up):

• The Transformers Archive – The entire original series, #1-80, plus the Headmasters Miniseries and movie tie-in. Pretty impressive. Scarily enough is that somewhere in a garage, I still have about 3/4 of those issues. Transformers were the first comics I got, and sort of kicked of a few years where I got really into comics and illustration.
• John Dvorak, king of moronic tech filler and exceptionally clueless punditry (even for a tech columnist) blasts Apple’s new ad campaign primarily by insulting and mocking the physical appearance of the people in the ads. He questions whether Mike (sic) is a real person (it’s Mark bonehead), is mean to KCRW’s Liza Richardson seemingly just out of spite, blasts Dave Haxton for his glasses and pocket protector and asks who could possibly identify with him (*bangs on Dvorak with clue stick* – perhaps all those UNIX guys and programmers who are switching to Macs in droves thanks to OSX? I personally know at least a half dozen people who would never have considered using a Mac until OSX, but are now happily chugging away on TiBooks or iBooks), and then finally ends complaining about Aron (sic) being creepy looking in his photo. Hey, if you really wanted to find out why he switched instead of presuming, why don’t you read the web page Aaron put up about it? God. Reading Dvorak articles makes me understand how some people can so venomously hate Katz. Same effect, I must imagine. (oh, and as far as execution, the Register did it better (and got the names right at least). in school they kick you out for plagiarism)
• warchalking looks pretty cool (it hit /. the other day). Of course, there are also more high-tech options, like netstumbler. Of course, what I don’t get about that is that it seems you’d have to be online to access the ap db.
• The new Matrox Parhelia is out, and while it has neat features and I’ll probably get one (can’t live w/o real dual monitors on Win2K), even at it’s steep price and (at least for the price) relatively mediocre performance.
• Apple Service Manuals – pretty nifty if you need to do any digging.
• k5 has some articles on our favorite dead horse, copyrights and ip: The RIAA, Fair Use, and You, Digital Rights Managment: Promoting Science and Art, or Monopoly Power?
• /. reports on ScummVM developments. Some interesting talk, and of course a pointer to the project on sourceforge

Oh, which leads to one last bit that’s just really damn cool news. Toys for Bob, the guys behind the original Star Control games have made an official announcement of a port of the 3DO version of Star Control 2 to Mac, Linux, and Windows. Star Control 2, for those who might not be aware, is one of the best computer games ever made. (shacknews has some comments too).

Andy suggested I take a look at Easynews. Yeah, it’s pretty cool, although sort of hard to search (only available once you’re in a group).

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way, by esr.

I threw my drive in the freezer yesterday and when I reattached it, it actually spun up. I was able to archive the albums I’ve ripped onto 8 CDs.

Here’s an IBM article on Customizing Apache for maximum performance. A little while ago there was a /. discussion on Building a Scaleable Apache Site. Some interesting posts there, including a link to how eToys architected their site w/ mod_perl and an article by local guru Dan Kegel on The C10K problem, which is a points to all kinds of interesting stuff, like Rik van Riel’s Linux Performance Tuning site.

Some other interesting stuff on /.: Distributing Unix Knowledge Among Admins, Parsing Algorithms and Resources, The Great American Road Trip, Weblogs as Base for KMS.

This is pretty damn interesting too: Mitnick Testifies Against Sprint in Vice Hack Case. Hey, Kevin Poulsen (google) (check out the just for kids link, those wacky guys at the doj) is editorial director at Security Focus now. I remember when he started out writing for zd a few years back…

I think the real question about Palladium, is how much do you trust Microsoft?

Ha. Last week I finally resolved to ripping my entire CD collection (EAC/LAME). I set up a second machine and a spare 10GB hard drive and started ripping on both my main system and the second machine. I actually was making pretty good progress. I had about 80 albums ripped. Woke up this morning to find the hard drive has apparently died.

Netcasters win ruling – U.S. rules songs delivered online will be charged royalty fees at half that originally proposed. So, the RIAA kills the internet radio industry and we get sunshine courtesy of CNN. That’s wonderful. Discussion @ mefi, /., Here’s a run of the numbers, some more details.

Today I spent a few hours working on relative positioning the xbCollapsibleList. You’d think it’d be easy, right? After all, there’s an example freely available… which doesn’t work with IEMac. OK, solve the switch, IEMac should have DOM support, it can default to the Gecko switch. Haha, if things were so easy. Well then, how about going to Microsoft and finding some documentation? Yeah, this is Microsoft’s idea of documentation for IEMac. (Honestly, is a little developer documentation too much to ask for? This is one of the reasons why I hate doing front-end development) Apple’s Developer Connection articles unfortunately, weren’t a help in this case. DOM Inspector would have been helpful with my poking around. In any case, after a bit of experimenting, it finally occurs to me that what’s going on is that IEMac and Gecko have disagreements on what the offsetParent is, and hence the different (or in IEMac’s case, zero) offsets (offset isn’t in the DOM so it’s hard to say who’s right in this case). In any case, I figure that I’ll have to write an offset calculating function that’ll sum the offsets to the top parent and it occurs to me that I know I read about this a while ago. After a few Google queries, I end up at Peter-Paul Koch’s Find Position article, which I in fact did read before. I threw in his find position functions, which really only saved me writing one loop, but it does remind us of an important lesson. Always check ppk’s site first. He also has a DOM Compatibility Table and recently updated articles on Window Manipulation and Doctypes.

Gecko users, check out Doctor Unclear’s window properties, methods, events page. Weeeee!

Funny, I never saw this PNG Alpha Mask Demo before. It kicks all sorts of ass. Here’s hoping that IE7 really will have the decent PNG/CSS support that was promised several versions ago (we’ll see if Microsoft steps up to the plate now that the competition has officially arrived).

Found this in my logs, I’m linked on a page of CSS stuff. I wish I could read what it says, but, um, I can’t because it’s in Japanese.