Get to the Point Paul

This essay is too long to read but too good to skim!

Is It Worth Being Wise?: "I think it's important to understand the relationship between intelligence and wisdom, and particularly what seems to be the growing gap between them. That way we can avoid applying rules and standards to intelligence that are really meant for wisdom. These two senses of 'knowing what to do' are more different than most people realize. The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence. Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic. And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment.

That's particularly worth remembering. A physicist friend recently told me half his department was on Prozac. Perhaps if we acknowledge that some amount of frustration is inevitable in certain kinds of work, we can mitigate its effects. Perhaps we can box it up and put it away some of the time, instead of letting it flow together with everyday sadness to produce what seems an alarmingly large pool. At the very least, we can avoid being discontented about being discontented.

If you feel exhausted, it's not necessarily because there's something wrong with you. Maybe you're just running fast."

All Aboard The Ubuntu Train! You Too ESR!

Goodbye, Fedora: "This afternoon, I installed Edgy Eft on my main development machine -- from one CD, not five. In less than three hours' work I was able to recreate the key features of my day-to-day toolkit. The after-installation mass upgrade to current packages, always a frightening prospect under Fedora, went off without a hitch. I'm not expecting Ubuntu to be perfect, but I am now certain it will be enough better to compensate me for the fact that I need to learn a new set of administration tools. Fedora, you had every advantage, and you had my loyalty, and you blew it. And that is a damn, dirty shame. -- Eric S. Raymond"

Vista's Peach Wreck Cognition

...windows vistas speech recognition of king rocks delete of king rocks capitalize f asterisk see kay eye inn gee sucks exclamation point ...




YouTube - Windows Vista Speech Recognition Tested - Perl Scripting

Life Is Hard

I use Google cuz it makes my life easier. I run Ubuntu cuz it makes my life easier. I prefer to program in Python and use Django for web developement cuz they make my life easier... and now the Django cheat sheet (Mercurytide) makes my life easier still!

I *HEART* Nintendo, I Hate Fox News & Penny Arcade is my Hero

MyFox Milwaukee | Nintendo Hand-Held Child Molester Target: "Nintendo Hand-Held Child Molester Target"

Penny Arcade! - The Most Recent Catastrophe:
"While driving on the highway, a child molester who is also driving might look into the back seat of your car and see your child using their DS back there. According to this terrifying report, the child molester can then - while driving their car - produce a DS of their own and utilize it to divine your home address. You will recall that he is driving on the highway at speeds approaching sixty miles an hour. One hand is on the wheel and the other is managing the gearbox. Thus, there can be no question... He is entering these messages into the DS with his erect phallus."

B.C. firm to show off quantum computer

B.C. firm to show off quantum computer: "D-Wave Systems Inc. of Burnaby, B.C. plans to show off its commercial quantum computers at the Computer History Museum on Feb. 13 and at the Telus World of Science museum in Vancouver on Feb. 15."

Steve Jobs has DRMatitis

Apple - Thoughts on Music

Bruce Schneier is Funny & Smrt

MySpace Passwords Aren't So Dumb: "blink182"

History of Programming Languages

I showed this to someone recently and they asked me to "put that were links go".

O'Reilly -- The History of Programming Languages

I Like It

YouTube - BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype - www.bumptop.com

Not All Traffic Is Created Equal

Not All Traffic Is Created Equal » Publishing 2.0: "mounting evidence suggests that Digg traffic in particular is less like networking with like-minded individuals at a social event and more like getting attacked by a pack of wild dogs, who leave nothing of value in their wake, other than lessons learned on closing comments and crashed servers"

open-source segway

http://lca2007.linux.org.au/talk/185

I've often thought that it would be fun for some of us to get together some summer's weekend to build something cool, like the open source segway. Any other suggestions of what to build?

The Internet weighs two ounces

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2007/01/this_is_lovely.html

Adobe's PDF Software Flawed

Dunham gave this hypothetical scenario: an attacker finds a PDF file on a banking Web site. The attacker creates a hostile Web site that links to the bank's PDF file. Included is malicious JavaScript code that will run on the unsuspecting user's computer once the link is clicked.

http://www.physorg.com/news87093505.html

Blutooth Watch To Control Your Phone?

Review: Sony Ericsson MBW-100 Bluetooth Watch

When a call is received by the paired phone, the watch will vibrate and display the phone number or, if available, contact name of the party that is calling. The phone's ringer can be quickly silenced by pressing the watch's top button once, and the call can be outright rejected (and sent to voicemail) by pressing the top button a second time. When the phone receives a new text or MMS message, the watch will vibrate and display an envelope icon for a few seconds...

... But it only works with a select few Sony Ericson phones :(

Do heavy things fall faster than light things?

Video of dropping a hammer and a feather on the moon to see which falls
faster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHzVsLAhUCA

Athlete fails gender test

1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6188775.stm reads:

"Santhi was subjected to a gender test in Doha and we have received the
report which says she failed the test," said Manmohan Singh, chairman of
the Indian Olympic Association's Medical Commission.

Soundararajan is refusing to comment. "I was not informed about the test
results and I don't know much on that. I do not want to talk about it,"
she told journalists.

...

KP Mohan, a sports journalist, said athletes were usually examined by a
team of doctors, including a gynaecologist, endocrinologist and
psychologist, and put through physical and clinical examinations during a
gender test.

2) http://tinyurl.com/yxxuu7 reads:

[G]enetic tests in place in sport might unfairly single out some women as
men, IOC medical commission chairman Dr Arne Ljungquist [said].

...

The gender verification tests are based on chromosomes and sometimes a
sexual disorder results in the presence of male chromosomes in a female.
The athlete would then present male-like features, though without gaining
any undue advantage.

...

The IOC only allows the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technique to
determine chromosomal patterns, a test that was reportedly not done on
Santhi.

...

AIS individuals are genetically male, will have 46,XY chromosomal (male)
pattern, may have male or female genitalia or predominantly male or female
genitalia, but will not have a uterus. Medically, if such individuals
compete against women, they will have no unfair advantage.

3) The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is used for duplicating DNA so labs
have a larger sample to perform tests on. I assume (but am not sure) the
sample is examined to find the X and Y chromosomes. Females have two X
chromosomes and males have one X and one Y.

It is possible for a human to be born with extra chromosomes. eg two X
and one Y is called "Klinefelter's syndrome". In cases of XXX, XXY, XYY,
or YYY there are a few known differences from the more common XX and XY
humans (eg height). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYY_syndrome for
more information.

Hidden Message

Apparently, this clothing company uses their labels for political expression.

Open-Source Car

"The idea behind open source development is to allow anyone to copy, modify and redistribute ordinarily secret information about a technology without paying royalties to the original developers."

Discovery Channel :: News - Technology :: Open-Source Car Project Gears Up:

Browser sniffing is [or should be] dead

"Sniff the right way

One solid alternative [to browser sniffing] is feature sniffing. This is the other solution mentioned by the “Gecko is Gecko” folks, and it’s vastly superior; instead of looking at the user-agent string and redirecting if it’s not in your “approved” list, you instead use JavaScript to test for the features you want (and, these days, browser sniffing is much more about JavaScript — particularly AJAX capabilities — than anything else). This is a concept that’s been kicking around for years, and which has had one or two high-profile articles written about it (including one by JavaScript guru Stuart Langridge, helpfully linked by the “Gecko is Gecko” site).

The nice thing about feature sniffing is that it’s almost completely foolproof: a browser will lie out of both sides of its mouth about whether or not it’s IE, but its JavaScript engine won’t lie about whether it supports getElementById. There are a couple of wrinkles in this rosy picture (notably Safari which, last I checked, exposes a method called preventDefault on DOM events, even though it doesn’t actually do what preventDefault is supposed to do), but I’d be willing to bet it’s as least as effective, percentage-wise, as sniffing for the “big four” (IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera) and it has the advantage of being future-proof: when the browser market changes, you have to adjust your sniffing scripts. But so long as you’re testing for actual features, you never have to update; getElementById isn’t going to get renamed any time soon.

And to really hammer it home, keep in mind that this is by far the most effective way to implement AJAX effects. Versions of IE prior to 7 expose XMLHttpRequest in a slightly different fashion from other browsers, so the browser-sniffing method relies on being able to absolutely differentiate IE so you can use the correct invocation. Of course, lots of other browsers like to masquerade as IE in their user-agent strings, so that’s out the window — trying to use IE-style invocation in non-IE browsers will just throw JavaScript errors at your users, and then they’ll complain (if you’re lucky) or take their money and their ad-viewing eyeballs somewhere else (if you’re not). Meanwhile, a few short lines of JavaScript which determine where the XMLHttpRequest object lives are all that’s needed to effectively work out how to do AJAX. "

The B-List: Sniffle: