Where is that x86 version of OS X anyway?
Month: September 2002
maybe not today, but perhaps next year
All the News Google Algorithms Say Is Fit to Print
Mr. Page said the origin of the service was a demonstration program written in January by a Google engineers that could identify similar articles on many Web pages. Yesterday, for example, Google’s site used this technology to offer users a choice of 1,897 articles on the siege of Yasir Arafat’s compound.
[ . . . ]
“Their front page is not too far off from what is on the Post site at the moment,” said Douglas B. Feaver, the executive editor of washingtonpost.com. “It’s a useful service, but it’s not going to drive me to the unemployment office tomorrow.”
It’s one thing for the bright young new hires to consider you a milestone they will inevitably surpass, but when engineers can make it happen, it can’t be a great feeling.
A dystopian vision is coming into focus: the Machines pick our news for us, program our meals (for optimal nutrition), tell us what crops to plant and when, assemble our entertainment (perhaps even writing the books and composing the music). What do we do for them once they built and plugged in? Make a list of the jobs that are or could be placed under the control of a machine. Then remove humans from the scenario (like the highway or the airways) and we might be on our way to redundance.
Mount Baker expedition
The pictures can speak for themselves.
bargains, if you can find ’em
Friends of the Library Book Sale
“It is not unusual to see people buy scores of books at once, carting them out on something you would carry luggage on,” she said. “They line up an hour or more before the sale starts and when the doors open, they make a mad dash to various parts of the sale, piling large numbers of books into boxes.”
It sure isn’t unusual to see that, but I never see all that much I want to take home. I did get some kids books (a couple of colorful natural history references), and my best score was a hardback of Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson” — with dust jacket — for a buck.
want half a ton of composted herbivore dung?
Woodland Park Zoo Press Release
As the (African wild) dog days of summer begin to wane, it’s time again to look forward to Woodland Park Zoo’s annual fall Fecal Fest! Now’s your chance to purchase a load of that rich, multi-species feces known as Woodland Park Zoo Doo®.
My third trip to the Zoo for this garden accelerator, 8 bags full (the tall Kraft paper yard waste bags). Loading it (each bag weighs about 100 pounds), carrying it up the stairs at my house, and spreading it around was a wearisome task. My back is already stiffening.
But some next spring, I’ll reap the benefits. And it will be time to get more, anyway.
I had planned to put most of today’s harvest on the vegetable garden, but summer doesn’t seem to want to end just yet, whatever the calendar may say about it. So tomatoes are still ripening, and I’m not going to disturb that process.
resolving IRQ conflicts in FreeBSD on a ThinkPad A20m
(The wordy title is to help make sure anyone who needs it can find it.)
I have not had working audio on this laptop since FreeBSD 4.6 was released (or at least since I upgraded to it). Turns out I had an IRQ conflict with the internal PCI bus: the sound chip/card and the network interface were trying to share IRQ 11 and if the card was inserted at boot time, the sound driver (pcm) never attached to the sound card. Bummer.
After many, many Google searches and a couple of queries to the freebsd-mobile list, I finally hit on something that unlocked the puzzle. I saw some notifications about the sound driver’s failure to attach: that led to a discussion of an IBM tool (called PS2.EXE) that allows you to rejigger how IRQs are assigned. In my case I wanted the PCI bus to pick from more than one, in hopes the different drivers would take take separate ones.
It worked.
Continue reading “resolving IRQ conflicts in FreeBSD on a ThinkPad A20m”
user agent of the day
Google Search: “Microsoft URL Control”
Microsoft URL Control 6.00.8169: what is it? and what does it want?
Early reports suggest it’s either hunting out unsecured formmail.cgi scripts (circa 1995) or looking for unsecured mail relays.
The version number (if that’s what it is) makes me wonder if it’s part of IE 6, remembering the offline browser feature that was in IE4 and the associated consternation it created.
NetInfo reference materials
Setting up a network of thin Mac OS X clients
I haven’ tested any of this but it looks like it covers a lot of useful areas.
RSS coming of age?
Usage Statistics for blue.paulbeard.org – September 2002
5 of the top 20 search queries I get are for CNN’s RSS feed (which of course is not provided by CNN): it’s the number 1 query with 4 more appearances in the 11 – 20 spots.
I wonder how many people are starting to browse their news this way and linking to it from an aggregator, rather than the home page of a site? And how will news organizations respond? Will they generate weak RSS files to discourage this (leading more third parties to roll their own) or will they find a way to leverage this new entry point? It’s akin to the argument over deep linking, though the site provides the links. One scenario is that pages read per user may go up as people scan the feed before going to the site: usage, defined as casual browsing, may decline, in favor of more focused reading. Never will good headlines and solid lead paragraphs (‘nut grafs’, as I recall them) be so important.
good news or bad news?
Suspected Computer-Virus Author Arrested
T0rn, with a zero, was not as menacing as the Code Red, Sircam and Nimda worms and viruses, which caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to corporate computer networks last year. Linux-based software systems account for a small segment of the computing market.
So does this mean that more people should use Linux since there are fewer viruses that exploit or are we lucky so few people do because the effects might have been worse?
According to this page, t0rn is a rootkit installed by the Lion or Ramen virues and exploits 8.2, 8.2-P1, 8.2.2-Px, and all 8.2.3 beta versions of BIND