Ping pong balls mysteriously falling up…. Garrett Fitzgerald’s Blog notes “Bob Keeshan, Captain Kangaroo, left us today. Fark has a long thread with people sharing their memories of the Captain and other shows that were on when we were young.”
An interesting biography is available here.
After a long, virtuous life in which he never used a 2-digit field to represent the year, a programmer died and was met at the Pearly Gates by none other than Saint Babbage himself.
As they walked down the hall in Programmer Heaven, they came to a door, and he looked inside to see lots of programmers busily working, and the walls were covered with user manuals, every one different.
“Oh, that’s Linux heaven,” said Saint Babbage. “We gave them all the manuals they could possibly dream of, well formatted and professionally prepared, answering any possible question they might have.”
The programmer looked in the door to the next room, and it, too, was full of happy looking programmers typing and merrily computing away. The shelves on the walls were absolutely crammed full of boxes of commercial software. He looked Saint Babbage, and Saint Babbage said “That’s OS/2 heaven. They finally get decent app support.”
“But we have to be quiet going past the next door, OK?” The programmer nodded, and the two tip-toed past another door. Yet another room filled with happy programmers.
Once they were well away from the door, the programmer said, “What was that all about?”
Saint Babbage nodded knowingly, and replied, “That’s Macintosh Heaven. They think they’re the only ones up here.”
Stephen C. Den Best at http://whining.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$24
There are more Linux distributions than hours in the day to try them all, but here’s an innovative one you might want to look at: Dyne:bolic is a single-CD bootable disk focused on multimedia applications – streaming sound, video processing, image rendering and manipulation. If multimedia is your thing and you’ve been thinking about checking out Linux, here’s a free and painless way to give it a try. And check out the easy, fast and reliable BitTorrent link on the download page – I’ll be one of many hosts for the weekend.
Great parody here, from Groklaw
Said Neo to The Architect.
David Kirkpatrick in Fortune:
What do these things have in common: the TV show American Idol, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, eBay, and the open-source Linux operating system? They’re all manifestations of a key trend of our time: the shift in power away from centralized institutions and toward the individual ÷ from the center to the edge.
“I agree. But it’s also from the few to the many, from supply to demand, from controlled to networked. And on the far side of each “to,” autonomy. The ability to initiate, to form and join associations, to do for themselves. To have and make up their own minds.”
“Choice. This is about choice.” — The Doc Searls Weblog
Radio Userland is doing some funny stuff, and conseqently, I haven’t been able to post entries for a few days. It appears I came very close to running out of space (the account comes with 40Mb of space) and my attempts to fix it have aggravated the problem. Hang in there…
Noticed two interesting hits in the http://www.tedroche.com web server log today:
2004-01-18 13:05:56 203.177.113.121 - 192.168.1.98 80 GET /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll UL=1&ACT=4&BUILD=2614&STRMVER=4&CAPREQ=0 404 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1)
2004-01-18 13:05:58 203.177.113.121 - 192.168.1.98 80 GET /MSOffice/cltreq.asp UL=1&ACT=4&BUILD=2614&STRMVER=4&CAPREQ=0|-|0|404_Object_Not_Found 404 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1)
I’d guess that the first is a call to the Outlook Web Service for exchange, and the second a probe to see if there’s an MSOffice or Office Web Parts installation on the machine, each presumably exploiting a Microsoft security problem.
The address of the inquirer is located in the Phillipines. I don’t really know enough to determine if that is a compromised machine, or if that is the location of the malicious attack. You’d presume they’d hide themselves, but this isn’t my specialty. I just ban the IP addresses I see.
This article in eWeek points out some of the pros and cons in the PostGreSQL vs. MySQL debate.
OSNews links to a review entitled “Can a Geek Love Xandros?” reviewing the distribution formerly known as Corel Linux. Overall it sounds like it could make a user-friendly desktop replacement. Pretty impressive, considering it is based on Debian, a distribution with a reputation for solidity but not user-friendliness.
(Fun Stuff) Credit Card fun. Do they really look at your signature? One fellow’s research into variations. Link from Hentzenwerke Intergalactic