Monday, October 18, 2004

The New Face of Ars

The New Face of Ars : Page 1 : Page 1

I've been working on a similar project to what Ars recently undertook. It's quite challenging to comform to XHTML 1.0 standards, but the end result is very cool. Separating presentation, markup, and data is a great way to add flexibility to your site. Especially when your content is generated. XHTML is a great way to go as it is easier to produce as consume (any XML parser should be able to consume valid XHTML)

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

RE: A Little Movie That Could...

I'm on the search beat every day, so I tend to get a little jaded about hype. Everyone loves an underdog, and I'm no exception. So when a little buzz ripple blossoms into a full-fledged trend, I tend to identify. Such is the case with the movie Napoleon Dynamite



[Via Flagged Items]

I thought this was interesting. It illustrates the independent model against the giant coporations when promoting movies. The independent film just chugs along steadily, where as the giant films go out in a flash of glory.

It would be interesting to compare the revenue vs. cost of the movies as well.

Monday, October 11, 2004

Re: Almost geekless in Seattle

Almost geekless in Seattle.

It's cool to see people blogging about places I've stayed and eaten. This is a post by Chris Pirillo's wife mentioning the hotel monaco (at which Gwen and I have stayed) and Thai Heaven (at which Gwen and I have eaten)

Monday, October 04, 2004

RE: Cooperative Networking: Share the Bandwidth

What happens when two children decide to share a teddy bear, but then one of them changes his mind? The children will likely tear the stuffed toy in two, leaving only bear parts and crying children. A peer-to-peer streaming system can be like that bear.

[Via Microsoft Research News and Headlines]

This sounds a lot like bittorrent. With video and audio editing software so common and with mainstream hardware capable of handling the loads, distributing that media is going to become and already is the bottle neck. Bittorrent wont solve this problem because it only increases distribution of popular files... And unfortunately, you're family isn't nearly as interesting to me as mine is...

Maybe we should all just have fiber in our houses....

Friday, October 01, 2004

RE: Is It Just My Imagination?

Are inkblots meaningless smears of ink, or the secret key to your personality? Though most psychologists no longer use inkblots to determine the twists and turns of your psyche, sometimes they pay attention to the stories you tell yourself about the blobs.

[Via Microsoft Research News and Headlines]

It's good to see researchers looking into technology that can be used to make our computer systems more secure. They bring up a good point that is discussed in many different places. The user is sometimes the most hackable part of a security system.

It would be interesting to take this study and create a threat model. Come up with some varying ways to attack a system that is secured using a similar method. In the article they discuss how, even is people see the same type of object in the inkblot, they will describe it differently.

I suppose if a system like this was implemented, the people with the greatest creativity would have the strongest passwords.
RE: Mount St. Helens Lets Off Some Steam

jdray writes "The cube farm is all a twitter right now, as Mt. St. Helens is spewing out a steam plume, and you can see if from our building. The cam for the volcano seems to be down, but we just saw a news helicopter from KATU, one of our local news stations, headed that direction. They should have some content up shortly." Other readers suggest: KOIN, KOIN webcams, Kiro TV, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, or CNN.

[Via Slashdot]

You can count this as our obligatory Mount Saint Helen's blog post.

Make this the second Mnt Snt Hlns eruption I've lived through...

Testing

uh... yeah what he said.

:)

Distribution and Vulnerabilities

http://www.installsite.org/pages/en/topic/gdi.htm?

An interesting article that covers what developers need to do as a result of the GDI+ exploit recently announced by Microsoft.

This exploit appears to be different than previous exploits because it touches a piece of code that is both 1) redistributable by a developer and 2) written in a platform that supports side by side execution of dlls. The overall effect being that developers are going to have to get more involved in making sure their applications are up to date and patched against this vulnerability.

It's not quite the same as when IE or WinXP has a vulnerability that must be patched. Depending on what major applications use this package, and how they use it, we could see other exploits beyond the ones targeting internet explorer or outlook.

Windows Media player in Europe

RE: EU Court of First Instance hears Microsoft antitrust appeal

Attorneys from Microsoft and its rivals argued whether the EU's antitrust sanctions should be implemented immediately or stayed during Microsoft's appeal.

[Via Ars Technica]

I'm mostly checking out bloggar's integration with RSS Bandit. Also, this is an interesting post. If Microsoft is forced to unbundle WMP from XP it will be interesting to see how that sells. And who pays for the marketing for this new version....

It seems likely that the unbundled copy wont sell very well, not because people like WMP, but because there wont be much of an incentive. Most people who want XP, already have XP, unless they're buying a copy with a new PC.

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