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Wednesday, March 24, 2004 |
Linux on the Desktop, Part XIV: The Novell Years.
Novell, the up-and-coming superchum of Linux who has recently acquired
both SuSE and Ximian, wants to toss its hat into the "desktop panacea"
ring and pontificate on the future of Linux on the desktop (with Novell
products in the server closet). [Ars Technica] 
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NewsWatcher is a "new free
RSS reader for Windows that includes the unique Vision interface
developed by Scopeware and Dr David Gelernter." [Scripting News]
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Nano Jobs. Our friends at the Foresight Institute
collaborated with Working In Ltd. on Working-Nanotechnology.com, a job
board and information clearinghouse specifically for careers in small
tech. The Education & Training section is especially cool, listing
programs and courses for students all the way down to middle school
age. Link
[Boing Boing]
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Hobby: buying used hard drives on eBay and unerasing the data for fun. My friend Simson Garfinkel wrote a great piece on the foolishness of selling hard drives that haven't been sanitized: "Since
then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then
analyzing secondhand hard drives. (...) Last summer, I started buying
drives en masse on eBay.
"In all, I bought and analyzed the content of more than 150
drives(...) In fact, only 10 percent of the drives I purchased had been
properly sanitized.
"Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives
once lived in an ATM. It contained a year's worth of financial
transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a
organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such
information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card
numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another
had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in
Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman
he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he's really into pornography." Link (via Bruce Sterling) [Boing Boing]
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Japanese style: Elegant Gothic Lolita.  Article about Japanese schoolgirl subculture.
An
Elegant Gothic Lolita, EGL or Gothic Lolita for short, is a Japanese
teen or young adult who dresses in amazingly elaborate Gothic looking
babydoll costumes. On the weekends these women walk the streets of
Tokyo and Osaka and fill Yoyogi Park and Harajuku neighborhood where
they pose for tourist’s pictures and sit around looking pretty. They
are beautiful, glamorous, doll-like manifestations of their favorite
Visual Rock stars. Link
[Boing Boing]
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John Shirley on the remake of Dawn of the Dead. The
always interesting John Shirley has a posted an entry about immortality
research and Dawn of the Dead, and why they are related. I
just saw the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, which I thought worked
well--though it lost touch with Romero's satirical metaphor about
living/dead shoppers in the mall--and which reminded me that zombie
movies are not really about corpses coming to get us, they're about
death coming to get us. The hungry corpses in such films (28 Days
Later, the Evil Dead etc) very simply stand for our own death. Our own
corpses, seen in advance. Aggressive, because death is always stalking
us, near or far; because it's inexorable, shuffling toward us slowly
but never stopping, as the zombies do. In those movies, the humans
never completely win out over the zombies. Can't beat death itself. (John also has a new book out about the life of Gurdjieff.) Link [Boing Boing]
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Mikroman: 150-micron-thick slices of theater. My review of Sam Buxton's brilliant Mikroman desk-toys appears in this month's Wired. They really do kick ass.
Using a chemical milling process borrowed from the electronics
industry, the Brit product designer acid-etches detailed scenes onto
150-micron-thick slices of stainless steel. Each of his eight MikroMan
subjects - like this finely rendered astronaut with rover and landing
craft -- is sold flat and can be teased into the third dimension with a
fingernail
Link [Boing Boing]
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Night of the Living Dead on Archive.org. BoingBoing reader VonGuard says:
What with all the zombies here today, i figured it was a good idea to point out that the copyright on Night of the Living Dead has lapsed, and now the whole danged blasted movie is available for free on archive.org. Man, Archive rules.
Link
[Boing Boing]
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Shrook 2 rocks Cory Doctorow's world. OK, after this ringing endorsement from Cory Doctorow, I have to re-evaluate Shrook. I wasn't too impressed with 1.0 but 2.0 sounds cool.
From Boing Boing: Wicked RSS reader redesign:
QUOTE My RSS reader of choice,
Shrook, went 2.0 this morning. After five or six hours of using it
(couldn't sleep, friggin' jetlag), I am in love. This is the best UI
overhaul I've ever seen (the old UI was pretty good too), a completely
unexpected redesign that nevertheless managed to make this app that I
use all day, every day, into something five times more useful and
stable than it had been the day before. I like this punctuated
equilibrium stuff. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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Ann Wizer pays Jakarta's trash-dump pickers to find and wash
plasticized packaging materials from the piles, then assemble them into
tote bags.
If you get busted driving drunk in Ohio, you get these rad-looking yellow license plates with red letters on them. 
