Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, September 27, 2002

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Much Better Sigma SD9 samples: "At last the sun is shining here in Cologne so we ran back to the Sigma booth and grabbed an SD9. These images are far more representative of what we had hoped and expected from Foveon's..." [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

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Hasselblad H1 & Kodak 645H sample: "We have managed to get a sample from Kodak Pro's new DCS 645H mounted on a new Hasselblad H1 medium format camera." [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

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Microsoft VPN flaw may open intranets to attack: "Flaw leaves Windows 2000, Windows XP clients vulnerable." [InfoWorld: Top News]

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iMakeContent tells about the top three most censored news stories of 2001/2, according to Project Censored [via Wood S Lot]:

1. FCC Moves To Privatise Airwaves [Guardian]

2. New Trade Treaty Seeks to Privatise Global Social Services [Ecologist]

3. United States' Policies in Colombia [Counterpunch]

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New Scientist: "The controversial do-it-yourself medicine that inspired the heart-rending movie Lorenzo's Oil has finally been proved to work. The new research ends years of uncertainty about the treatment and demolishes the claims of experts who repeatedly said it was a worthless quack remedy." [via John Robb's Radio Weblog]

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Writing Across the Arts - From Art Criticism to Art Play: "I ... came across this weblog named "From Art Criticism to Art Play" - a weblog that is part of a course being taught by Barbara Ganley at Middlebury College. The purpose of the course, she explains, is:To explore and write about the arts in 2002 can be an exhilarating though baffling journey through traditional, academic and journalistic print forms and new, often non-print forms, including hypertext and multi-media texts." [DeepFUN Weblog]

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AI Cats, Escaping Robot Bugs, and Self Taught Butterflies: "Researchers at Utah State University are taking a bold step in the quest for Robot AIs. While other teams are working on full humanoid mobility chassis or just robobugs (that escape), the Utah Brain Project seeks to build a 'cat brain' using 72 processors that use Field Programmable Gate Array technology to create neural networks. The current brain can operate as quickly as 10,000 Pentium II 400MHz processors in implementing the neural algorithms. The ultimate goal is a Robokitten that learns from its environment as it interacts with it through sensors that approximate the five human senses." [kuro5hin.org]

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Iris Scanners in Canadian Airports: "... the first biometrics (Iris-scanning specifically) devices in airport will be in place in Toronto and Vancouver starting in March." [Slashdot]

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Music firms try to 'gag' net café: "Music chiefs try to stop an internet café going public on their wrangling over £1m damages for allowing music downloads." [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY]

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( blogdex : recent ) points to Bush Speech Generator for making your own Bush speech.

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Software firms team to fight bug leaks: "The key proposal is a 30-day waiting period between a patch release and details of the bug being released." [The Register]

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Nokia introduces new 3G handset; stock price soars 10% on upbeat international news: "Nokia formally introduced its new model, the 6650 camera phone, on Thursday. The company claims the new handset is the world's first thoroughbred third-generation phone..." See also Focus falls on Nokia's 3G mobile phone and Nokia launches 3G phones. [Google Technology News]

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The duck of the draw: "And the winner is... a duck. A Scary Duck to be precise: Alistair Coleman's witty, irreverent blog has beaten 300 rivals to take the title of Best British Blog 2002..." [( blogdex : recent )]

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Adam Curry quotes Francois de La Rochefoucauld. "We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."

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Why Software Piracy is Good for Microsoft: "Salon has an article that explains why Microsoft has toned down its anti-piracy actions in China and other developing markets. The answer is simple: due to the network effect, the more users you have, the greater your strength..." [Google Technology News]

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Microsoft FrontPage Susceptible To Major Security Flaws: "Administrators barely had time to test and batch last week's round of critical Microsoft vulnerabilities before the company issued yet another critical warning. In a new bulletin, Microsoft says there's a critical flaw in its FrontPage." See also Microsoft FrontPage Flaw Found and Critical Flaws Affront Microsoft's FrontPage [Google Technology News]

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A Brief Introduction to Writing a Brief Introduction About Some Activity No One Cares About on K5: "You're passionate about something. It doesn't matter what you're passionate about. It could be basketweaving, jai lai, or how to make a convincing escargot out of common slugs. Whatever it is, it's something no one else could ever, ever, possibly give a damn about. But that won't stop you, no sir! You're going to tell the world about it and write... An Introduction to Something No One Could Ever Be Interested In. You can't just charge in to this, though. You need to write a good introduction. This article will show you how." [kuro5hin.org]

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He Can't Do That!: "That was the immediate, loud, and angry reaction of many who read the recent announcement that, starting January 2003, new Macs will not be able to boot OS 9." (Dr. Dobb's Journal via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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Microsoft acknowledges Linux threat: "At the Microsoft Most Valued Professionals conference held in London this week, chief executive Steve Ballmer acknowledged the growing threat of Linux. See also Ballmer: "We'll Outsmart Open Source" and Ballmer: Our pros will outsmart open source. [Google Technology News]

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Slapper Worm brought to heel: "Two fresh variants of the Slapper worm, which spreads through Linux machines by exploiting a well-known flaw in OpenSLL libraries, have been sighted this week." See also New Linux Worm Found in the Wild and Third slapper worm hits the street. [Google Technology News]

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Open-Source Tug of War Heats Up: "A lobbying group known as the Initiative for Software Choice is stepping up the fight against several governments' moves to adopt legislation advocating the use of open-source systems. By Michelle Delio." [Wired News]

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John Robb's Radio Weblog tells how to use Google news in Radio:

I just used the viewRSS box macro to create a list of the news from Google Business. Here is how to do it yourself (I published it into a story page). Just copy the code example into the "source" view of the editing box on Radio. Cut and paste the URL for the RSS feed you want to use and hit publish. Of course, it would be possible to create a single page with lots of news sources displayed this way on your desktop website. (Time to create = 5 minutes).

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Matt Croydon::postneo tells that The Washington Post ran an article this morning by Leslie Walker entitled "Google News, Untouched by Human Hand":

Despite the service's glitches, Google's human-free newscast may prove to be habit forming because it's so dynamic, changing more frequently than most publications it indexes. The news service has two components: a browsable directory that looks like a streamlined CNN.com and a searchable database similar to other news search services from Lycos, Ask Jeeves and AlltheWeb.
The novel part is the automatically generated directory resembling a digital newspaper, with computers dictating story placement. It presents summary pages in eight categories and contains headlines on about 60 topics, all refreshed every 15 minutes.

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I downloaded the installer for Microsoft Internet Explorer X 5.2.2, but didn't install, because the installer requires you to quit all other applications. And I haven't been using IE for months now, so maybe it is time to get rid of IE completely. I'm currently using OmniWeb 4.1.1, Chimera 0.5 and Mozilla 1.1 for browsing.

Microsoft Internet Explorer X 5.2.2: "Provides all of the latest security and performance enhancements for Internet Explorer 5 for Mac OS X, including the security vulnerability described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-050. It also provides support for the new Quart text smoothing feature..." [AppleScript Info] [Mac Net Journal]

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Why Some With HIV Are Healthier: "esearchers have solved the 16-year-old mystery of why a small number of HIV patients remain healthy after contracting the virus. By Kristen Philipkoski." [Wired News]

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You've got mail: 60 billion a day by 2006: "Onslaught of spam expected to drive market for message filtering." [InfoWorld: Top News]

The spam filter in Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) Mail program has been a blessing. I hope this technology can keep up with spammers. Of course, Mac users are currently a small minority of computer users, so spammers may not be too keen on making their messages bypass this filtering. I hope so.

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I have been using my iBook as a music jukebox. This has some problems, because sometimes I need the iBook elsewhere, and I have been planning to purchase an iPod. Thus it is nice to hear about user experiences. MyAppleMenu points to MP3 As Family Music Tool: "After using an iPod for a couple of weeks, I'm now convinced the category has legs."

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There are other Mac users who prefer Watson to Sherlock. MyAppleMenu ponders Why Watson Is Smarter Than Sherlock: "Watson is engineered to be a platform, while Sherlock is only an application."