Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, November 5, 2002

Chimera 0.6 is out -- Comment()
Yesterday I wrote about using Chimera 0.5 for browsing the web. Today a new stable version was released, see the Chimera project page. The new version works ok, but I have had one crash of the program. (Everything else continued to work, and Chimera started up all right after the crash, so nothing was corrupted.) Tabbed browsing is still the number one feature of the program, although the speed is also nice.

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Ancient anatomy: "Dream Anatomy: high-resolution gallery of ancient anatomical drawings."

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Utility Automates Users' Migration From PC To Mac: "Apple Computer's "switch" ad campaign -- where people describe how they dumped big bad Microsoft and their PC for the smoother, simpler experience of the Macintosh -- got a boost Monday when Detto Technologies announced..." [Google Technology News]

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Sonera security staff held on snooping charges: "Two senior security staff at Finish telco Sonera have been remanded in custody, charged with breaching customer privacy by allegedly riffling through private telephone records in an attempt to identify an internal mole." [The Register]

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Nokia goes head-to-head with Nintendo. "The Game Boy Advance is set to get serious competition at last, with Nokia taking the wraps off a new device called the N-Gage - a handheld console styled mobile phone which is designed specifically to act as a challenge to Nintendo's dominance of the market. The new device, which looks superficially similar to the GBA but bears an attractive brushed metal finish and is bristling with buttons thanks to the requirements of functioning as a mobile phone, will be introduced in February 2003, and games for it will be distributed on solid state memory cards - much like the GBA or GP32 units." [The Register]

Huevos developments -- Comment()
inessential.com writes: "Huevos ideas. I get a fair amount of email about how Huevos should allow one to choose a search engine from the keyboard. I agree completely. [...] What I’m thinking right now is that it would be best to allow the user to assign command keys to the various search engines. Google, for instance, might be cmd-G. You’d assign command keys through the Prefs window, the same place you edit your search engines."

This seems to be a nice idea. I like Huevos, because it is small and does one thing well. Would it be possible to make Huevos interface with Amazon.com also?

Manufactured Serendipity -- Comment()
Sam Ruby writes: "So why do I blog? Because it works. It finds worthwhile things for me to read. It helps me refine and focus my thoughts and be more productive too. And most of all, creates the opportunity to interact with more interesting people. That's what's in it for me." This text is the best discussion of blogging I have found so far.

I feel the same way. There are many things I'm willing to share with others, and things I don't want to share.

I don't want a webcam watching me, but I'm prepared to post my individual ideas for others to ponder upon. This may result in "self-organization", "emergent behaviour", and "collective phenomena" - topics in which scientific research is interested in right now. I believe some nice and unexpected things will happen when some of the private thinking and preparation of ideas is made public. The combination of individual viewpoints and thinking may result in suprising developments, which may benefit you, or somebody else somewhere.

Effectivity of the Mail spam filter -- Comment()
Yesterday I received 23 spam e-mail, and 19 of those were blocked by the spam filter in Apple's Mail program. And three of the non-recognized messages were identical, so basically only two messages out of 23 managed to slip through. This is nice.

These days spam is practically no nuisance at all for me. I have written before about the success of the Mail spam filter . The Mail spam filter is a convincing reason to start using the Mail program.