Category: Stuff

Protect your Naughties

Seth Finkelstein has a timely Guardian article on Judge Kozinkski and his exposed naughty bits.

I’m usually careful about making sure whatever I don’t want exposed to general access either is not located in a web accessible position, or is password protected. I don’t depend on robots.txt to ensure web bots don’t access or expose what I don’t want found. As it is, copies of my book, “Painting the Web”, have been appearing on BitTorrent downloads, and I’m not sure if these were based on the copies of chapters I hosted online for my reviewers to download. I password protected the material, but I don’t know how else the material came to be exposed to the P2P “Gimme it for free” crowds.

What think? .burningbird?

Virginia DeBolt writes about the new ICANN boutique domain names, which will spawn chaos, while generating money for a select few registrars (not to menion ICANN, which has now become an organization seemingly interested in profit).

What I want to know is, how am I going to be able to buy .burningbird? Think I should start a PayPal account, and ask for donations?

The bird is back!

Stavros the Wonderchicken is back, weblogging! If you don’t know Stavros, you’re in for a treat. The man is twisted, but in a, well, twisted sort of way.

Every time someone I’ve known a long time re-appears after a lengthy hiatus, I think of the others who I’d like to see writing online again: Jonathon Delacour, Phil Ringnalda, Kathy Sierra, to name just a few. I must not get greedy, though. It’s good to see Chris back writing again.

California, the Squid are coming

An Architheuthis Dux, or giant squid was discovered off the coast of California, a rare location for these elusive creatures. This one was 25 feet if you extrapolate the missing parts. A good size, but not the biggest, by any means.

The dissection shows massive damage from bites, but the researchers don’t know if the bites are pre- or postmortem. (via Laughing Squid)

I realize my job here is to create entertaining stuff for you, but the muse isn’t on me. I’ll leave you other people’s creative stuff.

• From the Indiana University anthropology department, The Museum of Weird Consumer Culture. Fake testicles for your dog. I kid you not. (via Metafilter).
• Fish genetically engineered to taste like fish. Huh. From Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets.
• Missouri hereby apologizes for subjecting the world to Senator Kit Bond. Waterboarding is like swimming…. No, not everyone in Missouri is an idiot.
• If you thought that was bad, during the ice storm recently, our Republican governor warned against price gouging, which is illegal. Instead of having us turn in culprits to the state’s Attorney General–Jay Nixon, a Democrat who happens to be running for governor next year–Blunt advised people to tell the Better Business Bureau or the Chamber of Commerce. Yes, and next time you come across a drug dealer, let Walgren’s know…
• Jeffrey Zeldman, on the call to disband the CSS working group because of the Opera lawsuit:
  

  Apple and Microsoft and Netscape and Sun and Opera have been suing each other since the W3C started. What lawyers do has never stopped developers from Apple and Microsoft and Netscape and Sun and Opera from working together to craft W3C and ECMA specs.

  And even if this time is different—even if, just this once, the existence of a lawsuit will stop a working group from working—I’m not sure it’s practical or advisable to cut browser makers out of the equation. For one thing, have you seen what the W3C comes up with when browser developers aren’t involved?

  I can attest to this. I diligently followed the RDF working group’s effort. No browser developers were involved in it. Turned my hair white.

• Granny Hackers make History. Good story but…granny? If I ever get a chance to meet Tim Berners-Lee, I’m calling him Grandpa. (via Michael Bernstein)

• From Dark Roasted Blend: The Art of Extreme Sleeping. Photos of nappers from Japan, to China, to the States, including cats, kids, and Japanese girl students. An incredible photo story.
• The “crowd-sourced justice” types (thanks to Dave Rogers for the term), may find themselves the target of the laws they advocate. One of the local laws being considered in the state of Missouri (and elsewhere) would hold sites like MySpace, Blogger, and Facebook liable for comments and posts considered ‘threatening’, or a form of harassment. The same would apply to Google, AOL, and Yahoo, for any threats or ‘harassment’ via email.
• Today marks the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, an event celebrated less and less every year. Wired has a short and wonderfully dispassionate look at the events of the day. On the day before Pearl Harbor, my Dad turned 31 years old. He was a train conductor, somewhere over the midwestern plains. When he heard about Pearl Harbor, he got off at the next stop and immediately signed up–serving in the 82nd Airborne throughout the war. Dad received battlefield commissions, eventually making the rank of Captain. What kind of soldier was he? Well, he greatly admired Bradley, and despised Patton. That should tell you all you need to know. (via 3 Quarks Daily)
• Discussing his new book, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman writes:
  

  I’m not a vegetarian, and I’m not an advocate of a vegetarian diet; I’m an advocate of Americans eating fewer animal products – less meat, fish, poultry, and dairy. And there are two excellent reasons for this….First off, we eat too much of that stuff for our health; every single responsible, independent, and impartial study shows as much. But they also show that replacing the beef in your diet with potato chips and soda won’t do you any good. You can be a “vegetarian” and still eat plenty of food that’s bad for you.

  Secondly, the production of animal products as food is a major contributor to global warming. See the UN Report entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow … which says, ultimately, that 18 percent of greenhouse gasses are a direct result of the production of animals for human consumption.

  So if you cut back your consumption of animal products significantly, you not only reduce your chances of heart attack and other so-called lifestyle diseases, you reduce your carbon footprint – the impact you have on global warming.

  The concept is not to cut out all meat, but to cut down on the amount of meat we eat. Americans eat far more meat then is needed–especially with diets like Atkins, which are environmentally equivalent to Indonesia’s deforestation . Via Sierra Club Compass.

• David Lance Goines from Illustration Art:
  

  I am a competent technician. I give value for value. I am an honest workman, and I do not want people to think that I am a con-man…. therefore I do not call myself an artist. I create flat, representational objects—books, illustrations, posters, stained glass windows, greeting cards, wedding invitations, wine labels–in return for money. I’m glad that people like what I do, because that means that I can go on doing it. I like what I do, and consider it a privilege to be able to make my living doing it. But, I am not, at least in twenty-first century terms, an artist. I’ll leave that to those who have no idea at all of what they do, or who they are, or where they are going, and must, for want of any other word, call themselves artists.

• From Loren, on Following your Bliss:
  

  For me, at least, the best reason to spend so much time and money producing a web site is to attract others who share your interests and appreciate your efforts. Such a community has helped me to grow in ways it’s hard to imagine until you’ve actually been part of one. Virtual communities of poets, photographers, philosophers and programmers have enriched my life in ways I would never have imagined before blogging began.

• Cranberries are the canary in the mine for global warming.
• If the RDF Triple is a fairy tale, is reification the wicked witch? Possible beginning to new series on RDF.
• Snow in the Puget Sound area. We missed the ice rain bullet, ourselves.
• On The Golden Compass:
  

  Earlier this fall, many Catholics began to receive e-mail messages warning of the “agenda” behind a “new Children’s movie out in December called ‘The Golden Compass.’ ” The film, these e-mails claimed, was intended to serve as bait for the novel on which it is based, the first in a fantasy trilogy collectively titled “His Dark Materials.” Kids intrigued by the film, the e-mails went on, would be tempted to read the trilogy and might thereby fall into the ideological clutches of its author, Philip Pullman, who seeks nothing less than “to bash Christianity and promote atheism.”

  The messages had the breathless, marginally literate quality of rumors about spider eggs in bubble gum. Perhaps that’s why the controversy promptly earned itself a page at www.snopes.com, that venerable Internet clearing house for urban legends. Snopes lists this particular rumor as “true,” presumably because the e-mails use a few genuine, if cherry-picked, quotations from Pullman’s writings and press interviews. But that doesn’t keep the whole thing from being fundamentally ridiculous.

• This Tasmania writes on problems with invasive species and their destruction of native species on Tasmania’s Macquarie Island. An Alaskan island known as ‘rat island’ is facing the same problem, but with rats, not rabbits. However, efforts are underway to eradicate the rats though not everyone approves.
• Color me astonished. Six Apart sells LiveJournal to the Russians. So much for “in the neighborhood”.

Just in time for Halloween, Candy Addict points to How to make your own candy bars from Chow. This site has pulled together recipes to emulate some of today’s more popular candy bars, including “Almond Jay”, “PB Cups”, a “Twixt” wannabe, and “Snickles”.

I’m looking for a DIY recipe for Cadbury’s Cherry Ripe, which is virtually impossible to find here in the States.