When I don’t have a strong affinity for either team in the Superbowl I tend to root for the underdog, so I’m hoping the Panthers pull off an upset. The fact that their coach is the former Giants defensive coordinator (whose departure was a big piece of the Giants decline) is also a big point in their favor. But do I think they can actually beat the patriots? Well….no. Belicheck is also a former Giants defensive coordinator (whose earlier departure was also a factor in an earlier Giants decline….) and he’s just a fantastic coach. Plus I don’t think the Panther’s strong running game will be able to overcome the stronger Pats defense, and while everyone is falling in love with the Panthers QB, if they decide to air it out a lot I think the Pats will be taking the ball away. On offense the Pats will be able to plod down field with the short passing game. It’s not going to be a high scoring affair, and I expect it to be a competitive and entertaining game, which is more than you can say for most superbowls. In the end, Pats by a touchdown.

Come back on Monday to make fun of me as you see fit, but that’s my call. I was 50% in my playoff picks which doesn’t speak well of my powers of prognostication, but I figure I picked against the Pats twice so now I’ll switch and pick them, I have to be right (I still think in a best of 5 the Titans would have won 3, but kudos to the Pats for taking that game).

Breaking my own pattern, I’m posting not one but two fun friday links. Got a hankering to be anywhere but work and a computer that’s sufficiently concealed from the view of the others around you? Get thyself over to the addicting games website and spend a few minutes entertaining yourself.

Continuing with my anti-Internet Explorer tirade, today’s link is courtesy of Microsoft themselves. They’ve helpfully put up a support page with some tips on how to avoid being hijacked. My favorite? They suggest:

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

. That’s right folks, no problem. Just type that 600 character URL ebay just sent you by hand yourself, no problem! Don’t click on the URL, a fundamental function of your web browser because, well, Microsoft can’t be bothered to fix a defect in their product.

It’s so pathetically absurd. Anyone who’s just read the proceeding paragraph and is still using IE needs to have their head examined. No, wait, actually, they need to have their computer forcibly taken away from them, they’re clearly not capable of operating one in a responsible manner.

There’s an opportunity for a class action lawsuit by all the people who’ve ended up buying bogus merchandise or had their checking or paypal accounts drained or discovered a lot of Ukranian hotel rooms charged on their credit card all of the sudden. Any ambulance chasing lawyers reading this are advised to get right on it

I’ve become quite the open source fan over the last several years, due mostly to apache and linux. Sometimes I have these twinges of guilt about it though. Yesterday I was offered the option to get an update to BBEditfor my mac at work and after thinking about it for a minute I declined. I just don’t need it anymore. I’ve been using BBEdit on Macs since before the internet, in the days of system 6 when it was just this great text editor, and it’s been a central part of my toolkit during my entire career. Until the last year or so that is, as jedit slowly replaced it. The main advantage jedit has over BBedit aside from being free is that it works the same on all platforms - my two linux boxes at home, the mac and pc at work, my gaming rig, my lab full of machines at work - on all of them I have the same editing environment. Jedit is also wonderfully extensible - everything from XML indenters to wiki editors are available and there’s an active development community supporting further extensions to the editor.

So what’s BareBones to do? How can they compete with free? Who is going to continue buying their text editor when they can just download Jedit and have a more extensible editor running in a matter of minutes? I guess I don’t see how BBEdit can survive in the long run with things like Jedit to compete against.

One other observation: Jedit is my favorite example of the potential of Java finally being realized. For at least 5-6 years we’ve been promised this ‘write it in Java and it will run on any platform’ future, but in almost all cases this meant buggy and slow software with crufty interfaces. Jedit breaks that mold. It’s a little memory hungry due to the Java overhead but otherwise you wouldn’t really notice it’s a Java based package.

Erm…one other observation. I guess eclipse deserves the same sort of credit, and actually its interface is even better than Jedits.

It’s friday, which means it’s time for something fun. Check out some copyright free belgian music. It’s mostly electronica in various forms (techno, trance, Drum N Bass, and so on) so if that’s not your cup of tea skip it, but if you’re looking to broaden your musical horizons give it a try. I’m partial to the trance myself.

Mind that you’ll need flash to listen - the site has a reasonably good embedded flash mp3 player.

I’ve been dreaming of space since I was a little kid. I’m an avid science fiction fan, and like most kids of my generation I grew up immersed in Star Wars and the attendant fantasies of galactic exploration. Given this it may be a surprise to hear that I am not a fan of the recently announced Mars initiatives. I recognize to some extent the power of a dream and the positive effects the moon landings had on our culture. I don’t think you can pull the same trick twice though. While landing men on Mars would be an amazing achievement, it’s not going to have the same impact that the original moon landings did. Our interests would be better served continuing to use robotic missions to explore the solar system.

I do agree with the need to retire the shuttle fleet and move to a new launch vehicle however, and getting a permanent colony started on the moon is a fantastic idea. Not as a stepping stone to Mars mind you, but to the asteroid belt, where (supposedly) the real treasure is to be found.

Like most critics of the Bush Junta I am suscpicious that this is all really just about military expansion though. Who else can get launch vehicles onto the moon and start a moon base? Who could challenge the authority of a power that could drop an asteroid on you from space with absolute impunity, and knock your communications system out of the sky should you cross us? I’m sure from the Neocon perspective this sort of move makes perfect sense. I suspect like with the WMD/al qaeda = iraq misconceptions the American public holds, this will remain almost completely off everyone’s radar until its become a fait accompli. Assuming my cynical paranoia pans out that is, and assuming congress agrees to fund this, which at this point actually seems fairly unlikely.

A common theme for me the past month or so has been the evils of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Mostly I’ve been ranting about the security holes. If you want to risk your bank balance or your paypal account password, fine, keep using IE. But there’s another angle to this I haven’t mentioned in a while - IE has serious problems rendering properly formed CSS. I struggle with this on an almost daily basis. Because they have a greater than 90% share of the browser market there’s not much one can do aside from complain. Microsoft won the browser war and now they can’t be bothered to maintain their fricking product. Anyway, you can read a more articulate version of this rant over on stopdesign.com if the subject interests you.

Yesterday I post about oil depletion and the possibility of a mad max scenario. Today They’re talking about the end of the world on metafilter. Coincidence or conspiracy - you decide.

(but either way I feel less like a looney for bringing this stuff up. See, I’m not the only one!

As I’ve mentioned before, I run a teamspeak server. Last night Andrew dinged me and told me to log in. I had recently changed the ‘push to talk’ key in the preferences for the app to the F1 key, which I failed to remember is the key that launches the windows help center. So Andrew and I begin to chat. After a few minutes I start to notice the machine is getting sluggish, like REALLY sluggish, and I can hear the disk churning. WTF I think, I never noticed a memory leak in Teamspeak before. I manage to invoke the windows process manager and notice I have hundreds and hundreds of processes and cpu utilization is pegged? WTF? Turns out I had been spawning an infinite number of help center sessions as I held down the F1 key to talk - by the time I had recognized the problem the machine was already overwhelmed. I spent the next 15 minutes in a race against the cpu - could I cancel help session spawns faster than it was managing to launch them? It was like an annoying videogame - ‘kill the help center, woot!’

Long story short, I managed to. I didn’t want to cycle the power because I had downloads going. At first I was really pissed, ‘fucking windows,’ I am thinking. Then I remembered an incident from about 10 years ago on a mac. I was in a meeting when the sales manager burst in in a frenzy - ‘my printer is replicating like…like tribbles!’ Whu? Who wouldn’t go investigate such a claim. I get to his machine and sure enough, the little desktop icon for his printer is spawning a copy of itself every half second or so. By the time I got to the machine his entire desktop was already completely covered with a thick layer of printer icons. After some fiddling I decided to cycle the power on it. When it came up the printer had stopped cloning itself, but his desktop was still completely covered in icons, thousands and thousands of icons. I left him burrowing in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, laboriously moving icons out of the way in a search for the trash can so that he could begin throwing all these cloned printers out (this was before the days of CMD-delete, unfortunately for him). Later when I had time to research it I discovered it was a rare but known bug in the first implementation of Desktop Printing. This left me leery of desktop printing for years afterwords, even though it was the sales manager and not me who spent half a day shuffling printer icons around.

I guess my point is I shouldn’t be hard on windows. Why it is capable of spawning more than one help center I don’t know, it seems to me it shouldn’t be able to, but whatever. Computers, all OS’s, are full of niggling little issues like this. They’re still annoying when they occur but in the end for the most part as with the help center videogame from hell, what I end up taking away from it is amusement more than anything else.

A week or so ago I posted a link to a site covering the peak oil production situation, how we were likely to hit it in the next couple of years, and the consequences of the ‘post peak’ energy economy. The site was thought provoking but its almost hysterical prognosis seemed like it came right out of Mad Max. If you had a hard time sorting out what might be true from the ‘the apocalypse is coming’ rhetoric on that site, you might find it easier to review this article from the economist for a more sober but no less chilling account of where we’re at with oil reserves and what might come after we pass peak production. I don’t know what to conclude from all this. On the one hand I’m an optimist and history is replete with examples of market forces and our ingenuity overcoming adversity. On the other hand oil is so profoundly linked with modern civilization and the rise of the industrial age that it’s hard to imagine how we’ll get past this. It’s not simply a matter of generating our electricity using alternative means (nuclear, solar, whatever)..oil is touching every aspect of our world, from the materials that make up the keyboard I’m typing on to the fertilizers that feed the almond trees to the fuel that powers the distribution network that brings them to me.

I’m going to continue to ruminate on this one. If you run across any interesting links covering the issue I’d like to see them. It’s funny, in my late teens I became obsessed with these issues - when I was in my early 20’s I had already run across some of the materials suggesting an end to the oil age. Somehow over time my concerns faded. I’m glad the issue has filtered back onto my radar though.

…and japanese tax dollars at work. wouldn’t you have loved to work on that experiment? Spend a few months on waveform research rolling pingpong balls down a ski jump ramp, great work if you can find it.

Check out Kandid, a java-based generative art tool based on genetic principles. Feed it some genetic algorithms, spend some cpu cycles, and you occasionally get cool looking art you can use as a desktop pic. Royalty and copyright free as a bonus

It’s been well established that I’m a geek, so it is without shame or embarrasment that I present another exercise device that I’m tempted to get. I already run on a treadmill and play games - having the option to use the bike some nights would be excellent. The only issue is how accurate the thing would be. I have trouble with games that require a lot of finesse when I’m on the treadmill already and mostly play RPG’s as a result. It seems to me this would be even worse, and I might be better off going for one of those DDR dance mats. Still, this thing is tempting, especially since I’m not sure I can really bring myself to play the dance games.

AOL is offering a promotional deal through the end of February where for 99 cents you can download movies and watch them on your local machine. This is the first pricing model for digital distribution I’ve seen that actually works for me - I would pay 99 cents to in effect rent a movie in the comfort of my own home. The restrictions - you only get to ‘keep’ it for 30 days and once you start watching the film you have only 24 hours to finish watching it - seem reasonable to me, and hackers will end up breaking the DRM anyway so if the restrictions bother you I’m sure it will end up being possible to bypass them. Too bad this is a limited time deal - if someone moves to a model like this I might actually return to the practice of ‘renting’ movies again.

Oh…you can read up on the details of the deal over on arstechnica

..comes this life-sized replica of Han Solo frozen in Carbonite, rendered in Lego. Impressive, there’s no doubt. Things like this make me less self conscious of my own odd hobbies and interests.

If you spend a little time digging around on Medscape’s site, you’ll discover what seems to be an overwhelming body of medical research that suggests the high sugar/high calorie diet that’s common in the western countries is a significant contributer to increasing health risks related to obesity and heart disease. Given this, why do you suppose the Bush administration has chosen to oppose the World Health Organization’s plan to fight back against the rising tide of obesity by helping people understand the negative health consequences of inappropriate consumption of soft drinks and junk food? Cynical person that I am, my conclusion is that the Bush Junta is more concerned with campaign contributions from big agribusiness and the food conglomerates than it is with the health of U.S. citizens. Of course with this issue like so many others, it seems like the mainstream media will ignore it and the general public will remain blissfully unaware. Spread the word says I, this represents my latest 2 bits

Have you noticed how most produce now has a tiny little sticker on it these days? Like me you probably figured they were just a convenience for the staff at the checkout. As with many things, it turns out that there’s more to it than that. Those little stickers provide both routing information and details on how the produce was grown. Check the link for more details.

The Inquirer has an article with details on how easy it is to falsify the feedback and other profile information on ebay. This is a serious issue if you use ebay regularly, until they fix this it means you can’t trust the feedback profile on the item page, you need to click through to the seller’s feedback page, and you need to not use internet explorer when you’re doing it. Honestly, people who use IE have to be clueless or insane, this URL re-write bug has been known for over a month now and Microsoft has done nothing, while their customers get victimized by scams like this.

..and I don’t go. That’s about the best thing I can say about it. I still have a job, a new title even, and presumably some new responsibilities. But I have a new supervisor who is a pale shadow of the one I used to have, I have to work with a couple of folks who have said and done some really unpleasant things about and to me over the last several years, and ultimately I think the college has really diluted what used to be one of its strengths. I know that sounds self serving, but the fact that institutions like the New York Times and funding sources like the National Endowment for the Arts were picking up on some of the stuff we were producing serves as evidence of the kind of things we were capable of. I don’t see those kinds of projects emerging from our newly structured group, and in fact I am suspicious we won’t even see them proposed. But still, at the end of the day I still have a job, and further evidence that the CIO has some faith in my abilities emerged so….what can I say. I’m trying to be optimistic and looking forward rather than backwards.

I have these moments, every now and then, when I’m almost embarrased to be a geek. Today is one of those days. While browsing rpg.net I happened across a link to this picture of a jr high school dnd club. Good lord, one of those kids looks a lot like I did at that age, bad haircut and all, and damned if I wasn’t in the dnd club for a while. While I tend to remember those times fondly, looking back on it now is almost painful when I look at that picture.

Somewhere I have copies of a newspaper story that was published about us during that time, I need to dig that out and get the scans online. May as well share my embarrasment fully