Or more specifically, is the thing eating cpu cycles on my computer? Say you visit a site and it’s got several of those wonderful attention grabbing blinking ads from hell. ESPN has them for example, as does Bluewsnews and the IMDB on occasion. They’re all over the place, really. The definitely eat cpu cycles on my machines, especially on the Mac if they’re flash based, you can actually see the slowdown of the browser’s ability to scroll when they’re on screen. My question then - if the browser is minimized or occluded by some other app’s screen or the finder or whatever, and the screen with the ad is not visible, is it still eating cpu cycles? Intuition would say not, but some testing on my laptop was inconclusive. Anyone know? Lacking a working commenting system you’ll have to IM me if you know the answer, or email me to one of the addresses on my contact page.

If so, you are obligated to visit this site and download the pixel-perfect remake of the classic Bruce Lee game for the Commodore 64. Despite the painful graphics (the pixels are as large as pencil erasers, for pete’s sake) it’s still as fun now as it was back in the day, in 5 minute bursts anyway. PC only but the requirements are so low I suspect a non-powermac could run it in emulation.

…at about 1100 feet in the tongue mountain range and you heard that coming from above, loud and then every bird in the vicinity took wing, all achatter, then you heard it again? If you were me you’d find that your instincts took over and you would immediately flee the vicinity. This happened about 2 weeks ago. I was making my way down to 5th point (although I thought I was heading to 5 mile peak, but that’s another story - time to really learn how the GPS actually works!) when I heard this, and the moment I heard it the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my flee instinct took over - I started heading right back towards the trailhead.

At the time I thought it must have been a bear, despite the late date. The winter’s been very mild so far so I figured it just hadn’t begun hibernating yet. It didn’t sound like any bear I had ever heard, but what else could it be? Many chats with friends later and I’ve concluded it was probably an ultra-rare mountain lion, mostly because of the page of audio recordings I’ve linked to - nothing else sounded as close to what I heard as the link I posted above - and because of conversations with a biologist at Skidmore and a colleague at Bowdoin. I saw absolutely nothing. The sound was coming from a ridgeline up above me by at least 100 feet, and aside from the growl like noises repeating twice I heard nothing either. But man, it was a spooky thing to hear out in the woods by yourself, whether it was a mountain lion or not.

The biologist here at Skidmore reported it to a friend of his who works in the fish and game department. They’re not unheard of in this region, they’re just exceedingly rare and as far as I am aware there have been only a couple of actual sightings, so in a sense I was lucky even if I didn’t actually see it. I’d really rather not run into one though, at least not until my dog is old enough to help me fend it off. Meantime I’m buying a can of pepper spray to bring with me on my hikes.

…actually announces something good. Again. Time Warner is giving its subscribers a new year’s gift of enhanced downstream speed for their broadband customers, an increase of 2Mbit for most folks, including me. This is great and much appreciated, but since I’m an irritable fellow I’ll once again ask: Where is my fucking upstream bandwidth!!! This is the second time in the past couple of years Time Warner has increased my downstream, but without the attendant upstream bandwidth it’s increasingly less useful to me, since most of my use of downstream use is limited by my available upstream due to the way P2P apps like Direct Connect and BitTorrent work. I subscribed to Time Warner’s product over 5 years ago and my upstream is substantially less now than it was when I started.

Repeat after me: content companies should not be in the access business. They’re conflicted. Keep your fingers crossed that Verizon’s Fiber to the Premises efforts work out.

(and lest anyone think I’m simply a pirate using my bandwidth to scarf content illegally, I’ll point out that increasingly the legal content I acquire is coming to me via P2P apps, especially bit torrent. I haven’t downloaded a game mod or patch that hasn’t used bit torrent in several months now. Time warmer could increase my downstream 1000 fold and I wouldn’t get the files any faster, whereas if they would only double my upstream, I would get them twice as fast. See the problem?)

Everyone knows the story of the printing press and how its invention led to an explosion of human creativity and the rapid advancement of civilization. The modern day equivalent, the internet, is being strangled by copyright. I’ve ranted and ranted about this and I’m going to do it again. We have the potential at this moment in time to embrace another great leap forward - the sum of human knowledge can be at everyone’s fingertips. Except. Except that the western notion of copyright, less than a hundred years old, is stifling the ability of companies like Google to get this material online for us. I don’t know what the path out of this dilemma is. Of course publishers and authors need to be compensated for their work (though as longtime readers know, just like with music and video, I question the contributions publishers will have to the process of creation and distribution going forward). But if I had to choose between compensation and freedom of information, right this moment, I would choose freedom of information. The money flow will sort itself out - it always does - and the freedom of information will inexorably lead us to the info-nirvana I’m obsessed with.

End rant. The only thing I can think to suggest to folks, aside from making your representatives aware of these issues, is to give money to the EFF.

I’m not actually obsessed by google, it’s just that they’re doing so much cool stuff. Today’s mention is about something I’ve touched on in the past - the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. Everyone’s getting used to the notion of google as one’s adjunct brain - who starred in casablanca opposite Bogart? How many home runs did Reggie Jackson hit in ‘79? What’s the population of Saratoga Springs, NY? - all of these answers are yours in about the amount of time it takes to type the question. What we need is more content, specifically the content that’s locked away in books (we’ll get to the content in movies and other multimedia later). Anyway google announced today that they’ve signed a deal with the University of Michigan to put the full text of every book in the University’s library online. 7 million books, fully searchable. On the one hand this is just the tip of the iceberg - 7 million books sounds like a lot but it’s really not in the scheme of things. On the other hand this is huge in terms of precedent. I hope this leads to a cascade of follow up projects - surely Microsoft will want to get into the game and they’ve got deep enough pockets to do it.

The downside of this is that it will take years to achieve, but it’s a start, a very auspicious one at that. Go google!

I worked with a lot of cool people when I was at Bowdoin College. One of them was Mike Kolster, who has a website that he posts images to daily. This image is just a great shot. I love his site, I just wish he had larger dimension images available so I could use them as desktop backdrops, and attaching the site to a print making service, or just selling prints of his images, would be great. I’d buy them for sure. He and I talked a little about such things when I was there, I should drop him an email and remind him. Oh, and Mike is also featured on Bowdoin’s homepage at the moment, cool kudos for him.

Gametunnel has a great article up which covers many of the entries to this year’s Independent Games Festival. As I’ve mentioned before, IGF tends to have more interesting and novel games than the stuff you’ll find on the shelves at best buy. This is mostly PC-based stuff but there are also some java and web-based games that are worth a look. My favorite so far is Avencast, a diablo-like rpg.

A lot of my friends have been getting the Time Warner DVR (the tivo-like device thats replacing the VCR). Here’s an excellent example of why you should not do it. Not unexpectedly, Time Warner is beginning to investigate limiting the amount of time a show you’ve recorded can live on your DVR. They already limit your ability to get the show off your DVR - now they want to limit how long you can keep it.

This is yet another example of why the content companies should not be permitted to be in the distribution business. It’s a lot more involved, but anyone who considers themselves technically literate should build their own DVR. There are open source (mythtv) solutions as well as a host of different (sagetv) commercial options (meedio). There is even at least one macintosh solution (eyetv). There are also systems integrators out there who will build a complete system for you, software, remote control, and all. If you’re interested, check out htpc news, there are tons of reviews and really useful forums.

I use snapstream myself and am mostly pleased with it.

It’s no secret I’m a fan of retro gaming. Retro Remakes just announced the results of their 2004 competition results. There’s a ton (well, 75 anyway) of games to check out, including remakes of Robotron 2084 (one of the finest arcade games ever made), the original atari 2600 Adventure game, and a long forgotten classic, Pengo, that I spent many a quarter on in my youth. Plenty of retro-gaming fun to be had simply by clicking a link or two. This is all PC stuff but in almost all cases the system requirements are so modest that macs should have no trouble running them in emulation.

Google continues to produce cool stuff. We’re all familiar by now with our browsers trying to autocomplete URLs for us - start typing ‘www.eb’ and the browser will suggest a set of possibilities, including say ‘www.ebay.com.’ While it can occasionally be annoying, generally this is useful feature. Now imagine if your search engine did it for you. Or don’t bother trying to imagine, just go try it for yourself. I am amazed at how quickly this is streaming data down to my browser. I’m also convinced at this point that the world’s cleverest programmers work for Google.

There’s an interesting race that started yesterday which will most likely make for an excellent case for the value of open source software. Secunia has identified a fairly nasty security issue in almost every web browser. You can read up on the details of it on secunia if you want. The gist of it is a vulnerability in popup windows and the ability of other open browser windows that did NOT originate the popup to take over the popup. That sounds relatively benign, but imagine a site where when you go to login, a popup window comes up asking for your authentication information. Unbeknownst to you, joe script kiddie owns this popup and you just gave him your login info. Or, say, you go to your bank and they popup a window ‘0% interest rates on transferred balances!’ Except you’ve been pwned and it’s Joe Script Kiddie again, and he has your account info now.

Anyway, the point of this post is this: my guess is mozilla/firefox will have this patched in relatively short order. Want to lay odds on how long it takes microsoft? I’m not guaranteeing MS will lose - there have been occasions where too much bad press manages to light a fire under their ass and they get patches out relatively quickly. But their track record is pretty bad, generally. I’m laying my money on Firefox, and if I’m right this episode gets added to my ‘why open source is superior to closed source’ file.

Meanwhile, make sure your popup blocker is set to kill, and for sites where you have to allow the popups, make sure you don’t have any other browser windows open that might be a source of malicious scripts. You could also turn javascript off to deal with this, the same caveats apply.

Everyone reading this is running firefox, right? If not, click the link and install it.

Anyway, evangelism aside, I happened across a most excellent extension to firefox yesterday. Regular readers know I’m a huge fan of wikis these days, and over the past year or so mediawiki, the engine that powers wikipedia has evolved into one of the best wiki engines. Now someone has put together a firefox extension that enhances the process of authoring wiki content. It’s geared specifically towards wikipedia authoring, but some testing at work has shown it is helpful in other wiki engines, or at least with oddmuse, which we’re using at Skidmore. If you’re authoring wikipedia content, definitely give this a look, and even if you’re using another wiki engine it might be worth your time to check it out.

An early lunch today and so, a fun link. Do you like the classic boardgame Risk? OK, so it’s a dicefest that favors luck over skill and tactics, but chances are you played it growing up and might even have loved it. If you’d like to tinker with something along those lines but with slightly more meat on its bones, check out the the computer version of the old Avalon Hill boardgame Wizard’s Quest. Free, fun little boardgame that you can play in under 15 minutes. Win32 only I’m afraid, but the system requirements are so modest I’m sure it would run smoothly under emulation on a Mac.

I blogged this several years ago, figured it was worth mentioning again since it’s fun and free.

This is for my own uses as I try and acclimate to the climate here in upstate NY. This week was the first real storm of the season - about 3 inches of snow followed by sleet and freezing rain, then thankfully extended rains to wash it all away. The roads were terrible one night, otherwise this was a minor storm.

In roughly 12 years in Maine I never really got used to the fact that Spring doesn’t show up until May. It was April when I was a kid. We’ll see where it is here in the Adirondacks. So far the winter here has been really mild. I was hiking up above 1500′ in the tongue mountain range on sunday in ~50 degree temperatures. I think this is national but it’s definitely at odds with the average winter in Maine, where by this time of year the temperatures were routinely below freezing.

Anyway to close this off I’ll also observe that my new car is terrible in the snow. I intentionally took the roughest back road home to test how things went. The impending arrival of my new dog and the expenses related to same have left me dead broke, which means no snow tires for me. My conclusion? I will be creeping along at 5MPH a lot this winter, and the chances of me getting stuck are very high. Ugh.

No, not that Gravitar (notice the spelling) - this gravatar - a modestly clever idea for making a universally available graphic (an avatar) for web forums, weblogs, and the attendant comment systems. Register yourself, and any system that supports this will begin to show your avatar when you use it. This is much simpler than the normal process of registering your avatar at every site you register for, and their rating system makes sure your r-rated avatar doesn’t show itself in all its glory at, say, disney.com. This is already supported by a lot of the big publishing tools (blogger, movabletype, wordpress, livejournal), and there are implementations out for drupal and phpbb, presumably the other big message board toolsets will have implementations shortly.

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for a Friday fun link. Today it’s another mention of the most excellent c-evo. This is an excellent, lightweight riff on the original PC game civilization. PC only unfortunately, and mind that you have to download a graphical tile set as well as the binary in order to play, but this is an excellent little turn based strategy game and it has evolved nicely since the last time I linked to it. Get playing!

(Non PC users can go grab the equally excellent freeciv, which runs on most platforms. And note how they have changed their site website over to a mediawiki instance, very cool).

I’ve waxed enthusiastic about usenet here over the years, without too much success as far as I can tell. Most folks remain largely unaware of how useful it is. Google has just made some changes to their web interface into usenet that may help in terms of raising public awareness. Basically they seem to have stolen a page from Yahoo’s Groups function - the interface is similar. Subscribe to a group, you can post to it freely, and it keeps track of what you’ve seen and not seen. The difference is google is tying directly into usenet whereas with Yahoo they’re using their own (unfortunately ad heavy) system. It would be awesome if Google would stitch in some improvements, especially RSS feeds (I wish anyone would do this, I’ve craved it for ages) and ‘watches’ similar to what I can do in feeddemon - what I mean by this is…for example, imagine I am subscribed to comp.sys.lang.perl and I have a watch on ‘libxml’ - the system would alert me to any posts that come through mentioning libxml. On the surface this doesn’t seem hard to do, and as you can imagine it’s enormously useful in terms of reducing the amount of chaff you have to sort through to get to the wheat. But anyway, regardless of my own needs, google’s just made it easier for anyone to play around with usenet and get a feel for how useful it is. Check it out.

I needed to figure that out today, the third day in a row I had bizarre file format questions. And no, I don’t mean .asf the windows streaming media format. In this case it turned out to be a binary file type from a dos-based statistics package. An emeritus faculty member had brought it in and wanted to print. I figured out how to manage this after stumbling across filext, a website devoted to cataloging all known file extensions. It’s got a pretty impressive database of filetype, including my unknown ~15 year old dos file. I wonder how long it will be until digital forensics becomes part of the curriculum in archaeology courses, clearly the need for the skillset will be there. Anyway stash a bookmark to filext away, it’s definitely a very handy site.

Microsoft launched their free weblogging system today, joining the likes of typepad (from the movabletype folks), livejournal, the original blogger (now owned by google) and others with a commercial blogging service. This will undoubtable further raise public awareness of the whole blogging phenomenon. Their system’s not half bad on first look either - it seems like it has a decent feature set, including photo galleries, mobile phone integration, buddy lists, music lists and more. It’s hard to say how well it all works though since it requires an MS passport which I dont have and dont want, and since it seems to be overwhelmed with traffic on its first day. Worth keeping an eye on as each of the big players adjust their offerings.