Entry 1,000 Revisited

Grok Headline matches for Entry 1,000 Revisited

"AIO G3 revisited"

"AIO G3 revisited" 08/23/2004 10:22 AM

OpenBSD revisited

OpenBSD revisited 06/07/2004 03:46 PM

""Hacking" Revisited"

""Hacking" Revisited" 02/13/2004 02:37 PM

Flash, revisited

Flash, revisited 09/11/2004 02:29 PM
I’ve never liked Macromedia Flash. For longer than I care to remember, I considered Flash nothing more than an annoying tools for advertisers to waste my bandwidth and make me install yet on more piece of software on my computer. The irony of providing “rich content” advertising and leave ...

Newsletters Revisited

Newsletters Revisited 03/13/2003 12:53 PM

Python Revisited

Python Revisited 01/01/2004 02:44 PM
Happy New Year! Let's talk shop as usual.

Recently, we've been looking at developing some server software in Python. This is my first serious look at Python since 1999, and I'm impressed with the improvements. It's a couple of years older than PHP, and certainly more mature. Python has a reputation for being more rationally designed than PHP or Perl, and in general that's true; but you can still see Python's age in the fact that there are many APIs that do the same thing (eg. the string functions).

PHP is still a better language for web development because it is a simpler language, easy to teach to Java or Javascript programmers, has more flexible string processing, and designed to work well with templates.

But as a general programming language, Python has its advantages. You can build sophisticated networking software with Python that supports threads and asynchronous connections with reasonable efficiency (though Python doesn't really take advantage of multiple CPU's due to an internal global lock). The Twisted and Dibbler frameworks are testament to that. Python's C API is well documented and Python can be easily embedded into 3rd party apps.

Python is also a good source of design ideas. I have noticed that othe rs have realized that many good Java ideas do not translate well to PHP. There is an impedence mismatch; many things that are hard in Java are easy in PHP. It makes sense to create an elaborate framework in Java to do something that's hard in Java, but to apply the same to PHP suggests more energy than sense. In contrast, I suspect that Python and PHP are more complementary than we all suspect...

PS: We also had a look at developing the same server software using .NET. However .NET doesn't have builtin support for open protocols such as POP3 and IMAP. I continue to be amused at the (intentional?) omissions in the .NET framework.

Using PDF Services, revisited

Using PDF Services, revisited 12/27/2004 10:39 AM
This hint reminded me that PDF Services might not be getting the attention or respect they deserve. So here's a simple yet very effective tip that makes saving PDFs fun! Create a folder on your desktop called "PDFs to Read"...

MySQL and OS X Revisited

MySQL and OS X Revisited 11/23/2002 10:02 AM
via Apple's Internet Developer: "In this article I'll give you an overview of MySQL's features and drawbacks, show you how...

Eldred Revisited

Eldred Revisited 08/23/2004 10:05 AM
Larry Lessig from time to time flagellates himself about losing the Eldred case in the Supreme Court. He shouldn't; it was unwinnable for a host of reason (the lopsided vote--7-2--is a clue). Yes, Congress can confer copyrights only "for limited Times," but what's "limited" is a matter of perspective. If...

Ratings Revisited

Ratings Revisited 02/10/2004 02:50 AM
Updated my entry ratings code. Added IP Address storing. Added one rating per IP code.

The CELL revisited

The CELL revisited 03/14/2005 04:51 PM
RWT posts a followup to their CELL article, and I revise my stance on the name "synergistic processing unit."

FIleVault Revisited: Yea Or Nea?

FIleVault Revisited: Yea Or Nea? 04/01/2005 09:29 AM

OPML Revisited

OPML Revisited 03/14/2005 05:44 PM

OPML is a simple, widely used, yet often misunderstood, XML format created by Dave Winer.  IMHO, misunderstandings stem from overexposure to traditional ways of using XML.  I must admit, I also laughed at OPML when I first looked at it years ago.  But when I cocked my head (a technique anyone can learn from their dogs), it began to make a lot of sense.

This is what I saw:

Infoset:

• An OPML document is a collection of objects.
• An object may have properties and contents.
• An object's properties are unordered map of name/value pairs.
• An object's contents are ordered list of objects.

Syntax:

• Objects are encoded as XML elements named 'outline'.
• Properties are encoded as XML attributes.
• Content objects are encoded as child XML elements.

Once you get this picture in your mind, you start to appreciate OPML more.  Throw in display and interaction semantics builted into the format along with distributed object linking and embedding Dave often raves about and you got quite a beast of a language.

As to the question of who defines the properties, the answer is everybody does.  OPML is a kind of Emergent Markup Language in that common properties are expected to emerge through industry practices rather than standardization through committees.

There are some shortcomings with OPML though which I would like to see addressed.

OPML Wiki

OPML needs a wiki for OPML developers to interact with each other and to document how each of them are using OPML so that standard or type-specific properties may emerge.

Structured Properties

One weakness of XML is that, while elements may be structured, attributes may not.  Since properties are encoded as XML attributes in OPML, (semi) structured properties (i.e. HTML fragments) have to be encoded at the cost of readability.

I think the need for a wiki is far more serious than the need for structured property support.

fireworks, revisited

fireworks, revisited 07/02/2004 07:44 PM
Two years ago, I wrote an entry that endures as one of my all-time favorites.

It's timely and topical, and (most importantly) frees me up this weekend to hang out with my wife.

Longtime readers will probably remember this, and I hope that new readers enjoy it as much as I do.

It's called Fireworks.

Read the full entry @ WWdN!

Strings, revisited

Strings, revisited 06/16/2004 10:49 PM
So, I finally did the last draft of the bytecode/assembly level string design for Parrot. It was a mixed bag--the per-string language tag is gone (darn!) but national character sets stay (yay!) with a set of "It's all Unicode no matter what you say" string ops thrown into the mix. Like any other engineering task with multiple conflicting requirements and strong proponents of different schemes, it's safe to say that everyone's unhappy with the result, but I think everyone can make do with what we have. What ultimately resulted, if you don't feel like going and looking up the post...

Suppress New Windows Revisited

Suppress New Windows Revisited 12/19/2004 03:25 PM
If you're like me, then you hate it when people use target="_blank". If you've installed Firefox 1.0 and are wondering why the suppress new windows advanced pref no longer works, it's because it's been overridden by a new advanced pref. To turn it on, go to about:config and set "browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs" to true. Or you can add user_pref("browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs", true); to your user.js file. Then in Tools | Options | Advanced | Tab browsing, a new option appears. You can then force links that open in new windows to open in the current window or a new tab instead. It's an experimental option for now, so it might be a little buggy, but it works for the most part. Update: The feature doesn't work on bookmarklets that open popup windows, like the bugmenot or Post to MT bookmarklets. It opens them in new tabs instead of as a new popup window. Update to Update: There's a pref for diverting window.open() calls too.

Amityville Horror, revisited

Amityville Horror, revisited 04/15/2005 11:07 PM
The house in Amityville with the fan-shaped windows making an inhuman face is the Godzi lla of haunted house movies. The town and current owner of the house where the DeFeo family was murdered try to downplay (registration required) its signficance. The trademark windows in the original have been replaced to disguise its identity, and lawsuits force studios to use a house-double. Although latest remake claims the status of "true story," the case has been widely dismissed as a hoax and the 2005 film has even rased the ire of George Lutz for how he is portrayed as the haunted father-figure. Other people involved in the case including convicted murder DeFeo are unhappy with the new attention. Still, the story has its true believers and psychics who argue the debunkers have their own agenda. Then again, Texas Chainsaw Massacre was also claimed by the same production company to be "inspired by a true story."

Psychic and other predictions revisited

Psychic and other predictions revisited 12/28/2004 03:40 PM
There's still time for some of these 2004 predictions to come true, but not much. For those of us who like schadenfreude (pleasure at another's mis-fortune, har): the p aranormal survey, the pet psychic, the banal, the faith-based.

Blogging Attributation Revisited

Blogging Attributation Revisited 12/29/2004 01:43 PM

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?: There's a really interesting conversation going on over at Slashdot about something I've struggled with in the past: blog attributation. Some guy on Slashdot evidently just copies and pastes content from other sources, drvies traffic to his site, and then reaps the advertising windfall.

Don't we all do this? I don't know. I hope that Gadgetopia provides some value in (1) aggregating stuff people are interesting in, (2) adding at least some original content to each entry, (3) relating entries to one another so a reader can learn more about a particular topic, and (4) having some completely original entries on top of that.

But, when you boil everything down, a lot of what we do here is posted quotes and excerpts from other sites, and springboarding off content found on other sites. I try to give attributation, but what happens when you find something in multiple places, or are posting about something that you found three or four levels removed from the first thing?

A year ago, I talked about this same thing. I said, in part:

The other day, I added a "via Anil Dash" link to one of my entries for no particular reason, and it got me thinking about it. If the content is A, and Anil Dash's entry that links to it is B, then should I link to Anil as C? Or should I follow Anil's link to the target and become a B? If I become a B via Anil's link, do I need to add attributation to his B?

It's confusing. My only goal to just try not to screw anyone. I hope I succeed.

The Comair Mess Revisited

The Comair Mess Revisited 12/28/2004 05:13 PM

Airlines' computer systems questioned: In the wake of the big Comair systems meltdown over the holdays, CNN has an article about why airline's systems are so rickety. It's notable for a quote from uber-security expert Bruce Schneier that tells the naked truth of it.

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert in Mountain View, California, said the issue boils down to cost versus benefit.

Airlines could upgrade existing computers to handle more transactions, install sophisticated backup systems that come on when the primary system fails or buy high-performance software that is used by NASA, nuclear plants and medical facilities to keep critical systems running at all times, Schneier said.

"It's certainly feasible, but it's my guess it's not economic," Schneier said. "My guess is it is cheaper for the airline to absorb this loss, which doesn't happen often, than to fix the problem.

Isn't that the truth? Absorb the damage, move on, and wait for it to happen again. Nice. Who gets to miss Christmas next year?

The Geek Squad Revisited

The Geek Squad Revisited 06/22/2005 01:56 AM

Pe rplexed consumers dial up tech 'geeks': Our original post on the Geek Squad is one of our most active. This is an article about the surge in computer support jobs in general, and it includes this bit on the Geek Squad:

Best Buy last week said it hired 1,500 more employees for its "Geek Squad," a team of for-hire tech-support staffers. The retail giant now has about 8,000 staffers taking phone calls, fixing electronics brought to stores, and traveling to homes and offices to solve problems. Best Buy hopes to have 12,000 next year.

That's 4,000 most agents in the next year — get your resumes in, people.

And remember that desktop support is less likely to be offshored that programming and network administration because it's so much more helpful to have someone right there to (1) fix your problem, and (2) show you how to prevent it in the future. I'm thinking these jobs would be a little more secure than others in IT.

The Mythical Man-Month Revisited

The Mythical Man-Month Revisited 06/18/2004 11:06 AM

The Good Old Patent Law - Revisited

The Good Old Patent Law - Revisited 07/11/2004 09:20 AM

Affiliate Marketing and SEM Revisited

Affiliate Marketing and SEM Revisited 07/12/2004 12:21 PM
Source: ClickZ - Affiliates extend your paid search advertising budget. Competing with affiliates on the same keywords is valuable because they help you dominate the page. If your affiliates are restricted from paid search advertising, they'll simply switch teams and...

Net advertising on a road revisited

Net advertising on a road revisited 05/25/2004 02:47 PM

The Bell Curve revisited

The Bell Curve revisited 07/16/2004 05:09 PM

Driving back and forth to Nashua, NH yesterday I listened to The Bell Curve as an abridged book on tape (picked it up for $5 in a used bookstore in San Diego).  This book created quite a stir in 1994 because of its discussion of average IQ differences among races but I had never read it.  It turns out that even if you leave out all the controversial stuff about race the book is potentially very relevant to our times.

The Bell Curve starts out by talking about how we live in an era where people get sorted by cognitive ability into socioeconomic classes.  In 14th century England if you were a peasant with a high IQ or a noble with a low IQ it didn't affect your life, reproductive potential, or income very much.  In our more meritocratic and vastly more sophisticated economy a smart kid from a lower middle class might make it to the top of a big company (cf. Jack Welch, who paid himself $680 million as CEO of GE) or at least into a $300,000/year job as a radiologist.  For the authors of the Bell Curve the increasing disparity in income in the U.S. is primarly due to the fact that employees with high IQs are worth a lot more than employees with low IQs.  They note that we have an incredibly complex legal system and criminal justice system.  So you'd expect people with poor cognitive ability to fail to figure out what is a crime, which crimes are actually likely to be punished, etc., and end up in jail.  (A Google search brought up a report on juvenile justice in North Carolina; the average offender had an IQ of 79.)  If they stay out of jail through dumb (literally) luck, there is no way that they are ever going to be able to start a small business; the legal and administrative hoops through which one must jump in order to employ even one other person are impenetrable obstacles to those with below-average intelligence.

The trend that the decade-old Bell Curve book misses is telecom and outsourcing.  The authors assume that an American with high IQ will have a higher income and better standard of living than an American with low IQ.  That's the sorting function of an advanced economy.  They don't get into the question of whether it is sustainable that an American with low IQ should have a higher income than someone in India or China with a high IQ.  Statistically you'd have to expect that there are more really smart people in India and China than the total population of the U.S.  If the sorting-by-IQ process were efficient across international borders you'd expect that an American with an IQ of 100 should be making less than an Indian with an IQ of 120.  Given that a lot of brilliant well-educated people in India are getting paid less than $5,000 per year, this is a bit worrisome those of us here who are fat, dumb, and happy.  [Imagine that you were running a company.  Would you rather employ a local high school graduate with an IQ of 90 or an Indian college grad with an IQ of 130 via Internet link?]

For us oldsters, one unexpected piece of cheerful news from this book is that younger Americans are getting genetically dumber every year.  Even if you ignore the racial and immigrant angles of the book that created so much controversy back in 1994 it is hard to argue with the authors' assertion that smart women tend to choose higher education and careers rather than cranking out lots of babies.  As a middle-aged (40) guy whose own cognitive abilities are beginning to fade due to neuron death I felt sure that there would be no place me for in the America of 2050.  Our population is predicted to reach 450 million or so, i.e., the same as India had back when we were kids and our mothers told us about this starving and overpopulated country.  An individual person's labor in India has negligible economic value--the American firm Office Tiger gets 1500 applicants, many of whom are very well qualified, on a good day in Chennai.  It would seem that no enterprise would need an old guy's skills in a country of 450 million; why bother when there are so many energetic young people around?  And how would we be able to afford a house or apartment if there are 450 million smart young people out there earning big bucks and putting pressure on real estate prices?  But if the book is right most of those young people will be dumb as bricks.

Black Holes - revisited

Black Holes - revisited 07/21/2004 05:58 PM

Direct and Related Links for 'Black Holes - revisited'

Stephen Hawking has changed his mind on his theory of black holes. ABC News has reported that Hawking now sides with particle physicists who believe that any matter swallowed by a black hole can’t just disappear. On the contrary, the matter must eventually generate a specific output….

Videophones Revisited, by Way of the
Modem

Videophones Revisited, by Way of the
Modem 02/18/2004 09:23 PM
The Internet offers video chat and cheap (if not free) telephone calls. Now those functions have been married not in a PC but in an appliance called the VisiFone.

The Battle of Algiers Revisited

The Battle of Algiers Revisited 09/16/2004 03:44 AM
In September of 2003 the Bush administration telegraphed their intent to use torture on prisoners in Iraq when they screened Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers for officials in the Pentagon.

Mac Doom 3 benchmarks revisited

Mac Doom 3 benchmarks revisited 03/17/2005 04:02 AM
With new video cards in hand, we've come back to provide you with more details about how Aspyr's Macintosh conversion of Doom 3 runs. This should give Mac gamers a more general idea of how well the game performs on a high-end Mac system. To that end, we've now tested the game with several graphics cards: ATI's Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition and Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition cards, Apple's Nvidia 6800 Ultra card and the stock Radeon 9600XT card that came with our test system.

10.3: Using WU-IMAP with SSL and xinetd
revisited

10.3: Using WU-IMAP with SSL and xinetd
revisited 12/09/2003 10:59 AM
Changing the password authentication sheme in NetInfo as described in this hint is not a good solution, since it will only last till the next password change, and lower the security level of your system. So, I decided to post...

Government Grants, Revisited

Government Grants, Revisited 04/15/2005 12:38 AM
Lockergnome Apr 15 2005 4:58AM GMT

Amazon.com's API Revisited

Amazon.com's API Revisited 08/06/2002 07:50 AM

Acid2: Rows 6-9 Revisited

Acid2: Rows 6-9 Revisited 04/15/2005 04:16 PM

Earlier I asserted that Safari passed rows 6-9. Now I'm not so sure. As someone in the comments pointed out, Safari has a 1px golden ring around the black nose that is not there in the reference rendering. I will have to figure out what causes this to see if it's a bug in Safari.

Web mindshare calculator revisited

Web mindshare calculator revisited 12/04/2003 09:37 AM
My old web mindshare calculator has been updated for the Spidering Hacks book. The original version from 1999 used AltaVista to measure what I called the web mindshare -- that is, the number of indexed inbound links -- for a collection of sites in a Yahoo! category. The new version is updated to use Google. Cool! That project was one of the first things that really got me thinking about what Web services would inevitably become. Here's how I described it in my book:

In effect, every web site is a scriptable component, and the Web as a whole is a vast library of such components. You can invoke these invidually from any scripting language that can issue HTTP requests and interpret the responses.

What's more, you can join components to achieve novel effects. For example, I've used Yahoo! and AltaVista in combination to measure the "mindshare" of web sites in specific categories. To do that, I wrote a Perl script that uses Yahoo!'s namespace API to unroll the subdirectories under a node of the Yahoo! directory tree, yielding a consolidated list of URLs belonging to some category, such as /Science/Nanotechnology/. Then the script feeds that list of URLs, one at a time, to AltaVista, using its CGI API to ask, for each site, how many other pages in the AltaVista index refer to that site. The ranked list of these citation counts measures what I call the web mindshare of the sites.

Yahoo! wasn't designed to produce an unrolled list of sites in a category, but its web API can be made to do it. Likewise, AltaVista wasn't designed to count references to each of the sites in such a list, but its web API can be made to do it. These two macrocomponents, driven remotely by a 100-line Perl script (see http:/ /www.byte.com/features/1999/03/udellmindshare.html), can be joined to create a new application that measures web mindshare. [Practi cal Internet Groupware, Chapter 8, Organizing Search Results]

...

OCZ VX Revisited: DDR Updates on DFI
nForce4

OCZ VX Revisited: DDR Updates on DFI
nForce4 04/01/2005 05:36 PM
AnandTech Apr 1 2005 8:37PM GMT

Mythical Man-Month revisited

Mythical Man-Month revisited 09/09/2002 10:39 PM
CNET Sep 9 2002 10:11PM ET

The DotCom Crash Revisited

The DotCom Crash Revisited 03/14/2005 05:02 PM
Slashdot Mar 13 2005 3:43AM GMT

Password generator revisited

Password generator revisited 06/17/2005 07:21 PM
Yesterday I was on the receiving end of a drive-by slashdotting. A comment on yesterday's /. story about writ ing down passwords sent a bunch of folks to my simple single sign-on screencast. So now's a good time to summarize some recent conversations I've had on the topic. ...
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Entry 1,000 Revisited

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