After much deliberation, I've decided to put the archives of my old memory logs online. There's a lot of text in there, dating all the way back to the year 2002 - from my final year at Pitt to my last few years in Pittsburgh to just after moving to Washington, DC. I've fixed all of the screwy filenames that accumulated over the years and deleted the intra-page archive references that used to be at the end of each file. I haven't fixed any broken links inside of each page, however - the ones outside of my site are gone, probably for …
HTML entity containing multiple hyperlinks to other sites, presumably for the purpose of artificially bumping up someone's search engine rankings. Both the height and width of the injected HTML code are usually set to zero pixels each, but I've seen a couple of instances of one-by-one
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entities as well. It stands to reason that pretty much …
This evening while going walkabout after work, Lyssa and I happened upon a new Indian restaurant in Chantilly, Virginia that chanced to have opened just last week called Dishes of India (13949 Metrotech Drive; Chantilly, Virginia; 20151; telephone number 703-961-1004), which can be found in the big shopping plaza. It's a fairly unassuming place, sandwiched between a Catholic Store (no, that's really what it's called) and a small pizzaria, but the service was enthusiastic, attentive, and most of all, helpful. We sat down to try a selection of the fare and were pleasantly surprised at how excellent it was. The …
Telerama, one of the first Internet Service Providers in the world has finally jacked the big black, but somehow managed to pull off a miracle as it flatlined. Telerama (referred to as Teletrauma by ex-employees) has dropped offline a couple of times in the past because they couldn't pay their bills, management vanishing, and suchlike. In the net.community they're notorious for some of their business practices (such as outsourcing IT to the country of Brasil and running their tech support entirely off of IRC), which has probably contributed to the ISP's decline in the past nine years or so …
It seems that the US federal government has been busy lately - a pair of news articles released last week show the lengths they're going to so that they can get their way while seeming to be on the up and up. As you'll recall, back in July of 2005 the city of London, England was rocked by a number of explosions which were placed by suicide bombers to maximally disrupt the public transportation system of the city. The British government probably asked the FBI to assist in the investigation (as suggested by a number of documents obtained through the Freedom …
Neurologists at Northwestern University have made a minor breakthrough in the field of nerve regeneration: They've developed a form of self-assembling nanofibre that can be used by damaged nerve cells to stitch themselves back together. The process involves a solution of molecules (the names of the compounds involved were not included in this article) that, under the correct circumstances, will arrange themselves into molecular-sized tubes that act as repair scaffolds for injured nerve cells in the spinal cords of mice. Ordinarily, when nerves are damaged, scar tissue develops at the injury sites and precludes rejoining the ends in any fashion …
Friday as a whole wound up being something of a comedy of errors - the first half of the day was supposed to be spent at the dentist's office having stage two of my emergency root canal performed (building up the plastic post, taking the cast for the permanant crown, and placing the temporary), but per usual things started going south. While out running an emergency errand on Friday morning I got a call from my boss - not only had I been re-assigned to another project at the last minute but there was apparantly a pressing need to show up at …
Now that I've metabolized the caffeine from the two-and-an-unknown-fraction pots of coffee I've drunk today (don't ask), I have it together enough to write about an unusually annoying glitch that plagues Linux users from time to time: Automatic mounting of USB storage devices stops working after you tinker with the systemware, usually after recompiling something or upgrading a package. I ran into this a few days ago but didn't think much of it because I've mostly been using Windows XP for work (yes, yes, you may now all laugh) but I decided to sit down and figure out what happened …
Since the country of China stepped up its activities in Tibet hundreds of pro-Tibet websites have been springing up all across the Net. Predictably, some subset of those sites are being compromised by pro-Communist China crackers, which is a popular political maneuver (of questionable effectiveness). Not content to merely deface these sites, some of them are being infected with a malware agent called Fribet, which attacks vulnerabilities in the user's web browser to silently install itself. Fribet not only sets up a backdoor into the system that allows it to be remotely controlled but it is capable of attacking other …
