I'd like to post congratulations to J.C. Hutchins, the podcaster behind 7th Son. In this week's episode he announced that he'd been contacted by an agent about getting the 7th Son trilogy published. Not long after this, what J.C. described as 'a major science fiction publisher' contacted him through his agent about the manuscript for the first novel, Descent.
Congrats, J.C.!
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Yesterday Intel announced the first few models of its new line of solid-state hard drives based upon NAND gate technology. Rather than using spinning metal platters that use a lot of electricity ('a lot' is a relative term - when you consider the power consumption of a laptop running off of battery power, hard drives are power hogs) they use flashchips similiar to the ubiquitous USB key that just about everyone has one of these days. The Z-U130 line will come in 1, 2, 4, and 8GB capacities, read 28MB and write 20GB per second, which isn't bad for a flashdrive …
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Todd of A Different Drum was nice enough to post a YouTube playlist of music videos of some of the synthpop acts his label works with, such as Leiahdorus, De/Vision, and Cosmicity. Check 'em out.
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It wasn't really like that, but it's my attempt at a silly subject line for today.
Despite the large amounts of antibiotics and analgesics running through my biosystems in the past week or so, somehow I managed to get kicked between wind and water by the first cold of the season. Waking up with a sore throat and burning sinus drainage should have been my first clue, but it didn't actually sink in until yesterday afternoon, when my nose started running. But now I have to back things up a little bit.. On Saturday Lyssa and I took the day …
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David and Eileen Wetzel converted a 1986 Volkswagon Golf to run on vegetable oil as fuel a couple of years ago, and have been driving around with it for a while now. The Illinois Department of Revenue is investigating them for criminal charges, mostly for not paying tax on fuel that the car doesn't even use, retroactive to the point at which he re-worked the car's engine. The couple (who are in their late 70's) had to post a $2500us bond (no mean feat when living on a fixed income, as many retired people do), and have to pay $244us …
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Somebody built a stone circle out of old cars.
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Yesterday I linked to an article at Heise Security about Windows Genuine Advantage phoning home to tell Microsoft that you refused to install it. When word of this got out, supposedly an insider at Microsoft leaked that Windows Update phones home every time it installs an update. Supposedly, it is only to confirm that an update took to control retransmission and reinstallation from the Windows Update servers; while this makes sense, I would personally feel better if packet captures of this would be posted to confirm or deny his statement.
Which, in fact, I think I'll do tonight while I …
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Back in 2003, the US Government formed a project called TIA - Total Information Awareness, with a logo that made about half of the country cringe in fear, anger, and disgust, and sparked off a firestorm in the news media because it constituted a major violation of the right to privacy of US citizens. The project was very publically shelved for the edification of the public, though it wasn't actually terminated.
As with many government projects are are shelved due to public outcry, it was renamed, reclassified, and worked onapace - the data mining software that TIA was supposed to be based …
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Windows OneCare is Microsoft's all-in-one personal security suite, encompassing everything from malware removal to virus scanning on your average personal workstation. The latest release has a particularly nasty glitch, though: When scanning your Outlook .pst files, if it happens to come across an infected e-mail it'll move the whole file into quarantine or delete it entirely depending upon how you've got it configured. It doesn't treat a file that is a legitimate part of a Microsoft app any differently from a trojan executable on the hard drive.
Oops.
Thankfully, there is a workaround for this problem outlined in the article …
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I had originally titled a post about last weekend "''I'm tryin' ta think, but nuttin' happens!'' --Curly, The Three Stooges", but a bit of poking around inside the index file generated by my weblogging application revealed that putting a pair of dashes into the title of a post does something that HTML4 doesn't expect - it thinks that they either start or end a comment in a block of HTML. Carefully looking at the frontpage, I could see where the string of posts was broken because there was a post, then part of a post without the headers, then another part …
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