Month: August 2006

So long Pluto, I hardly knew you from Uranus.

I also think I found the dumbest article written about the topic.

I saw a bunch of HTTP referrers from UniqueDaily.com today. It’s a site that posts user submitted links to weird stories and they must have been fans of the Ham Dog. But then I saw how they actually linked it (see August 18th)…

Adrien Brody shows folks how to make The Ham Dog

Really? I guess I never noticed a resemblance. At least he’s cool.

>

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the show on Friday night. Without you guys there would have only been about two people there! I was definitely rusty and my voice/wrists/fingers started failing by the end of the show, but overall I had a good time.

Grooveground is a cool venue, but it’s a shame their location is at the end of the business disctrict in Collingwood. Many of their potential customers get siphoned off by the Treehouse. It probably doesn’t help that there’s a Wawa almost right across the street, too.

Don’t forget to stop by my show at Grooveground tonight! See you at 8:00PM.

Back in the late 90’s, there used to be a search engine called Metacrawler that let you view the last ten searches put through their system. It was called MetaSpy and I used to be fascinated at the people who would search for www.hotmail.com. Occasionally you would see names float by of famous or non-famous people, but because they were among millions of users there was no way to guess who was searching for what.

Last week AOL released 36 million search queries from 658,000 different users, but unlike MetaSpy they tagged each user with a random userID that linked the users searches together. So if user 1238192 searches for links about his town, street, the kind of car he drives, what high school he went to, etc., it’s isn’t difficult to guess who the person is. That’s just what a NY Times reporter did for 62 year old Lilburn, GA resident Thelma Arnold.

The search database was taken down almost immediately, but not before its contents were mirrored all over the web. There are many sites now where you can view the searches for yourself, like this one.

So what’s the harm in matching up someone’s search results with their identity? Blinq reports that in 1997 a Navy sailor’s AOL profile that mentioned he was gay was mistakenly matched up with his real name. The Navy discharged him and the man sued both AOL and the Navy and eventually had it settled in his favor.

That’s one example of how the leaked search data can affect someone’s livelihood, but one can easily see the same problem with family members, church goers, politicians (ok, no sympathy for the politicians).

The upside for all non-aolers is that this has provided some of the funniest reading material ever. Just page through a collection of “best of” users like this one and you’ll see what I mean. Note: They’re pretty raunchy.

My prediction? AOL is in deep shit. They’re already seeing FTC complaints about it.

I was listening to the Diggnation podcast this morning on my way to work and one of the hosts, Digg.com founder Kevin Rose, had this to say:

Listen to Kevin Rose saying he won’t mind if kids egg his house (MP3 500KB).

Have at it kids!

I started playing an online game called The Ship a few weeks ago, because the premise sounded a little like Odd Man In to me. It’s a 3D first person shooter that uses the Halflife 2 engine.

The basic idea is this: You’re stuck on a cruise ship and forced to play a game of hunt and kill for the enjoyment of a maniacal mastermind. You’re assigned an identity in the game and each round you get a quarry (ie target). You have a limited number of time to hunt down this quarry and kill them using a weapon found on the ship like a shaving razor, a fire axe, or the flare gun found on the pool deck. You must also avoid the player who is hunting you!

Another twist is that you can’t just kill your quarry as soon as you see them. You have to do it discretely, so no killing in front of a guard or a security camera. Otherwise, you’ll be arrested and locked up.

So you ask, “What’s to stop me from just hanging out by the security guard the whole time?” The game includes a number of needs that have to be fulfilled like eating, drinking, entertainment, showering, pooping, peeing, etc. You also have to sleep, in which your screen goes black for about 15 seconds leaving you completely vulnerable.

If all that isn’t brilliant enough, there are items found around the ship that can help satisfy your needs. Books are lying around all over the place for entertainment, energy drinks are available for the tired, and using deodorant can delay the need for that shower. My jaw dropped when I first discovered you can find and use a colostomy bag and a catheter to keep you from having to actually go into the restroom alone. Sometimes you even find these items in the trash!

This site posted a list of what they thought was the greatest software ever written. I decided I’d come up with a list of my own personal favorite free (or nearly free) programs.

10. Trillian (Instant Messaging) – I used to use IM a lot more, but when I do it’s always through Trillian. My contacts are fragmented all through AOL, ICQ, and MSN and Trillian lets you connect to each of them as if they were one network. File transfers don’t always work through it, but overall it’s great.

9. Toad (Database interface) – At work I access an Oracle database all the time and Toad is an awesome lightweight program for running SQL queries.

8. putty (SSH client) – The only SSH client you’ll ever need, although it never seems to save my color preferences.

7. Adblock Plus extension for Firefox – Firefox’s ad blocking extension makes the web so much better.

6. Google Maps – Everyone used mapquest for so long it was amazing that google was able to come out with something so much better. The best part is overlaying street names on the satelite photos. I use it all the time.

5. iTunes – It says a lot for iTunes that I used it for over a year before I got an iPod. I’ve had love/hate relationships with a lot of MP3 players and organizers, but iTunes does it right. It has all the features you want: smart playlists, volume evening, ratings, sort by anything and everything, burn mixes to CD, etc. I wish I could have more advanced smart playlist logic, but it’s still better than anything else out there.

4. Gimp (Photo/Image editing) – I used to own photoshop 5, but I haven’t bothered to upgrade since I found Gimp for Windows. Sure, the interface isn’t as slick as Photoshop but it’s a fantastic image editing program for FREE.

3. Mozilla Thunderbird (Email) – I got so fed up with Outlook Express I actually wrote and used my own mail client for a while. Then my computer crashed and I lost a lot of the code. I started re-writing it, but then I found Thunderbird and gave up. It has everything you like about OE without all the viruses.

2. Editpad Lite (Text Editing) – A friend showed me this replacement for Notepad a long time ago and I haven’t used much else since. One testament to its greatness is that many times I’ll show it to someone once and from then on I’ll see them using all the time. It’s a lightning fast text editor that lets you do multiple tabs, word counts, and line numbers. I use it every day and its speed makes my life easier.

1. Mozilla Firefox – When Netscape first released their source code everyone thought there would be a competitor for Internet Explorer right off the bat. Not so. It took years before the Mozilla foundation had something worth using, but when they finally did it was pretty neat. The Mozilla suite (email, newsgroups, browser, and IRC chat client) worked great, except the annoying problem that if the email client crashed so did the browser. Some kid decided to strip the browser out by itself and Firefox was born. I give credit to Firefox for taking the web back to users in allowing us to block ads, manage cookies, and circumvent annoying technologies using many of the awesome extensions out there available like AdBlock, Greasemonkey, Bugmenot, Web Developer, etc.

Honorable mentions: Audacity (sound editing), ptkdb (gui based perl debugger), PrimoPDF (ultra simple PDF converter).

If anyone is in the AllPeers beta, add me as friend. My name on there is Washizu.

I don’t know what the heck was wrong for the past few days, but the site seems to be working again. I spent a while trying to figure out what was wrong and it eventually fixed itself. I guess something broke on the server.