Turtles all the way down

The United States: The Half-Hearted Empire

2011-10-09T13:03:00.001-04:00

What is the plan-book for the United States' military success in Iraq or Afghanistan or indeed anywhere else? The only example of successful intervention is the Roman one. Everyone else failed. This includes the British, the Persians, and Russians, all of whom had powerful empires of relatively brief duration. How does one build an empire that lasts a thousand years? One starts by studying the

What's possible for Israel and Palestine?

2011-09-23T16:06:00.001-04:00

I'm not an optimist. I strive to be a realist. I would like to recognize where people are coming from, what's the concern that they have, in their heart of hearts; how is that translated into action, and expressed in beliefs and deeds; what contradictions and conflicts lurk there. I lived in Israel between 1970 and 1972, age 12-14. I recommend to every American to live in a foreign country for

Review: A Dance With Dragons

2011-08-08T09:45:00.002-04:00

Meaty, beaty, big, and bouncy! Plenty of the usual Martin juiciness in character, interactions, schemes, and events. Brutality and suffering are well in evidence, side by side with hope and sincerity. Alas, I start to tire of the cliff-hanger formula for each chapter. I would like to follow each story line farther, with fewer interruptions. Is this device so necessary? It's typical of a

Review: Game of Thrones: Season 1

2011-06-20T17:48:00.002-04:00

Sean Bean as Eddard Stark. Perfect in every way. I had been looking forward avidly to this HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Well, to tell the truth, I was a bit put off by the extreme hoopla. There is such a thing as over-promotion. I'm sufficiently bored with marketing antics to not pay much attention to them. It tends to inspire disgust. Though I did think the food

Review: The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin

2011-04-08T16:39:00.011-04:00

The Dispossessed is a murmuring tale whose circular, interwoven structure echoes Shevek’s paradigm-shifting research into temporal physics while examining the moral consequences of two interlocked societies, one capitalist, the other communist. The setting is the twin worlds of Urras and Anarres, each of which looms in the sky as the other’s moon; a symbolical relationship. Urras, a land of

Review: The Bards of Bone Plain

2011-02-28T17:41:00.013-05:00

Author: Patricia A. McKillip Format: Hardcover Page Count: 329 Genre: Fantasy Publisher: The Penguin Group Pub. Date: Dec. 7, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-0441019571 Rating: 8 out of 10 The Bards of Bone Plain is a lyrical fantasy that melds a remote, legendary past with a steam-driven modernity. The author, Patricia A. McKillip, neatly weaves an unfolding plot, populated with believable, attractive people

Speculative Fiction Online: Short Stories

2011-01-12T11:04:00.002-05:00

Lovers of speculative fiction — elf watchers, sorcery buffs, space nerds, zombie huggers, apocalypse prophets — fantasists and science fiction lovers of all stripes — can find plenty of fiction online to sate an appetite for shorter works at a low price, or no price at all. Short fiction is one of the best ways for new authors to be published and recognized. You can feel the thrill of discovering

Knife of Dreams

2010-12-05T21:50:00.002-05:00

Knife of Dreams is much better than Winter's Heart or Crossroads of Twilight. Stuff happens in spite of Jordan’s usual foot-dragging, boring mental landscapes, and scene-killing clothing descriptions.My favorite scene: Egwene mastering the situation as a prisoner of the Tower, converting the novices to her side, coping with the pain of punishment, drawing on her considerable inner resources,

Shameless promo of Adonalsium.net

2010-12-02T21:01:00.003-05:00

Stooping to brutal marketing tactics, Adonanalsium.net promises Brandon Sanderson fans that social networking promotion of Adonalsium will improve their chances to win Sanderson books. I'm happy to oblige, although I draw the line at Facebook. Note that you do have to register for their Drupal forum in order to fill out the giveaway form. Cool stuff: free download of Warbreaker! Kindle owners

Altering CSS for every nth element of a class

2010-11-11T22:09:00.006-05:00

I wanted to improve on my previous jquery fix to remove the left padding for the 4th floating div.widget on the Rabbit Software homepage. If I add more widgets, the rows won't align correctly unless I can remove the padding from every 4th one. Because of the fixed width template and fixed width of the widgets, there are always 3 widgets per row. The index of widgets counts up from 0, so I needed

Even floated div columns: equalHeights

2010-11-11T22:02:00.004-05:00

When you are floating a bunch of divs inside a container, it is a design problem when the divs are of different heights depending on their content, because they tend to wrap funky. One can, by brute force, make them all the same height, but that approach is fragile and can create problems with the content contained in each div. (Why is there a flower photo? Just because it looks nice.) A better

Rip an Audiobook CD to an IPod

2010-11-07T12:07:00.003-05:00

I have been spending time with audiobooks lately. Managing and navigating audio book CDs, which can have up to 99 tracks per disc, can be a nightmare on the IPod unless you build playlists before syncing. This CNet post, How to rip an audiobook CD to an iPod, was very helpful. Insert Audio CD, and select it in ITunes. Before beginning the import, select all the tracks on the inserted CD, and

Join tracks in ITunes

2010-11-07T11:24:00.001-05:00

If you imported an audiobook CD to ITunes but didn't join the tracks when you imported, there is a solution. Doug's Applescripts for ITunes will allow you to select a set of tracks (AAC or MP3) and join them into a single file. This is a great help for audiobooks, because there's no reason to have 99 tracks in an audio book. If you have several audiobooks in this condition, they're a holy mess

New logo for Rabbit Software

2010-10-21T20:17:00.002-04:00

I made a new logo for Rabbit Software: Richard loves the Barry Flanagan leaping hare, but we don't want to infringe on creative copyright. We've seen one of these wonderful sculptures at the Virginia Museum of Art. My first step was to collect a lot of images on the web, save them in a folder, and using Adobe Bridge, made a neat-o PDF document with small equivalently sized and tiled images that

Wheel of Time Online Resources

2010-10-20T16:38:00.001-04:00

This material was first published on Dreams & Speculation: Winter's Heart Mid-month Discussion. Here are some valuable Wheel of Time online resources. My list is necessarily incomplete, because there is so much material available. Please add links to your favorite sites in the comments. Can't keep up with a Wheel of Time read-through? Not to worry! Hop on to one of the read-through summary

Some small modifications of the SimpleFolio Wordpress theme

2010-10-19T19:31:00.005-04:00

I'm using the delightful SimpleFolio Wordpress theme for the Rabbit Software website. I made a donation; it's nice to support good opensource work. I found a few issues with it that I have addressed. 1. The single post view was incorrectly showing the excluded "Portfolio" category in its Recent Posts sidebar widget. In this theme, you can select a specific category to populate the homepage

I made the Rabbit Software website

2010-10-09T22:14:00.005-04:00

I made a very simple WordPress-blog-based website for Richard's new adventure in consulting: rabbitsoftware.com I just pasted in some content from his LinkedIn profile. He'll have to tweak that. I'm working on a proper rabbity logo, this one is just a filler. I think I'm satisfied with the favicon. The slides are slices from a high resolution NASA image. On Sat., April 17, 2010, the

Review: The Last Page

2010-10-07T13:07:00.002-04:00

Please see my guest-blogger review of Anthony Huso's fantasy novel, The Last Page at Dreams & Speculation.

D. H. Lawrence poems formatted for Kindle

2010-09-24T12:03:00.004-04:00

I've been messing around with my new Kindle, downloading free books (e.g., Thomas Paine's "Common Sense") and turning other digital content such as PDF and HTML into Kindle-ready form. Amazon provides a free service to convert compatible documents into Kindle format, and loads them automatically onto your Kindle. Kindle owners get a personal email address which they use to convert content. For

Winter's Heart by Robert Jordan

2010-09-21T10:40:00.004-04:00

Tor reread by Leigh Butler Wheel of Time Challenge discussion on Dreams & Speculation My "first half" review, through Chapter 18. The second half of the book suffers from the same problems as the first half: chapters that are full of padding, pointless description, flaccid tension-building, wordy sentences, sub-plot shifts that ruin plot momentum, and meandering point-of-view writing that does

Not so excited about Boardwalk Empire

2010-09-20T17:33:00.001-04:00

The pilot for Boardwalk Empire, the new HBO series, didn't thrill me. First of all, let me say that there is goodness in it: the sets, costumes, and lighting, all done very nicely, quite atmospheric and carefully, lovingly observed. The historical detail is superbly researched. Very educational. Number one turnoff: my goodness, you've got all the brilliance of Jazz Age music to choose from, yet

Half-way through Winter's Heart ... the tedium of it

2010-09-17T10:33:00.003-04:00

My contribution to the mid-month discussion. Actually, I'm almost done with the book, and I can assure you... almost nothing happens in this book, and there's little to enjoy about it. Oh yes, there are a few scenes you might enjoy, but wading through 800 pages for a few scenes spoils the enjoyment. Better to read the synopsis of this book. I’m putting hands to head and screaming, “Hundreds of

Solutions to missing Home/End keypad keys on Macbook

2010-09-05T16:12:00.003-04:00

Do you ever want to quickly navigate to the beginning or end of a Word document on your Macbook? Do you find yourself missing the old Home and End shortcut keys that are on the keypad of full size keyboards? The keyboard commands are fn-Command-right arrow and fn-Command-left arrow. If you said, "Man, that is so not intuitive," you have a couple of options. You can use a two-step keyboard

Review: Songs of the Dying Earth

2010-09-01T09:43:00.000-04:00

Please see my review of Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. TJ is letting me be a regular reviewer at her Dreams and Speculation blog. Thank you, TJ!

Climate change: my view

2010-09-01T09:26:00.004-04:00

A dear old friend of mine sent me a link to this article published in the UK paper The Daily Express, perhaps thinking he would be making a crucial point. CLIMATE CHANGE LIES ARE EXPOSED My emailed reply, below. Media Matters discussion of that article Wikipedia's well researched article on scientific opinion on climate change I'm not a climate scientist, but when I see people kicking around

The Path of Daggers

2010-08-22T16:14:00.003-04:00

The Path of Daggers re-read at Tor Publishing The Dreams and Speculation Discussion I have to confess that I enjoyed this book more than the previous three books. I find that I'm more engaged in the good vs. evil context, and I'm less repelled, confused, or bored. That's not to say that all is good, but I feel more tolerant. Is it just me? Have I become more... submissive? One of the most

Duplex printing for Brother HL-2170W laser printer on Mac OS X

2010-08-20T10:41:00.002-04:00

I've been disappointed with this printer's lack of at least manual duplexing: you know the routine, print even pages, flip paper, refeed in the right direction, print odd pages. I use the same printer on my Windows bootcamp/VM, and that driver has a nice set of instructions and pictures, showing the user how to feed the paper in easy steps. Anyway, after another stint of research, I found out

Photos: Rosalie and me, and Dad, 1964-1968

2010-08-19T18:04:00.000-04:00

A few amusing photos that Rosalie pulled out of her album. http://opally.tumblr.com/post/978594929/family-photos-1960s She gave them to Dad, he scanned them, and sent them to me. Me and my sister: our own culture.

Review: The Dying Earth

2010-08-18T08:58:00.000-04:00

Please read and comment on my review of the audio book The Dying Earth by Jack Vance, published at Dreams and Speculation. The Dying Earth influenced a whole generation of science fiction and fantasy writers who grew up in the 1950’s and 60's.

My life as an avatar, part 1: Kesmai

2010-08-13T13:08:00.007-04:00

Since childhood, I always dreamed of being other than myself, being a better, stronger being, in a more beautiful, nobler world. As a child, this usually involved pretending to be a wild horse (yes, girls love horses) or enacting made-up dramas and comedies with stuffed dolls, trolls, or even Corgi and Matchbox cars. Any obect that spoke its personality to me could be a player in an impromptu,

Review: The Name of the Wind -- and yay, I'm a guest blogger!

2010-08-04T08:35:00.001-04:00

Thank you TJ at Dreams & Speculation for allowing me to be a guest reviewer! More incentive for me to read and write. My review of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is here. TJ has a lovely, popular book review blog focused on sci-fi and fantasy genres. I'm very impressed with what she's put together; she must be a reading and writing machine.

Tea party contradictions

2010-07-24T15:04:00.002-04:00

Great reply by George R. R. Martin in response to a comment from a reader on his blog. The blog post was about the eerie similarity he observed between a video of a Tea Party political rally or town hall meeting, not sure which, and the biergarten scene in Cabaret where a Hitlerjungend sings "Tomorrow belongs to me". I think George's observation is spot-on. He's picking up on the emotionalism of

A Crown of Swords

2010-07-15T16:44:00.010-04:00

Dreams and Speculation blog's Wheel of Time challenge Tor's Wheel of Time re-read and synopsis by Leigh Butler. I am tired of whining about the quality and characteristics of these books. This month I just plunged in, and read it as if I were AA-grinding in EverQuest. If you want a payoff, you knuckle down and endure the dreary bits. I'm glad to say I finished it a few days ago. I'm getting

Margaret Atwood and Science Fiction and Space Opera

2010-07-10T17:20:00.000-04:00

Over at TJ's Dreams and Speculation fiction review blog, I was surprised to learn that Margaret Atwood had denied that her books The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake were science fiction, saying "science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen." According to Wikipedia she has since refined her objection, and described her work as social science fiction. It

Parallels VM configuration

2010-07-03T16:44:00.004-04:00

Finally got my Parallels VM working. Turns out Parallels 5.0.9344 doesn't really play nice in the Mac OS 10.6.4 environment. It's hogging memory, so... give it less memory. It has to be physically restricted. Parallels preferences: Total memory allocated: Manual: 1456 Mb VM Configuration: General: 1Gb memory (I have 4Gb total memory) Options: Optimization: UNcheck Adaptive Hypervisor

Lord of Chaos

2010-06-30T11:26:00.003-04:00

Dreams and Speculation blog's Wheel of Time challenge: review of LoC. Tor's Wheel of Time re-read and synopsis by Leigh Butler. Sigh, what to say. I'm fully onboard with sci-fi author Adam Roberts' take on this series. What I detest about the Wheel of Time series so far: I am not finding the characters to be interesting and compelling; rather I find them to be flawed creations that serve the

Adam Roberts' sharp and witty criticism of Wheel of Time

2010-06-18T09:29:00.000-04:00

I relish Adam Roberts' criticisms of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I'm slogging along, barely able to keep up with the one-book-per-month guilty pleasure/onerous chore of TJ's Wheel of Time Challenge. (see my footer.) I was spoiled by George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. I thought other popular fantasy writing would be up to those standards. Au contraire, mes amis. I

As liberal democracies decline into fascism...

2010-06-16T10:53:00.004-04:00

I love this Daily Show. What more can I say? Well, since you asked, I'll try to be succinct: Democracy requires an informed, educated, active, healthy and nourished population. As our newspapers and new outlets succumb to journalistic mediocrity and underfunding, there is a natural tendency for journalists to collaborate with corporate and government interests in controlling information and

Wordpress: show paginated list of posts at URLs other than site root

2010-06-15T16:54:00.000-04:00

I FINALLY fixed the problem on Pugix's blog where the "more recent posts" wasn't paginating properly to older posts. Sadly, my question was ignored on the WordPress forum. I found the answer in this WordPress documentation codex page, Making Your Blog Appear in a Non-Root Folder. I *did* have to create a new template. The key was this: the posts.php template isn't a display template, it just

Revising Pugix's Wordpress Blog

2010-06-02T10:06:00.006-04:00

Over the Memorial Day weekend I delved back into WordPress and made some needed changes for pugix.com, my husband's analog synthesizer blog. It uses WordPress 2.9.2, the current release, and a pack o' plugins. In essence, we wanted to get current content onto the homepage, not just as a little "what's new" link in the sidebar. About four years ago I used WordPress to convert his static HTML,

The Fires of Heaven

2010-05-29T15:38:00.003-04:00

Dreams and Speculation's Wheel of Time Challenge. Tor.com's Wheel of Time reread of TFoH by the ever-entertaining and in-your-face Leigh Butler Adam Roberts' witty and snide review of TFoH. What most concerns him is the writing style. And really, I agree with him. A very sprawling read, and I really began to feel bored. Very tedious and repetitive detail. What kind of literary mind repeats

Why I'm so tired of rock music

2010-05-26T09:25:00.002-04:00

Rock music today cannot reproduce the excitement of its youth. People who were listening to music in the 60's and 70's remember the excitement, anticipation, and mind-opening of new albums by great rock bands. Progressive rock stations played that music, not corporatized market-oriented pablum. The problem today with "classic rock" is nostalgia. Yes, Led Zeppelin was great, but there cannot be a

Starting The Fires of Heaven

2010-05-07T08:50:00.003-04:00

So I broke down last night and started reading The Fires of Heaven, book 5 of The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Participating in a reading group does give one some of the "stick" when the "carrot" isn't so tasty. Elaida, the new Amyrlin Seat, is being ignored because although she instigated the revolt and deposing of the previous Amyrlin, she doesn't herself command enough power and

The Shadow Rising

2010-05-01T11:54:00.005-04:00

Book Love Affair blog discussion for this book and the Tor reread outline by Leigh Butler. I feel like I'm being sucked along in this Wheel of Time epic. I'm not a rabid fan (they seem to be out there) but I am enjoying certain aspects of the story. It's written in a way that moves along well, for plot, and has dreamworld and magic themes that interest me, and I care just enough about the main

Show full path in Finder menu bar in OS X

2010-04-25T15:43:00.002-04:00

If you like to see the full path to the active folder in the Finder menu bar, enter this in a terminal window: defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES killall Finder killall Finder will relaunch the Finder with the changes.

Find hidden files in Mac OSX 10.6 Finder

2010-04-25T08:18:00.006-04:00

Inspired by Pat Durr's screen capture movie. My first recording! My first YouTube video! For my Quicktime recording, I resized my screen to 640x480 for a form factor more agreeable for this narrow blog. I used Squared 5's MPEG Streamclip for Mac — the beta version was needed to make an MPEG-4 that is visible to YouTube — to downsize it further. I think I need a wider theme if I'm going to

View/hide hidden Mac OSX files in finder

2010-04-25T07:57:00.005-04:00

View hidden files in finder: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool TRUE killall Finder change to FALSE to hide hidden files. killallFinder will restart the finder. You need this if you do any kind of development work on your Mac! This is the best method.

The Dragon Reborn

2010-03-31T11:01:00.002-04:00

Book Love Affair blog discussion for this book and the Tor reread outline by Leigh Butler. I love the feeling of being absorbed in a richly imagined alternative world, as I used to enjoy in Everquest, and I experience some of that in these books. They're very long, with enough juiciness and intrigue to stay inviting, although they have their frustrations for this reader. It has become more

The Great Hunt

2010-02-28T11:02:00.005-05:00

Reactions to The Great Hunt I found this book more absorbing than The Eye of the World; I finished reading it around Feb. 15 and had to force myself not to start The Dragon Reborn until March. Picked up Bernard Cornwell's The Winter King in the meantime, but more about that in another post (TK). Leigh Butler's smartly written synopses at Tor are very handy references and refreshers. I think

Starting The Great Hunt

2010-02-09T17:59:00.004-05:00

Reactions so far to The Great Hunt: I'm enjoying Rand's resistance to his calling. Almost every genuine spiritual calling is met by horror and resistance. Oh, you need examples to prove the point? Moses, St. Augustine, Jesus (if you like Kazantsakis' deeply-felt interpretation) ... um, I'll think of some more. A "spiritual transformation" is a destruction of the ego. It's a "lose yourself to

The Eye of the World

2010-02-09T14:38:00.008-05:00

OK, signed up for the Wheel of Time big read-in on Book Love Affair blog. Just happenstance that I started reading WoT. I really liked George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire (so far) and wanted to indulge my LoTR-inclination, did some research, and picked up The Eye of the World. What I enjoyed in this book: Large, detailed world with (typical fantasy-lit) medieval-style political/economic/

Count number of files of certain size

2010-01-12T17:17:00.003-05:00

find ./ -size 0k | grep "sess_" -c This finds the files and directories matching a path and matching a size. Can use -size +[number]k (above a certain size) or -size -[number]k (below a certain size), or a size match. Then it pipes that to a grep for the word "sess_" and returns a count. Helps us count the enormous number of blank sessions that our app is generating on OSX.

Selecting non-distinct rows in MySQL

2010-01-08T15:29:00.005-05:00

Got this here. SELECT *, COUNT(*) AS count FROM tablename GROUP BY fieldname HAVING count > 1

To count the number of session files in a directory

2009-12-23T10:10:00.002-05:00

count number of session files in a directory: ls -l | grep "sess_" -c

PHPMyAdmin: Setting up the MAMP environment

2009-12-05T16:54:00.002-05:00

Continuing notes to self. Followed the PHPMyAdmin macports installation instructions here.I couldn't get logged in to PHPMyAdmin. When I tried to log in I got the message "#2002 - The server is not responding (or the local MySQL server's socket is not correctly configured)"I googled the error and found this helpful thread in the MySQL forums. Amusingly, I found that I had previously had the same

Configuring my new MacBook Pro for development

2009-12-05T15:32:00.008-05:00

I'm setting up my new —well, used, thanks JB!— MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard for development. I'm using MacPorts for simplicity, but of course, one always runs into something that baffles and confounds. For future reference and benefit as I struggle through this: Setting up the MAMP environment for Apache Don't forget to install XCode before installing MacPorts. This MacPorts guide is a good

Temporarily locking submit button

2009-10-13T10:56:00.005-04:00

Suggested by this example.I need a temporarily locking submit button because if there's a validation error on the page, the user needs to resubmit. But I need to stop the clickers (slow response sometimes on this server) and give them some feedback.$(document).ready(function() { $(':submit').click(function() { $original = $(this).val(); $(this).val('Saving, please wait...')

Brief display of unformatted text while jquery-ui or yui loads

2009-07-20T09:14:00.009-04:00

On our new site I was seeing ugly unformatted text for a second while the jquery or yui widget loads. I didn't find anything about how to deal with that, but Michael of Amptools showed me the light.1. Add style="display: none" to the element. Not in the stylesheet.2. In the js for the dom event watcher, after the element loads, make it visible, like so:(function () { var carousel = null;

Eclipse crashing when typing $

2009-07-20T08:50:00.003-04:00

Eclipse 3.5 has been hanging almost every time I type a "$" character... and that's quite often. Every time this happened I had to force-quite on my Mac. At least PDT fixed that ridiculous "Selection Job Titile" error with this release.Michael of Amptools kindly posted this bug to the Eclipse project, too. In the meantime I reverted to writing code in TextMate, no hardship there, but no "

Smart columns with CSS and jquery

2009-06-12T21:59:00.002-04:00

Could be useful...Smart columns with CSS and jquery.The thing is, these are all the same height. These aren't columns. They're bricks.I'm perplexed about dealing with a bunch of floating items of different heights. I'm using the usual float everything left strategy, but it would be cool to try this approach to resize the widths to fit the window nicely.the problem arrives when the items sort out

jquery to show a div depending on values of two selects

2009-06-03T16:46:00.008-04:00

Using Jquery:$(document).ready(function() { $('select#article-type').change(function() { var type = $(this).val(); var section = $('#article_sections').val(); (type == '500') && (section > 20) && (section < 40) // higher education event ? $('#event-info').slideDown() : $('#event-info').slideUp("fast"); return

SitePoint Mega Menus: my incarnation

2009-06-03T16:32:00.008-04:00

Got a great approach to menus from the SitePoint MegaMenu post. ugh, I wanted to share some code, but looks like code tags are verboten here. I really need to make myself a decent blog. sigh. Well, the javascript shows up, sans whitespace indenting, so here you go: (of course you also need the hoverIntent plugin for jquery -- read the article!) function addMega(){ $($(this).find("h2")).

Turtles all the way down

2009-02-10T16:57:00.003-05:00

Explained very nicely on Wikipedia.Apocryphal quote from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time:A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the

Worst passwords of all time!

2009-02-10T16:44:00.002-05:00

Weak passwords are one of the greatest vulnerabilities in any application or network environment. Not enough people take it seriously.Here are the top 500 worst passwords of all time.Oh, and here's an attack dictionary, kindly offered by a commenter to that blog.

Nice FireFox addon: UrlbarEXT

2009-01-28T15:57:00.011-05:00

Lots of utility here for FireFox browsing, plus anonymous surfing. Looks easier to use than The Onion Router (Tor). Is it equally secure? URLbarEXT

Botnets for Macs

2009-01-28T11:05:00.010-05:00

You knew it was coming.Mac Trojan Horse OSX.Trojan.iServices.A Foundin Pirated Apple iWork 09 Exploit: OSX.Trojan.iServices.A Trojan HorseDiscovered: January 21, 2009Risk: SeriousDescription: Intego has discovered a new Trojan horse, OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, which is currently circulating in copies of Apple’s iWork 09 found on BitTorrent trackers and other sites containing links to pirated

Stumbling Feedburner integration

2009-01-27T12:12:00.003-05:00

Google's acquisition of Feedburner continues to stumble along. Integration doesn't seem to be going well at all. Many users are complaining about broken stats. Me too.See ReadWriteWeb's review of PostRank as the Feedburner-killer.Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed.Interesting stuff.

New MidEast policy

2009-01-27T11:21:00.003-05:00

The most important comments in Obama's interview on Al Arabiya:And so what I told [George Mitchell] is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating -- in the past on some of these issues -- and we don't always know all the factors that are involved. So let's listen.And the surrounding countries need to be involved, as well: Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and

VIM tutorial

2009-01-27T11:12:00.002-05:00

nice that vim comes with an interactive tutorial. Perhaps I'll finally remember how to go between edit and command mode.Just open a terminal, and $ vim tutorial

cool wireframe tools!

2009-01-27T10:29:00.003-05:00

Just learned about Balsamiq and IPlotz.Why would anyone mess around with Adobe tools to develop web page feature placements and plot navigation?Software development (e.g., web design) needs to be collaborative to be successful.

Enough with the whining

2009-01-27T10:10:00.002-05:00

I think people have forgotten what “war” means. If the ratio had been the other way around, Palestinians would have been celebrating instead of whining. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought war was all about killing as many of the other guys as possible, and losing as few of your own as you can possibly manage.If Israel’s policy was to kill as many Palestinians as possible, they would have