Whew! After 6 weeks, Project Honeypot has identified a spam harvester trolling one of the sites I signed up with them. Considering it only took 3 days for them to hit some of the local spamtraps I set up at the same time, I’m surprised. I’m especially surprised that it was found on the least trafficked site.
Author Archives: Kelson
Manual off-topic
I picked up a new mouse to use at work yesterday, mainly because I wanted a scroll wheel that actually turned. (The old one was jammed.) I figured I’d go optical as well, since I much prefer optical mice. I ended up getting a basic $15 Microsoft mouse, though I would have gone for a more expensive Logitech if I were getting one for home.
When I plugged it in this morning, I was surprised to find that it skipped all over the place. Not constantly, as if the KVM had gotten its signal mixed up, but enough that it would be a real pain to use. (Oddly, it worked more smoothly on my Linux box than the Windows box. I have no idea why.)
So I pulled out the manual, looking for a troubleshooting section. Something like “If your mouse skips, it may be caused by XYZ.” Nothing. The contents were:
- One page on how to plug it in
- One page on which button does what.
- One page on cleaning instructions (half of which was for ball mice).
- Five pages on ergonomics and how to arrange your chair, desk, monitor, keyboard and mouse to avoid eyestrain, carpal tunnel syndrome, etc.
- One page titled “Be Healthy,” advising you to eat a balanced diet, get plenty of rest and exercise, see your doctor on a regular basis, etc.
- The usual radio interference and legal information. And another health warning about RSI.
Useful information to be sure, but not quite what I was looking for.
As it turns out, I just tossed away my mouse pad and tried the mouse directly on the desk. It works like a charm now. I guess the pad was too reflective or something.
Cancellations: Fallen Angel & B5
Fallen Angel is ending with #20, and Babylon 5: The Memory of Shadows has fallen through.
However, JMS has always said, “If they can do a Brady Bunch movie, you can be sure that sooner or later, somebody’s going to do a B5 movie.” Even better, it turns out that while Warner Bros. owns the B5 TV show lock, stock and barrel, JMS owns the movie rights…so he’s in a position to make sure that whoever does do a B5 movie will get it right. “To that end,” he says… “I can wait.”
As for Fallen Angel, I suspect the timing of the decision means DC either wasn’t waiting for sales after all, or was going on pre-orders from stores. Peter David cryptically remarks, “We are not, however, quite dead yet.” It’s not clear what he means, but the characters are creator-owned, and the series isn’t tied to the DC Universe, so it’s entirely possible for them to pop up again at another publisher. Only time will tell.
New meaning to PDA
OK, this is bizarre. Apparently a Hong Kong software company is preparing to release a Virtual Girlfriend for high-res mobile phones. It—or I suppose I should say “she”—is structured as an online game, on the virtual pet model. (Remember the tamagotchi fad?) You hold conversations with “Vivienne,” give her virtual gifts, even work up to a virtual wedding—which adds a virtual mother-in-law to the game.
The graphics are nice, and apparently they’ve put together a very elaborate conversation engine, but I have to wonder who this will really appeal to. The way she’s described she’s pretty high-maintenance—why go to all that effort when you don’t get the benefit of a real person?
Of course, there are other possibilities for the technology:
Vivienne, for instance, will double as a translator for travelers. Type in the desired words in English while traveling and, with additional programming in the next few months, her synthesized voice will coo it back in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish or Italian.
Just as games have driven desktop computing to keep pushing the envelope, this could lead the way toward the conversational interfaces that are so prevalent in science-fiction.
More Linux Consolidation
Remember UnitedLinux? It was a consortium of Conectiva, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera to build a common distribution that could compete with Red Hat. That effort got derailed, in part because Caldera decided they could make more money by changing their name to SCO and extorting suing the market into oblivion. Now Novell owns SuSE, TurboLinux is facing competition from Red Flag, and Conectiva is merging with Mandrake.
Mandrake’s a nice OS. I keep trying to switch, but I keep coming back to Red Hat Fedora. While my own experience with Conectiva has been, shall we say, less than stellar, they did port Debian’s outstanding package manager APT to work with RPM, and started the development of Synaptic, which should (in my opinion) be the standard way to install and upgrade software on any package-based Linux distribution with a GUI.
For now it looks like they’ll be maintaining separate brands based on a common core (hmm, sounds familiar), but I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up merging the products in a few years.
Hey, if it means Mandrake replaces their clunky update system with APT and Synaptic, I’m all for it.
(See also CNET’s take.)
Billion-year-old Nuclear Reactors
From the Astronomy Picture of the Day, it’s the remnants of a two-billion-year-old nuclear reactor discovered in 1972 in a mine in Oklo, Gabon.
Apparently in the old days there was enough uranium-235 in the Earth’s crust that, under the right conditions, nuclear fission could occur naturally. Over time the fuel was used up, and now uranium deposits are mostly 238U, so we don’t need to worry about any new nuclear reactors popping up without our help.
What’s really odd is that this reactor produced plutonium naturally. There’s still some there. Most periodic tables I’ve seen label plutonium as a synthetic element, so the idea of natural plutonium takes some getting used to.
Kind of like the idea of a natural nuclear reactor.
Bring It On
As reported all over the place, Microsoft has reversed its previous plans and will be releasing a new beta of Internet Explorer this summer instead of keeping it locked to the next version of Windows.
About frelling time.
Of course, there’s no word on whether they’ll actually improve page rendering—all the statements so far have focused on security, anti-phishing, and the like—so we web developers will probably have to continue using hacks to work around buggy rendering and missing features that are so much easier to build for Firefox, Opera and Safari. And even if they do fix things in IE7, they’re focusing on Windows XP (we might get it in Windows 2000, if we’re lucky), and there are still people using on Windows 98/Me who will still be stuck with IE6.
Of course, unlike Microsoft, Mozilla hasn’t stopped working on their browsers. By the time IE7 is out, Firefox 1.1 or 1.5 will be available, and they may be well on the road to 2.0.
Congratulations to Mozilla and Firefox for convincing Microsoft to get back to work!
Competition is good.