Wednesday, June 30, 2004

I have very little sympathy for co-workers who refuse to discuss difficult issues and reach a consensus via email. I work with a number of people who, if a thread gets longer than about 3 messages, start insisting that a meeting be called instead.

In the open-source/Internet world, e-mail (and other electronic media such as newsgroups, forums, blog comments, etc.) is the main medium for discussion. There are no face-to-face meetings except maybe at JavaOne or something. Why can't the world inside my corporation operate the same way?

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Google Search: "sudden adult death syndrome"

Why are all the hits for this in the .uk TLD? Is SADS a medical condition that particularly afflicts the British?

Monday, June 28, 2004

Confessions of a Lazy Anti-Warrior

My own confession: I was introduced to the work of Peter Bagge by John "Wiccan Boo" Robinson.

Thursday, June 24, 2004

Honored more in the breach than in the obserance

From a message way down the thread:
When you consider that I am constantly running into references that I don't understand in works that are less than a hundred years old, it's hard to believe that even scholars catch more than a fraction of Shakespeare's meaning.

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

mezzoblue - Web Apps are Hot

Apparently all it takes is one article by Joel, and suddenly it's the nineties again. Web apps are hot! Web apps have zero installation! Web apps are cross platform! Duh!
The recession is over, the slump is ended. Web development is in demand, and the demand is only going to increase.
Whoohoo! Read this article as it contains a lot of links.

Has this been on Slashdot yet?

Pilot Razor Point Marker Pen

My employer recently started stocking these things in the supply closet. OMG they are so retro geek chic! The shiny "metal flake plastic", the shape, the cheesy yellow tip of the cap.. It's like a collection of late-70s Hot Wheels in your shirt pocket!

"The one and only genuine Razor Point marker pen that introduced America to fine line writing."



Tuesday, June 22, 2004

freshmeat.net: Project details for Socat

Socat is a relay for bidirectional data transfer between two independent data channels. Each of these data channels may be a file, pipe, device (terminal or modem, etc.), socket (Unix, IP4, IP6 - raw, UDP, TCP), a client for SOCKS4, proxy CONNECT, or SSL, etc. It provides forking, logging, and dumping, different modes for interprocess communication, and many more options. It can be used, for example, as a TCP relay (one-shot or daemon), as a daemon-based socksifier, as a shell interface to Unix sockets, as an IP6 relay, for redirecting TCP-oriented programs to a serial line, or to establish a relatively secure environment (su and chroot) for running client or server shell scripts with network connections.

DOSBox, a x86 emulator with DOS

Free, and specifically targeted for games.

The DVD Journal: The Adventures of Indiana Jones

Yr. hmbl. reviewer refuses herein to refer to any Lucasfilm production by its "revised" title. Yes, I understand that Raiders of the Lost Ark was re-titled to keep all the Indiana Jones films next to each other on the video shelf. Nevertheless — at no point in the following review will you see the titles Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Palace that Leads to the Temple of Doom or Indiana Jones and His Dad and the Last Crusade. (For that matter, any future reviews written by this author will not use such revised Lucasfilm titles as Luke Skywalker and the Return of the Jedi, A Man Called THX-1138, Tucker: The Man and His Dream about a Car, or Howard: The Duck that Talks.)

Legal Handbook for Photographers

(via JWZ)

Monday, June 21, 2004

Index of /casey/images/plan

I have no idea who this Casey is, or what his "plan" was, but these images include a bunch of really nerdy high-school-or-college-age guys playing on computers and vandalizing a bunch of parked cars.

This came up when doing a Google image search for "revenge of the nerds".

ESPN.com -- Browser Upgrade Page

ESPN's browser-upgrade page is a good example of how even the kind of sites that held onto Netscape 4 support well into the current millenium are finally not only embracing web standards (or, rather, hiring standards-using designers and letting them do their damn jobs) but also explaining their use of standards to the general public. Notice that they do not just say "upgrade because newer is better" the way web sites used to when they went from "3.0" to "4.0" browser support way back when.

OWASP WebGoat

Possibly blogged this before.
Web application security is difficult to learn and practice. Very few people have full blown web applications like online book stores or online banks that can be used to search for vulnerabilities. In addition, security professionals frequently need to test tools against a known vulnerable platform to ensure they perform as advertised.

why I went to college

Because there was a brief window of time from the late eighties until about 1994 when people outside of the academic community knew that there existed something called the "Internet", but the simplest way to get access to this Internet was to actually join the academic community. In 1992 applying for financial aid to go to the University of Alabama was easier than to find an ISP with a local dialup in Bayou La Batre...

Web Application Penetration Testing Methodology Patent

As many of you know, Sanctum, Inc. has a been granted a patent (United States Patent No. 6,584,569) describing a process for automatically detecting potential application-level vulnerabilities or security flaws in a web application. What you may not know is that this patent is a "method" patent which means that it describes the way something works rather than a "product" patent which describes an actual product. A method patent is the broadest form of a patent which covers not just products but also the process or way people work.

The Sanctum patent is very broad and virtually everyone who is involved with web application security is in violation of this patent.

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War

Everybody else is blogging this, so me too. Has it been on Slashdot yet?

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Mallet Virtual tour

Photographs and Tour by David Kudrav. This disappears off of the official Mallet-Assembly.org every time they redesign it.

UMLGraph - Declarative Drawing of UML Diagrams

UMLGraph allows the declarative specification and drawing of UML class and sequence diagrams.

The following is an example of a sequence diagram specification and the resulting UML diagram:



Define the objects
object(O,"o:Toolkit");
placeholder_object(P);
step();

# Activation and messages
active(O);
message(O,O,"callbackLoop()");
create_message(O,P,"p:Peer");
message(O,P,"handleExpose()");
active(P);
return_message(P,O,"");
inactive(P);
destroy_message(O,P);
inactive(O);

# Complete the lifeline of O
step();
complete(O);

Simple UML sequence diagram

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

For your convenience


an even better browser-resolution tool


The Chinese Privet has long since faded in Atlanta. Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) and Crepe Myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica) now rule the landscape, along with that beatiful weed Mimosa (Albizia julibrissin).

Monday, June 14, 2004

DumbassDOT.com

I saw a billboard ad for this website on I-85.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Doomworld -- Music

I have not downloaded any of the MP3s from this site, because I go into a queue that says "approximate wait time: 27 minutes" and I just don't have the patience for that.

The page is still interesting because it shows the actual song titles for the music that was used on each level of Doom, which are different from the names of the levels of the game. Also some comments written by Robert Prince, the composer. I've been told that the "Untitled" music for E3M1 is actually an uncredited cover of some metal song. Prince says something about metal covers, but doesn't say anything about this song in particular.

And, they have MIDIs, which is slightly more acceptable in the case of DOOM than for say, Castlevania, since DOOM's music was MIDI anyway. The filenames for the MIDIs appear to be the same as the internal resource names for them inside the DOOM IWAD file!

What I really want now are some MP3s that capture exactly what DOOMs music sounded like on an SB16, the first place I ever heard it. I think that DOOM actually had a built-in software synthesizer that was used for the MIDI when the game was played on low-end soundcards, because the hardware ones sounded so bad. I remember converting MIDI files from the to Internet into DOOM's internal format so that it would play them, and they sounded a lot better than they did through the SB16's built-in synth! Okay, maybe not "better" by most people's definition of the word, but at least they sounded like DOOM and that made them fun to listen to. I want some MP3s that sound like that!

The Undead Zone - Why realistic graphics make humans look creepy.

Yes, this was on Slashdot. Yes, I remember saying that I was going to stop reading Slashdot.

This reminds me of what Novarese said about Legend of Zelda. (And his Slashdot comment which was for some inexplicable reason moderated as "Funny").

Zophar's Domain: NSF Players/Utilities

List of utilities to play files in the NES Sound Format: music "ripped" directly from NES carts. My understanding is that these players are at least partial NES emulators.

Paul's Stuff - DOOM Music

Not really the kind of thing I'm looking for, but still interesting. This guy took the MIDI music from DOOM, and ran it through high-quality synth gear so that all that it sounds like the music is being played by real instruments.
A synth guitar still sounds like a synth guitar though. I very briefly considered overdubbing my own on it, but quickly decided that that would be worse than the synth version.

Gamer's Corner - VGM MP3's

The following links below are hosted by Gamer's Corner. They may or may not be permanently here so download them right away.

Konami NES Music Vol.1 - Castlevania Collection

This is the shit, right here! This appears to be a "this month's feature", so this link my die! Download this now while you have the chance!

Open Directory - Games: Video Games: Music: MP3

Good place to start, anyway.

Obsession of the Day: retro videogame MP3s

On my commute to work this morning, something on the radio reminded me of Chet, which got me thinking about his ringtones discussion. Which in turn got me thinking about MIDI. Which reminded me of how I've lots of MIDI files which claim to recreate the music of classic videogames.

Which reminded me of how I have some cassette tapes made in the 80s of NES music, by plugging the headphone jack of the TV into the line-in of a tape recorder (complete with voices and other ambient sounds apparently picked up through the needle of the record player that was also attached at the time).

Which finally made me think: hey, the Internet is a geeky place! I bet lots of people have put up MP3s of the original music from old videogames. None of that re-programmed MIDI bs... the real deal!

I've only just begun to search for sites that have these things, but plan to see postings about them soon, until I get tired of it (probably by the end of the day).

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

java.net: It's time for RDBMS Change Notification Services [June 09, 2004]

RDBMS authors should build on the trigger technology to implement publish and subscribe change notification services. Applications (and object caches) would subscribe to change notifications by issuing statements very similar to update triggers with the addition of a callback. When the trigger is fired, the callback is invoked.

I'm officially senile (or, why you shouldn't get dressed in the dark)


Monday, June 07, 2004

Brandon: As if there weren't already enough reasons to laugh at Nickelback

I don't really listen to the kinds of radio stations that would play a band like Nickelback, so I have no idea if this even really what they sound like. It's still funny, though.
Some internet genius took Nickelback's first horrible "hit," and mixed it with Nickelback's newest awful "hit." By "mixed" I mean one shitty song plays in the left speaker, and the other ear-bleeding excuse for rock plays in the right speaker. What a surprise, they are almost EXACTLY THE SAME. It's uncanny, sad, and hilarious at the same time.

Plant Profile for Ligustrum sinense

I think this is what the switch bushes of my childhood really were. Ligustrum sinense or Chinese privet is one of the commonest weeds in the South. It was imported in the 19th century as an ornamental hedge, and has gone on to become almost the kudzu of shrubs. I still like the smell, though.


Sunday, June 06, 2004

Welcome to the PLANTS National Database

The PLANTS Database provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories. It includes names, plant symbols, checklists, distributional data, species abstracts, characteristics, images, plant links, references, crop information, and automated tools.
I could spend way too much time looking at this.

Friday, June 04, 2004

OldVersion.com

Old versions of software that can now only be downloaded in it's latest version from the offical sources.

Thursday, June 03, 2004

java.net: RMI, Dynamic Proxies, and the Evolution of Deployment [Jun. 01, 2004]

When RMI first shipped, it looked a lot like CORBA. A lighter-weight and Java-specific CORBA, to be sure, but with the exception of dynamic codeloading, it had the same feel, and the same basic structure -- you define interfaces, create stubs and skeletons, and so on.

Slowly and subtly, that's changed. Over the past few releases of the JDK, RMI has evolved into a low-process and lightweight framework for strongly typed remote method invocation. And that's what this article's about. /blockquote>

Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Ralf Brown's Interrupt List - HTML Version

Not sure if I've blogged this before or not.

Marvel Directory

(via blog-fu)

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

CORAL

Apparently Blue Dragon is not the only alternative to Macromedia for CFML.

RE: [BlueDragon] BD6.1 Week Numbers

Discussion about the fact that the ISO first day of the week is Monday (not Sunday). Includes these references:

http://webexhibits.org/calendars/week.html
http://www.ernie.cummings.net/calendar.htm
http://www.co.nye.nv.us/iso8601.html