paulproteus

Apparently Zyprexa kills.

Will this be like the Diebold memo distribution efforts before?

Both Firefox and IE correctly handle round-robin DNS apparently.  This means if you list multiple A records and one of the machines says “Connection refused”, both will retry.

Source for Firefox.  Actually, I can’t find a source that confirms this solidly for Internet Explorer.  Dear Lazyweb…?
Anywya, Venkatesh, thanks for correcting me on this important web tech issue.

I just got spam emails with these two subjects:

• Let your computer be the PRO!
• dickinson ethnology

For the first one, I have to say, expert systems were a long-promised result of Artificial Intelligence research that still haven't become fully real. And I don't know why spammers would be so interested in the cultural anthropology of Emily Dickinson. Unless they're trying to lure me into opening the mail because I would be intrigued by such a letter….

We recently got a new phone line installed at our apartment in the Dell House, and I asked Verizon for a number in the 235 exchange. “I just love that exchange,” I pleaded. Luckily, they were able to find us one.

If you're not already convinced that the 235 exchange is the best one near the Homewood campus (with the possible exception of 516), you might want to know this list of things in the 235 exchange:

• WYPR, the local NPR affiliate
• The Rotunda Theater
• One World Cafe
• Rocky Run
• The “Goof Troop” house
• The Real Deal Jamaican and American Carry-Out
• The Maryland SPCA
• New No Da Ji
• Holy Frijoles
• Angelo's Pizza
• Environmental Fund for Maryland

Having just read an article on kuro5hin, I can now say:

I'm tired of not being radical.

I recently read The Tyranny of Structurelessness, an essay by Jo “Joreen” Freeman about how having unstructured feminism groups was a problem local groups needed to get over.

There are some good lessons in here; I'll update this with choice quotes.

I just tried creating a Debian package repository that uses the Coral Content Distribution Network. If you're not familiar with it, it's an instant-temporary-mirror service that you can use by append “.nyud.net:8090″ to any URL.

Let me give a little background: My web server (asheesh.org) is on a slow cable modem uplink. Serving big files that are Debian packages to the Internet sucks from it. But if I download the files from Coral instead, they're fast:

• http://www.asheesh.org/debian/dyna_0.3.8-1_i386.deb: 45 KB/s
• http://www.asheesh.org.nyud.net:8090/debian/dyna_0.3.8-1_i386.deb: 501 KB/s

As I said, Coral is fast. So it would be great if I could hack a .htaccess to redirect access for the package files through Coral CDN but first have them hit my server so I can count package downloads. Alas, apt-get does not follow redirects:

paulproteus@hawking:/tmp/apt-0.6.35ubuntu2$ sudo apt-get source dyna
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Need to get 13.3MB of source archives.
Get:1 http://www.asheesh.org ./ dyna 0.3.8-1 (dsc) [317B]
Err http://www.asheesh.org ./ dyna 0.3.8-1 (tar)
302 Found
Get:2 http://www.asheesh.org ./ dyna 0.3.8-1 (diff) [7834B]
Fetched 8151B in 0s (74.0kB/s)
Failed to fetch http://www.asheesh.org/debian/./dyna_0.3.8.orig.tar.gz 302 Found
E: Failed to fetch some archives.

Unfortunately, the Debian apt program doesn't handle HTTP redirects at all. I have filed Bug 12378 with Ubuntu to see if they'll support it.

Bonsai Kitten can't hold a candle to a cat with two faces. Unless you consider this quote from the article:

Roughly three years ago, she [the two-faced-cat's owner] discovered a litter of smaller than normal kittens she calls “miniature cats.”

She now has plans to market the miniature cats, which grow to about 4 pounds, on the Internet.

In the beginning of the summer, I spoke with Safi Shareef about getting him an ACM server account so he could run MediaWiki to host the JHU Muslim Association's website.

Boy, am I impressed. Safi's wiki has non-techie users with accounts, and he's really doing cool things with it. He's using lots of the MediaWiki tools that I see elsewhere and think, “I should learn how to use that.” If I'm wikimaster@jhu.edu, he's sure showing me up.

Also, I decided tentatively to join the Linux Broadcom 4301 Driver Project. Broadcom is a chip company that makes, among other things, the wireless networking chip in my iBook G4. They refuse to tell anyone how to program their chip, so Linux developers can't write drivers for it. That means I have to use an external USB wireless stick just to get online with my Mac, since I run Linux.

The project's plan is to take drivers that already work, disassemble them to learn how they work, and use the disassembly knowledge to tell Linux developers how to write their own drivers. It's a cool application of the right of reverse engineering, and it'll hopefully make my laptop more useful to me.

The title of this post is taken from the old Netscape Engineers Are Weenies” message in a Microsoft product.

There's a new top-level domain (liked dot-org, dot-edu, and dot-fr) vaguely for “adult websites.” The domain is “.xxx”, and I think it's a miserable idea.

Categorizations are not hard-and-fast, but the domain registry is. ICANN is aware of this, but decided to be wrong. In the past, according to the Beeb:

Icann also rejected the idea because of worries that eventually all sites dealing with sexual matters, including sex education sites or those that support victims of sexual abuse, would be forced to use the .xxx domain and, as a result, be harder to find.

Will just hardcore porn be pushed to dot-xxx? What about softcore porn? What about naked protesters? What about sex education site so our teens understand their bodies?

Dot-xxx was created to enable easy filtering. This “easy filtering” will cause too many false positives. When kids can't read about sex ed materials at school, we will be WORSE off as a nation.

And what do other countries think about this?