I just got a new Dell Inspirion 6000 to replace my older Inspirion 1100. There was a nice promo on the 6000, and I have a Pentium-M 740, 1GB of RAM, and a 60GB hard drive, as well as integrated Wireless b/g, bluetooth, a DVD writer (not that I will ever use this in a laptop..) and a 15.4″ widescreen LCD.
The first thing I did was try to install our corporate copy of Windows 2000 Professional, to bring it inline with the rest of the systems at work.
There’s a lot of sites using captchas these days in an effort to prevent spamming and other automated attacks/uses of services. The idea is you have to type in the usually distorted text you see in a picture in order to proceed, and only a human would be able to read the text.
Apparently spammers have found a way to get around this by having people do the work for them.
I’ve been getting a ton of comment spam today, but it’s very strange spam. All the links go to different places (Forbes, Bloglines, Sciencedaily) that don’t seem like the types to be comment spamming.
Usually the first sentence or two is something like “Found your site very useful”, “Cool site! Be back soon!”, followed by some nonsensical sentences with the links to these weird sites. I got about a dozen of them, all posted around 10-20 minutes apart.
Someone came up with a way to “squeeze” oxygen directly from seawater. Though they say that it would be useful for SCUBA divers, I think it will be a long time before this gets adopted, if ever. Replacing a relatively simple device (a compressed air tank) with an electro-mechanical device that relies on batteries to operate is definately not something most divers (including myself) will be keen to do.
That said, it sounds like it could be of great use to submarines and underwater habitats, where it would be pratical to add filters (in the case of polutants in the water) and keep compressed air cylinders as backups.
Two great sites with some good (digitial) camera stuff: How to hold a camera steady, and How to take product pictures. Lots of people have digital cameras nowadays, but not many people really know how to use them (yes, there is slightly more to it than pushing the button).
The last few times we’ve had a heavy snowfall or worse, freezing rain, I was harshly reminded that it was time to get new wiper blades as mine were leaving streaks – of course directly lined up so I had to either strech up high or crunch down low to see properly. So I decided to take the annoying know-it-all guy‘s advice and try out Canadian Tire’s reflex wiper blades. After aclimitizing them to the backseat of my car for a couple weeks, I finally put them on about a week ago.
As an update to a previous entry I made about sleep cycles, it seems that someone did as I suggested and developed an alarm clock with a wireless wristband that monitors your sleep. It’s a bit pricey, at $244 US, but if that’s what good sleep is worth to you, then maybe it’s worthwhile. Doesn’t seem to actually be available just yet though.
Just wanted to try implementing “asides”, as described by one of the creators of wordpress. Hopefully they’ll let me make more frequent updates, without feeling compelled to writing a full article. This is part of my upgrade to WordPress 2.0, which has already caused me some grief, including finding a couple bugs.
This the third straight year of decline in Hollywood ticket sales. Sales are down 12.6 percent from 2002. More and more analyists are starting to wonder if it’s a permanent trend, and what the cause is.
I don’t know where these analyists and producers have been, but my feeling, and a feeling I see echoed on the internet in blogs or by talking to my friends, is that for the past couple years, the movies have just sucked.
We had some spam problems last week, one of them caused by a form that wasn’t properly escaped. While that problem was fixed, the real problem was that it was hard to figure out what script had the issue.
To solve this, I wrote a sendmail wrapper for use by PHP (though really it could be used by anything) that logs the message along with the date, a message id (also inserted in th e headers) and the current directory (which gives the location of the original script).