SCO is apparently the target of the MyDoom e-mail virus. Infected machines are supposed to take part in a denial of
service attack against SCO beginning February 1st. Toward
that end, SCO has offered a $250K reward for information which leads to the conviction of the miscreant who created the virus.

It’s hard not to gloat. SCO is after all a bunch of
litigious bastards. Daryl McBride, CEO of SCO has recently begun to lobby members of Congress with all sorts of nonsense, most of which has been critiqued by many others, including Lawrence Lessig and groklaw. SCO is failing in the marketplace for exactly the same reason so many other dot-com companies went bust: they are trying to market a piece of software for serious dollars that they can’t even give away. I doubt that litigating their way to profitability is going to prove fruitful.

How about a genetically modified flower that signals the presence of unexploded landmines by changing color based upon the presence of nitrogen dioxide?
The plants grow quickly, and if their roots pass near buried ordnance they turn bright red.

Now that’s thinking outside the box.

I ran across The case of the 500-mile email while reading Jef’s website. A great story.

While exploring the NOAA’s website, I noticed that they have a list of photos of weather and ocean related images that (being funded by your tax dollars) are mostly in the public domain.
I suspect I’ll be spidering and looting this collection shortly.

While perusing the web, I sometimes encounter odd brain-related products. Today some random link took me to the
Soda King, a purveyor of unusual soda pops.
Brainwash Soda combines an unnatural blue color and a skull logo with a brain portruding. How cool is that?

Or perhaps you need a
brain shaped Jello mold? Or perhaps a budget brain and skull model, perhaps from brain-mart.com.

Modern GPUs are interesting bits of silicon. They pack a huge number of relatively slow floating point processors in parallel to achieve large throughput. Because of this, GPU performance has vastly exceeded the Moore’s law style improvements for the last decade. Recently other application programmers have begun to try to use the huge amount of compute power to other applications. In perusing some Slashdot links this morning, I ran across gpgpu.org which has links to all sorts of helpful resources.

If you haven’t seen NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day
website, you should check it out. The most startling picture I’ve seen in quite some time is APOD: 2003 December 8 – An Antarctic Total Solar Eclipse.
Simply awesome.

In a bit of synchronicity, today’s llinks have a decidedly crypto
theme. Julian sent me a
link to the Enigma-E, a modern electronic equivalent to the original Enigma machine. Unfortunately, these are apparently only available in the UK and the Netherlands (so far), otherwise my credit card would be debitted already. It just seems too cool.
Bruce Schneier’s Cryptogram
coincidently arrived, and had a couple of interesting links. The first was a list of unsolved codes and ciphers. I knew of a number of the more famous ones, such as the Beale and Voynich ciphers, but didn’t realize that some of the cryptographic messages from the Zodiac killer remained unbroken.
Another good link was to a collection of papers on fooling biometric fingerprint readers. I’ve seen a lot in the news about increasing use of these sensors, and it’s interesting to see how easily they may be fooled.

I wrote a weblog system in Python by stealing some ideas from
blosxom. Today I found a great list of Python Software for Weblogs. Enjoy!

I spent the weekend in the company of other individuals of like (and considerably different) mind, and thought I’d provide some links to some interesting projects.

Trevor Blackwell has built his own balancing scooter. I got to ride this little marvel, and it works rather well. It cost about $2000 to make, if you weren’t interested in paying full price, you could probably scrounge many of the components for less. It’s a pretty nifty gadget, and Trevor provides most of the details you need to duplicate his effort.

Jeri Ellsworth showed off her C-One, a Commodore 64 implemented in an Altera FPGA. She’s interested in making it potentially run as other classic 6502 machines as well, like the Apple II and the Atari 400. Nifty work!

Don Knuth translated the classic Adventure game into a literate program using CWEB. You can get the original
CWEB source too. Nifty.

Probably some more stuff to come later.

Today’s Slashdot extravaganza sent me to deviceforge.com for a robot design using Via’s Mini-ITX motherboards. Thse motherboards are very capable and about 7″ square, they have an even smaller motherboard called Nano-ITX that will be a mere 5″ square.

The robot itself doesn’t appear to be very clever, but it’s still a pretty nifty idea.

I didn’t attend this year’s SIGGRAPH, so I was pleased to find
the following link to the SIGGRAPH 2003 Papers online.
Perhaps the time for buying dead tree versions of these papers has passed.

While mucking around some more with maps, I encountered a somewhat useful website at the Census Bureau that can be used to draw maps from a URL. Check out this dynamic map of downtown San Francisco. Or perhaps a map of the area near Pixar Animation Studios.

A couple of years ago, Tom Duff approached me with the notion that he was going to write a simulator for the ancient PDP-1 so that he could run SpaceWar!, widely regarded as the first real video game. We both wrote simulators for the PDP-1, and enjoyed playing around with such a bizarre machine.

Lately I’ve decided to resurrect this code and make a nice version using the Simple DirectMedia Layer library. Toward that end, I dug up
some of the old links documenting the PDP-1, but ran accross
Dan
Smith’s PDP-1 Music page. He has links to ten different mp3 files which were made from original tapes he made at the time.

I liked them enough that I made them accessible here:

• As Time Goes By…
• Assorted Christmas Carols
• Downtown
• Goldfinger
• Bach’s Little Fugue
• Chopin’s Minute Waltz
• Bach’s Passacaglia and Fuge
• Shiela, by Tommy Roe
• We Shall Overcome
• The Winston Cigarette Jingle

RC-CAM: Amazing R/C model video system seems to have some interesting information about using video cameras aboard radio controlled models.