brainwagon

In the decade to come, it’s clear that the Internet will face two related challenges: Increasing volume of spam, and Increasing sophistication of viruses. These two are related because spam is being increasingly used to spread viruses, and viruses are increasingly used to subvert security measures on computers and to turn them into spam relays. […]

The BBC is reporting that there will be no Daleks in the latest incarnation of the Dr. Who franchise. It appears that talks between the BBC and the estate of Terry Nation have broken down. At least here in the United States, copyrights and patents were intended as incentives for individuals to create and extend […]

But to free the world of Weapons of Mass Destruction, it’s worth every penny. I’m beginning to agree: a vote for Bush in November is now a sign of a character flaw.

Reuters is reporting that the Senate has just passed a bill that makes using a camcorder to record a movie a federal crime. punishable by up to three years in prison, or up to five years in prison if such recordings were made for commercial purposes. On the one hand, I work for the movie […]

Ed Willis has an article entitled The Mythical Man-Month Revisited [Jun. 17, 2004] on onlamp.com. As I read it I can only imagine that the author is one of a number of young programmers who rode the dot.com bubble and now considers themselves hardened computer professionals, but who in fact have little experience or perspective […]

Apparently after two years of noodling around, the POV-Ray team has finally seen fit to release a new version of their rendering software. I can’t help but be mystified at how this project continues to generate enthusiasm among the amateur computer graphics community.

I was looking for some clip art that I could use on my website, so last time I was at the bookstore I acquired a copy of Dover’s Old Fashioned Animal Cuts, a book of copyright-free images ready to be scanned. It’s a fairly nice collection of hundreds of black and white images which are […]

Over on linuxdevices.com, there’s interview with Glenn Henry, founder of Centaur Technology, the bright guys behind the C3 CPUs which are marketed by VIA. I’ve got a 1ghz Nehemiah running the webserver that you’re looking at this very moment. I saw this mentioned on Slashdot and on Dan Lyke’s flutterby!, and I thought that I’d […]

Holy crap. It isn’t often that I get a chance to read something as high in drivel as Ken Brown’s rebuttal to Andy Tanenbaum’s critique of Brown’s Samizdat, an as yet unreleased critique of the Linux operating system, Linus himself, and open source software in general. If you haven’t read Andy’s comments on Brown, by […]

I have been attending Weight Watchers since early January, and have had good results (over 36 lbs lost as of my weigh in on June 6). If you are having difficulty getting started on your weight loss goals, I recommend them as a sane, safe and reasonably effective way to get jump started. It’s definitely […]

The title is a bit of a fraud. This is not so much an article on how to build your own weblog as a short bit about what I think is important in building a weblogging system, what is not important and how to drive most directly toward a system that is simple, flexible and […]

Allright, I admit it. I watch lots of crap “reality” television shows. None do I find more disturbing than The Swan.

Sweet Manatee of Santa Fe. Apparently if you post an article about a TV show on your blog, you become their official voice on the Web. Read the comments below the main posting. If you really do want to get on the show, a simple Google search will turn find you how, admittedly below the […]

It’s fascinating the degree to which Microsoft/SCO backed front companies are trying to create FUD around the use and authorship of the Linux operating system. In a Slashdot article today, they link to an article by Andy Tanenabaum about Ken Brown’s claims that Linux Torvards is not the author of Linux. Brown’s argument seems to […]

Today someone on our local message board posted a link to MSNBC – Can Star Wars: Episode III be saved?, a story that suggested that if one could fire George Lucas, Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman and put in more Christopher Lee, you could hire some real writers and salvage the entire script. Not a bad […]