schrödinger's dog

del.icio.us

I've just discovered a nice web site called del.icio.us. Basically it's just a website onto which you put any web links you want. It's both a convenient place to keep all your links (if you work on multiple computers) and a place to share your links with others.

For example, if you have a link to HotPenguinChicks.com, you can also see who else has that same link, and then take a look at their other links that may be of interest to you.

I uploaded all of our links there already. A direct link to our bookmarks is at http://del.icio.us/jvandonsel. The "Tags" column on the right shows the categories of bookmarks. I wrote a small Perl script to allow me to easily push our several hundred bookmarks up to the site. This script works with Firefox or Mozilla bookmark files, and has only been tested on Linux.

I do have to say that del.icio.us isn't the prettiest site in the world. At some point I'm sure that somebody is going to come along and make a much more user-friendly version.
Jim on 12.31.04 @ 09:34 AM ET [link]

Museum-ing

While in the Albany area for Christmas, we made a pilgrimage to the NY State Museum, more to get the kids out of the house than anything else. It was actually a better museum than I remember from ten or so years ago. It had the usual stuffed animals and Indians in dioramas, and shiny rocks and minerals from the area, etc. But most interesting was an exhibit of the 9/11 rescue and recovery phases. Walking into the exhibit you're confronted with a 20 foot high piece of steel from the World Trade Center exoskeleton. Display cases were filled with various artifacts found in the wreckage, including an entire firetruck, mostly destroyed.
Jim on 12.28.04 @ 11:02 AM ET [link]

Borrowed Wifi

What luck! My in-law's next-door neighbors seem to have left an unencrypted Wifi network open. I'm sure they won't mind if I borrow it for a while. The signal's a little weak from here, so I have to balance the laptop on my knees in the corner of the house, but it works.

Some people leave their wireless networks open deliberately, as a neighborly gesture of goodwill. I don't do this at home, but not for misanthropic reasons. I encrypt my network simply because I often use Windows computers on it and I simply don't trust the security of those machines. Of course, Wifi encryption is actually pretty easy to break, but it's still a far cry from leaving it completely open.

So in order of security from low to high:

Enable WEP encryption

Don't use MS Windows

Use ssh and ssl encryption whenever possible.

Use a wired, not wireless, network.

link

Anagram solver

I only need to do any Perl coding a couple of times a year, and each time I have to laboriously drag out the Perl manual and search for this or that oddity. So I set myself the task of actually learning the language this time, at least reasonably well.

So to that end, I coded up this small anagram solver. It only operates on single words, and it can't do a lot of proper names, but it works pretty well.

And I code up CGI apps even less frequently, maybe once a year, so I may never get to the point where I can do them without resorting to digging through books and web sites.
Jim on 12.21.04 @ 10:13 AM ET [link]

Knoppix

I just downloaded and burned a Knoppix Linux CD, which worked amazingly well. If you're not familiar with the whole Linux "live CD" thing, it's an entire Linux Operating System on a single bootable CDROM. Basically, you just put the CD in your drive, reboot your computer, and 2 or 3 minutes later you have a running Linux system. It doesn't touch your hard drive, so you can test drive Linux without fear of messing up anything you have.

What's especially amazing to me is the amount of stuff they managed to pack onto this one CD. Granted, there is some good compression involved here, but it looks like there are more applications on this one CD than I have on any of my installed Linux machines. Not only do you get KDE 3.3, the 2.6 kernel, Mozilla, etc, but also things like the full Open Office wordprocessor/spreadsheet suite, a ton of games, and more utilities than you know what to do with. I just wish they had put Firefox on it - that will probably show up in the next release.

And there is the option of copying the image to your hard drive to make the installation permanent, something I haven't tried. This sort of CD makes a wonderful emergency recovery disk, so I plan on keeping a copy handy at all times.
Jim on 12.20.04 @ 05:41 PM ET [link]

Arm & Hammer

A couple of years ago Barb and I created a small page describing how you can cook a turkey in your clothes dryer. It was a joke of course and, except maybe for Barb's Mother, nobody took it seriously.

But last week on a whim I sent a link to that page to Church & Dwight, the company that makes Arm & Hammer dryer sheets, which were pictured in the turkey photos. This response came back today:

Dear Mr. Van:

Thank you for contacting us recently regarding ARM & HAMMER® Fresh 'n
Soft® Fabric Softener Sheets.

While you may find our product effective in the use you mentioned, your
application is considered a misuse and we recommend you discontinue using
it for this purpose.

We value your patronage and under separate cover, via the United States
Postal service, have sent a coupon for one of our products.

Again, thank you for taking the time and having the interest to contact
us. If you have any questions or concerns in the future, please call us
at 1-800-524-1328.