Vista

the next version of windows will be called VISTA, not the code name longhorn. I like the code names so much better than what they actually choose. Vista?!! yeah.. thats a garmin GPS. names been taken, pick a new one.

RTV

I was asked the other day by one of my employees:

"Boss man, what does RTV stand for?"

now to give it a little context, the RTV is a chemical that turns rubbery. we use it for sealing things. hmm.. sounds easy enough right? after a few minutes I did learn what really stood for here. I was a little disapointed I wasn't able to pull that one out of my butt on the fly. maybe next time.

DHT

ever wonder what a Distributed Hash Table is? well after snooping around Azureus, I wondered what pesky abreviation was. you can read up on it here

pinky!

probably my only readers of this blog already know about this, but I'll do a quick write up for the rest of you.

you see, when my wife and I went on a cruise this summer with my brother and his wife we had a most wonderful time. someone coined the term 'pinky' after this late teenage girl that just got married and was traveling among the 1500 passengers on the ship. one night she was part of a game show that we attended and every time she answered she had this kind of high pitched yelp. pinky pretty much summs it up and will forever describe my stereo-type view of late teen girls.

Pinky. I laugh every time I think about it.

blackjack computer

hidden way down in an article about building the first blackjack computer

No, we kept it a secret. We wouldn’t have been countenanced well by the church. There are a lot of hard-liners that only see black and white, even though the Bible doesn’t actually condemn gambling. There is a thought somehow that gambling is evil. There was deceit involved there, and that really bothered my wife in particular. It has always been an issue. I personally haven’t had much wrestle with it because I came to realize that man is basically evil, and except for the grace of Jesus Christ we haven’t got a chance. We’re doomed. Whether the sin is one thing or another, it is still a sin. Gambling per se isn’t a sin. The love of money is a sin. It’s like trying to rate sin. Can you put one sin over another? Jesus made it clear that when the Pharisees talked about having sex with a woman out of wedlock, the fact that you had lust condemned you equally. To gossip about someone, or to lie to someone, these are all human failings we have. Gambling is just another in a long list of things that are ripe for abuse. To get more to the question, Ken’s lifestyle-that is the real world. As Christians we are to be out in the world, and be witness to the world. For some, we will be the only bible they ever read. It was an opportunity to witness to Ken, and we had some very good conversations about faith and such subjects.

Spam Filter Chess

thanks to slashdot.org for the link to can a spam filter play chess is an indepth paper on unix scripts to setup, 'train' and play a spam filter. it is VERY educational in both scripting and the concepts of learning through probabilities. a must read for the intellectual or bored gourd.

Dshield

Dshield.org seems to be the internet storm watch center. I Like it!

$99 linux

This is an embedded device, 90mhz, keyboard, display, and 802.11b for $99 that runs linux. if its not to hard to mod this would be a GREAT embedded box. I wonder how hard the GPIO is to expand?
hack info here
more hack info
add mmc?
a little first hand experience
mainboard scan

for me, an idea to expand the GPIO with i2c here

NE64

I'm back to playing with the NE64 chip. I've got someone that can really benefit from a simple program on it so I'm off to use it! finally! heres a note for me on uBug12 and miniide review

NE64 on freescale
intro to microcontrollers
bcd to 7-segment display
asmide
GNU for HC12
HC12 guides
hc12web
miniide and ubug12 example

XR honda

for me, a link to xr650r.us as they seem to link to even the manual!

home price inflation

I was taking a look at the stock LEN, one of the symbol Lennar Homes trades with, you know.. the guys that are building our new home? anyway, check out the max history yahoo finance publishes, and it got me to wondering if home prices have tracked the value of this stock? probably not but its fun to look at and think that if I were right I'm selling at a high and buying a high so its kind of a draw.

corporate words

here is a list of words that some have submitted as 'weasel words' I've made it a little way down the list and my favorite so far is ThoughtShower

Thoughtshower: 'Brainstorming is itself bad enough (and was apparently banned by the BBC because it was deemed offensive to those suffering from epilepsy), but 'Thoughtshower' is abominable. This site also explains a variant of brainstorming, in 'blamestorming' (where colleagues publicly denounce one another).

money talk

I read a good article on bankrate.com about what is appropriate and not appropriate to talk about money. the interview with Emily Post's great grand daughter in law was interesting but danced around the topic, as usual with ettiiquite, not giving anything substantial one way or the other. the most useful thing was a quote from Emily Post:

When in doubt, always remember the four cornerstones of etiquette: respect, kindness, consideration and honesty.

a comment!

I'm not one (usually) to link to my own stuff but check it out. I actually got a comment way back in the depths of the archive! thanks Eddie M.

some of you may be wondering how I found it. I'll clue you in on a little secret. you can setup blogger to email you when a comment is made so you don't miss any. I have it send it to a gmail account

open access point

I found this on slashdot in one of the comment sections, arguing that it should not be illegal to access open access points. I rather like it...

Imagine your neighbor has a TV going loudly - he has cable TV and you do not. You hear a show playing you've been meaning to see. You yell over the fence, "mind if I come over and watch that show?" The neighbor's butler yells back, "Sure, come around through the gate.". You go over, sit down and enjoy the show. After the show is over, the owner shows up, and is PISSED because you are there.

The neighbor has not lost any property, but has been denied payment for a service he has performed. (providing you with entertainment) Unfortunately for the neighbor, you were allowed free access to the entertainment indirectly by the neighbor. The neighbor has no legal grounds against you because you were acting with permission of an agent of the neighbor. (the butler)

This is very similar to the issue of open access points. The wireless router being the butler that's been told to allow anyone that asks to be given free internet access. Just because you get upset that the currentl policy of your own access point bothers you does not give you free license to sue someone that has taken advantage of your offerings.

TOR?

hmm.. whats this? tor.eff.org seems like distributed surfing model to help anonymize your connection. its like bittorrent meets proxy. interesting.

$4500 / code

Google is paying $4500 to summer interns that finish a coding project. it is intended to introduce new coders to the wonders of open source. read about it on code.google.com.

one interesting aspect is they may work on imbedding bittorrent in firefox. read it on summer.mozdev.org

VOIP adapter

build your own POTS (plane old telephone service) to VOIP (voice over IP) adapter cord. pretty trivial but fun. see it here thanks to slashdot.org.

Human Computers

from Slashdot.org it talks about how human computers (the first use of the term computer) were used to compute tables. they had a little rule:

Black plus black is black
Red plus red is red
Black plus red or red plus black, hand the sheets to team 2

UNR mba

its nice to see Daimler-Chrysler puts UNR MBA graduates on par with DUKE, or at least lets them work together. read it here

phishing

Ahh..... the beginning of the internet! I totally forgot about this. read all about the early years on wikipedia.org

more NE64

for me, more NE64
a good sd -> ethernet project done here