Every once in a while, there’s something on Slashdot worth reading. More often than not, it’s in a comment rather than one of their “articles” (quotes intended to convey ample contempt for the editing process there). There’s a discussion there, High Court Trims Whistleblower Rights (Slashdot), in which one participant got pretty shrill in responding to a troll[1], trotting out all of the arguments that trolls dearly love to feed on (as well as those ever-delectable tears of frustration and rage).

Some... [More]

The application tar is ubiquitous in the Unix/Linux world. It rolls multiple files and directories into a single “tarball”, which can be transferred more easily and expanded at its destination. A single option, -z applies a compression to the resulting tarball, giving the file the by now well-known extension .tar.gz (for tar-balled and g-zipped). Extracting this file involves two operations, in which first the compression is removed and then the tarball unrolled.

The easiest way to back up a... [More]

“OOP without generics is like a car that only turns left – sure you can go right, just take three lefts.”

Googlewhacking—finding a search combination that returned exactly one hit—used to be all the rage, with some people devoting astonishing amounts of time to it, only to report it on a blog, have Google index it, immediately invalidating it (because now there are two results). Below is one that I stumbled on recently:

Googlewhack May

At the time (May 12th, 2007), it returned exactly one result and, amazingly, has stood the test of time, returning only one relevant result today (as shown below):

Googlewhack July
... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

Trillian is a multi-protocol chat client that’s been around for a quite a while, with both a free version and a professional version, which includes extra features and support. Their version has stagnated quite significantly, offering a grand total of one update over the last three years or so. The feature set is robust and it does pretty much everything you need from a chat client, but its look and feel... [More]

What is a terrorist? A terrorist, according to the dictionary, is someone who kills or destroys in an attempt to exert political influence. According to the media and almost all of America’s politicians and police forces, it’s pretty much anyone who’s ever had a seditious thought. Ever. And why is every one of these potential terrorists treated like the most capable evil mastermind to ever walk the earth? A thirty second sound byte is usually more than enough to show that the person (or people)... [More]

The release of Safari for Windows seems to be the only issue worth discussing for most of the technology world. Whether it’s the horrific zero-day exploits (already patched, but still a rocky start), the crashing bookmarks for non-US English-speaking users or the ridiculous amount of effort put into making Safari exactly the same on Windows as it is on OS X—including all controls (scrollbars, buttons, etc.), behavior (can only resize from the bottom-left) and, last but not least, the... [More]

The following 3-minute video shows US traffic patterns as they ebb and flow throughout the day. The data is from March of this year and is real, spiking from a low of about 4000 flights to over 16,000 flights in the air at peak travel periods. There are so many that the flight paths actually acurately delineate the shape of the continental United States.

Found on US Air Traffic by Brad DeLong (Grasping Reality with Both Hands).

Or “Benito Giuliani”, if you prefer. That’s how he was known to the denizens of the fair city over which he ruled with an iron fist, using and abusing his beloved black-booted police squads to do so. It’s this same Rudy Giuliani—former mayor of New York City and proud owner of an elaborate back tattoo depicting himself holding a bullhorn, an American flag and a New York hot dog while simultaneously digging a fireman out of the rubble of the World Trade Center on which he stands, illuminated... [More]

Keeping it short and sweet, Discrimination by Scott Adams throws out a few observations on paradoxes in our society’s of valid and invalid prejudice. For example, though most prejudices aganst traits people can’t control are regulated, “it’s totally legal for an employer to reject a stupid person” who applies for a job. To the hypothetical argument that this is a worthwhile exception, he retorts:

“You might argue that it is in society’s overwhelming best interest to discriminate against stupid people because... [More]”

Lucky Stars (Time) is an interview with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Ellen Barkin and Matt Damon. The interviewees literally have no interest in promoting the movie, unless you count them parading their hilarious camaraderie that undoubtedly features heavily in the film as promotion. At any rate, it seemed incidental to just having a whale of a time.

The first question asked them how they kept their cool and turned out a quailty product—according to general opinion, the best of the series— instead... [More]

Khalilzad replaced John Bolton as the American ambassador to the United Nations.

The article, What Do States Owe The Exonerated? (Plastic), poses an interesting question. Almost everyone will have a knee-jerk reaction to it—evincing either a gut feeling that an exonerated prisoner is an innocent man and therefore has been treated unfairly by society or a kneejerk reaction that anyone who the courts saw fit to send to jail must be guilty in one way or another. There are those who view every exoneration as the result of a sly criminal’s—and a liberal lawyer’s—machinations of our... [More]

There are all sorts of sites that produce content meant to be funny, like The Onion, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Something Awful or a Pointless Waste of Time. Whether or not you think the invidual attempts at humor are successful or not, that is their purpose to at least some people. The Internet offers humor in unlooked-for places as well, like this collection of Cool Cybersex Logs, in which one or more users troll chat rooms to prank unsuspecting partners with frustrating experiences. For... [More]

This article addresses a very specific problem involving people matching the following criteria:

1. You live in Switzerland.
2. You are a Cablecom customer.
3. You send mail using their SMTP relay.

If any of the conditions above fails to apply to you, there is really very little need for you to read further, unless you wish to be bedazzled by scintillating prose unlike any you have likely ever seen. If so, by all means, read on.

Rejected!

If you do match all of the conditions above, you have... [More]

Another game that’s been in development for a long time is Crysis. Earlier this year there was a pretty good review of it, Crytek’s Jack Mamais on Crysis by Chris Remo (Shack News), where the reviewer noted that “running on a beefy DirectX 10-capable NVIDIA 8800, the game was never short of gorgeous.” Granted, an NVidia 8800 is no shrinking violet of a graphics card—with the top-of-the-line version weighing in at $600+ and 177 Watts—but still, it was running the game “at a fluctuating framerate in the 20-30fps range” at... [More]

“It’s better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is often credited with the blustery threat to “wipe Israel off the map”. Though the mainstream press is pleased as punch to press this citation into service again and again, in myriad forms, it was noted in more responsible circles quite some time ago that the president of Iran had said no such thing. As meticulously documented in ’Wiped off the Map’ – The Rumor of the Century by Arash Norouzi (AntiWar.com), the statement he made, translated directly and faithfully from the Farsi, was:

“The Imam said... [More]”

The first screenshots of Halo 3 are floating around, showing it to be a next-generation game ready to squeeze every drop of performance and visual effects out of the graphics horsepower found in the X-Box. One in particular (shown below), reveals an impressively cinematic quality, with good material detail, reflections and very natural depth-of-field effects. Notice how the focus is on the right knee, with everything else appropriately softened. It’s not clear how well this level of detail... [More]

The annual chance for Europeans to embarass themselves in a no-holds-barred music contest finished up on Saturday evening. Ukraine and France were clearly having the most fun, with France entering a band singing French in a horrible British accent and English in a horrible French accent while a very bald guy ran around with a stuffed cat attached to his neck. The Ukraine was led by a transvestite in mirrored silver with awesome Boogie Nights sunglasses who sang in several languages—though... [More]

This marvel of technology is only about a year and half old, so it had at least a decade of cell phone software to build on when it came out. Still there are enough usability problems in the software—which, honestly, doesn’t have to do very much other than send bits of text to peopel—to frustrate even the calmest person. Some say that the iPhone has nothing to offer a market already saturated with hundreds of models; that the big touch screen and other hardware doodads aren’t enough to... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

The term DRY—Don’t Repeat Yourself—has become more and more popular lately as a design principle. This is nothing new and is the main principle underlying object-oriented programming. As OO programmers, we’ve gotten used to using inheritance and polymorphism to encapsulate concepts. Until recently, languages like C# and Java have had only very limited support for re-using functionality across larger... [More]