A detailed (and interesting, if you know a little something about HTTP, Linux, and Perl) account of how the PCWeek Linux box got cracked into.
A detailed (and interesting, if you know a little something about HTTP, Linux, and Perl) account of how the PCWeek Linux box got cracked into.
Something new for the TBTF Jargon Scout: ".commerce" (said as "dot commerce") as an alternative to the overused "e-commerce".
Patrick Naughton's Web site. If you'll remember, he's the Infoseek exec that got nailed by the FBI for crossing state lines to have sex with a 12yo girl. Here is the FBI agent's affidavit recounting what happened with the case. Interesting, if somewhat disturbing.
Of course, the whole Jesux is a hoax. I should have known, but it's still funny, regardless of what Roblimo said on Slashdot.
Many thanks for all the kind birthday greetings yesterday (and today). :)
Birthday wrap-up: I got virtual cards from both of my parents, a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate from my co-workers, got to bust open a pinata whilst wearing a sombrero after lunch at work (don't ask), my dad took me out to lunch (today), and Nichol surprised me with flowers, dinner, and a movie (Run Lola Run). Great day.
Today is my birthday. I'm 26.
I was anxious to see American Beauty and for one of the few times this year, I wasn't disapointed in what I saw. One of those comedy dramas that I'm becoming more and more interested in, American Beauty has a great story and some very good performances, particularly by Kevin Spacey.
I'm starting to compile a list of my favorite movies of the year...hopefully I'll remember to publish it come January. There are already several films on the list, but I'm leaving room for upcoming releases like Fight Club, Man on the Moon, Dogma, and hopefully others I've not yet heard of but will delight my socks off.
Mylook appears to be one of those content syndication places. On the preferences page, you can add and delete sites that you want to appear on your customized news page. Somehow, amongst the big boys like Playboy, Wall of Sound, TV Guide, and Broadcast.com, you may also select kottke.org to appear on your news page. Weird.
For all my IPO seeking friends, from Peterme: "Money is what makes our capitalist society go 'round. It's just not where good work comes from."
"Jesux (pronounced Hay-sooks) is a new Linux distribution for Christian hackers, schools, families, and churches." It optionally disables logins on Sundays, does not come with sendmail because it was written by a homosexual, and doesn't include any encryption...because "Christians have nothing to hide". Sweet Jesus.
After getting a few emails over the last couple of weeks about the quantity of cool indie Web stuff emanating from Minnesota or from former Minnesotans, here's a small list I came up with (in no particular order): Chank!, Windowseat, the Nubbin, testpilotcollective, Pop Culture Junk Mail, Magnetbox, Mouser.org, James Lileks, Obscure Store & Reading Room, ~carl (and his column at The Industry Standard), Maximag, Girlwonder, Alt Text, Quasistatic, Wench, Honeyguide, Biglunker, Anacam, Cursor, Suture, Fucker, The Spleen, Ding an Sich, and Vitaflo. And then there's my humble offerings: 0sil8 and kottke.org.
Suggestions? Anything I missed?
Tasty Flash goodness. Wow!
Bizzare art of women with their panties down. I wet my pants reading this. James Lileks has tons of great stuff on his site. And he's a Minnesotan.
Google is out of beta. Their new GoogleScout finds pages and sites related to a given page or site. This GoogleScout search on "www.kottke.org" yielded a host of other weblogs (and also a link to McSweeneys which I'm not sure is warranted). Good stuff.
On the job listings page, Google is looking for a chef and a massage therapist. I think what they really need is a designer....that logo is bad, bad, bad:
"Say Bob, how many more colors can we cram in here?"
"I don't care. Just as long as you make it unreadable at really small sizes, we're OK."
I realize I'm a little late on this, but Marc Andreesen has resigned (mostly) from AOL/Netscape. Supposedly, Marc was one of the big heroes of the Internet in the 1990s (along with Berners-Lee, Torvalds, Larry Wall, and others), bringing Netscape to the masses. So, why is no one lamenting his departure? Perhaps it's because the people who make such heroes (i.e. the people in the trenches who do all the work and know what's really going on) know that Andreesen was really just a regular guy whose only accomplishment was being in the right place at the right time and taking advantage of that situation.
My Palm V just got a whole lot more useful. Showtimes is a program that pulls movie showtimes from Yahoo! for all the movie theatres in a given area. A must-have for the Palmed movie fan.
I'm not on this 100 most overrated people list. Bide your time, Jason. Your hour will come. Anyway, Barbra Streisand is my #1...and where's Jesse Ventura?
I've written my first Epinion on Adobe Photoshop 5.5. Here's the summary: 4 stars & I recommend it because of improved type tools and bundling of ImageReady 2.0. If you're interested in such things, go read all about it.
I dyed my hair again. It's more of a reddish blonde this time. I think I liked the blonde better, but wouldn't mind going bright red just for the hell of it. Picture. Soon. Maybe.
A weblog on pop culture from right here in MN. Excellent.
Both Saving Private Ryan (Nov 2) and The Iron Giant (Nov 23) are due for release on DVD. Yay! The Iron Giant disk is supposed to have some great extras. Neat.
Carl writes about Design for a Better Living over at the Industry Standard. If you're a Web designer, you should read this and then think about how much your job really sounds like that. Design is not art, the client (or the CD or the PM or the CEO) is going to make your site look like shit, and if you don't get that, you need to buckle up and take a ride to the clue store. Of course, this is coming from someone who still thinks that "if I change that button, it will ruin the whole composition of the interface."
Also, did you notice how nice the print version of the above article reads so well? That's because you don't have all this navigational and advertising crap distracting you. The concept of white space on the Web is almost non-existant.
"They don't have meetings about rainbows."
Ran across the Jennifer Lopez site today. Some very nice Flash work by the folks at Kioken. However, the use of the Japanese characters on some of the pages on the Jennifer Lopez site is puzzling. I realize that it adds a nice visual element, but it doesn't seem to fit. The same element shows up on the Kioken site and also Praystation, which is run by one of the senior designers at Kioken....so I guess you can see where it comes from. He must really like the Japanese characters.
As some may know, a trilogy of movies based upon J.R.R. Tolkien's excellent Lord of the Rings books is being made. Here's an update on the casting.
I've been had! An alert reader noted that the Luddite.com site featured below was actually done by Prophet Communications long ago as a joke. I'm going to see if I can get it onto Slashdot anyway. :P
Just for kicks, I wondered what might be at the Luddite.com Web site (that's one of them there oxymorons). Turns out that they make computers. Out of wood. The history page, complete with a Quicktime video of the company's founder that appears to have been made in 1969, is priceless. The timeline down the side lists two previous failed efforts by the founder while the text talks about "the official recognition and later cover-up of Technology Exposure Syndrome (TES)". Priceless stuff.
The Internet Music Player takes your IP address and fashions a tune from it.
The preceding was found on the Anil Dash weblog, which I am adding to my near daily reading list. Good stuff.
The Bible Code debunked. While I'm glad that someone took the time to do a statistical analysis, anyone with a little knowledge of the scientific method and some common sense knew that the Bible Code idea was complete rubbish. If you want to find something bad enough, you'll find it:
"It says the Pope is the devil if you take every 261st letter of Genesis, remove all the letters after G, fashion a tune out of it, and play it backwards on your turntable."
There is a Bible code that does work....sorta. If you look at the 46th Psalm in the King James version of the Bible, the word "shake" is 46th word and the word "spear" is the 46th word from the end. There is some debate as to how that happened: some say that it was placed in there by Shakespeare himself while others say that it was placed there as a birthday present for his 46th birthday while others say that it's just a coinicidence. Note: in the text of the Bible verse linked above, "spear" is actually the 47th word from the end.
If you're a geek or work in a Dilbertesque environment, you should see Office Space (VHS, DVD). It's not a deep or insightful movie by any stretch of the imagination, but for me at times, it was like looking in a mirror. And don't let Jennifer Aniston scare you away...she's not in the movie all that much and she's not that bad. "I don't like to talk about my flair."
I queried Ask Jeeves thusly: "Where can I find Jason Kottke?" and ended up with 4 direct ways to get to my site and two or three more indirect ones. Neat.
A short profile in the Pioneer Press of fellow Twin Citian Laurel Krahn's Windowseat weblog, one of my daily reads. There's also a small mention of kottke.org.
As near as I can tell, about 2200 people have downloaded Silkscreen, give or take a couple hundred. The font is also available on a few other sites, so it's possible that many more copies are out there floating around.
This poll is hilarious. It will be interesting to see what wins.
Openlog has been redesigned again. Nice.
I'm featured on the design project site. It feels pretty nice to be included with all those other great designers. Includes an interview, some of my work, and my insights on design and life (which are about as meaningful as anyone else's insights on those topics).
But you still have to use the OS. It's like trying to suck an orange through a straw. Of course, if you put Linux on that baddie...it would fly.
Learn2 is a good resource for learning how to do things. Two items of particular interest: how to write a business plan and how to lease a car.
More movie stuff (apologies to all those that don't care about such things): Kevin Smith's Dogma has found a North American distributor and will be showing at a theatre near you in November. Yay!
Stuff to do: download Silkscreen (a font), edit openlog (a collaborative weblog), or take the ICQ number poll.
The Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me DVD is being released on November 16th. New Line Home Video really has their act together when it comes to producing DVDs, at least Austin Powers DVDs. The first Austin Powers DVD had deleted scenes, a game, music, trailers, and commentary by Mike Myers and the director. The Spy Who Shagged Me is even better, with 20 minutes of deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes information, a Dr. Evil featurette, DVD-ROM games, music videos, and some neat tactile goodies in the case. No one else is doing anything like this with their DVDs.
Is Saving Private Ryan ever going to come out on DVD? Spielberg is dragging his feet in supporting the format.
The whole Y2K problem has been vastly overblown. We're going to be just fine.
Print is dead. Print will never die.
The Internet is dead. The Internet will never die.
Content is dead. Content will never die.
HTML is dead. HTML will never die.
Creativity is dead. Creativity will never die.
There has to be a market out there for people who want to do auctions but don't want to deal with the icky eBay interface or installing custom auction software. A service like Blogger or Vox Populi except for auctions. They handle all the transactional stuff, but it looks and feels like it is actually on your site.
After 180+ votes in the ICQ number poll, it's surprising that over 75% of the respondents actually have an ICQ number.
Busy, busy, busy, etc.
Blast from the past: Bubble Goo and the Bubble Goo IPO. Classic Suck.
Some Evany updates. If you've never been to her site, go go go! I laugh more at this site than I do at The Onion.
An extremely nifty picture of the recent solar eclipse as seen from Mir. Wow.
New poll: I've been thinking about this for a couple of days now and the mention on evhead of people auctioning off low ICQ numbers on eBay prompted me to wonder:
View the results. (If you'd like to add this poll to your site - please do! - just link to the poll page.)
My ICQ number is in the 20-30 million range...I got in late in the game and never use the damn thing anyway. Oddly enough, my dad, who is not exactly an early adopter of new Internet technology, has the lowest number of anyone I know at just over 650,000.
The lowest number I could find on the system was 10,002, used by a "Sandman" with an icq.com email address. One of the founders of the company, I would suppose.
People have been saying lots of nice things about Silkscreen so far (thanks for the feedback)....some have even used it in their Web and print projects. Not bad for a font that's only been around for less than a week.
I'm going to come right out and say that I am not a big fan of the new Entropy8 site. Well, I guess I should qualify that...I'm not as fond of it as I was of the previous incarnation, which was one of my big Web design influences. Auriea does some great work for some great clients.
The 12 Monkeys DVD contains a very good "making of" featurette called "The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys". Highlights: the movie tested *very* poorly at pre-opening screenings but did well at the box office, and I now understand why Hollywood makes so many crappy films. Films are micromanaged by the studios to such a high degree that there is almost no art left in them by the time they reach the theatres. Not to keep beating a dead horse, but if you want to see an artful film that made it through relatively unscathed, go see The Iron Giant.
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything looks like an interesting read. Velocity implies momentum...the faster you go, the harder it is to stop and the bigger the mess when you hit something.
American Love Stories on the PBS Web site is worth a look. I especially enjoyed this story about a Jewish woman, her black husband, and her mother's gradual acceptance of him and their children.
