brett's logjam

JPL/Caltech Float Cam 2005 Rose Parade:

JPL and Caltech are very excited to have a float in the upcoming, New Year’s Day 2005 Rose Parade!

Our float will tower 50 feet above the ground and promises to be spectacular! The view from the top will be out of this world! And we don’t want you to miss it!

On parade day click on the link below to see a live web cast of the parade route from the top of the JPL/Caltech Float! Tune in starting at approximately 8:00am PST on January 1, 2005.

Year in review: Browser wars, part 2

Lilly Shares Fall on Report About Prozac Documents:

It is unclear what, if any, action might result from the matter. In October, the F.D.A. ordered pharmaceutical companies to include “black box” warnings on the labels of their antidepressants, including Prozac.

The warnings are the strongest restriction the government can impose on pharmaceutical companies, short of banning a drug.

The warnings state that antidepressants increase the risk of “suicidal thinking and behavior in children and adolescents.”

British medical regulators have recommended that many antidepressants not be prescribed for children and teenagers, but had not included Prozac in those advisories.

Orca - not a whale.

Yahoo! News - Consumers Gripe About Cell Phones in Survey

SecurityFocus HOME Mailing List: BugTraq:

Various vulnerabilities were found and fixed in Mozilla-based products, ranging from a potential buffer overflow and temporary files disclosure to anti-spoofing issues.

Slashdot | MS AntiSpyware vs Ad-Aware vs. SpyBot

“The Drive”

Damn you, irony!

Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing

LWN: The LWN.net 2004 Linux Timeline

How did I miss this brujahah? LWN: Debian and the hot babe problem.

I particularly like the Debian developer’s objections:

The program involved is hot-babe, a graphical CPU utilization monitor. It works by displaying a typical Bruno Bellamy drawing of a minimally-clad, maximally-endowed woman. As the CPU gets busier (“hotter”), the woman undresses to compensate. Your editor, whose journalistic ethics required that he investigate this utility, found it to be an amusing addition to the desktop - for about five minutes, or until the children walk in, whichever comes first.

The Debian developers raised the obvious, predictable objection to the inclusion of this utility: the associated images were covered by a non-free license.

Ubuntu.

A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals--completely depressing, completely enthralling. Well done.

I appear to have caught the annual office cold. Last night I didn’t last very long, and 11 hours of sleep later, I have no voice, am still draining, and am as pale as a sheet.

The stress at work this past week has been amazingly high: multiple projects launching, or trying to launch, or needing to launch but not launching. I lost my temper yesterday morning, which was both a good and bad sign: good because it’s better to express anger than hold it in, bad because I’m normally very calm at work. Add that on top of a frantic week, with a fantasically stressful client call on Friday afternoon, and I should have know I’d be knocked out this 3-day weekend.

Ugh. I hate being sick on the weekends. Especially 3-day weekends.

What better way to spend a day you’re feeling lousy than by updating your bookmarks?

(Don’t actually answer that. Taking naps would be a better way.)

Have I mentioned how the Firefox Bookmarks Synchronizer has changed the way I use my bookmarks? Keeping a copy of your bookmarks on a server so you can download them onto whichever computer you’re using is nothing new — I’ve had mine online, somewhere, since my very first homepage in 1996 (at http://owlnet.rice.edu/~cutter/) — but it was always so manual, it required volition. FTP works, and can work well, but setting it up differently on each UNIX, Linux and Windows box got old fast.

(It was actually easier back in the dark ages of the internet; wherever I went on the Rice campus, I could log in and access everything from whatever client I was on. Ah, those heady days of using SPARC stations and DEC Alphas.)

Anyhow, the Bookmarks Synchronizer makes it easy — it downloads on startup, uploads on exit, merges changes automatically. It makes it easy to move from computer to computer, which, which when you regularly bounce between 3 different laptops running Linux and Windows, is no small thing.

Add it to the list.

Fever broke sometime in the wee hours of this morning; I won’t say I’m feeling better, per se, but I’m no longer shivering and sweating at the same time.

Dumb colds. At least I sound terrible, too - if you’re going to go through the trouble of being sick, at least get sympathy for it.

So we spent yesterday confirming that the baby industry is much like the wedding industry, with more attention paid to safety; purchased a crib, car seat, and rocking chair. Of course, only the car seat was in stock; the crib will take 12-16 weeks to special order, and the rocking chair padding will be 4-8 weeks.

Yes, that’s right, the crib will arrive at the same time as the baby. Shop early! Shop often! Sheesh.

Ever hear of JIT inventory? Yeah. Go tell babys’r’us or buybuybaby.

I shouldn’t be this grouchy about inventory systems. Probably time for another nap.

An open letter to AA.

Ugh. What a day.

Record-setting commute today; beat my previous worst by a full hour and a half. (The previous worst was Halloween, 2001.) Five and a half hours in the car today! For a 12 mile trip! Huzzah!

• 25 minutes, trip in. (Very pretty swirling snow, not sticking.)
• 1 hour, attempt to go home before snow hit. (Heavy snow, fruitless effort, stuck on hill, dodged sliding trucks, retreated to relative safety of office.)
• 4 hours, 10 minutes, trip home. (Fading snow to ice, six conference calls.)

There was little to no traffic this morning, except on the Key Bridge into Georgetown, and the snow was lightly blowing around. It was really pretty. I should know better. Things that look pretty in nature are dangerous. The next time I see snow like that, I’ll remember today. And work from home.

(In other news, I’m starting to feel almost human again, though Merrystar is bearing the brunt of the office cold right now. I got her chicken soup and chocolate cake tonight. Separately, of course.)

When it snows in Washington D.C., do not go into work. WORK FROM HOME.

The only way you can get anywhere is with a helicopter. You do not own a helicopter. Work from home when it snows. You’ll get more done.

Build vs. Buy?

The Lions of Al-Rassan as a movie?:

Warner Bros. has attached Ed Zwick to direct period epic “The Lions of Al-Rassan,” an adaptation of a Guy Gavriel Kay novel about the collision of religions in Spain during the Middle Ages that melds fact and fantasy.

Panasonic’s latest Let’s note/Toughbook laptops:

God bress multinational corporations who remain unafraid to rock the Engrish: there’s a lot of ground to cover on Panasonic’s non-Sonoma (i.e. Carmel/855-based Centrino) sexy new Let’s note lineup--we know them this side of the Pacific as the Toughbook series--which has four new model revisions of the W2, T2, Y2, and R3, so in brief: the W2F and T2F has an 12.1-inch XGA screen, Pentium M 753, 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD, 802.11a/b/g, and SD; the Y2F has a 14.1-inch SXGA (1400x1050) display, Pentium M 758, 60GB HDD, 256MB RAM, 802.11a/b/g, and SD; the diminutive R3F has a 10.4-inch XGA LCD, Pentium M 753, 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD, and, of course, 802.11a/b/g, and SD. Now we’re going to go on as though we didn’t see these, our importer has run the company card quite enough already this week.

Yet another excellent Firefox extension: I must not fear!

(It’s right up there with the egg timer and the Lorem Ipsum generator.)

Also excellent: ForecastFox.