I never had the pleasure of watching him do the Tonight Show but what little I’ve seen and heard always makes me wish I had:
Rest in peace, Johnny.
A small collection of interesting articles:
Spam exists in many forms. There’s junk mail (credit-card and loan offers and other crud), telemarketers, survey-takers, cellphone spam, email spam, usenet spam, and one of the more recent members in the family is Wiki-spam, and anyone who’s read this blog for some time or reads or writes one themselves will know about the comment-spam crud.
The comment-spam continue to exist because of people’s desire to be anonymous and with that allowing lack of accountability, or the other side’s desire to be read and commented on, and as a result not wanting to create too many speed bumps for people to sign up and write comments on their entries.
The Wiki-spam has a similar reason for existing. The idea behind Wiki is to allow anyone to contribute, with as few obstacles as possible. This means that in many Wiki instances you can just browse a page, decide to hit the Edit button, and make some modifications. Some Wikis politely suggest you may want to create a Wiki account but they are far too nice about it.
The result: Pages full of spam links, or hundreds of pages created just to cross-reference eachother so that they in turn can, for instance, increase the Google rank of some other page, making it more important.
The last few weeks I’ve been cleaning up some crud on the original DGD Wiki which was created about a year ago and, after an initial burst of activity, left to gather dust a bit, sadly. Today, as I was cleaning up some more and then noticed dozens of new pages being created, more than I could ever wish to clean up with the limited tools I have (I’m just another user on that Wiki, not the admin), I figured enough was enough and installed the Wiki with which I have the most experience myself, TWiki, as we use it at work. It has support for requiring authentication for viewing, modifying or renaming topics and you can define different groups with different levels of access, which is just what we needed.
So after a morning of figuring out how to do this from scratch (in a manner of speaking, I did use the existing Debian package, but my webserver setup is not what they assume it to be) and an afternoon of taking pages from the original MoinMoin Wiki and translating them to TWiki-ese, we now have a new DGD Wiki! Now the task of trying to keep some momentum in that one… ugh 
I should now be running WordPress 1.2.2. Until now I had been running on the WordPress 1.2.0 package that’s in Debian but while there is now an actual 1.2.2 package from them I think I’m better off just tracking the versions myself. Changing to 1.3.x will be a bit more work, I’m sure, but I can postpone that for a while now. *crosses fingers*
The title of this CNN article just says it all:
Poll: Nation split on Bush as uniter or divider
If the (US) nation is split on this decision, surely the conclusion is that he’s a divider?
On the eve of President Bush’s inauguration, a poll shows the nation is split over whether he has united or divided the nation, but a majority believe his inauguration festivities should be toned down because of the war.
I doubt that’s going to happen though.
Somewhat amusing (using sophisticated tools like, err, a putty knife) and reassuring instructions on how to take the Mac-mini apart. I’ve already ordered one with extra RAM so I likely won’t want or need to do that, but it may come in handy at some point in the future.
The year 1905 was truly extraordinary – for science and for Albert Einstein.
In a handful of papers, he established the existence of atoms and determined their size, he laid the ground work for one of the most fruitful branches of modern physics, called quantum theory, and he introduced his theory of relativity to the world – a revolutionary description of the nature of space and time.
Interesting sites:
Interesting articles:
I agree 200% with the article’s intro:
If you’re like me, you’re always torn between showing up for a movie early, and getting the best seat possible, or showing up 15 minutes after start time, and skipping the commercials. Some theatres are worse than others when it comes to actually showing movies “on time.”
I live in a fairly cellphone-quiet environment, except when I am at the mall or some other shopping environment, but I do remember Amsterdam, where this was definitely an issue when traveling in public transportation, so this article certainly triggered some memories.
… must come down?
![[Rating graph]](/wp-images/local/rating.png)
This is my rating graph on DGS and I’m just waiting for this mostly-winning-streak to end, pulling me back down to 14-15 kyu, which is the rank I expected myself to be.
What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
An intriguing question and an even more intriguing collection of answers. I’ve only just begun reading through them (and to be honest I have no idea if I’ll get very far in trying to read them all, I’m too easily sidetracked for my own good, quite often) and quite like what I see. Here’s a quote:
What I believe but cannot prove is that quantum physics teaches us to abandon the distinction between information and reality.
The fundamental reason why I believe in this is that it is impossible to make an operational distinction between reality and information. In other words, whenever we make any statement about the world, about any object, about any feature of any object, we always make statements about the information we have.
Happy Sunday!
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