NATIONAL POST

The doctor who first raised the alarm about a mysterious new disease has become one of the most famous casualties of the deadly respiratory illness.



Dr. Carlo Urbani, an Italian communicable-disease expert known for his tireless dedication to his patients, who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work with Doctors Without Borders, died in Thailand this weekend, where he was being treated for the severe acute respiratory syndrome he was the first to diagnose.

Usability Myths Need Reality Checks

Two papers, published by Robert Virzi in 1992 and Jakob Nielsen and Thomas Landauer in 1993, made a pretty good case that five users would uncover 70% of major usability problems and the next three would get most of the rest - for certain types of software. The usability community took the idea and ran with it.

Arguments advanced in the articles justified five to eight users as a significant number. It was also an affordable number. All sides were satisfied. Let the testing begin!

The two papers gave five to eight users a scientific basis for the testing of small software applications. However, extending the "five user theory" to larger software applications and the world-wide web turned a useful rule into a myth with no scientific basis.

Good myths are plausible explanations that serve a purpose. Feel free to chuckle, but at one time more people believed that a big guy in the sky with a hammer caused thunder and lightning than ever believed five users was enough to test anything, even though praying to Thor never did stop the rain. The myth served its purpose, which was not to control the weather, but to keep the Nordic priesthood in power.

Social Software panel at PC Forum 2003

Clay Shirky: Social software is everything from chat to group email to games. Three key things:

It's native to the Internet in ways that other technologies are not. Prior to the Web we had other tools for publication. IM was preceded by phones. Social communication -- how groups gather -- has no analog except the table.

It has an inverse relationship of value to scale. Websites are better with more users. But inviting 10,000,000 to dinner or putting 10,000,000 in your Rolodex sucks. The smaller the pool, the more valuable the relationships. The unit of social software is small groups.

War Desk | canada.com

There is something surreal about an intense gun battle in such intimate circumstances.



As one of the young gunners told me just after the fight, "It was like the best video game I have ever played."

Bibliography and style guides for writing and teaching English

Citing sources from the World Wide Web

Jon Udell: The universal canvas

Yahoo! News - Brody Surprises Berry With Kiss at Oscars

Brody Surprises Berry With Kiss at Oscars

2 hours, 57 minutes ago



LOS ANGELES - Best-actor winner Adrien Brody created an amorous Oscar moment to remember when he grabbed presenter Halle Berry and planted a long kiss on the mouth of last year's best actress.







A stunned Berry was left openmouthed and gasping Sunday, although she appeared amused by Brody's enthusiasm after he won an Oscar for his role in "The Pianist." Looking on from the audience at the Kodak Theatre was Berry's husband, singer Eric Benet.



"Whoa, I bet they didn't tell you that was in the gift bag," Brody cracked.



Backstage, the 26-year-old Brody was asked about the smooch.



"Well, if you ever have an excuse to do something like that, that's it," he said. "I took my shot."



Did Berry kiss him back?



"Oh yeah," Brody said, grinning.

Online Technical Writing: Strategies for Peer-Reviewing and Team-Writing

Online Technical Writing: Power-Revision Techniques

'Sick Feeling' for a Pilot's Family

"I want President Bush to get a good look at this, really good look here," his father, Michael, said, holding up a picture of the dead marine. "This is the only son I had, only son."

The Memory Hole > Thomas Pynchon's Unseen Writings for Boeing May Get Published



Thomas Pynchon was once a technical writer. Wheee!

Word Styles

Al Qaeda Training Manual

Al Qaeda Training Manual

The attached manual was located by the Manchester (England) Metropolitan Police during a search of an Al Qaeda member's home. The manual was found in a computer file described as "the military series" related to the "Declaration of Jihad." The manual was translated into English and was introduced earlier this year at the embassy bombing trial in New York. The Department is only providing the following selected text from the manual because it does not want to aid in educating terrorists or encourage further acts of terrorism.

Jernej Simoncic's homepage - GimpWin installer page



This is actually the best place to download Gimp, a free graphics program for windows.

Tor Lillqvist--GTK and GIMP for Windows

Mr. Bush's War

This war belongs to Richard Perle, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Dick Cheney and all the fellows from the Project for a New American Century. Again, if you have not yet clicked the links above, go ahead. I'll wait.



Welcome to the American Empire. Don't be surprised that your rights and privileges have changed all of a sudden. We used to be a constitutional democracy. That's pretty much done now. You're a citizen of an empire today, one that attacks sovereign nations without cause, with the backing of such international heavyweights as Spain and Eritrea. You're not a citizen. You're a customer. Take a number and get in line.



Above all, and amusingly enough, this war belongs first and foremost to George W. Bush. Mr. Bush ran a number of oil companies straight into the ground before becoming the constitutionally castrated governor of Texas. From thence to our current greatness, it seems. This has been his party since July, but few were truly interested in attending. 160 nations want nothing to do with this attack, and eleven of the fifteen United Nations Security Council vote-counters told him to go pound sand, despite a month-long bribery campaign that would have made John Gotti blush with envy.

Mozilla document

Recommendations

RECOMMENDATIONS

In spite of these positive gains and improvements in training teachers, more still needs to be accomplished. Adams and Fuchs assert,

When you bring a computer into the classroom, things naturally change. Some changes can be anticipated; others cannot. Some changes are desirable; others are not. Of one thing we can be certain, whatever our field of work, we must be aware of the influence of technology or be beached by this sea of change. (5)

I recognize that technology brings with it inequities and injustices of its own, and I am not arguing that technology will solve these problems; nor am I arguing that a teacher's knowledge about technology will necessarily produce better literacy within the students. What I am arguing, however, is that teachers need to be trained to use technology so that they are better prepared to combat, recognize, and fend off the inequalities that will appear in computer- equipped classrooms. Teachers need the knowledge so they can have the agency to make decisions about technology and so they can be contributors to the developing of technology. In sum, we need to train teachers so that they will not just see themselves as people who are having technology shape and define them, but as people who have the power, the authority, and the agency to be developers of technology and to be, in Haas and Neuwirth's words, "shapers" of technology (326). We, as a field, cannot afford to be washed away; we cannot allow the rug to be swept out from under us while we remain content in our teaching . . . or our training.

In the section below, I will address the concerns that a computer-rich environment evokes and give recommendations regarding how we might better prepare teachers to utilize and facilitate

technology in their teaching.

Recommendations

RECOMMENDATIONS
In spite of these positive gains and improvements in training teachers, more still needs to be accomplished. Adams and Fuchs assert,
When you bring a computer into the classroom, things naturally change. Some changes can be anticipated; others cannot. Some changes are desirable; others are not. Of one thing we can be certain, whatever our field of work, we must be aware of the influence of technology or be beached by this sea of change. (5)
I recognize that technology brings with it inequities and injustices of its own, and I am not arguing that technology will solve these problems; nor am I arguing that a teacher's knowledge about technology will necessarily produce better literacy within the students. What I am arguing, however, is that teachers need to be trained to use technology so that they are better prepared to combat, recognize, and fend off the inequalities that will appear in computer- equipped classrooms. Teachers need the knowledge so they can have the agency to make decisions about technology and so they can be contributors to the developing of technology. In sum, we need to train teachers so that they will not just see themselves as people who are having technology shape and define them, but as people who have the power, the authority, and the agency to be developers of technology and to be, in Haas and Neuwirth's words, "shapers" of technology (326). We, as a field, cannot afford to be washed away; we cannot allow the rug to be swept out from under us while we remain content in our teaching . . . or our training.
In the section below, I will address the concerns that a computer-rich environment evokes and give recommendations regarding how we might better prepare teachers to utilize and facilitate
technology in their teaching.

raelity bytes: blosxom: plug-in registry

I, Cringely | The Pulpit

But the trick here is not to do this by passing a law because laws can't generally be enforced over national borders. The only behavior any of us can reliably alter is our own, so WE -- not the spammers -- have to do something different. My proposed solution is a new class of e-mail application that combines many of the attributes we see on eBay, the Internet's one great commercial success. In fact, this solution could well be OFFERED by eBay, and I recently suggested it in an e-mail to Max Levchin of eBay's PayPal subsidiary.



What I am coming down to is essentially an economic argument. I think that passing laws is the wrong way to handle this problem and the right way is by making the spammers pay -- literally pay -- to reach me. I find preferable the idea that spammers pay me directly rather than have them pay the equivalent of postage that doesn't benefit me at all except by reducing the volume of spam. Of course, doing this requires a micropayment system, which made me think of PayPal, which can efficiently handle tiny transactions and already has 17 million customers.

Another factor in this choice is that writing fiction every day seems to be an essential component in my sustaining good mental health. If I get blocked from writing fiction, I rapidly become depressed, and extremely unpleasant to be around. As long as I keep writing it, though, I am fit to be around other people. So all of the incentives point in the direction of devoting all available hours to fiction writing.

raelity bytes

email - sends newly aggreagated stories to the email address of your choosing.



Be sure to set the $mail_cmd configuration variable in the email.pl plugin source to the email command Blagg should use to send email; defaults to "/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t".



Usage requires additional command-line switches:



* -plugin=email (activates the Email plug-in)

* -email={destination email address}

* -subject={email subject line} [optional; default is "You've got Blagg!"

raelity bytes

blogger - speaks to any Blogger API-enabled application.



Take a gander at Blagg w/ Blogger Blaggplug in action at blagg.blogspot.com .



Usage requires additional command-line switches:



* -plugin=blogger (activates the Blogger API plug-in)

* -username={your blogger username}

* -password={your blogger password}

* -blogid={your blogger blog id}

* -url={URL of the XML-RPC server at the remote end; defaults to Blogger's}

* -app_key={the app_key for a particular Blogger API URL} (optional)

raelity bytes

email - sends newly aggreagated stories to the email address of your choosing.



Be sure to set the $mail_cmd configuration variable in the email.pl plugin source to the email command Blagg should use to send email; defaults to "/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t".



Usage requires additional command-line switches:



* -plugin=email (activates the Email plug-in)

* -email={destination email address}

* -subject={email subject line} [optional; default is "You've got Blagg!"

KCRW Music: Morning Becomes Eclectic

Flaming lips. Capture this stream.

Yahoo! News - U.N. Orders Inspectors From Iraq

UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) ordered U.N. employees on Monday to leave Iraq (news - web sites), after the United States, Britain and Spain abandoned efforts to win U.N. backing for military action.

Sounds like we're ready to start killing people.

Poynter Online - Thursday Edition: Kidnapping Facts

Only 100 or so abductions by strangers each year fit into more serious categories -- cases in which the child is held for an extended period of time or is killed, she said. But the longer the abduction lasts, the more bleak the prospects become of finding the child alive.

Poynter Online - Thursday Edition: Kidnapping Facts

In 2001, 840,279 people (adults and children) were reported missing to the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC). The FBI estimates that 85 to 90 percent of those (roughly 750,000 people or 2,000 per day) reported missing were children. The vast majority of these cases are resolved within hours.



Based on the identity of the perpetrator, there are three distinct types of kidnapping: kidnapping by a relative of the victim or "family kidnapping" (49 percent); kidnapping by an acquaintance of the victim or "acquaintance kidnapping" (27 percent); and kidnapping by a stranger to the victim or "stranger kidnapping" (24 percent).

William Gibson While I'm on the topic of mediated personae, something that came up during that CBC taping, last night (for me, anyway) was the idea that blogging (or even posting to fora) represents the democratization of the mediated persona. Literally anyone can have one, now, or several. I am an exception to this, because I have mine via the printed word, the oldest mass medium on the planet, and this website is maintained by a publishing company that belongs to an even larger corporation owned in turn by shapeshifting reptiles from Beta Reticuli, but the rest of you, today, are free to mass-mediate your own personae. Which was formerly, hugely, not the case. Choose a handle, post: you're mediating a persona.

William Gibson SOMEONE EXPRESSES SURPRISE
At my having remarked yesterday (with an evident sense of discovery) on something (the mediated persona) that I dealt with, extensively, as far back as IDORU.
Keep in mind that anyone who's read a novel of mine has read it much more recently than I have. I can't recall ever having reread anything of my own, in its entirety, after publication.
But, also, now I think about it, IDORU was the last of my full-on I-don't-do-the-Internet freestyle extrapolations. When I wrote IDORU, I was still faxing my daily pages to friends for comment, and probably wasn't at all sure what websites *were*. ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES was the first book I wrote as an email-using, web-searching, spam-accreting human. So I suspect that my unlikely-seeming wonderment at the democratization of mediated personae is about that awareness arriving, for me (as opposed to my Man Behind The Curtain) only just now.

Googlism :

mark crane is trying to get a phd in composition and rhetoric at the university of louisville

mark crane is an assurance and advisory business services partner in the west michigan practice and has been with ernst & young

mark crane is an aquatic toxicologist expert in many ecotoxicological techniques

mark crane is working on a phd

mark crane is our troop leader

mark crane is available to assist with your technology procurement needs

mark crane is maintaining the pages under the direction of dr

mark crane is most probably right

mark crane is a partner in the chicago office of segal mccambridge singer & mahoney

mark crane is a senior editor at medical economics magazine

mark crane is doing a lot with them

Covering the Chaos (Randy Bass)

Covering the Chaos (Randy Bass)

Heath Row's Media Diet

Bubble Money

Bubble Money

Sterling: Let's talk about the business side. That’s Topic No. 2: Where's the bubble money? Where's the economic activity? Where's the business model? So much glass was put in the ground and so much human energy was expended for something that doesn’t have a business model. The death of portals is a problem. The death of ISP's is a problem. If something like Canopy takes off, there go the ISP's. Its interesting to me that the biggest thing going right now is Google. Google isn't a portal. It's all about getting right into the database. Get me right into the database.



Who is this poor guy from Red Herring? I saw him on CNN this morning. He says, "I was googling it. I was bloggering it." I was blog dancing him. He says, "Yeah, the enthusiasts usually start it and then someone like me comes in to finance it." I was, like, "Where's your magazine dude?" How many times do these guys need to be punished? How much money do they need to lose? When will they learn that the Internet is a product of the sciences and the military. Those aren't profit-motive ventures.



CNN doesn't have any money to send anyone to Baghdad this time around. Fox lost heaps of money, enough money to build entire cities from the ground up. There's no money. There's no money in Blogger. There's no money in the corporate media. Money has to come from somewhere. Unless information wants to be worthless. Unless we just want to be worse informed from machines that work worse and worse. That’s the trend I'm looking at, and it's bugging me.

Elizabeth smart has been found alive, in the company of some drifter street prophet who calls himself "Emmanuel." Completely unbelievable. I wonder if she's brainwashed. They found her in Sandy, my hometown. Thank heavens for the random pullover policy. Oddly, I was pulled over for no reason a few days ago in Orem, and I sorta look like the guy. Hmmm...

test.

"Orchid Fever" by Susan Orlean

John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. He is thirty-four years old, and works for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, setting up a plant nursery on the tribal reservation near Miami. The Seminole nicknames for Laroche are Crazy White Man and Troublemaker. My introduction to Laroche took place last summer, in the new Collier County Courthouse, in Naples, Florida. The occasion was a hearing following Laroche's arrest for illegally taking endangered wild orchids, which he is passionate about, from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, which is a place he adores. Laroche did not dress for the occasion. He was wearing wraparound Mylar sunglasses, a cotton-blend shirt printed with some sort of scenic design, and trousers that bagged around his rear. At the hearing, he was called forward and asked to state his name and address and to describe his experience in working with plants. Laroche sauntered to the center of the courtroom. He jutted out his chin. He spoke in a rasping, draggy voice. He stuck his thumbs in his belt loops and said, "I've been a professional horticulturist for approximately twelve years. I've owned a plant nursery of my own. . . . I have extensive experience with orchids, and the asexual micropropagation of orchids under aseptic cultures." Then he grinned and said to the court, "I'm probably the smartest person I know."

"Orchid Fever" by Susan Orlean

John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. He is thirty-four years old, and works for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, setting up a plant nursery on the tribal reservation near Miami. The Seminole nicknames for Laroche are Crazy White Man and Troublemaker. My introduction to Laroche took place last summer, in the new Collier County Courthouse, in Naples, Florida. The occasion was a hearing following Laroche's arrest for illegally taking endangered wild orchids, which he is passionate about, from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, which is a place he adores. Laroche did not dress for the occasion. He was wearing wraparound Mylar sunglasses, a cotton-blend shirt printed with some sort of scenic design, and trousers that bagged around his rear. At the hearing, he was called forward and asked to state his name and address and to describe his experience in working with plants. Laroche sauntered to the center of the courtroom. He jutted out his chin. He spoke in a rasping, draggy voice. He stuck his thumbs in his belt loops and said, "I've been a professional horticulturist for approximately twelve years. I've owned a plant nursery of my own. . . . I have extensive experience with orchids, and the asexual micropropagation of orchids under aseptic cultures." Then he grinned and said to the court, "I'm probably the smartest person I know."

Clique of Instant Messagers Expands Into the Workplace

Clique of Instant Messagers Expands Into the Workplace
By AMY HARMON

Instant messaging, long associated with teenagers staying up late to chat online with friends, is moving into the workplace with an impact that has started to rival e-mail and the cellphone.

Less intrusive than a phone call and more immediate than e-mail, instant messaging is finding users far more quickly than e-mail did when it was first introduced, according to Forrester Research, a technology research firm in Cambridge, Mass. In the last year alone, Forrester said, the number of instant messages has grown by more than 50 percent, so that nearly one-third of American adults are now IM-ing, as it is called, with their children, clients, colleagues and each other.

"It really is instant," said Nancy Elieff, a realtor in South Pasadena, Calif., who recently began using instant messaging to stay in touch with her children in college. "You don't have to wonder if they're going to get your message, when they're going to get your message, if they're going to write you back. It's really now."

The growth is driven in part by the availability of free IM software on the Internet, as companies like Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo use it to lure customers to their other services.

Software Pioneer Quits Board of Groove

Sample chapters

Must have gadgets - QuickTopic bulletin board

I'm also in the military (National Guard, not currently activated), and when the situation calls for bringing anti-boredom items, I will always bring a book. Printouts of classics are also great to always bring along. God bless Project Gutenberg. It doesn't matter if they're ruined, so I can fold them up, put them in my pocket, and take them into the woods or sand without worry. The last thing I read that way was Milton's Areopagitica. Photocopies work too, as well as torn up, 50 cent used books. Similarly, cassette dubs are the best for music in the woods, because it doesn't matter if they're ruined, they're cheaper, more durable (somewhat), and hold more than a CD-R. And you play them on a $5 portable radio.

DECONFERENCE

March 22 - 31, 2003
DECONsciousness: Building as Blog

Ever had cause to wonder what a house or building is thinking? In an age of networked consciousness, that thought is an echo that slips frictionlessly past the soapy surface of time's constraints. Agile, flexible, and invasively curious, the spaces of this exhibition are collaboratively curated and designed by Steve Mann and architectural designer Stewart Morgan.

Joi Ito's Web: An email from Dee Hock about the emergent democracy paper

I wonder if you realize that a dozen or two people like yourself with the right combination of communication, technological and organizational skills could design and implement a global government without the consent of any present form of organization and provide it with the neural network to insure its success. A government that could continually evolve to ensure that no matter affecting the public good or the health of the planet fails to be disclosed, examined and understood. Or that any existing organization could escape being confronted with synthesized opinions and alternatives that would swiftly emerge. Such an organization based on rights of participation and withdrawal and consent of the participants could be something entirely new in this tired world. Now that would be something truly worthy of the best within us and the best among us. And a great deal of fun in the bargain! It would, in the fullest sense, be far from democratic since the Internet remains largely a tool of the privileged and technologically savvy. That, we can hope, will change in time. One must always begin somewhere, remembering that the sages tell us our responsibility is to succeed in the world as we find it if it is ever to become the world we wish it to be.

Joi Ito's Web: An email from Dee Hock about the emergent democracy paper

Joichi:

How nice to hear from you and how kind of you to take time to send your paper on Blogging, a singularly uncharming term, but none the less interesting. I have read it several times with considerable interest, for it deals with a number of subjects in which I am deeply interested, such as democracy, scaling, the failure of the Internet to fulfill its promise, and the ability to perceive and honor differences without losing perspective of the parts as inseparable from one another and from the whole. To distinguish without dividing is a state of mind badly needed in the world today.

As you may know, I have been arguing for a decade that the Internet was fatally flawed and would go the way of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television as far as its promise of elevating ideas and discourse, advancing democracy, enhancing liberty or facilitating economic and political justice. I have lived long enough to remember the claims that were made at the advent of radio and television, and read enough of the history of the telegraph and telephone to realize that the claims made by the messiahs of those forms of communication were not dissimilar from the claims made by aficionados of the Internet. The reason, from my perspective, is not complicated.

Untapped Networks

Watts: Absolutely. Corporations could benefit a great deal by thinking about their problems not just as technology or engineering problems but as network problems.

Look at Microsoft. I find it ironic that Microsoft is fighting so hard to not have its software packages segregated. What the company doesn

O'Reilly Network: Cory Doctorow's Bitchun' World: P2P Gone Wild [Feb. 27, 2003]

Koman: There's a scene in the book, where they ask the Imagineers, "How long to build?" And the guy says, "Five years." And they say, "No, without reviews, and approvals, and sign-offs." And the answer is eight weeks. You've had this experience of pulling together some entrepreneurial programmers but being completely stymied in being able to release your code ...

Google Search: comp.risks

Interesting archive of computer-related risks, per our discussion of the shuttle disaster on Wednesday. Also John Dvorak has a very interesting article on email and the shuttle:

Email and the Shuttle

Kicking back as a career / Life of tester not all fun, but it is all games

Developers is a catch-all word for the programmers, artists, sound technicians, managers and other people who get together to make a single game. A sampling of the brainy topics developers will take on in San Jose this week: "Geometric Modeling for Sound Propagation," "34 Ways to Create Emotions in Games" and "Revenue Models for Massively Multiplayer Games."

Digital FM Transmitter CC-FMT

Finding the right way to connect your radio, MP3 player, or even a computer, to a stereo system can be time consuming and frustrating. This Digital FM Transmitter lets you send a signal from any audio source to any radio easily, and without wires. Use it to send a satellite radio signal, MP3 audio, and more, to nearby radios around your home or workplace, even in your car.



The FM Transmitter is simple to use. Just plug the Transmitter into the headphone jack or line out of any audio device and set the frequency of choice (88-108 MHz). You

Nemesis Follows Hubris, DIY or Not

What was really going on was hubris, and that deathly fear of damage to public image. Was there some reason that the Columbia went to an orbit from which it couldn't reach the ISS as easily as it could de-orbit, its only real hope (and still not a good one) of a rescue? Would an ISS rendezvous orbit have been ... cowardly? Underconfident?

Columbia was too heavy to reach that orbit.

Nemesis Follows Hubris, DIY or Not

Now factor in that it might take four times longer in a space suit. The Columbia didn't have six weeks -- supplies would've run out long before. Then figure in that far more than a single tile was damaged on the Columbia. Multiply by the number of tiles, and they don't finish until mid-summer, long after their climbers' knapsacks are empty.

Do we know conclusively it was a tile problem?

The Press Gaggle

MR. FLEISCHER: Tonight, the President is going to discuss this. I think you will hear the President tonight talk about the threat of Saddam Hussein and how he poses a danger to the American --



Q. In 12 years he hasn't done anything.



MR. FLEISCHER: We will temporarily suspend the Q&A portion of today's briefing to bring you this advocacy minute. (Laughter.)

Wired News: Net Hacker Tool du Jour: Google

"We've done a lot of work at universities and teaching hospitals, and it's the hardest environment to impose security, because they tend to have an open information-sharing model," Langston said. "It makes it very difficult to impose restrictions on data: In a teaching environment, that's how people learn and extend their knowledge.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL I remember a time years ago when I was as convinced that Dick Cheney was obscenely wrong about something I am now. Subsequent events raised the possibility that he might not have been so wrong after all.

[IP] a pirce very worth reading till the end SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL byJo

Veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied me on one of my futile visits to his office, where she spent better than an hour listening to us argue about ³circular errors probable² and ³MIRV decoys² and the other niceties of nuclear nightmare. When we were leaving, she, who had seen a lot of politicians in her long day, turned to me and said, ³I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous person I¹ve ever seen up here.² At that point, I agreed with her.

[IP] a pirce very worth reading till the end SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL byJo

Here is the problem I think Dick Cheney is trying to address at the moment: How does one assure global stability in a world where there is only one strong power? This is a question that his opposition, myself included, has not asked out loud. It¹s not an easy question to answer, but neither is it a question to ignore. Historically, there have only been two methods by which nations have prevented the catastrophic conflict which seems to be their deepest habit.

Teemings - Extras - The Horror of Blimps

On this occasion I awoke to the sense that there was a large menacing presence approaching me silently out of the gloom, so I opened my eyes, and there it was! A LARGE SILENT MENACING PRESENCE WAS APPROACHING ME OUT OF THE GLOOM, AND IT COULD FLY!!!



Somewhere in the control room of my mind a fat little dwarf in a security outfit was paging through a Penthouse while smoking a cigar with his feet up on the table, watching the security monitors of my brain with his peripheral vision. Suddenly he saw the LARGE SILENT SINSITER MENACING FLOATING PRESENCE coming at me, and he pulled every panic switch and hit every alarm that my body has. A full decade's allotment of adrenaline was dumped into my bloodstream all at once. My metabolism went from "restful sleep mode" to HOLY SHIT! FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE OR DIE!!!! mode" in a nanosecond. My heart went from twenty something beats per minute to about 240 even faster.

Virtual March - QuickTopic bulletin board

it took me a bunch of tries, but i did finally get through to the white house. after i made my comments, the woman on the other end said, "i'm hand writing all this... i think i'm getting a lump on my finger."

To the generally nice janitor who cleans my cubicle each evening:

COULD YOU PLEASE SHUT THE **** UP AND QUIT CUTTING DEALS ON YOUR CELL PHONE SO I CAN GET SOME WORK DONE NOW THAT THIS NOISY ARMPIT IS FINALLY EMPTY?

Thanks pal.

CNN.com - Diamond heist police arrest four - Feb. 25, 2003

Thieves forced open 120 safes in a number of vaults in a building in Antwerp's diamond centre over the weekend of February 15-16.



They reportedly changed the video tapes of the security cameras in the building to avoid being identified.

Deal May Freshen Up Google's Links

So how will the chattering of Blogger's 200,000 active users help Google improve its news judgment? The deal may be less about chatter than about links, said Meg Hourihan, who founded Pyra with Mr. Williams in 1999 and left in 2001 after a dispute over its direction, keeping a stake in the company. Ms. Hourihan said she was not familiar with Google's plans, but she said that it made sense for Google to be interested in gaining faster access to the links in Weblogs.

I thought they left because they weren't getting paid.

Do Scripters Suffer Discrimination?

Hey, if all those art majors and wanna-be fashion designers hadn't decided to become "web developers", maybe someone who can write an actual program in Perl might get some respect.

Seriously, scripting languages have been "tainted" by the Web. "If it's a script, it can't possibly be worth anything" is a pretty common mind-set these days.

While I've seen some pretty awful C and C code out there, it's nothing compared to the horror of amateur Perl or (shudder) Shell scripts.

It's interesting to consider that scripting languages have been able to ride Moore's Law to the extent that you can reasonably implement things in a scripting language hat would have really needed to be compiled a short time ago.

-Mark

Z Partners - Weblog

Our ever-increasing dependence on the microchip is enabled, in no small part, by a near-universally held idea about computers: no matter how complex and powerful microprocessors might become, in principle they are always rational, predictable, and 'debug-able' by the engineers who design them. As opposed to the messiness, ambiguity and complexity of the natural world, computers are structured, transparent and orderly - features that also make them trustworthy. We admit them into our lives because we believe (or assume) that we know what they

KRT Wire | 02/22/2003 | Inexperience hurt shuttle analysis, engineers say

Several engineers here began conducting their own analysis after the crash - using the same data and procedures that were used in Houston during the flight. Their results are not only different, but they indicate that NASA had an emergency on its hands.



"We're redoing the analysis because we think it needs to be done differently," said another longtime shuttle engineer, an expert at calculating debris impact. "The re-analysis is finding things to be more harsh than the original."

Wired News: Why Did Google Want Blogger?

Cleveland said Google will likely use Blogger to develop sophisticated searches that utilize the rich metadata inherent in the RSS feeds from weblogs: who wrote what and when, what it linked to, what linked to it and its level of popularity with Web surfers.



Cleveland said the search tool his company built for Blogger did exactly this kind of indexing on individual posts, in real time.



"By doing this we were taking a couple of baby steps down the road of what some have called the semantic Web -- a Web ... where computers can understand, at some level, the meaning and context of a Web page or blog post," he explained in an e-mail.

Salon.com Technology | Use the blog, Luke

The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It's about information management. The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. Often dismissed as self-obsessed "vanity sites," the bloggers actually have an important collective role to play on the Web. But they're not challengers to the throne of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They're challengers to the throne of Google.

Written 10 months before the acquistion of blogger by google. Hmmm..

E-Mails Reveal Shuttle Concerns (washingtonpost.com)

In one e-mail sent three days before the shuttle disintegrated on Feb. 1 as it hit the atmosphere, a Langley engineer complained that those managing Columbia's flight had chosen not to do simple studies to clarify what risks it would face on landing, and had treated such information "like the plague."

Spirit of Place

quoted from emails to all the family from Don, Cory's uncle, who's a UN nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq right now:



"I think that before Bush/Blair decide to start a war here they should both come and see what we see. From what any of us have seen there isn't anything here worth destroying. They have the usual military stuff, usual for a poorer state that has had sanctions for the last 12 years which means generally older and out-dated stuff. They don't have anything in the way of a nuclear program and for biological and chemical it is possible that they have something but no one seems to be able to find it if they do have it. So if we can't find it how will B B find it to destroy it?????????



All the machine equipment we have seen is old, perhaps even ancient. Not worth sending a 1 million dollar cruise missle to destroy that sort of stuff. Buildings are old and are in desparate need of repair. Most air conditioners we see sticking out the side of a building are terribly rusted and don't appear to be in opearation order. Destroy that?????



And when Saddam is gone what will happen to Iraq as a country? There are three main factions who will all be fighting for power and within these factions there will be fighting."



How will the Iraqi people benefit if they are bombed and killed? Where is the evidence that Saddam is a real threat to American security? Where is the evidence that invading Iraq will not destabilize the rest of the region and lead to more terrorist attacks? I have so many questions to which there are no answers.

Central Timetabling By Computer: A Review Of Existing Information

# Since a computerised central timetabling system will seek to meet all demands for accommodation, there may be difficulties when staff find they are no longer permitted to specify certain times when they do not wish to teach, such as Monday mornings or Friday afternoons.



# Some systems will allow such restrictions for individual lecturers, but there would have to be an institutional policy about who should be allowed to restrict their teaching times in this way. Similarly, most systems can include a restriction, if required, that would prevent any lecturers being scheduled to teach at 9-10 am and 5-6 pm, with nothing scheduled in between.

A Grateful Survey Of Information Architecture - English 6410 - Utah State University

Few [if any] sentences have exerted a greater influence on the American judicial system than the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."



Among the various exceptions officially recognized by the Supreme Court are issues dealing with slander, copyrights, and pornography. However, specific definitions and interpretations are often left to the community (i.e. local and state governments) in which an individual resides. Both private and public governing bodies tend to offer stricter standards than national laws; for example, students are expelled and/or employees fired for using racial slurs or any harassing comment. A lay definition may state that your rights of expression extend to the tip of my nose.



The CDA (Communications Decency Act, see http://www.epic.org/free_speech/exon_bill.txt) was passed by Congress in 1996, then signed into law by President Clinton, however the US Supreme Court ruled the following year that the Internet is protected by the First Amendment and the CDA was a violation of the First Amendment. To salvage this legislation, it was rewritten as COPA (Child Online Protection Act, see http://www.ggtech.com/hr774_ih.html) with the intent of amending the Communications Act of 1934 to allow freedom of speech on the Internet while simultaneously protecting children from unsuitable online material. COPA was combined and passed along with the Congressional Spending Bill of 1998.

OmniUpdate Web Content Management - Web Content Management home

Credit Card Payments - Payment Options - Student Information - Bursars Office - University of Louisville

Credit Card Payments





You can pay your student account by Master Card or Visa over the web.



Go to: Summary of Account. Put the amount you wish to pay in the first box at the bottom of the Summary of Account, then push the "Web credit card payment" button.

Contact - Registrar's Office - University of Louisville

Mailing Address

Registrar's Office

University of Louisville

Louisville, KY 40292

$247

From Lannon, John. Technical Communication. Ninth ed.



Glossary tips:



- Define all terms unfamiliar to an intelligent layperson. When in doubt, overdefining is safer than underdefining.



- Define all terms that have a unique meaning in your report.



- List all terms in alphabetical order



- On first use, place an asterisk in the text by each item defined in the glossary.



- List the glossary and the first page number in teh table of contents.

Online Technical Writing: Graphics and Tables

Mac OS X: MySQL on Mac OS X

In this article I'll give you an overview of MySQL's features and drawbacks, show you how to install MySQL on Mac OS X, and introduce you to some of MySQL's notable technical aspects.

Lindows Launches $799 Linux Laptop

here I am, writing from the floor of the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego, where Michael Robertson, the founder and CEO of the Summit's local host company, Lindows, has done the same for a much smaller audience (several hundred vs. several thousand) but potentially a much larger market. At the top of his list of announcements is an item that drew a gasp from the audience: a 2.9 pound, $799 Linux laptop, the Lindows MobilePC.



Here are the stats:



* 933MHz VIA processor

* 256MB RAM

* USB 2.0

* Firewire

* Ethernet

* 12.1" 1024x768 TFT display

* PCMCIA slot

* Compact Flash slot



Michael Robertson tells me "It has the same mini-ITX form factor that's in the Lindows Media computer."



There's no WiFi or modem capabilities installed, but you can add a PCMCIA card for both. During the break I heard no complaints and plenty of kudos. (Nobody in the room had used one yet, though, other than Michael Robertson, who used the box to give his whole presentation.)

Ready.gov - Be Informed - Explosions:Trapped in Debris - Visual Guide

a parody

Media Page www.4jhc.org

After the NBC news team got detained by police while interviewing the family outside of Duke University Medical Center, Mack and Jesica's parents were called into a board meeting with the hospital administrators and department heads. They were challenging Mack's power of attorney, attempting to restrict visitors, refusing the family to be able to take photographs of Jessica, wanting the photographs to be removed from the website that had any hospital personnel in them, wanting to limit Mack's access to Jessica and her medical information and restricting the press from entering the hospital. All the while, completely ignoring the pleas of her parents to have Mack retain all access to Jesica. This was a horrendous meeting with translator's, attorneys, etc., all present. In the midst of this conference, Senator Dole called Mack on his cell phone. Mack proceeded to tell Senator Dole in detail, what had happened during the surgery, after the surgery, about the media being detained, the hospital administrator wanting to restrict Mack's access to Jesica and the horrors of the past week. Everyone in the room was silent, as Mack explained the dire situation Jesica was facing to Senator Dole. Mack explained to her, that he was sitting in front of the hospital administrator right then. Senator Dole asked to speak with him. Mack said, "Sir, Senator Dole would like to speak with you." The administrator shook his head no in disbelief. Then, Senator Elizabeth Dole discussed with Mack, her concern for Jesica's and wanting to make sure that nothing happens to that "Sweet Baby." She made sure Mack had her cell phone number and told him to call her with whatever he needed and with continual updates on Jesica's condition. When Mack hung up the phone, the hospital administration ended the meeting promptly, by escorting Mack immediately upstairs to the ICU. There, they added Mack's daughters and attorney to the ICU visitors list. They let him once again take photographs of Jesica and they informed the head of the ICU ward, to assist Mr. Mahoney with whatever he needed. The hospital's tone instantly changed the minute Mack hung up the phone with Senator Dole.

Santa Fe Institute Bulletin: Winter 03

Basics of Grounded Theory Analysis:Emergence vs. Forcing

I, Barney G. Glaser, have come to the conclusion that it is up to me to write a cogent, clear correction to the many wrong ideas in Basics of qualitative Research by Anselm L. Strauss and Juliet Corbin, 1990, Sage Publications. The many wrong ideas in Basics of Qualitative Research are too subtle for the average reader and user of grounded theory to follow, to corn-pare to previous work and to critique. These readers should be set back on the correct path to discovery and theory generation using grounded theory.
This book, with its corrected view of the underlying logic of grounded theory offered in Basics, will enable researchers to get on with their research and keep up their productivity. It is better for the reader of this book to just follow a corrected version of Strauss' book and go forward with confidence that this correction will produce an emergent, grounded theory. Basics produces a forced, preconceived, full conceptual description, which is fine, but is not grounded theory.

The Tard Blog

I wanted him out of there. He was being rude and disobedient. He wouldn't go. This is when Riti Sped forms a brilliant plan.



I remember that Augusta had really enjoyed the play Hansel and Gretel that we had seen two weeks earlier. I gave my aide a bag of Hershey Kisses. She went out to the hall and laid them out in a scattered trail, leading to the office. I give Augusta a paper sack, and tell him there is a trail of treats laid out that will lead him to a prize. He jumps up and snatches the bag out of my hand. I had never before seen him move his big ass so fast.







He begins furiously picking up the chocolates. He was like a police dog searching for drugs. My aide followed Augusta out and all the way to the office.

Let's Get Snarky!: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

Besides, people don't necessarily want a Smarter Stephen den Beste . Part of the joy is watching a man who knows nothing about anything except the innards of mobile phones trying to understand a complicated world around him with no sources of information other than the Internet.

Google and Larry Page: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

By making Blogs the preferred system for publishing information in the first place, Google will be able to help improve the weaving and ranking processes even more reliably and in the otherwise untrustworthy world of the Internet, that will keep them on top. While other search engines are still trying to figure out how to turn their spidered information into a business, Google is focusing on what really matters, and that is reliability. The Blogosphere will benefit because Google will fund the development of the tools and they will be open source because the more of them they have out there the more valuable they are, because, can I say it again, Google does not sell search, it sells reliability, and every blogger and surfer and webmaster in the world is contributing to that. We do not get free services from Google, we pay for them with our clicks on their linked information. Pretty soon we will also be paying with our Blogging and we will be paid back with reliable information. That's an information economy; the information is the currency, knowledge is the payoff and reliability is marketable to those whose reliance on it is highest.

Google and Larry Page: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.

"Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

21 Killed in Panic to Exit Chicago Club (washingtonpost.com)

Blackwell said one man crushed between two people told him, " 'I can't breathe! I want you to hold my hand, man. If I don't make it, tell my mom that I love her!' He just basically collapsed."

reversible

:: Douglas Rushkoff - Weblog ::

Call it awful, but I realized that the judicial decision to give the 2000 election to Bush has left deeper scars on my psyche than watching the WTC fall (from my apartment window). It made me wonder if the 'system' is broken, the game is rigged, and no one of conscience will ever be allowed to actualize the Constitution ever again.



Close to the end of the meeting, we got on to the subject of the Showdown in Iraq. Gore said quite plainly, "Well, of course it's just a distraction. Nothing more." I nodded along, but only later thought to ask: a distraction from what?

Gbloogle: what it all (may) mean - QuickTopic bulletin board

Joey deVilla 16

02-16-2003 08:05 PM ET (US)



Personally, my favourite amalgam of "Blogger" and "Google" is Booger.

DAREDEVIL / *** (PG-13)

Affleck is at home in plots of this size, having recently just tried to save Baltimore from nuclear annihilation and the world from "Armageddon," but Garner, Farrell and Duncan are relatively newer to action epics, although Garner did see Affleck off at the station when he took the trail from Pearl Harbor to New York, and Duncan was Balthazar in "The Scorpion King." They play their roles more or less as if they were real, which is a novelty in a movie like this, and Duncan in particular has a presence that makes the camera want to take a step back and protect its groin.

The similarity to Archive.org is intriguing me. Archive is fed by Alexa who are owned by Amazon. Amazon have shit-hot collaborative filtering, but no great web corpus. Google on the other hand have an enormous corpus, but a relatively poor collorative filtering technique. Just perhaps they've realised the value of metadata and nicely marked up data...

Dave Barry Official Website

Let's say you're flipping through your 8,479 cable channels, and you come across a program called Eat Bugs For Money, wherein they bring out a large live insect, and the contestants secretly write down the minimum amount of money they would have to be given to eat it, and whichever one has the lowest bid has to actually do it. Admit it: YOU would watch this program. In fact, right now you're saying to yourself, "Hey, I wonder what channel that's on." Unfortunately, at present it's still in the conceptual stage. It's based on an idea from my editor, Gene Weingarten, who has publicly stated that he would eat a live adult South Florida cockroach (average weight: 11 pounds) for $20,000.



My point is that you'd watch this program, but you wouldn't tell Arbitron. You'd claim that you watched a National Geographic special with a name like The Amazing World of Beets.

Dave Barry's Blog

HOMELAND SECURITY UPDATE



We are in a Heightened State of Alert. Our official national-security status has been raised to Level IX, or "Buttpucker." Everybody needs to be ALERT and HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS. Like, if somebody at the supermarket asks you, "Paper of plastic?", your correct response is: "Who wants to know?"

Dave Barry on homeland security.

z2003-02-14- West Wing Interventionism (WebSeitzWiki)

"We're for freedom of speech everywhere. We're for freedom to worship everywhere. We're for freedom to learn, for everybody. And because in our time, you can build a bomb in your country and bring it to my country, what goes on in your country is very much my business. And so we are for freedom from tyranny, everywhere, whether in the guise of political oppression, Toby, or economic slavery, Josh, or religious fanaticism, C.J. That most fundamental idea cannot be met with merely our support. It has to be met with our strength. Diplomatically, economically, materially..... No country has ever had a doctrine of intervention when only humanitarian interests were at stake. That streak's gonna end Sunday at noon (at Bartlet's inauguration speech).

Google Search:

If you have Office 97 running "fast find", it is probably indexing your hard drive. Also your anti virus protection could be running in the back ground. Try the alt tab delete buttons and see what is running. Mike

SLA members sent to prison / Ex-radicals sentenced for murder

More than a quarter-century after their crime, the former radicals have become the people they vowed to destroy.

vog blog::vlog

qualitative methods in various disciplines. one of those scary, erudite, detailed journals that, well, is about qualitative research methodologies... for some reason i'm not surprised that it is in german and english.

Sizzling HTML Jalfrezi - HTML by Example

TP General - Troubleshooting hard disk drive issues

# PC Doctor diagnostics must be completed and any error codes or messages noted prior to hard disk drive (HDD) replacement.

# Noisy drives are not always defective. Some are just inherently noisy. Compare against another identical drive.

Wired News: Conversation With Marc Andreessen Andreessen: We always figured there'd be a much more sophisticated way of navigating, but no one ever came up with it.

Things like the Back and forward button, we never intended that to be a permanent part of the interface. But people get locked into metaphors. You have to be careful with the metaphors you put in front of people because once they click onto one, that's it.

WN: If you were to design Mosaic again, what would you do differently?

Andreessen: If I had to do it over again, I'd probably show some sort of graphical representation of a tree, so you could see what path you're traveling on and could backtrack. I'd also include thumbnail renderings on the tree to show where you'd been.

TIA Systems

The Memory Hole > Information Awareness Office Website Deletes Staff Biographies

CNN.com - 'Hi-tech' shuttle pic really low-tech - Feb. 12, 2003

The shadowy, closely analyzed photo of space shuttle Columbia's underside was not snapped with cutting-edge military equipment, but by three researchers playing around with an old computer and a home telescope in their free time, officials said Wednesday.



The grainy photo was made February 1 at the Starfire Optical Range at Kirtland Air Force Base and released Friday by NASA. It shows what appears to be a suspicious bulge on the shuttle's wing shortly before it broke apart.



But contrary to reports last week, the photo was not snapped by one of Starfire's extraordinarily powerful telescopes, which are designed to spy on enemy satellites and detect incoming missiles.



Instead, it was taken by Starfire Optical Range engineers who, in their free time, had rigged up a device using a commercially available 31/2-inch telescope and an 11-year-old Macintosh computer, the researchers said.



"We were not asked by NASA to do this," said Robert Fugate, the optical range's technical director. "There was no official project or tasking to do this. The people who work here are geeks. This was an opportunity to look at a rapidly moving object and try to take a picture of it. That's really all it was."

O'Reilly Network: Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks [Oct. 22, 2002]

The quick way to add a user or a group is to feed a record in either the passwd or the group format into niload (commands you type are shown in bold; the ? is used by the here-document syntax that starts with <




% sudo niload passwd . <
? rothman:*:701:20::0:0:Ernest Rothman:/Users/rothman:/bin/tcsh

? EOF

OSXFAQ - Technical News and Support for Mac OS X

Users, Groups, and Permissions form the foundation of Unix's multi-user view of the file system. Users and groups identify you, the files that you own, and the files that you share. Permissions mark out your personal 'turf' and the extent of your access to remainder of the file system - that is the files you can see and change, and the programs that you can run. Permissions are applied individually to each file and define who can read, write, and execute it.

Social networks sturdier than 'Net TRN 021203

Although many types of networks, including biological networks, social networks, and the Internet, have a lot in common, when you get right down to who is connecting to whom, social networks follow different rules.

Student loans suck. What more needs to be said? | Metafilter

What I *really* wish is that we hadn't gotten to the point where having a bachelor's degree is seen as essential to having any shot at dignified, interesting work and a comfortable life. I value education, but conflating college with "line up and pay your dues for a ticket on the gravy train" is just screwy, and causes no end of hassle for students who are bright and ambitious but not at all academically inclined.

http://www.qsrinternational.com/freedemos/freedemos.html

Yahoo! Autos : VolkswagenGolf Messages : 354-383 of 383

Motherboards.org - Motherboard Drivers - MS-6373

amazon activity theory selections

296 page

Suchman, Lucy and Randall Trigg, "Artificial Intelligence as Craftwork" in Understanding Practice: Perspectives on activity and context", Chaiklin S. and Lave J. (eds.), Cambridge University Press, NY 1993.

296 page

Ch 4 - Nardi - Studying Context: a comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition

296 page

Highly recommended: American Anthropological Association and Computing Research Association, Culture, Society, and Advanced Information Technology, 1995. http://www.cra.org/Policy/reports/aspects/

Suchman, Lucy. (1999) - "Embodies Practices of Engineering Work".

Activity Theory's central premise (Cole and Engestrom 1993) is that to grasp an activity fully one needs to understand how cultural-historically situated artifacts both mediate activity and are in turn enlivened in and through it. (Structuration theory argument?)

Suchman, Lucy. (1999) - "Embodies Practices of Engineering Work".

Bodker (1996) has proposed an analysis of the use of computer applications in terms of the relation of an application to its object:

The object of activity is present only in the application.

The object exists as a physical object but is present in the use activity as the rendition provided by the computer application. (e.g. Andrea's object of activity-earth)

The object is physically co-present outside the application.

Suchman, Lucy. (1999) - "Embodies Practices of Engineering Work".

The main purpose of the paper is to consider the respective orientations of ethnomethodology and activity theory to work and its objects, with reference to a particular case of working practice. The focus of this paper is on that aspect of engineering work that comprises the production of exhibits and plans, and the place of computer-aided design tools and paper-based drawings as mediators of that form of engineering practice.

UCB Parents Recommendations: Vans & Minivans

From: Toby



We have a 1995 Mercury Villager that we bought used this past February with 19,000 miles on it for $17,000.00. Before we bought the van I went to the library and looked at the auto magazines that compare and value cars. This was essential. I would suggest that you do this before you go shopping. Many of the vans are basically made by one company, but sold as 2 different vans, like the Villager, which is the same car as the Quest made by Nissan and the Honda van is the same as another lesser cost van (I don't remember which one). Also, we used an auto broker that we found through Cal State 9 credit union. If you don't like haggling over price, an auto broker is the way to go. After you read about what's available, go test drive and decide which colors and features you want, but don't buy the van until you call the auto broker. The broker will locate the van you want and give you a price. This price will be lower than the sticker price and lower than any price quoted to you by a dealer. You cannot haggle over this price, but you may be able to get a lower price from the dealer. I much prefer buying cars this way. I hate dealing with car sales people. Good luck.

[iBistro] BYU Online Catalog

Personal Author Suchman, Lucille Alice.
Title Plans and situated actions : the problem of human-machine communication / Lucy A. Suchman.
Publication info Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Physical description xii, 203 p. ; 22 cm.
General Note Includes indexes.
Bibliography note Bibliography: p. 190-197.
Subject term Man-machine systems.
Subject term Cognition and culture.
Subject term Ethnophilosophy.
LCCN 87008013
ISBN 0521331374
ISBN 0521337399 (pbk.)

Allowing controlled SMTP relaying in Sendmail 8.9 and later

FEATURE(relay_entire_domain)

Google Search:

This may not be related, but on ONE install (I've been through a couple of clean installs due to disk problems), I found that in the course of moving and reinstalling stuff, the system forgot that I was an administrator. Really annoying, and I hated the idea of starting all over. So I did some investigation and hacked my way back in. The easiest way I could think of to recover was to set a root password from the install CD, then use NetInfo (with the root password to allow access, which worked even though the root account hadn't actually been enabled for login... though I ended up doing that, too) to add my account back into the 'admin' group. (From which it had been removed.)

Google Search:

PS.: I suggest reading the /usr/lib/sendmail-cf/README file.

Allowing controlled SMTP relaying in Sendmail 8.9 and later

SMTP AUTH in sendmail 8.10-8.12

Introduction

sendmail 8.10-8.12 support SMTP AUTH as defined in RFC 2554 which is based on SASL. This document describes the necessary steps for installation and operation of this feature with sendmail 8.10 and later versions.



(2000-03-23) If you use sendmail 8.10.0 as client for SMTP AUTH, please read the security warning.

Mattel camera linux drivers

The Tard Blog

I can't believe what I see: Tyler is snorting Pixie Stick sugar.

using rsync with Mac OS X

using rsync with Mac OS X

Terrence Geernaert tgeernaert@merlinsoftech.com

Tue, 5 Feb 2002 11:16:19 -0800



* Previous message: rsync fails all of a sudden

* Next message: Error from rsync-2.5.2

* Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]



--Apple-Mail-1-269641553

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Content-Type: text/plain;

charset=ISO-8859-1;

format=flowed



OK, I'm brand new to this group, brand new to rsync, brand new to=20

unix in general. I'm trying to play catch up with this discussion=20

so there are likely many misconceptions that I have about these=20

issues.

Barnes & Noble.com - The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance

In this age of the computer, Petroski's delightful, elegant history of the lowly pencil is a mind-sharpener, a revelation. The pencil's slow evolution from metallic-lead stylus paralleled the growth of engineering prior to the Industrial Revolution. In America, the saga of pencil-making encompassed gentlemanly cabinetmaker Ebenezer Wood and philosopher/amateur engineer Henry David Thoreau; the latter, while working in his father's pencil business, hit upon the idea of combining graphite and clay. In modern times, pencil-making was transformed from cottage industry to mechanized science, with a boost from international trade rivalries, the Faber manufacturing family of Germany and engineers' quests for perfection. Toulouse-Lautrec said, ``I am a pencil.'' John Steinbeck was seemingly obsessed with his pencils' points, shapes and sizes. Petroski ( To Engineer Is Human ) illuminates the intersection of engineering, history, economics and culture. Illustrated. (Jan.)

Barnes & Noble.com - The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance

Procrastination, How to Stop Procrastinating - Psychological Self-Help

Procrastination is a strange phenomenon. Its purpose seems to be to make our life more pleasant but instead it almost always adds stress, disorganization, and frequently failure. Ellis and Knaus (1977) and Burka and Yuen (1983) describe the process: (1) You want to achieve some outcome, usually something you and others value and respect--"I've got to start." (2) You delay, briefly thinking of real and imagined advantages of starting to change later--"I'll do it tomorrow when I don't have much to do." (3) You delay more, becoming self-critical--"I should have started sooner"--and/or self-excusing--"I really couldn't have left the party early last night, my best friends were there." You may hide or pretend to be busy; you may even lie about having other obligations. (4) You delay still more, until finally the task has to be done, usually hastily--"Just get it done any old way"--or you just don't have time--"I can't do this!" (5) You berate yourself--"There is something wrong with me"--and swear never to procrastinate again and/or you discount the importance of the task--"It doesn't matter." (6) You repeat the process almost immediately on other important tasks, as if it were an addiction or compulsion.

POP before SMTP for Sendmail

How to restrict relaying through your mailserver to only local users that have authenticated using Post Office Protocol.

Relaying Denied/Allowed (in sendmail 8.8/8.9-8.12)

Relaying Allowed

There are a few cases in which relaying is allowed even though it isn't intended. The most common is case is the use of FEATURE(relay_entire_domain) which allows relaying for every system in class m. If class m is wrong, then the system may open up relaying for other hosts in that domain. Check it with



echo '$=m' | sendmail -bt -d0.4

Relaying Denied/Allowed (in sendmail 8.8/8.9-8.12)

O'Reilly Network: Configuring sendmail on Jaguar [Sep. 10, 2002]

Allowing Relaying from Certain Hosts



Sendmail doesn't like to relay mail that isn't sent from trusted sources. The designers of sendmail do this purposefully to try to alleviate the problem of spam. You see, spammers take advantage of mail servers that will relay mail from anyone in order to send mail to all of us while taking advantage of somebody else's bandwidth costs. It's truly heinous.



By default, sendmail's paranoia means that when we set up a server, we can only relay mail through it that originates on the local machine. In order to use it as a proper mail server, we need to let it know what hosts to trust to relay mail. For example, my mail sever is configured to accept email that comes from my private home network that is running behind a NAT with a fixed IP address. In addition, I always want to be able to send mail, using my laptop, from my friends houses which have known DSL hostnames. To do this, you simply need to define these rules in the /etc/mail/access file, as shown:

Using check_* in sendmail 8.8

Using check_* in sendmail 8.8

Relay control in sendmail 8.8,9 for roaming users

Authorize relaying based on authentification provided by a modified POP daemon

FEATUREs for check_* in sendmail 8.9

FEATURE(relay_entire_domain) allow relaying for every system in class m, which may cause a problem if it is set incorrectly.

Relaying Denied/Allowed (in sendmail 8.8/8.9-8.12)

Relaying Denied/Allowed (in sendmail 8.8/8.9-8.12)

William Gibson

Gibson's response to the Columbia tragedy.

POP before SMTP for Sendmail

POP before SMTP

How to restrict relaying through your mailserver to only local users that have authenticated using Post Office Protocol.

Geek Times - Mac OS X: Using Qualcomm qpopper to provide Post Office Protocol (POP) access for email users

Mac OS X: Using Qualcomm qpopper to provide Post Office Protocol (POP) access for email users

Qpopper Information

What is Qpopper?

Qpopper is the most widely-used server for the POP3 protocol (this allows users to access their mail using any POP3 client). Qpopper supports the latest standards, and includes a large number of optional features. Qpopper is normally used with standard UNIX mail transfer and delivery agents such as sendmail or smail.

O'Reilly Network: Configuring sendmail on Jaguar

Setting Up the LUSER_RELAY

244746 - Disk Defragmenter Polling Causes Excess Disk I/O on Drives with Unformatted Partitions

NOTE: Although the Disk Defragmenter console makes this excess disk I/O apparent by polling every few seconds, the same excess disk I/O can be triggered when you are performing other tasks (such as starting Windows Explorer) if you have a large number of unformatted partitions.

Windows 2000: Hard drive thrashing under Windows 2000

Depending on what is running.



1) win2k uses page files for all sorts of stuff.



Indexing may be turned on.

Are any MS Office products installed.



They also have indexing and other stuff.



Check for viruses also :



Here is my suggestion :



Cleanup the startup stuff. In win98 - Do a Start - Run - msconfig, startup Tab , or for win95 , NT or win2k,

Download the Startup COP a free pcmag utility from

http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/pctech/content/18/08/ut1808.001.html

Run it and it will show you everything that is listed in all the possible startup

places, and allow you to disable things one at a time until the problem is eliminated.

A lot of probelms are caused by excess old baggage - programs that have not been properly un-installed. Startup Cop will help eliminate leftovers and un-wanted programs that you no longer want.

Older Antivirus programs and Norton Utilities have been known to cause problems

try disabling them also !

Google Search: sendmail mx loop

Did you add "avalys.com" to class w? It seems that sendmail doesn't think the mail domain avalys.com is local, hence it looks for an MX record to find the destination host, and is surprised that the MX record points back to itself. To see the contents of class w run sendmail in test mode: [shell prompt]% /usr/lib/sendmail -bt > $=w This should list all names sendmail considers local. Joachim

'World's smartest person' at U-M

He received the title by scoring 22 points out of 25 possible on the society's online Test for Exceptional Intelligence. It was the highest score ever recorded on the exam.

AppleCare Document: 107288

Mac OS X



1. Open Disk Copy (/Applications/Utilities/).

2. Drag the disk image file icon into the Disk Copy window.





If the disk image file still does not open, users of Mac OS X 10.2 or later (Note 1) may follow these additional steps:



1. Open Disk Utility (/Appliations/Utilities/).

2. Select the Mac OS X startup disk in the left-hand column.

3. Click the First Aid tab.

4. Click Repair Disk Permissions.





After repairing permissions, try opening the disk image file again.

Crash logs in OS X

Mac OS X Hints - Instructions for enabling sendmail in 10.2

This might be common knowledge already, but I've been able to get sendmail working on two different machines by following the instructions in /etc/mail/README. The catch is getting sendmail to start when starting the machine up. I just changed "MAILSERVER=-NO-" to "MAILSERVER=-YES-" in /etc/hostconfig, and now sendmail works again.

She states that "one type of research is not necesarily better than another," but out of approximately 910 lines of her text she devotes only 30 lines to scholarly inquiry and practitioner inquiry and over 870 lines to qualitative and quantitative methods. She lists the characteristics of productive research as "credibility," "transferability," "dependability," and "confirmability," and I think she and most of her readers would agree that, based upon that criteria, empirical methods succeed much more than scholarly or practitioner inquiry.

The purpose of methodological clarity and consistency in a discipline is, as she says, to "let one know how much a given piece of research can be relied on." To return to computers and writing, then, the boundary between a "critical" and an "uncritical" enthusiasm is drawn by a presumed universally agreed upon set of criteria for what claims "can be relied on." Underlying all these calls for a greater methodological consistency in research is an implicit or explicit desire to support computers or writing or rhetoric and composition as a clearly defined academic discipline with a discipline's usual political stability and clout.

like Ronald Sudol and the Delaware study, they don't like the apparent chaos or open flow of what happens in Interchange, what Shoshanna Zuboff calls the "post-hierarachical relationships" implicit in networked communications. To them, hierarchy means controlled, incremental progress. Interchange seems to suggest that the students are always just about to break out of the hold and take over the ship. Consider some of the comments:

* I have a bunch of smart-ass sophomores in my class, and they love to screw around.

* Because the discussion moves so quickly, students are forced to write in one to two sentence comments that allow them only to make fragmented contributions to the overall discussions. These comments do not allow them to make supported arguments; rather, they just make generalized claim after claim.

* Of course, other students respond, and we soon have a meaningless name-calling exercise with insightful comments like "liberals suck" or "Do you consider yourself a FemiNazi?" or "You're just a bigoted male pig." I've even seem some veiled comments bordering on racial slurs pitched in. Some teachers might rationalize this activity as a great learning experience about "bigotry" or ineffective rhetoric. At a minimum, I think it's a waste of time. In a larger sense, it could be seen as threatening to some people, because they cannot confront or even just identify the people who hold ill will toward them.

Regarding the use of computers in composition, one of the more persistent calls put forth in articles in College English, CCC, Computers and Composition, and on BITNET lists like MBU and WPA, and in conference presentations, workshops -- both local and national -- and even in casual conversations in elevators and hallways, is a call for proof.

Proof.

People want proof about the following:

* Proof that people write better on computers.
* Proof that peer work and group work succeed better than drill and practice.
* Proof that classroom and interclass e-mail isn't a trivial use of instructional time.
* Proof that computer network interaction is more egalitarian and less racist and sexist than face-to-face interaction
* Proof that any new idea actually works, is actually better than what teachers are currently doing in their classrooms, no matter what that may be.

Yahoo! News - Tips for Healthy Sleep

_Set a regular time for bed each night and stick to it.



_Establish a relaxing bedtime routine, such as a warm bath or reading a book.



_Make after-dinner playtime a relaxing time.



_Avoid eating a big meal close to bedtime.



_Make sure the bedroom is dark.



_Set the bedroom temperature at a comfortable level.

What Should I Do With My Life?

Perhaps my favorite "evidence" story is from Bronson himself where he speaks of a job that required him to check data in a spreadsheet all day and put little checkboxes next to the ones he validated. What he actually did was run a small greeting card business out of the office, using all of the office supplies he could lay hands on, and at the end of the day would just go ahead and check off some numbers that he never really validated. His coworkers not only knew about it, but they invested in his business. Being in a dead end office job where no one looks over my shoulder, married to a woman who once told me that if she couldn't do physical therapy she'd like to open up a greeting card store, I found that story brilliant.

What Should I Do With My Life?

He told me, instead of doing something you enjoy, do something that pays decent and works decent hours, and pursue your hobbies. So I do. And now I've got weekends free and enough money to write short stories, scuba dive, and contribute to Open Source projects.



So maybe my job isn't the greatest in the world. I have to deal with crappy management, stupid projects, etc etc. But that's not my life focus. I spend every evening and all weekend doing exactly what I want to do.

So Sorry!!!

7) Take care of your health & well-being. This means both your physical & mental health. You cannot afford to become ill or depressed. Take in enough daily water (body weight/2 = # ounces needed), eat well (protein, vitamins, minerals), invest in some supplements, exercise (1/2 hour walk daily can have an amazing impact on reducing stress), use your support system (family, friends, fellow graduate students), regularly see appropriate health professionals (doctor, dentist, counselor - if need be), take time off from work for recreation (rent videos, chat with friends, whatever floats your boat).

Hey folks: Just got word that Blogger is working on the Invite bug. You may want to try resending your invites and see if it's fixed. Send me one too, so I can check it.

Yahoo! Groups : blogger_user_support Messages : Message 757 of 765

The Pyra staffer who monitors the Pro mailing list just posted the

following:



"I believe this may be a bug we introduced late last week. We will fix

this so invites work again. I'm sorry for the trouble.





best regards,

steve"



----- Original Message -----

From:

To:

Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 11:53 AM

Subject: [blogger_user_support] Re: problems accepting invitation to join

team





> I've got 22 people creating blogs in a class, and we are experiencing

> the same problem. Disappointing to see that it has been happening

> for a few days now. We are all using IE 5.x

>