Kansas has enacted new laws to permit instruction in “Intelligent Design” (I.E. God created Earth and all life 6,000 years ago…) in schools. At first, I was horrified by this: school is for instruction in math, sciences, literature and history, not for the teaching of faith masquerading as fact. But then, I was enlightened: I have become a Pastifarian.
Google, everyone’s favorite search engine, has been on an amazing winning streak. Everything they touch seems to turn golden. Their technical brilliance is lauded by millions. Even part of their corporate philosophy, “You can make money without being evil“, strikes a friendly chord: they can truly do no wrong.
Google’s latest stunning innovation announcement is something called Google Purge. Beginning in mere weeks, Google will begin destroying all information they can’t index. Its all part of their effort to meet the user’s demands to make the world simple, clean and accessible- just like Google’s main search page.
Continue reading Coming soon- Google Purge!
I am generally not a war-like guy- some might even call me a peacenik. That said, I have great respect for people who serve in the military. And I also find the “hardware” of war fascinating. Stealth bombers, laser guided missiles, ICBMs, tanks…rifles, bayonets, gas masks…swords, armour, and helmets.
A few years ago, Irene’s Aunt Judith offered me a few odds and ends from her basement. I took a couple of bayonets, then spent a happy evening doing Internet research. Once I’d confirmed where they came from, I put them on the shelf to admire once in a while. A conversation I had today with my Nephew Shane and brother in law Bryan reminded me that I had these items.
Continue reading Little pieces of history
Thirteen high school students in Kutztown, Pennsylvania have been criminally charged for “hacking” their high school provided laptops. Some relatives of the teenagers have set up a website to tell their side of the story.
Continue reading Kid’s charged for “hacking” school computers…
Google is supposedly about to start providing RSS feeds of their Google News headlines.
That’s great, and I guess I’ll have to switch over from using my own Google feed scraper program. Its been working pretty well for the last few months, but maintaining it has always been a bit of a pain. That said, I was also somewhat proud of the fact that it *did* work, and that it allowed me to have Google News on my site when other folks didn’t have this feature.
Sigh…try to do one little thing to fix a configuration problem, and a dozen bugs show up.
If you are a website admin and use PHPNuke, this might interest you. Many (?) Linux distributions are now shipping with a PHP configuration setting called “register_globals” set to “Off”. This is a good thing for security as described by the PHP documentation. Unfortunately, it seems that PHPNuke has a ton of places where globals are used “incorrectly”.
Microsoft has been working on their next generation operating system, codenamed “Longhorn”, for several years now. Its been delayed several times, had features stripped … and now has been given a poofey sounding name: Windows Vista. That name smacks of desperation, as in “dammit, this is so late we can’t use a year, and it has no really compelling features that suggest a good acronym, so we better come up with some buzz or spin that will get people to buy it without any practical reason…”
I’m still awake, and its 1:00 am on a work day. Why am I still up, you ask?
Well, its like this. The other day I edited one of my website configuration files…Vhosts.conf, which will be meaningless unless you’ve ever configured an Apache web server. Anyway, I fixed a problem whereby my “default” virtual website was solstice.kgadams.net, instead of www.kgadams.net. And in the process, I apparently broke my log file configuration.
My main personal computer crashed last week, as I mentioned on July 12. I managed to get everything working again, with one exception- standby mode.
My back hurts. More specifically, my upper back: my doctor said something about C4-5 and C5-6, and spondylolisthesis, which sounds like a kind of fungus. The pain comes and goes, and is sometimes accompanied by numbness in my arm. He prescribed painkillers and physiotherapy. I’ve been putting off the physio, but the pain today has gotten to be a bit much so I think its about time.