Ramblings & ephemera

How technologies have changed politics, & how Obama uses tech

From Marc Ambinder’s “HisSpace” (The Atlantic: June 2008):
Improvements to the printing press helped Andrew Jackson form and organize the Democratic Party, and he courted newspaper editors and publishers, some of whom became members of his Cabinet, with a zeal then unknown among political leaders. But the postal service, which was coming into its own as [...]

I for one welcome our new OS overlords: Google Chrome

As some of you may have heard, Google has announced its own web browser, Chrome. It’s releasing the Windows version today, with Mac & Linux versions to follow.
To educate people about the new browser & its goals, they release a 38 pg comic book drawn by the brilliant Scott McCloud. It’s a really good read, [...]

Dropbox for Linux is coming soon

According to this announcement, a Linux client for Dropbox should be coming out in a week or so:
http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?id=2371&replies=1
I’ve been using Dropbox for several months, and it’s really, really great.
What is it? Watch this video:
http://www.getdropbox.com/screencast
It’s backup and auto-syncing done REALLY well. Best of all, you can sync between more than one computer, even if one is [...]

A domain name reserved for examples

According to RFC2606, available at http://www.rfc.net/rfc2606.html, the following domains have been reserved for examples in technical and other writing:

example.com
example.org
example.net

In addition, the following TLDs are reserved for obvious uses:

.test
.example
.invalid
.localhost

Related posts

Famous domain name sales
Monopolies & Internet innovation
10 early choices that helped make the Internet successful
Why software is difficult to create … & will always be difficult
Who made [...]

Fat footers

Jerry wrote this & sent it to a client;
A fat footer is a means of showing secondary navigation, or
showcasing primary navigation, or reinforcing selected pieces of your
navigation. Here are some examples:
On a long-scroll blog page, put some choices at the bottom:
http://bokardo.com/
Put sales and branding at the top and navigation at the bottom:
http://www.dapper.net/
Promote the pages you [...]

Flush your DNS cache

Windows
ipconfig /flushdns
Mac OS X
dscacheutil -fluchcache

Related posts

Synchronizing Outlook & Google Apps
Retrieve CD Key from Windows 95 or NT
Remove EXIF data from JPEGs
Who runs botnets?
What bots do and how they work

Synchronizing Outlook & Google Apps

Plaxo
http://www.plaxo.com
(web-based)
OggSync
http://oggsync.com
ScheduleWorld
http://www.scheduleworld.com
iCal4OL
http://ical.gutentag.ch
Google Calendar Sync
https://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955

Related posts

Retrieve CD Key from Windows 95 or NT
Flush your DNS cache
Ubuntu Edgy changes to fstab
Remove EXIF data from JPEGs
I for one welcome our new OS overlords: Google Chrome

Remove EXIF data from JPEGs

ImageMagick
mogrify -strip *.jpg
JHead
jhead -de *.jpg

Related posts

Ubuntu Edgy changes to fstab
How to run a command repeatedly
Flush your DNS cache
What actions change MAC times on a UNIX box?
Unix vs Windows: NYC vs Celebration

Russian music sites

I just had a student email me asking about Russian music download sites. Here’s what I told him:
http://www.mp3sparks.com isn’t accepting payments. Dunno why. They haven’t for a long time, so they’re out of the picture, as far as I’m concerned.
I recommend looking at http://www.mp3fiesta.com now, as well as http://www.mp3sugar.com.
There’s a huge list of Russian music [...]

Obama, Clinton, Microsoft Excel, and OpenOffice.org

I recently posted this to my local Linux Users Group mailing list:
Thought y’all would find this interesting - from http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/05/26/fundraising_excel/index.html:
“A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic [...]

Web design contrasted with graphic design

From Joshua Porter’s “Do Canonical Web Designs Exist?” (Bokardo: 14 November 2007):
… web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.
Graphic designers can judge by looking. Web designers cannot. Web designers must judge by doing (or observing others doing). The problem is that too many people judge web designs without actually using [...]

What Dell learned from Wal-Mart

From Fake Steve Jobs’ “Why Dell will not bounce back” (11 May 2008):
On the manufacturing side, Dell figured out faster than the others in its space how to squeeze component suppliers and play them off each other. They brought in loads of former Wal-Mart people to refine this practice. One example: If you want to [...]

How Google motivates employees

From Larry Page’s “How to Motivate Your Staff” (Business 2.0: December 2003: 90):
We wrote a program that asks every engineer what they did every week. It sends them e-mail on Monday, and concatenates the e-mails together in a document that everyone can read. And it then sends that out to everyone and shames those who [...]

What actions change MAC times on a UNIX box?

From Holt Sorenson’s “Incident Response Tools For Unix, Part Two: File-System Tools” (SecurityFocus: 17 October 2003):

Various commands change the MAC [modify, access, and change] times in different ways. The table below shows the effects that some common commands have on MAC times. These tables were created on Debian 3.0 using an ext2 file system contained [...]

Do’s and don’ts for open source software development

From Jono DiCarlo’s “Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software” (5 October 2007):
Do

Get a Benevolent Dictator
Someone who has a vision for the UI. Someone who can and will say “no” to features that don’t fit the vision.
Make the Program Usable In Its Default State
Don’t rely on configurable [...]

The Internet makes (sloppy) writers of nearly everyone

From Adam Parfrey’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007):
I like the internet and computers for their ability to make writers of nearly everyone. I don’t like the internet and computers for their ability to make sloppy and thoughtless writers of nearly everyone.

Related posts

The shift from [...]

The shift from interior to exterior lives

From Mark Dery’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007):
But we live in times of chaos and complexity, and the future of writing and reading is deeply uncertain. Reading and writing are solitary activities. The web enables us to write in public and, maybe one day, [...]

World distance reading WiFi and RFID

From Bruce Schneier’s “Crypto-Gram” (15 August 2005):
At DefCon earlier this month, a group was able to set up an unamplified 802.11 network at a distance of 124.9 miles.
http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/networking/news/…
http://pasadena.net/shootout05/
Even more important, the world record for communicating with a passive RFID device was set at 69 feet. Remember that the next time someone tells you that it’s [...]

How to open a physicist’s briefcase

From John D. Barrow and John K. Webb’s "Inconstant Constants: Do the inner workings of nature change with time?" (Scientific American: 23 May 2005):

One ratio of particular interest combines the velocity of light, c, the electric charge on a single electron, e, Planck’s constant, h, and the so-called vacuum permittivity, 0. [...]

The most popular commands in Word

From Microsoft’s “No Distaste for Paste (Why the UI, Part 7)“:
The data set I’m pulling from is all Word 2003 users who have opted in to the program. We could slice the data based on, perhaps, CPU speed to try to get more power users. Or 800×600 screen resolution, to try to get more home [...]