Here is a random-ish URL from Salon.com, a not too unusual online magazine: http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2008/05/09/askthepilot276/.

This HTML page contains the first chunk of a piece of journalism by Patrick Smith; the actual body copy runs to approximately 950 words of text. The average word in English is 5.5 characters long; add 1 character for punctuation or whitespace and we would reasonably expect this file to be on the close order of 6.5Kb in size.

(Patrick, if you're reading this, I am not picking on you; I just decided to do some digging when I got annoyed by how long my browser was taking to load your words.)

In actual fact, the web page my browser was downloading turned out to be 68.4Kb in size. The bulk of the extra content consists of HTML tags and links. It's difficult to say how much cruft there is — much of it is Javascript, and I used a non-Javascript web browser for some of this analysis — but a naive dump of the content reveals 128 URLs.

So, we now have an order of magnitude bloat, courtesy of the salon.com content management system adding in links and other cruft. But that's just the text, and as we all know, no web page is complete without an animated GIF image. So how big is this article, really?

I stared at it for some time while it loaded over a 10mbps cable modem connection. Then I switched off my browser anti-advertising plugins (AbBlock and NoScript), hit "reload", and then saved the web page. Inline in the page are: 4 JPEG images, 4 Shockwave FLASH animations, 4 PNG images, 8 GIF images (of which no less than five are single-pixel web bugs), 4 HTML sub-documents, 6 CSS (style sheet) files, 22 separate Javascript files ... and a bunch of other crap.

The grand total of extras comes to 860Kb by dry weight, meaning that in order to read 950 words by Patrick Smith my cable modem had to pull in 948Kb, of which 942Kb was in no way related to the stuff I wanted to actually read.

With AdBlock and Noscript switched back on, the cruft dropped off considerably, but not completely — the core HTML file squished down to 52Kb (after a bunch of Javascript extensions failed to load) and the hairball of advertising cruft dropped from 62 to 41 included files, for a grand total of 372Kb of crap (from 840Kb). Finally, I updated my /etc/hosts file to include this blacklist of advertising sites, redirecting all requests for objects hosted on them into the bit bucket: the final download came to 40Kb of HTML in the main file and 208Kb of unwanted crap.

Let me put this in perspective:

This is a novel in HTML, with three small image files (totaling about 10Kb). "Accelerando" runs to 145,000 words; it fits in about 400 pages, typeset as a book, using very small print. It is 949Kb in size, or about 10Kb larger than a Salon.com feature containing 950-odd words.

Here's another novel, available for download in HTML. "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" runs to 328Kb in HTML; it's about 180 pages in book form, and it's still 40Kb smaller than the hairball you get from Salon.com after you switch AdBlock and NoScript on.

If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam?

(Note: these are rhetorical questions. Despite the burning certainty that someone on the internet is wrong, you don't need to try and explain how the advertising industry works to me. Really and truly. I'm just taking my sense of indignation for a Sunday walk.)

Volkswagen AG will join forces with Japan's Sanyo Electric to develop a lithium-ion battery, a key component of hybrid and electric cars, the Nikkei newspaper reported Sunday.

One of the best out there today. Click here for a thread on the Pellaton.

Carl Zeiss has announced a new addition to its increasingly popular ZM range of Leica M mount lenses. The slower maximum aperture of the C Biogon 35mm ƒ/2.8 allows the new lens to be "exceptionally compact" for a lens with the highest level of image quality, making it a good match for the C Biogon 21mm ƒ/4.5. In particular, Zeiss says the lens has virtually no distortion. Zeiss even says "You can even use the lens like a 50mm standard lens for digital rangefinder cameras with crop factor 1.3"—meaning, of course, on an M8 (although the correct number is actually 45.5mm-e). The C Biogon consists of 7 elements in 5 groups and weighs 200g, and should be available by midsummer with a price less than that of the 35mm ƒ/2 ZM.

_______________________

Mike

A vulnerability in the Apache web server allows an attacker to inject an XSS to any Apache server that use the Forbidden 403 default page.

Mis au point à l'Institut Lavoisier, à Versailles, le MIL-101 peut stocker 400 fois son volume de dioxyde de carbone, un gaz à effet de serre.

He might be the star of "OSS 117," a deadpan, borderline-brilliant satire of postwar spy movies and preening Euro-idiocy in the Middle East.

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 16:54:00

Blame the parents instead

A NEW BOOK PUBLISHED by a couple of Harvard boffins reckons that video games are really not to blame if your child turns out to be a deranged and psychotic mass murderer. The Harvard Medical school husband and wife team, Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, published their study findings in...

Here's a deeply important passage from my favorite survey of the time diary literature:

One of Galinsky's more surprising findings centered around a question she posed to both children and parents: "If you were granted one wish to change the way your mother's/your father's work affects your life, what would that wish be?" Some 56 percent of parents anticipated that their children would want more time with their parents and for their parents to spend less time at work, yet only 10 percent of the children actually wanted more time with their mothers and only 16 percent wanted more time with their fathers. A far larger proportion, 34 percent, wished that their mothers would be less stressed and less tired, and 28 percent wished this about their fathers.

My interpretation: Spending time with our kids has become a chore because we're doing so much of it. Even if you put on a fake smile, your kid can sense if you're not really happy to be with him.

The upshot: If you really don't want to do something with your kid, think twice about doing it. If you're going to be a grump about it, he'd probably prefer not to do it either. It might sound like a convenient rationalization, but it's true.

Charlie Demerjian the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 16:07:00

Comment Forks and knives

THERE IS ANOTHER power game brewing over USB3.0 and it looks like the user is going to pay the price once again. If you remember the OHCI/UHCI mess that made USB1.0 worthless, Intel is about to provoke the same thing for USB3.0....

By Andrew Liszewski

Have you ever looked up in the sky and thought “Hey! That cloud looks just like the McDonald’s arches”. If you have, there’s a good chance that cloud may have actually been engineered to look that way by a special effects company called SnowMasters. They’ve developed something they call Flogos, which are basically flying custom logos. Made from a proprietary soap based foam, the Flogos are filled with gases such as helium rather than air. As we all know, helium is lighter than air, so once the Flogo comes out of the machine, they just float away.

Depending on the soap mixture, the Flogos can last for just a few minutes or up to an hour. They can also travel 20-30 miles and fly as high as 20,000 feet, though the weather conditions (particularly wind speed) play an important factor in how far they go. The standard Flogos range in size from 24 inches to 48 inches, though the company is working on an even more impressive 6 foot generator. The Flogo machines can produce a flying logo every 15 seconds, and the soap based material is 100% environmentally safe.

[ Flogos ] VIA [ Cool Hunting ]

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 14:04:00

Sun, see and open sauce

SUN MICROSYSTEMS HAS unveiled a useful little update to its xVM VirtualBox, open sauce desktop virtualisation, which now has support for both Solaris and Mac OS X. The update means that Sun is now officially the first firm to have launched open source virtualisation for those particular two operating systems....

If the U.S. had decided to go back on the gold standard in 2006, where would we be today? That's a question my friend Randy Parker recently asked me. Here's how we both would answer.

Many things might have been different had the U.S. decided to promise to exchange dollars for gold at the 2006 price of $600 per ounce of gold. But let's start with some of the things that wouldn't have changed. I contend that we'd be no less worried today about geopolitical events in places like Nigeria, Iraq and Iran. The phenomenal growth of the Asian economies would presumably have continued. The bad mortgage loans made prior to that time would still be on the books and still be problematic, with attendant worries about the financial soundness of many institutions. All of this would have meant an increase in the demand for gold. Equilibrium would then require an increase in the relative price of gold compared to what it had been in 2006. That is, the number of umbrellas, or cars, or chairs that people would be willing to surrender in order to obtain an ounce of gold would have gone up relative to what it had been in 2006.

Now, if the number of dollars you have to surrender to obtain an ounce of gold is fixed by the government's commitment to a gold standard, and the number of umbrellas, or cars, or chairs you'd be willing to surrender for an ounce of gold has gone up, the only way that can be is if the dollar price of umbrellas, cars, and chairs have all fallen. Maintaining a gold standard while the relative price of gold increases requires deflation in the dollar prices of all other goods.

The only way the Fed could engender that deflation is with a monetary tightening. Suppose the Fed had been dutifully implementing that procedure in August 2007, when there was a sudden increase in doubts about the soundness of key financial players. A savvy speculator would then reason as follows.

The U.S. has promised that it will continue to convert dollars to gold at $600 per ounce. But that will require them to raise interest rates at a time of potential financial panic, and I don't believe they have the stomach for that. I'm going to ask for my dollars in gold right now, in the guess that they'll abandon this policy shortly. When they give up the standard, my gold will have appreciated, and I'll have a handsome profit.

And how could the U.S. respond to such a speculative attack? We'd have two choices. One would be to say to the speculators, you're right, this idea of driving interest rates up at a time of financial crisis was a dumb one. Dollars are no longer convertible to gold at the old fixed rate.

Or the other option would be to say, no, we really mean it this time, honest, we're serious about this whole gold standard thing. So, we drive interest rates higher and watch the deflation mount. Outstanding debt that is denominated in dollars becomes more and more costly for people to repay, and we'd see a really impressive level of bankruptcies and business failures. The cycle would continue until the politicians who promised to stay on the gold standard are driven out of office and the deflation spiral could finally be ended by the new leaders choosing option 1 after all.

Now, I know that the gold-standard bugs are howling at this point, "but that's not how a gold standard would actually work, because..." But what I just described was not a hypothetical scenario. Instead, in my opinion it's a pretty accurate description of what happened in the United States during the Great Depression of 1929-33.

In 1929, the U.S. was on a gold standard, with the exchange rate fixed at $20.67 per ounce of gold. Geopolitical insecurity and financial worries warranted an increase in the relative price of gold, which, with the dollar price of gold fixed, required a decline in the dollar price of most everything else. Speculators bet (correctly) that Britain would abandon the standard in 1931, but the U.S. fought against the speculation, with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York raising its discount rate from 1.5% to 3.5% in October 1931. This sharp increase in interest rates at a time of great financial turmoil succeeded in defending the parity with gold, but produced an economic disaster.

A 1991 research paper by Ben Bernanke and Harold James noted the very strong correlation between when a country abandoned the gold standard and when it began to recover from the Great Depression. The top panel above shows their calculations of the average annual growth of industrial production for the 14 countries that decided to abandon their currencies' gold parity in 1931-- they experienced positive growth in every year from 1932 on. Countries that stayed on gold, by contrast, experienced an average output decline of 15% in 1932. The U.S. abandoned gold in 1933, after which its dramatic recovery immediately began. The same happened after Italy dropped the gold standard in 1934, and for Belgium when it went off in 1935. On the other hand, the three countries that stuck with gold through 1936 (France, Netherlands, and Poland) saw a 6% drop in industrial production in 1935, while the rest of the world was experiencing solid growth.

As I pointed out in an article published in 1988, gold-standard advocates think in terms of an institution whose continued operation, once adopted, would never again be doubted. But the problem is, if you can go on a gold standard, then you can go off a gold standard. And uncertainty about if and when the latter will occur can make the system itself a very destabilizing force.

---

Technorati Tags: Great Depression, gold standard, macroeconomics

I've loved going to Zuni Cafe for decades, but I must confess -- never for the pizza. My decision has always been between the Caesar salad, the roast chicken and the hamburger, leaving little...

EU Parliament calls for Book of Fat Lunch

A compulsory register of lobby companies revealing which companies or organisations are paying their bills comes a step nearer today.…

By Luke Anderson

How many times have you wanted a cold drink in the summer, only to have the ice cubes melt before you’re even halfway done? Unfortunately this waters down your beverage and you’re stuck either throwing it out or being stuck drinking something nasty. Apparently you can combat this by using spheres of ice. That’s great, but just how do you make ice spheres exactly?

Apparently it is a complicated process, one that is simplified by this Ice Mold. All you need to do is take an ice cube, set it in the metal press and wait for it to melt into a perfect ball. You can choose sizes of 55, 65, 70 and 80mm spheres, and get to work. You should be able to churn out 30 to 40 balls per hour, provided you already have some ice cubes made. Unfortunately there is no word on pricing or availability.

[ Taisin ] VIA [ BoingBoing ]

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 11:23:00

Here we go loop de loo

THE LONG-AWAITED and much-delayed update to Windows XP, Service Pack 3, is giving owners of machines with AMD hardware headaches aplenty it seems. The problems, which first arose just one day after the push, have been causing lots of noise on Microsoft support sites and angry user bogs....

Even the most diehard TeXhead has moments when he needs to read some Word document. Tonight was such a night and I have Office 2004 on my machine for just such an eventuality (Please don't write in to tell me that I should run Pages. As I said, I don't want to run either of them, but I also don't want to deal with Pages/Word incompatibility.) Anyway, I boot up Word and the Leopard firewall asks me if I'd like to let Word listen for network connections. I go to click no and either manage to click it or raise some other window or something. The dialog disappears and when I check the firewall it sure does say to block MS Word. So, that's OK, I guess.

And then I get to thinking, "Why is Word opening up TCP listening ports anyway?" So, I run netstat -a | grep LISTEN and get:

[49] /usr/sbin/netstat -a | grep LISTEN
tcp4       0      0  *.3369                 *.*                    LISTEN
...

Hmmm. What's 3369? Google doesn't know, so that's not good. I close Word and the port goes away and lsof confirms it's Word:

[52] /usr/sbin/lsof -i TCP:3369

COMMAND  PID USER   FD   TYPE    DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
Word    8198  ekr   16u  IPv4 0x6c4d66c      0t0  TCP *:3369 (LISTEN)

I shut down Word and my WiFi and restart it, but it's not listening now. Maybe I need the network on. Sure enough, I bring the WiFi back up and restart Word and now it's listening, but on a different port: 3828 this time. Stranger and stranger. Now ordinarily this would only be about a 4.0 freakout on a scale of 1 to 10, but it turns out that I only recently installed Office on this machine and was unaware of the following delightful property of MS AutoUpdate: it only installs one update at a time, no matter how many updates are pending. So, when you have 10-20 updates to install, and you're just letting update run itself, it takes forever to get uprev. The consequence of this is that I was loading random people's documents with some two year old (and vulnerable) version of Word. Who knows what malware I've had the joy of installing. This jacks things up to a freakout factor of about 6.2.

Next step: compare to another machine. It shows up on my other Mac, which is a little comforting, but of course that machine could be infected too. I double check with Hovav, who is about as paranoid as I am, and his copy of Office is is listening, but on some other random port. That's sort of comforting. This is starting to look a lot less like malware and a lot more like a feature of Word. A little more digging tells us the process name that is actually doing the listening. It's Word (as I knew) but with some wacky argument starting with -psn_0_.... Searching on this, we find out that I'm not the only person who has had this question.

If you close UDP 2222, then no other computers will know which TCP port your copy of word has chosen to listen to (in the 3000-3999 range), because that info is broadcasted in the UDP packets. The protocol is thus: Your copy of word spews it's serial number (encoded) and the TCP port it is listening on in a packed on UDP 2222. Other copies of word on the network get this packet and then respond the your copy of word on the specified TCP port if they have the same serial. Then one copy shuts down.

I guess it was malware after all. Outstanding!

No, it's not a low-res portrait of an "alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler"; rather, "Pixel Bender" is the official name for Adobe's new scripting language for writing fast imaging filters.  Engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith explains,

 

Hydra is an awesome name for a language like the one we created. At the very beginning, Jonathan Shekter came up with it as a code name for this cool language that could run on different kinds of hardware efficiently. The problem is that it's a great name for any kind of technology that does multiple things, so it is pretty popular. We didn't want to confuse folks, so we worked with the Adobe branding team to come up with a new name that we could use moving forward. That name is Pixel Bender™.

 

As someone whose mind was blown by the original MacPaint, I was pushing for "Phat Bits"--a fun way to combine a reference to the old-school "Fat bits" display mode with an equally dated bit of 90's slang.  But hey, they don't pay me to come up with the marvels of Adobe branding.

 

Developers wanting to take Hyd--er, Pixel Bender--for a spin can grab the coding & preview environment from Adobe Labs.

We had better realize the dangers of location-based devices and Web services and how to 'fake out' the trackers

On Saturday, The New York Times published a brilliant chart illustrating the spending of the average American:

“Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gathers 84,000 prices in about 200 categories,” the paper writes, “like gasoline, bananas, dresses and garbage collection.” These numbers form the Consumer Price Index, one common measure of inflation. And this graphic makes that information accessible.

This chart is neat for several reasons:

• The circle itself represents 100% of the average consumer’s spending. The circle is divided into eight large shapes, each of which is divided further into a number of smaller shapes. The size of each shape represents an estimate of what the average American spends on the category it represents. For example, gasoline is the largest shape in the transportation category.
• Each shape is color-coded by the change in prices for that category between March 2007 and March 2008. The three dark red shapes (representing price increases of more than 40%) are all petroleum products. But eggs — with a 29.9% price increase — are close behind.
• Hovering over any shape will reveal the category name, the share of spending from the average budget, and the amount by which prices have changed in the past year.
• You can use the “zoom in” tool to get a better view of the action, and then drag the chart around to look at different categories. It’s only by doing this that you can see lettuce has its own category, and that the green, leafy stuff has declined in price by 3.2% over the past twelve months.

I’ll confess to feeling like a total geek because I spent twenty minutes exploring the different numbers. I even started taking notes and making extrapolations and comparisons.

For example, Americans, as a whole, spend three times as much money on cigarettes as they do on financial services. Actually, because we know that 0.7% of expenditures are made to cigarettes, and because we know that 21% of Americans smoke, then (if my math is right) about 3.5% of a smoker’s expenses go to cigarettes. (Note that I’m not criticizing. At one time, comic books accounted for 7% of my own expenses.)

I would love to find more charts and graphs like this one. (The New York Times has a history of producing great charts and graphs, such as their graph of home values from 2006 and their rent vs. buy calculator.)

[The New York Times: All of inflation's little parts]

---
Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• Long-Distance Phone Tax Repealed
• How is a Canadian Art-Pop Singer like a Bagel Salesman?
• The American Dream
• Manage Your Finances Like a Professional Gambler: Small Things Add Up
• Spend Less and Live More with a Volunteer Vacation

Arcam is to unify its hi-fi separates ranges under the FMJ sub-brand, with two new amplifiers and two new CD/SACD players - priced from £450 – due by June. The newcomers promise to include "the company's highest-performing music player to date".

Arcam's DiVA sub-brand, meanwhile, lives on for its AV products, with the Solo range continuing to cover music and movie systems duties.

First in the new player line-up will be the Arcam FMJ CD37 (pictured above), about which those 'best ever' claims are being made.

This £1000 CD/SACD player features the latest Wolfson 8741 DACs, using native DSD coversion for SACD discs.

Other features include a power supply with dual toroidal transformers (one each for audio and digital circuits) and some anti-vibration/interference aspects with names that seem straight from a comic book.

For example, Arcam's proprietary "Mask of Silence" technology is designed to dramatically reduce electromagnetic interference, which is further foiled by the use of "Stealth Mat", unique metal-fibre matting. These audio-loving superheroes are also on the case of the arch-villain vibration, deploying "Sound Dead Steel" - damped chassis construction - to "virtually eliminate mechanical influences on the electronics".

The FMJ CD37 will be swiftly followed by the FMJ CD17, a £500 CD player for which we have few details - other than it will also incorporate a new Wolfson DAC.

Moving onto stereo amplifiers, Arcam has announced the FMJ A28 and FMJ A18, both of which - to reflect the vinyl revival - include moving-magnet phono stages.

The A28 (pictured above) is a new midrange model, costing £700. The 75 watts per channel integrated amp includes six line-level inputs in addition to the aforementioned MM phono stage. It can be used in "processor mode" for integration with AV amps, and features pre-amp outputs that enable bi-amping with Arcam power amplifiers.

The amp - which comes with Arcam's CR90 learning remote - also features all-electronic control for volume and input selection; two pairs of individually selectable speaker outputs, and a new power-supply design. It additionally boasts Arcam's Mask of Slience and Stealth Mat technology.

More details will follow on the A18, which will cost £450. As with all Arcam FMJ designs, it will be available in black or silver finish.

The two new models join the previously announced A38 and P38 amplifiers, detailed here. A review of the £1200 A38 amp will appear in our next issue, on sale 29th May.

Technorati Tags: amplifier, Arcam, CD player, FMJ, new hi-fi, phono stage, Stereo amp

Verizon shows us some of the challenges and benefits of outfitting the dense urban jungle of New York City for FiOS

The new version of OpenOffice.org was a long time coming, but it brings a solid batch of new features and file compatibility. Ars Technica looks at some of the most significant enhancements to see if they stack up.

Read More...

En ce 8 mai, Nicolas Sarkozy rend hommage à Ouistreham aux Français du commando Kieffer, parmi les premiers à y débarquer le 6 juin 1944.

An undergraduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has learned very quickly that a spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down. In fact, with his invention, the sugar may actually be the medicine.

Tapespace made a video compilation of almost every single couch gag from the opening sequence of The Simpsons. They also posted a 19 minute regular speed version of the couch gag video.

There’s a full list of couch gags by episode on Wikipedia.

ShareThis

A team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that a new breed of supercomputer made from simple, low-power embedded cores could challenge existing designs that rely on complex, high-power, general-purpose processors.

Read More...

Long de 40 kilomètres,il reliera le Qatar à Bahreïn et symbolisera une volonté d'intégration politique.

Welcome to the first of (hopefully) many Rapid Restaurant Reviews.

You won’t find star ratings here. You won’t find a lot of flowery descriptions of food or snarky comments about service. And you especially won’t find any charming back story about how the chef’s first job was cleaning the deep fryers at McDonald’s before securing the financing to open a wildly successful San Francisco bistro.

Instead, you’ll find the answer to ten questions that, to me, encapsulate the San Francisco dining experience:

(more…)

Computer science researchers have created a Java-based Azureus BitTorrent plug-in that uses the information from commercial content caches to help find peers within local networks. It has the potential to alleviate some of the problems experienced by ISPs.

Read More...

Last week, we shared a rendition of a Tufte graphic using just a few lines of Nodebox code. As our commenters pointed out, Python is great, but it may not be every business analyst's carnal desire to learn a programming language just to generate some nifty graphs. I spent some time to push Chris's Nodebox rendition into a PIL-based Windows tool that can generate the same sort of comparison graph from an Excel file on the fly.

The result is The Comparison Chart Generator 1.0. The installation instructions are relatively simple. Unzip the zip file, and run comparisionchartgenerator.exe.

We start with some data in an Excel (xls) or Comma Delimited (csv) format. The data for this graph has to be contained within the first sheet starting with cell A1, as in the following picture.

Select an input file. There are a couple example files bundled with the download.

After selecting a file, you'll be prompted to modify a few of the basic options available for the chart.

Finally, save the result as a jpeg.

Here is the same image found in Tufte's textbook processed using the Comparison Chart Generator. It is generated using the csv example file bundled with the download.

Those of us who have undergone lasik eye-improvement surgery may still prefer the sharp crisp Nodebox results, but for the rest of us, this image looks pretty good. Let us know if this tool is useful. If there is enough of a positive response, we may consider expanding functionality for other fancy Tufte-esque charts.

If you do prefer Nodebox, I have an updated script here. This pushes the script up to 20 lines of code or so, but the extra 9 lines allow the labels to push themselves apart on their own. If you want to look at the source code for the windows program, you can get it here. I used py2exe to compile it into an executable. The code, however, has not be thoroughly commented or cleaned as of yet, so edit it at your own risk.

We have not had a chance to test this on Vista. If you are a Vista user, please let us know if the program works for you.

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

Trolltech has announced the official release of Qt 4.4, a new version of the popular open source software development toolkit. Ars takes a close look at the new features, which include an integrated WebKit-based HTML rendering engine, the new Phonon multimedia framework, support for Windows CE, and significant improvements to the QGraphicsView system.

Read More...

I work in the beverage industry and use this scraper for removing stickers from cooler doors that other guys with pocket knives, razors, car keys, etc. couldn't budge. The Trim 10 has wide, super thin, very flexible blades about 4 inches long that really conform to the surface of the work. I find it picks up more material per stroke and gets down to the bottom of things better than a single-edge razor blade. The holder has a very elegant folding design that allows for safe, touchless blade changes and compact, safe transport -- a much smaller, flatter package than a lot of utility knives. The scraper comes in a nifty case that holds a few extra blades, which can be purchases separately. A modular handle is also available for heavier work, but I never need it. I get mine from a janitorial supply company in Austin. I believe the scrapers are popular with window tint installers, too.

-- Christian Taylor

Unger Trim Scraper
$6
(Trim10)
Available from ReStockIt.com

Manufactured by Unger

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

Lil Chizler

Dexter-Russell Dough Scraper

Silent Paint Remover

OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 is now available for download.  Its quite a departure from traditional Solaris. Why? because the CD that one will be downloading is probably just a chapter in the full book. To understand the full picture one will have to really look at the bigger picture on how the whole deployment model is now changing. The full scope is not my topic of discussion but I probably want to focus on probably couple of pieces today in order to demostrate on how to create a PostgreSQL OpenSolaris LiveCD.

In order to create a custom LiveCD, its probably best to start with OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 installation though it is not necessary as it can be done on Solaris Express installations also but needs pkg(5) to be installed. But the two things really required to create a custom LiveCD, you need one kit to download and a repository to access. The kit to download is OpenSolaris's Distribution Constructor project. Its quite easy to clone the scripts in the project using mercurial "hg" command. Installing the SUNWmercurial package is as easy as typing "pkg install SUNWmercurial" (provided networking is working and internet connection is available).  The good thing is if your "pkg" command does successfully install SUNWmercurial it means the second requirement of accessing a repository is already fulfilled.  Coming back to Distribution Constructor the project can be cloned as follows

hg clone ssh://anon at hg dot opensolaris dot org/hg/caiman/distro_constructor

This creates a distro_constructior directory in the current working directory which includes all the scripts and templates to create a distribution.  The best way to proceed is to copy test_data directory  and mofidy the settings in it after reading through the README file on the project source repository.

You will soon realize that pkgs.txt is what one really needs to modify to select what packages to be added as part of one's custom LiveCD. What I realized later is that its easier to add packages than actually remove packages. Since while pkgs.txt  doesnt handle depedencies (in the sense person reading the file cannot figure it out), the actual kit does resolve dependencies. (Though I wouldn't try random packages only since there are some utitilies required and hence hard to get it right in first few tries if one is trying to do a minimized LiveCD.) Right now GNOME et all is required since the installer is dependent on it and hence hard to cut down the size of the LiveCD below 600MB if one wants an installer from the LiveCD to the harddisk to work. However the good news is there is some space still available to fit PostgreSQL in and still burn a CD that will work. Anyway coming back to the pkgs.txt of the test_data which needs to be edited its surprising to see such a small list.. it basically containts slim_install, SUNWslim-utils and entire. Hardly stuff that can be removed in it.  However the modification I did was to add PostgreSQL 8.2 packages (SUNWpostgr-82*)  along with pgAdminIII (SUNWpgadmin3) packages which are available on http://pkg.opensolaris.org and as mentioned in README file executed the script file build_dist.bash /pathto/test1.conf. If your setup is right and access to http://pkg.opensolaris.org is fast then maybe in couple of hours (or three) you will get your own OpenSolaris 2008.05 LiveCD with PostgreSQL included with a size of about 640MB.

 

PHP has announced the release of 5.2 ...(more)...

Le dernier décret autorisant la généralisation du passeport biométrique vient de paraître. Les premiers exemplaires seront attribués en octobre.

Unicode outpaces ASCII for encoding Web site text, and life gets easier for Google and others that grapple with an increasingly international Internet.

I’m tired of typing my postal address into Web sites. Furthermore, it’s stupid, wasteful, and a little worrying that so many of them out there have stored copies of it. Wouldn’t it be better just to give them the address of my address?

[This is provoked by an acronym-heavy discussion that’s sloshing around online; a good sample of the thinking may be found in “Feeds-Based VRM”: A Web-Centric Approach to VRM Implementation, by Adriana Lukas and Alec Muffett.]

Your Offline Address, Online

The idea is this: Instead of filling your address into a form, you give them a URI for your address, where a Web site’s server can fetch a machine-readable version and fill in all the fields. In the case where the site only needs your address once, this is worthwhile for labour-saving and quality purposes; how many times has it taken you three tries to get all the pieces of your address into the right place on a persnickety Web form, and how many other times have you noticed a dumb error in an on-file address you entered earlier?

Suppose the Web site needs to keep your address; perhaps they’re going to send you something every month. Then this URI-based approach really shines, because if you move, then you just change your online address in one place and then anyone who needs it every so often goes and picks it up when they need it, and they’ll have the latest version without you having to run around the Web and change it everywhere.

This seems like a no-brainer, and if you buy into it, there are maybe a lot of other similar cases. Here are some other things that you might want to keep online in one place, control yourself, and deal the addresses of out, as required: your credit card info, your FedEx account, your health-insurance number, and your frequent-flyer programs.

Of course some of these get into very sensitive security issues; but actually we’re getting pretty good at providing information on the Web in a secure way.

The people who are thinking about this are slinging around jargon from the “VRM” (Vendor Relationship Management) community and from the Identity community. I’m not really a member of either, and thus am probably missing some of their finer points. But the notion of you controlling your own automated information dispensary seems like an obvious winner to me, and furthermore, one that ought to be easy to build using existing Web technology, right out of the box.

And you don’t have to be that paranoid about privacy and security issues to appreciate the advantages of controlling the storage and delivery of information about yourself.

Technical Issues

This originally came across my radar because Alec Muffett asked me what I thought about the idea of using Atom (RFC4287) as a wrapper format for this kind of data. Off the top of my head, it sounded plausible. Atom is XML, which helps with internationalization, and then it also provides you with a guaranteed last-updated timestamp and a nice globally-unique identifier for each item.

Let’s focus on that nice simple example: storing your address online. The first thing you need to figure out is how to encode the address machine-readably. From where I sit, it looks like the vCard format is the most deployed and is thus probably well-debugged. It comes in three flavors: plain-text, XML, and an XHTML microformat.

Any of them would work, either on their own or in an Atom wrapper; I’d be inclined to pick the native plain-text version just for simplicity.

Speaking of simplicity, I guarantee that if this idea got momentum, you’d hear voices raised arguing that vCard is just too simple for this or that business’ addressing needs. Well, too bad, they don’t have to play if they don’t want to. My bet is that the upside from bringing order to this chaos is much bigger than the cost in forcing businesses to dumb down their addressing data.

So, what would using an Atom wrapper, as opposed to just a naked vCard resource, buy you? To start with, you’d be able to batch up things for delivery; for example separate billing and delivery addresses. Or for that matter everything you want to share to drive one particular transaction: address, credit card, and affinity programs.

On the other hand, there’d be a cost, because you’d have to give the receiver two pieces of information: the URI of the feed and some sort of selector for the bit that contains the particular item in question.

While thinking about this, I realized that we never specified a fragment-identifier syntax for Atom, so in http://example.com/feed.atom#37, the #37 doesn’t actually mean anything. Sigh. I pinged Joe Gregorio online and asked “Did we really not do that?” and he replied, more or less, “D’oh, we should fix that.” Neither of us can remember the issue ever coming up for discussion during the Atom process.

So actually, it’s not obvious to me that an Atom wrapper is a good idea here. The timestamp would be nice, but then a well-run Web server should also provide that information.

Take-Away

Unless I’m missing something obvious, the notion of everyone bringing the online information about themselves under their own control, using plain vanilla Web technology, seems like a winner.

What would it take to get this started?

Today in my Flickr account I came across a photo from my trip to Belize in 2007:

This photo reminded me how much joy I get creating handmade cards and giving them to family and friends. For many years I've preferred to create cards (when I plan ahead) because they're fun to do and are always received well.

And you know it's really much easier than you think. With computer card software being so popular, you can get pre-folded blank cards, complete with matching envelopes at any office supply or Target store. Most stores will have simple colored pencil kits, and as for pens, the Pilot G2 and Uniball Signo 207 work well.

I recommend sketching out your idea in graphite pencil very lightly, then draw over the pencil with the G2 or Signo's black gel ink. Erase the pencil. Color the card with the colored pencils, or if you wish, keep it black and white like my card above.

You can add a message inside, and be sure to write some kind of "created by" message on the back of the card. My line in college when I started creating cards was:

"Rohde Cards: When you're too cheap to send the very best."

Belize Thank You Card Story
As for the story behind the handmade card above, I was in Belize in July 2007, as a part of a church service group. A small team from the larger group paid a visit to a Mennonite family in the village of St. Margaret's, in the mountains of Belize.

The family we visited was incredibly hospitable to our team. They offered fresh pineapple juice and friendly conversation at their home overlooking the river, high on a hillside. I wanted to say thanks, but what can you offer a Mennonite family they don't already have — or will accept?

How about a handmade thank you card?! :-)

With this in mind, I drew up a little thank you card on spare construction paper, had our entire group sign the back and sealed both sides with leftover clear contact paper. Our team presented the card to the family, which they loved.

Go Forth and Create Handmade Cards!
So, visit the store this week and get your supplies for Mother's Day! Your mom will adore your handmade work, regardless of your drawing skills. Remember, it's not about your skills as an illustrator, it's about sharing from your heart!

Photo Credit: Laura Winslow

Edouard Balladur et Michel Rocard débattent pour Le Figaro sur les grands chantiers en cours, dont la révision générale des politiques publiques et la réforme constitutionnelle. Entretiens croisés. » LIRE AUSSI: la première partie du débat «L'an I sous le signe de la crise financière».

There is no right to privacy at international borders. For those of us with laptops, this presents a pretty major problem: How do we get through US Customs with our beloved portable devices, without having Uncle Sam peeking at every email we've sent, ever

Sun's business model does not work and it hasn't worked for a long time. Moreover, open source, MySQL, StorageTek, and SaaS (Software as a Service) will not fix it. What will?

Cory Doctorow has a tradition of releasing a Creative Commons-licensed free electronic version of his books when they come out in the stores. For Little Brother, Cory was a little behind the actual book release — he had the temerity to be offline, having a life with his family, of all things! — but now he’s all caught up and has out up a Little Brother area on his personal site, complete with free CC downloads as well as other ginchy things. Check it out.

Also: if you check it out and you like it (as I expect you will, it’s excellent), go to your local bookstore (or favorite online retailer) and buy it, either to have a physical copy for yourself, or as a gift for a teen you’re hoping to either start or to further encourage on the road to geek rebellion. As you know, around here we’re big fans of rewarding authors one likes with income, so they can maybe write more books later. It’s a virtuous cycle, it is.

Charlie Demerjian the Inquirer, Monday 5 May 2008. 09:16:00

DRM, Price and BD-J

BLU-RAY PLAYER SALES are sucking wind as well they should. According to Cnet, sales of the DRM infected format players are dropping like rocks. The not so bright people out there had expected sales to skyrocket once the format war was done, but it didn't....