Owner: ThansCorner URL:http://www.thanscorner.info Join Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 16:41:31 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: News articles, musings, coldfusion, technology, gadget and web design discoveries, code snippets, and Than's commentary on the news of the day; a filter of the news and web through my lens of interest. Not a journal Not a diary. Just commentary. Site statistics:Click here
Your Online Footprint 2007-09-20 19:08:00 Each of us has at some point done a google search of our name, curious about what sort of information is out there to be found about each of us. Taking this process one step further is a new site in beta called Pipl. Enter the first and last name, and home city of a person. This service then does a search of what it calls the “deep web”, including social networks such as myspace.com, blog networks such as blogcatalog.com and more otherwise unindexed media. Depending on the uniqueness of your name, it can turn up a lot of interesting stuff you didn’t know was out there.
Peopledata.com supplements the information on Pipl, with current and previous addresses and phone numbers. All this info on the internets… Read more:Footprint
ReCAPTCHA Putting Website Users to Work 2007-09-17 16:33:01 ReCAPTCHA puts a new spin on the typical ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’ (CAPTCHA)
CAPTCHA describes a technique for restricting website access to spammers or bots by means of an image with scrambled letters that a human user should be able to recognize and authenticate. ReCAPTCHA combines a solution to this common problem with the ability to help scan and make digitally available the vast wealth of print media information in circulation.
How it works: Users are shown a background image with two words printed over it. One of these words is already known and understood by the computer but the other is one that it was unable to recognize when scanned off the page. The user then types in these words and is granted access if the response was correct. ReCAPTCHA benefits from providing the service because each time someone verifies him or herself this way, another previously unrecognized word is added to the project’s ver Read more:Putting
White House Benchmarks on Iraqi Progress Released - Success? 2007-09-14 15:37:37 White House
Press Release on Assessment of Iraqi
Progress
This morning, the White House
released the mandatory assessment of Iraqi progress on a number of benchmarks. All-in-all, there has only been one additional ’satisfactory’ benchmark rating since the same assessment was made in July.
So, our ultimate purpose for military and political action in Iraq was to establish a stable diplomatic government capable of sustaining itself and maintaining order within the country. With that in mind, here we are - mission accomplished? I’d say, rather unfortunately, that going into this engagement, we naively thought these sort of goals easy and achievable with enough force. The military ‘coalition’ involved did nothing but tear down the current forces holding things in place.
We can’t force a people we don’t understand to live according to our beliefs about the world and society. Our leaders do not understand the values and general day-to-day Read more:White
, Success
Xbox Media Center 2007-09-14 14:59:05
Lifehacker: Turn Your Xbox
into a Killer Media Center
This article is really a sweet tutorial for how to turn your (probably) neglected Xbox into a networked media center capable of running video, music, and additional applications off of its own hard drive or those of any PC on your network.
I look at this and see essentially an Apple TV with more user control. Well, perhaps my Xbox will be experiencing an overhaul over the weekend…
Productivity 2007-09-12 18:56:32 Skimming through my daily set of blogs this afternoon, I encountered one of the many productivity posts out there, outlining a system for organizing your life, managing time and getting things done in an orderly and effective manner. These things pop up all over in different forms all over the web, appealing to our universal desire to live better and easier lives.
The ideas are good, like classifying tasks by importance, limiting email to a certain block of time, or restricting aspects of your life that eat away time. I feel, however, that, though implicit in these suggestions for life management, the most important message is missing.
We are independent beings, aware and in control of what we do and don’t do. Simple, right? Except that when you start running through your day-to-day actions and interactions, you begin to notice thoughts such as, “I can’t believe he’s making me do this.” or “if only I could sleep in a few more minutes.&rdquo Read more:Productivity
Oh Man Apple… 2007-09-10 16:12:33
With the most recent set of apple announcements came a new line of iPods and an updated price on the iPhone. The iPod nano got a makeover, shaped now to handle movies with a wider screen and more square design. The iPod Classic got a slightly sleeker design and a price cut.
Most exciting, however, is the release of the new iPod Touch. Design is almost identical to the iPhone and for all practical purposes, it can be considered the same device, minus the phone capability.
I wondered for quite some time about the incredible publicity of the iPhone when it was only really practical for a small portion of the population, and only targeted to the elite few with cash to burn and serious connectivity needs. And yet, kids, seniors, and the average citizen from every walk of life heard about it and knew what it was and what it could do.
Now, it’s all clear. The iPhone is not something the average person should care about. But it’s brother, the iPod Touch, most definitely is. Read more:Apple
, hellip
Off to Canada 2007-08-05 02:09:29
Well I’m off to Canada
for five days of camping in the woods of our neighbors to the north. I expect it’ll be a good chance to relax without the usual hustle and bustle of daily life. Believe it or not, the laptop stays home - nature at its best without interruption. I think somehow the world will manage without me for a few days…
And We Thought the Age of the Pirates Had Drawn to a Close 2007-07-26 21:39:24
I’ve always wondered if this sort of thing still happened in today’s modern world of high-level weapons and global surveillance. Well, it turns out some 200-300 pirate attacks are reported each year to the Piracy Reporting Center in Kuala Lumpur.
Long gone are the days of rope-swinging, eye-patched, parrot-adorned raiders, plundering the riches of the seven seas, but still survives the spirit of boarding thieves armed with grappling hooks and a slightly more advanced of rocket-powered grenades and automatic rifles.
Check out this truly wonderful and incredibly in-depth look at The Pirate Hunters and those they pursue. Read more:Pirates
, Close
Nighttime Light Show 2007-07-26 21:20:50
This is one sweet video. This group used long exposures to paint each frame with multicolored lights and then ran them together to make a minute-long Spring commercial.Take a look at the sky over time and recognize how long these guys were out there…
Hit up this Link for more about the artists.]
Interesting Security Exploits 2007-07-26 20:30:32 Talking with my good friend Chris Mueller this afternoon, we stumbled across an article about a cross-site scripting sort of vulnerability that’s pretty wide-spread on the internet.
The general background is that many many dynamic websites, including probably this one, use forms or variables in the url of the page to communicate information from one page to the next. This includes things like login information, page choice, and virtually any link that changes over time. (mousing over the “Most Recent Entries” links at the right gives ….?entry=entry839402874 and such)
This is hackable because, though my password might be unhackable, once I’m logged in to the admin or user-privaleged portion of a site, a hacker can send me to a site that essentially gets me to do their work for them. They do this by adding a tag to a page. Because the user is already logged in on their site, when this page opens the link within the tags, it allows things to go through
Protesting Monks in Burma 2007-09-26 13:52:32 By 12:30 p.m., hundreds of monks, students, and other Rangoon residents approached the police, stood in the road and began to pray. Then the soldiers and police began pulling monks from the crowd, targeting the leaders, striking both monks and ordinary people with canes. Several smoke bombs exploded and the riot police charged. The monks and others fought back with sticks and rocks. Many others ran, perhaps four or five of them bleeding from minor head wounds. A car was set alight — by the soldiers, some protesters claimed — and then there was the unmistakable crack of live ammunition: the soldiers were shooting into the air.
TIME Exclusive
BBC Report
I am by no means an expert on the situation in Burma
, but I am familiar with a sense of decency. Nonviolent protest and the idea of calm prayerful opposition don’t warrant a violent response. Praying monks do not deserve a club to the back or a rifle-butt to the head. The image of a Buddhist monk’s shaved head, red wit
Turn a Smartphone into a Webcam 2007-09-26 12:02:51 SmartCam
Alas, I can’t personally justify to myself the need for a smartphone, but if I could, I would totally take advantage of this SmartCam project. You install a server on your machine and then extract the client on your smarphone and voila! you have your very own portable webcam.
I could see this coming in handy for video bloggers or anyone wanting to run video on the fly. This sort of thing is going to become more and more mainstream over time as smartphones like the iPhone fall into the hands of the common consumer. Read more:Smartphone
Xming and Linux Programs on your Windows PC 2007-09-24 16:02:36 As a computer science major, I spend a fair amount of time in the Science Center on Linux
machines working on homework and projects. With the semester wearing on, the trek over there and the time spent in the lab have become more and more of an annoyance.
Solutions for my laziness? I could go through the trouble of setting up Linux on my machine, duel boot or otherwise, or I could use an SSH or VNC connection to log in remotely to the lab machines. Better though, is a program I just came across called Xming.
Xming is one of a number programs available that allow a windows machine to accept and display X11 window forwarding from a Linux machine.
Here’s how it’s done:
Download and install Xming server
Install the following font packages (without which programs like emacs have compatibility issues)
75 dpi fonts
100 dpi fonts
Run Putty to connect to the Linux machine (check the “Enable X11 forwarding” under the left menu system SSH -> X11)
And with th Read more:Programs
, Windows
Embodying Wisdom 2007-10-02 20:51:32
Lost in a world, fresh and vivid, the weary and seeking mind of a man beneath the blossom of branches and colored leaves begins a journey. The novel, whose pages flutter like the leaves above on the autumn breeze, could be a calculus text, or a romance novel, or a simple story with plot and climax. Vast bookshelves whirl past the imagination with the endless possibilities and collections and genres.
Yet, tossed among the rising seas of published knowledge, this book rests on the surface with few others worthy of our adoration. The young man passing his autumn afternoon in the cradling comfort of nature’s vitality could memorize a text book or skim the cliff notes of every honored classic. Educating himself thus he might be called learned; seen as respectable. He may claim this knowledge as his, but he does not absorb it; cannot so easily integrate the lessons into his flesh and soul.
There are those we encounter passing on the road who radiate wisdom. there are these who Read more:Wisdom
Block caller id for your cell phone call 2007-10-01 10:56:00 I had forgotten about this useful bit of cell phone
lore. Now and then, there’s a time when you wouldn’t want someone to have your number or know it was you who called. To make a cell phone call that will show up without your caller id info and number, dial *67 before the call.
Books, Cars, Plane Tickets and Such…When to Buy 2007-10-14 17:55:47 Ok, so I hate to simply post links to things I find on Lifehacker quite this much, but some things are just too good to let go. Everything Finance did an analysis on the cheapest days to shop for certain types of things including books, plane tickets, hotel rooms, cars, clothing&hellip
;.you get the idea. It’s definitely worth checking out, if only because it’s an idea I think we could all wish we’d thought of.
For the Frugal Mind: Cheapest Days to Shop Read more:Books
, Plane
, Tickets
Quick and Dirty Photography Tips in 60 Seconds 2007-10-14 17:36:42
From lighting to composition to landscapes and portraits, there is a lot to be learned in a short period of time from this whirlwind tour of photography tips. These tips may not be applicable in all cases or true for everyone but know I personally get bored of taking the same kinds of shots over and over again. It’s a great starting point for some new ideas and tips to get the ball rolling.
Improve Your Photos in 60 Second (or slightly longer) Read more:Quick
, Seconds
“Victory for Costa Rica” 2007-10-09 12:32:02 The Washington Post Article by the same title represents what we can safely consider to be the general United States perspective on the matter. The approval of the &ldquo
;Tratado de Libre Comercio&rdquo
; by 51.5% of the Costa Rica
n voting public represents the culmination of several years of debate over the issue and it’s many ramifications. In one sense, this is in fact a victory for Costa Rica to the degree that it will probably encourage better economic growth as generally accompanies open trade and stimulated industry. Just so, however, with the capitalistic focus of commercialism, comes a blow to the small community, the traditional Costa Rican family, and the unique qualities that make up the rich culture.
As things stand prior to the TLC, Costa Rican quality of life is fairly good. Education, government, environmental consideration, social life, and family life are all fairly high above our general stereotypes of what it means to live in a Latin American country. As Read more:Victory
Free Online Course Materials From MIT 2007-10-08 21:01:41 If I had the time and energy, I’d take courses in a huge variety of different departments and subjects. Unfortunately, my college career is 4 years long, and majoring in Physics and Computer Science, I’m limited mostly to courses along those lines.
I recently stumbled across MIT’s OpenCourseWare which hosts more than 1700 courses, fully accessible online complete with lecture notes and reading recommendations. It’s a cool way to pursue a bit of directed independent study in an area where your expertise is lacking.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm Read more:Materials
Mozilla WebRunner 0.7 2007-10-05 11:35:23 Firefox has been our browser for quite some time now, touted all along as safer and more efficient. Everyone knows, though, that firefox has memory leaks and, when using many of the web applications out there (gmail, meebo, facebook, etc.), firefox can slow down to a crawl.
Mozilla
’s WebRunner is a streamlined version of the mozilla browser, designed to handle one web app within a window, without all the menus, bookmarks, and complications of a full browser. Profiles of the form <app_name>.webapp can be downloaded for different apps and placed on the desktop. The idea is that users open these apps much like one would a program on the computer itself.
There are a number of bundles out there for various web 2.0 applications. If one hasn’t been made yet, it’s pretty simple to do it yourself.
Open a new text document in notepad.
Modify the following code to fit the settings you want. ‘id’ must be some unique id allowing WebRunner to keep track of
Judgement on Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth 2007-10-19 15:37:55
Check out these two articles in that order. It’s amazing what people can do to science.
Junk Science: Hey Al Gore, We Want a Refund!
vs.
An ‘error’ is not the same thing as an error
London Justice Burton heard a case regarding the problems with presenting Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth
to classrooms across the UK. The justice acknowledged the value of the film as professionally produced and well-meaning but struck down 9 major errors in the presentation. These pertained to Hurricane Katrina’s path of destruction, melting snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and the loss of fish communities dependent on coral reefs, among other things.
In none of these cases does the justice find Al Gore’s assertions to be false. Rather, the claims he finds have to do with a lack of sufficient comprehensive evidence for global warming as a cause, and possible other factors potentially responsible for the discussed climate changes.
Frankly, Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Pr Read more:Inconvenient Truth
GoDaddy Applications 2007-10-19 12:33:10 I’ve been hosting this website on GoDaddy
for five months now and I’ve been incredibly happy with the experience. Server uptime has been reliable, the administrative interface is very smooth and easy to user, and at $4.95/month, the price is right.
Something I hadn’t realized until this morning, though, is the suite of applications they offer. Open Source apps and frameworks such as Wordpress, Moodle, Drupal, Joomla and a collection of content management systems, wikis and eComerce solutions are all available from GoDaddy with every hosting account.
Once logged on to your account, one need only enter a few bits of information such as admin account login/password, and the location within the domain where each app should reside. GoDaddy takes care of the rest and lets you know when the process is complete. Now, of course each of these apps is something you could install and configure yourself with some work. But where else are you going to find a system that g Read more:Applications
A Few Web Development Tips to Secure Your Web App 2007-10-16 00:06:38 This is somewhat old news (the original blog was written November 2006) but it’s a really good collection of simple things we can all keep in mind to avoid gaping security holes as we develop new web applications. Included are reminders about the vulnerabilities in browsable directories, plain-text variables, and freely-visable web stats from tools such as Webalizer (noted security vulnerabilities).
A few things I would add to the list include warnings about cross-site scripting vulnerabilities involved in careless variable passing (explanation here), SQL injection in forms, and predictability in the locations you place important files (system, admin, or install files). All of these items open doors for malicious outsiders to learn how your system is set up and find ways to exploit it.
You may think you’re safe from hackers, spam or any sort of malicious activity, but this stuff happens all the time to all sorts of websites. All it takes is a small hole and a script-kidd Read more:Development
, Secure
Weather.com: Yesterday vs. Today 2007-10-30 12:57:54
Living on a college campus and walking to class puts me outdoors a fair amount in a given day. So naturally, I’m one of those people who checks the weather forecast each morning as I get dressed.
For me, though, the actual forecasted highs and lows mean very little without some context. Is 60 degrees (F) warm enough for a t-shirt? Do I need to break out my winter coat? It’s all relative. Take a look at a comparison between today and yesterday, the idea being that I was outdoors yesterday, I know what the felt like.
Yesterday
vs. Today
Back to Back
No Title 2007-10-30 00:07:01
Have you ever found yourself sitting in class, or reclining on a hillside beneath a beautiful sunny day, and realized the depth of things within which you were immersed? Walking along, deep in thought or worry about the difficulties of the day, it’s pretty easy to walk along a path or through a front yard, lost in the list of things to do.
But sitting among blades of grass spiraling up out of the earth, I look out around me and open my eyes. Life is sorted into layers upon layers; first details of the grass, before the grass itself, before blades together composing the field into which each is lost. Beyond that are the hills whose curves the field blankets before reaching to the trees just over the ridge, where shadows from clouds in the sky lazily skim across the horizon before getting lost in the curature of the earth itself.
What could be sorrowful in a world such as this? I imagine sitting there, camera raised up before my eye. I slowly cycle the lens, focusing close Read more:Title
Left Brain vs. Right Brain Optical Illusion 2007-10-29 15:44:48
Perth Fun: The RightBrain
vs Left Brain test
A friend of mine pointed out the above article about testing left-brain/right-brain dominance. The idea is that judgments can be made about hemispherical dominance according to which way someone perceives the spinning of the dancer. Those who see it as a clockwise rotation are right-brain dominant (feeling and big picture oriented) and those who see it as counter-clockwise are left-brain dominant (logical and detail oriented).
The thing I wonder about is the fact that throughout the course of reading the article, I found myself seeing it both ways, clockwise and counterclockwise. I really wish this article would provide more evidence for the claims it makes about the relationship between this image and right/left-brain dominance. If it’s true, it’s a pretty cool way to see how your mind works. Either way, though, it’s an interesting exercise to try switching back and forth between directions. (Hint: Cover most of t Read more:Optical
, Optical Illusion
Workfriendly.net 2007-11-06 22:51:04 Workfriendly.net provides a clever way to browse the web on the sly in an office environment. This isn’t something I really ever do, but I found the idea rather clever.
Enter an url in the main page and it gives you a new window, skinned to look like a word document. The window then serves as a text-based browser which allows streamlined viewing of whatever site you give it. There’s even a “boss key” that hides your web browsing and ironically brings up a document on overcoming procrastination and time management.
This site is definitely worth checking out if only for the sake of its humor and simplicity.
Forwarding St. Olaf email to Gmail Accounts 2007-11-05 16:27:13 Saint Olaf College’s new email system, RoundCube, is a pretty classy upgrade from the previous SquirrelMail interface in use until this year. Unfortunately, the new software is still in beta and unreliable. I personally have found it much easier all along to have all St. Olaf email forwarded to my Gmail
account where I know I can access it anywhere, at any time alongside my regular gmail account messages.
How it’s done:
1. To set up forwarding from your St. Olaf account to Gmail:
Go to https://www.stolaf.edu/stobase/
Log in with your St. Olaf username and password
Click “Set Up Forwarding
or Vacation Replies”
Enter your Gmail email address under “Forwarding Address”
Uncheck “Deliver mail to your inbox” unless you want things showing up both in the st. olaf email client and Gmail.
Scroll down and change the value of “Expires” to “never”
Your email should now be successfully forwarded to your Gmail account. Read more:Accounts
Of Honey Bees and Finer Vision 2007-11-05 14:35:15 Upon the shores of an endless sea
rests noble Thomas, a honey bee
whose thirst is for the finer fruit-
riches like tunes from the gentlest flute.
Though large the span, no awful feat
for the small one to grasp such things so sweet
at the horizon’s edge for him to see,
a modest contented honey bee.
To his loyal peers, taking pause,
he speaks his joy, such urgent cause
of things to see, to know, to do
just beyond the rolling blue.
I’ll have you know, he booked a flight
and gathered those fellows without a fight.
They all were strapped in good and tight
and arrived contented that evening.
“Life is bitter, sweet and tough.”
Why believe that sour bluff?
Things are ours to love or hate.
Why turn down a happier state?
Read more:Finer
Magic DVD Ripper - Finally a simple, efficient, and fully-featured solution 2007-11-19 13:01:11 I’ve looked around for quite sometime, trying to find a simple means to backup my DVDs to take them with me on the road. All too often the results are disappointing with loss of quality, glitchy results, or complicated settings to maneuver.
Magic
DVD Ripper
provides the ability to rip copy-protected DVDs to disc in a variety of formats, including full DVD-video quality, mpeg, avi, and such, with options for Divx, Xvid and other such codecs. DVDs can thus be saved in full-quality, or reduced to small 700mb files suitable for portable device viewing.
The biggest advantage I appreciated was the reliability of the process. Often software packages work only with certain types of copy-protection or occasionally fail with ordinary processes. I have backed up dozens of DVDs of different sorts via this method and in every case, the quality has been surprisingly good, and the experience pleasantly efficient
and simple. Give the trial a whirl and if backing up your movie collectio Read more:Finally
, fully
Recommend Site To A Friend
