Skip to content

Index

  • 1 min read

[QUASI-GEEK] Dan Bricklin describes how fiber to the home is installed in the real world

At a level of detail only a geek could love reading (or bother writing), Dan Bricklin gives us an interesting and fun illustrated story of installing Verizon fiber to his home: "…… Once that was all done, the installer cleaned up all the dropped wire insulation, empty boxes, etc., and we said goodbye sometime around 4 PM. I then connected my line to the router and plugged it into my laptop upstairs. Things work well." (from "Installing Verizon FIOS fiber-optic Internet service to my house") I do have one question about the Terms of Service: I ordered the 15Mbps down/2Mbps up service which has a list price of $49.95 a month before the discount. (They also have 5/2 for $39.95 and 30/5 for $199.95.)Terms of service say they "do not permit customers to host any type of server, personal or commercial". You know what they mean (maybe) but they do say it wrong (in an Internet application, each side often plays the part of a "server" as well as "client" -- they are using lay terms in a legal document)." What exactly does anyone think people will use 2Mbps upstream bandwidth for?… Technorati Tags: danbricklin, verizon

  • 1 min read

[GEEK} Good article about pluggable LAFs in Java

One of the hairier and most interesting parts of Swing (Java's GUI layer) are the so-called pluggable look and feels (or is it looks and feel?.) Truth is that you can live a very happy Swing life without knowing how it works, but if you are curious or need to know for some reason… This document is a good summary, even though a little dated, if you are interested in really understanding it. Like many things it's not so complex once you understand it. Technorati Tags: java, swing

  • 1 min read

Incogruous

Florida-202 Originally uploaded by claesk.
Space shuttle in a parking lot. Funny. p.s. I found this with a BlogBridge SmartFeed on Flickr pictures about "shuttle" and I blogged it directly from Flickr's blogging interface. Cool!

  • 1 min read

[Geek] Good Java Mailing List

I've subscribed to this list from OCI ("Object Computing Inc.") for a while now. They always have interesting readable articles on one thing or another related to Java. If you are interested in Java, I recommend it! Technorati Tags: java

  • 1 min read

Bill Gates Foundation supports Intelligent Design?

The New York Times is running a series on the Evolution/Intelligent Design 'debate'. Quite interesting. I was startled to see this in the article, though: Referring to the Discovery Institute, one of the main think tanks pushing the ID agenda, the New York Times says:

"A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman's $141,000 annual salary - and asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs." (from "Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive", New York Times)

The New York Times series is just beginning (2 articles so far) and seems to be a good survey of the issue.

  • 1 min read

[GEEK] More tips for the 40 year old virgin

Here's something funny I came across: "Sex Tips for Geeks: How to be Sexy" where we learn such gems as:

"While human beings often have sex for pleasure, the instincts that drive human mating behavior have been shaped by a deadly serious game of evolutionary selection. Sexually attractive people are those whose characteristics suggest they are well equipped to help you propagate your genetic line successfully. Good looks are sexy because they correlate with health and a robust immune system; wealth and status are sexy because they signal ability to sink high levels of investment into offspring, increasing their chances of surviving to reproduce" (from "Sex Tips For Geeks")

Technorati Tags: funny, Geeky, sex

  • 1 min read

The unfolding of language: Looks like a very interesting book

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=blogbridge-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0805079076&fc1=000000&lc1=0000ff&bc1=000000&lt1=_top&nou=1&IS2=1&f=ifr&bg1=ffffff&f=ifr I came across this review in "World Wide Words", an email newsletter (remember those?) about … well, words. Here's an excerpt from the review:

"He takes readers through introductory topics such as syntax, case endings, grammatical gender, and the curiosities of Semitic nouns, in which a set of three consonants creates a template within which detailed meaning is carried by the interspersed vowels (so shalom, salaam, Solomon, Islam, and Muslim are variants on the root s-l-m). He quotes examples in English of what seem to be abrupt changes in sense--resent three hundred years ago mean to appreciate or feel grateful for, practically the opposite of its modern sense." (from World Wide Words, "The Unfolding of Language")

Sorry, but I love stuff like that. Technorati Tags: book

  • 2 min read

Who has a life?

As you might have seen over at our BlogBridge blog , we are experimenting with a new visualization of blog postings, right inside BlogBridge. I've taken to calling this the Kleppner Widget as it was invented by Paul and Andrew Kleppner who have been contributing some cool stuff of late. Picture 1-11 This is a snippet from a pre-release build of BlogBridge: What you are looking at is a display of 4 Feeds (Dan Gillmor, Joho the Blog, Emergence Marketiong and Pito's Blog) All the way over to the right you can see the visualization. Here's how you read it: From left to right, each column is 1 day, starting today, yesterday, and back to 1 week ago. The number of dots in the column corresponds to the number of new articles or posts on that day. Hey look at that: David and Dan are posting like crazy, Francois pretty good, and I am the laggard. We aren't sure yet whether this new visualization is the cats pajamas or too gimicky but we are quite fond of it. It will probably make it in the very first weekly release after BlogBridge 2.0 ships early next week. What do you think? Too much information, or a nice compact summary of how active a blog is? And by the way, should the days run left to right (as they do today) or right to left? Technorati Tags: blogbridge, visualization, UI