Blog: Archive for November, 2003

Whoa. Novell buys SUSE. I wonder if they'll put something together that would be a tempting replacement for Red Hat Linux on small servers (like the ones I run)....

A new book club without many of the evil traits of traditional book clubs is publishing Manna from Heaven, a short-story collection from Roger Zelazny, including five uncollected Amber shorts along with a bunch of other short fiction.

Hmm.... A lifetime subscription to Locus is only $520....

One of the cheesiest bits of animation I've ever seen, explaining why everyone should license software. Beware, children—steal software, and you, too, might be sucked into your computer and forced to play old Atari 2600 video games to recover your design portfolio.
Via Bruce Sterling.

Do-it-yourself Segway.

The article is especially interesting because it goes into a lot of the theory behind the functionality, as well as the various compromises that had to be made to get the thing to work.
Via FreeBSD.org.

Just briefly this morning, I had a shiny new 12" PowerBook. Then M realized she couldn't find her video adapter cable, and stole it away.

More problems with electronic voting machines, this time with machines from Advanced Voting Solutions.
Via Slashdot.

Verified Voting has information and links to petitions to encourage Congress to pass legislation requiring a paper recording of votes for backup and verification of the electronic results.

The bill in question is H.R. 2239, “To amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy under title III of such Act, and for other purposes.” (Summary and Status)

Some cool links to useful information about graduate school, research proposals, and the like, from the syllabus for CS 6010, Writing Research Proposals, at Utah's School of Computing.

• Links from Mark Leone, CMU
• Wilson Hsieh's Resources on Academia
• A brief article by Edward Tufte, PowerPoint is Evil
• Notes on the Ph.D. Degree
• Bedtime Reading for People Who Do Not Have Time to Sleep
• Parables for Graduate Students

From the same issue of Wired, David Byrne on the artistic possibilities of PowerPoint. (See also his new book/DVD, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information.)

I check the “what's new” list at ThinkGeek pretty regularly. They often have wacky little techy things that are fun to look at (if not actually buy). Last night, though, I found a really cool toy that someone should buy me for Christmas—Cuboro.

Cuboro is a set of 5 cm-a-side beechwood cubes. Some are plain, some have tracks gouged out one one or more sides, some have tunnels bored through them. By piling up the blocks, you can create a path for a marble to roll along, through, and under. There are various supplemental sets that include new blocks with new features (doubling-back, dual tracks, etc.).

Their site has pictures, movies, and, coolest of all, a Flash-powered do-it-yourself tool.

They also have some links to other sites, including various marble tracks, rolling-ball sculptures, and the company that manufactures the Cuboro cubes (and does a lot of other woodcarving work, as well).

Today is the first day since Monday that I've been reasonably functional. Various digestive things started to make themselves felt on Tuesday, and took over pretty thoroughly on Wedneday and Thursday.

As such, we spent much of the day shifting books around. We finally got a tall bookcase, put it together, moved it into place, and fastened it to the wall. And managed to pretty much completely fill it.

To be fair, we emptied one shelf in the bedroom (replaced with a CD rack) and close to another shelf on one of the smaller bookshelves in the living room. Still, what little slack there currently is probably won't last that long.

Cool opinion piece in Time praising the National Book Foundation's choice of Stephen King as recipient of its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Via Locus.

From the Grauniad, an article about the seminal “Krautrock” group Can.

In addition to some interesting new solo work, there's a new DVD with music and interviews coming out for Christmas.