Saturday, August 30, 2003

The art of the rejection letter, in However, thank you for your interest (The Telegraph). There are more rejection letters now than at any time in literary history. There are more manuscripts than ever - most publishers receive at least 100 a week - and more people to reject them. These days authors can expect rejections not only from publishers but also from the agents who themselves must wait for the work they're representing to be rejected. Clare Morrall tells me she has received thousands of rejection letters. But now her novel Astonishing Splashes of Colour is on the long list for the Man Booker Prize, which was announced last week. It is the reward for an extraordinary amount of patience. Although this is the first novel she's published, it's the fifth that she's written. 11:36:08 AM    comment []

The Smoking Gun has stuff up on Arnold Schwarzenegger -- In 1977 interview, actor spoke of orgies, drugs, and homosexuality. They also have the whole interview with Oui magazine. 9:35:49 AM    comment []

Flawed Routers Flood UW Server: Low-cost Internet routers are the source of problem. By Mike Klein, Wisconsin Technology Network. Over 2,200 computers on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus were infected with the latest e-mail virus last week. At the same time, it was revealed that beginning in May 2003, UW-Madison discovered that it was the recipient of a continuous large scale flood of inbound Internet traffic destined for one of the campus' public Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. NTP servers are used to synchronize computer clocks on the Internet. The flood traffic rate was hundreds-of-thousands of packets-per-second, and hundreds of megabits-per-second. The problems are far from being resolved. The university has determined the sources of this flooding are literally hundreds of thousands of real Internet hosts throughout the world. What was thought to be a malicious distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, turned out to be a serious flaw in the design of hundreds of thousands of NetGear platinum products, including the RP614 and MR814. These are low-cost Internet routers targeted for residential use. At first the NetGear product support team was very unresponsive, according to the report. The unexpected flaw found in NetGear routers will cause significant IT problems for UW-Madison for years to come. 2:34:43 AM    comment []