Saturday, August 17, 2002

iPAQ Music Center. Compaq dropped the price of their iPAQ Music Center to $399, which is where these devices should have been from the beginning. It would be interesting to see a teardown of one of these. [Hack the Planet] It's pretty, it's got gobs of features, and it's only $400. I might pick one of these up after I move...
4:55:33 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Experimenting with a new design, a kind of bastard stepchild CSS/tables monstrosity. Anyway, I can't seem to get the jpg to upstream into the /www/images/ directory. Do I have to put all my art in myPictures? Things need padding, and I have to learn how clearing and floating works to get better at placing CSS boxes. Next step is to take apart the main table and put the side nav in its own div. [Radio Free Blogistan] Take a look at this page - nifty stuff. I'm going to have to play with CSS one of these days... Also, I killed Radio at around 10:50, compressed the data files, and started again - we're now at 55mb of physical memory consumed and 108mb of virtual memory. This is a Problem. I'm off to try fix it.

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NY Times: "Testing out a tactic to combat online piracy, a group of record companies asked a judge yesterday to order four major Internet service providers to block Americans from viewing a China-based Web site that offers thousands of copyrighted songs free of charge." [Scripting News] Listen4Ever: "No web site is configured at this address." [Scripting News] Yup - I could get to that site yesterday, after hearing about the furor. Today I can't get at it through my AT&T Broadband cable modem. Mind you, I can't get at it from other non-AT&T systems either...looks like they brought the page down.

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BTW - a little over an hour after I started Radio up, with 19mb of physical memory and 11mb of virtual, we're now at 34mb of physical and 38mb of virtual. This is Not Good.
10:36:28 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

The Waco Road to Baghdad [New York Times: Opinion] Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant column. Frank Rich tears Bush apart - as he sees it, the emptiness of the Waco economic publicity stunt wasn't news. The Bush administration NEVER puts actual content out for public view. As he puts it: "Mr. Bush has two inviolate, one-size-fits-all policies (if obsessions can be called policies): the tax cut (for domestic affairs) and "regime change" in Iraq (foreign affairs). Everything else is a great show designed to provide the illusion of administration activity when it has no plan." Sounds pretty accurate to me...some examples he brings up - those creepy backdrop slogans that show up whenever Bush is speaking outside of the White House - you know the type. Things like "Small Investors/Retirement Security" at the econofarce this week. Rich describes them as Orwellian - and he's right. We're not supposed to listen to what Bush actually says - just the reassuring sound of his 'down-home' voice while we identify whatever the slogan behind him says with Bush himself. It's disturbingly clever. Another fun one - the Administration jumping on the kidnapped kid bandwagon. Because, y'know, kidnappers are so much easier to catch than anthrax-mailers. Rich goes on to explain why the US will be attacking Iraq - because otherwise W. looks like a pussy. Oh, and he's basing that on quotes from an administration official in the Times. Woops. Rich sums the entire Bush reign very well: "Though the president's harshest critics think he's stupid, I've always maintained that the real problem is that he thinks we are stupid."

10:35:35 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

Attacks on Minority Faiths Rise in Post-Soviet Georgia [New York Times: International News] The man in the picture to the right is a Jehovah's Witness, watching as Bibles, pamphlets, etc... burn. A gang of Georgian Orthodox men showed up at his house, gathered all the supplies and books for a gathering planned for the next day, and burned them - while the police either looked on or took part. It's unsure what role the police took, according to this article, but it's a sure thing that they were there, and that no arrests were made. I've long been amazed by the religious explosion in the ex-Soviet Union - from the Mormon and Catholic churches proselytizing in Russia with dramatic success, to Aum Shinrikyo, the nerve gas-wielding apocalyptic cult from Japan, having hundreds of followers in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The religious environment has gone from one extreme - state-enforced atheism - to the other - a plurality of religious belief, ranging all over the map. Not surprisingly, the Orthodox churches have taken poorly to these threats to their newly-regained power. For example, the government of Georgia has rejected attempts to have the Jehovah's Witnesses be given official status as a church, at the behest of the Georgian Orthodox establishment. It seems to me that the ex-Soviet states are going through a similar process to what Western Europe and the US went through in past centuries. Remember, less than 200 years ago, the US more or less drove out the Mormons, the Nazis killed Jehovah's Witnesses 60 years ago, and non-Anglicans have only had voting rights in the UK for around 150 years. Not that I'm defending the Georgians for allowing this to happen - I'm looking at it more from an academic perspective.

10:04:52 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

The Dangers of Mystery Meat [Washington Post: Editorial] ...an unpleasant little piece here. No, it's not about spam. Rather, it's pointing out the ridiculous fact that the USDA does NOT have the power to order a recall of E.Coli-infected ground beef. We're relying on 'voluntary' measures by corporate America to keep us from dying - I, for one, don't particularly trust them. Write your Congressman - tell him that the USDA needs that power to protect our children. Ick, this editorial makes me so not hungry...

9:39:37 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

OK - I'm getting some nasty memory leaks in Radio here on my Win2K laptop - last night, it got up to about 50mb of physical memory and an unreal 300+mb of virtual memory. I'm going to try to track its memory consumption here for a while, mainly fo rmy own information. At 9:30 am on Saturday, just after starting it up, it's got nearly 19mb of physical memory, and a bit over 11mb of virtual memory...let's see how much it grabs over the next couple hours...

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