New High Water Mark
or is that low water mark?
This month: 1788
So Google has gone and done their S-1 filing with the SEC. This doesn't mean they will IPO but that they could. They may have been compelled to file due to SEC regulations that require companies to report financial results to the SEC once they have at least $10 million in assets and more than 500 shareholders of record.
Here are a few very worthy summaries of that S- Document : Tristan Louis's TNL.NET , John Battelle's Searchblog and TechDirt's take
A couple of interesting things to note :
Last weekend. after dim sum, we cruised down to Queen West and poped into Sanko's (Sanko & Jackielne Int. 730 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario. M6J 1E8) where we stocked up on on lots of good stuff - Unagi, Nori, Fish cakes, Green Tea Ice Cream, and a bunch of other stuff (no Wasabi Peas this time) - and noticed that it was their 36th Anniversary, plus they are having a Discount Sale on May 1st only - maybe yummy discount Unagi?
http://toronto-sanko.com/en/
Found Via MetaFilter comes Taiwan Cam, a Scenic Spot Search System, using a Flash based drill down map or drop down menu to find various web cams around Taiwan. The biggest problem being the ~12 hour time difference between Toronto (Eastern Standard Time and Taiwan).
The Candidate. George W. Bush and John Kerry spend a whole month together in a mansion filled with lobbyists. Who will get in bed with whom? Don't miss the sizzling behind the scenes deal-making. Each episode concludes with both candidates handing out long-stemmed roses to their favorite special interest groups. The Apprentice of The Dark Side. The evil Emperor must choose among several aspiring Sith Lords, all vying for the coveted job of "Darth Executive," in charge of overseeing construction of the Deathstar. Each round eliminates a contestant with the famous tagline "You're fired," and is then zapped with lightning and thrown off a ledge to his infernal doom. Aramaic Idol. The nation wide search for the next messiah. Come put your healing powers to the test and go head to head with other saviours and miracle workers for the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever amen. Produced by Mel Gibson. CNN Cribs: News Anchor Edition. Paula Zahn gives a sneak peek of her kickin' pad in the O.C., all West Coast flava y'all cuz the bitch is mad bangin' wit the bling bling, know what I'm saying? Holla!
New York Times : When a Canadian Insults Fox News, Them's [Expletive] Fighting Words!
Following up on Cory's earlier post (http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/22/bill_oreilly_mistake.html ) The New York Time has noticed Fox News' Bill O'Reilly public brouhaha with the Globe and Mail's John Doyle.
Fox News (and their defenders) come off as foaming at the mouth crazies, who don't understand why everyone don't love them.
Just discovered the site of Karen Cheng a Asian Australian living in Perth, Western Australia and Graphic Designer, her Life, her husband (Andrew) and bady (Callum). Cute. Nicely designed site, great photo's and slice of life postings.
Garry Trudeau done a fairly radical thing in the April 21 (2004) strip of Doonesbury
The first thing was so shocking (a helmet's been there for 30 odd year's, I'm not sure if Boopsie has seen him without it) that I didn't notice the second thing, even after going back to it 3 times. It wasn't until someone else commented on it that I final figured out what was bugging me.
As a statement it is a gusty move. As a piece of writing / cartooning - the miss direct and subtleness - it is a masterful stroke.
Ovidiu Predescu's WeblogAs you probably know already, ssh-agent is an easy way to enter the passwords for your private SSH keys only once per session. On Linux and Unix systems, when using X-Windows, it is very easy to setup ssh-agent as the parent process of your window manager. In fact most of the Linux distributions start-up the window manager this way.
The way ssh-agent works is by setting up two environment variables, SSH_AUTH_SOCK and SSH_AGENT_PID. The first is used to communicate the location of the Unix socket domain on which ssh-agent is listening for requests. The second is used to identify the Unix process id of ssh-agent, so it can be killed by ssh-add -k.
These environment variables have to communicated to every process that wants to use ssh later on, so ssh can connect to the ssh-agent process and fetch the decrypted private keys. In the Unix parent-child process model, this works just fine. The ssh-agent does the work of creating the Unix socket domain and then forks a child process. In this process it first exports the two environment variables above, then exec the process - the window manager for X-Windows. This way all the processes that inherit from it will have these environment variables available.
On Windows this is not possible, since there is no way to interpose some other process before the window manager. This of course, assumes the same parent-child relationship of processes as in Unix. The alternative is to always start ssh-agent on some well-known socket. Below, I assume you use Cygwin, an excellent free-software Unix emulator for Windows.
There are few things you need to do. First in your Windows home directory (usually c:\Document and Settings\yourusername, make sure you have a .bash_profile that reads:
. ~/.bashrc
Then create a .bashrc file in your home directory, and add to it the following:
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/.ssh-socket
ssh-add -l 2>&1 >/dev/null
if [ $? = 2 ]; then
# Exit status 2 means couldn't connect to ssh-agent; start one now
ssh-agent -a $SSH_AUTH_SOCK >/tmp/.ssh-script
. /tmp/.ssh-script
echo $SSH_AGENT_PID >/tmp/.ssh-agent-pid
fi
function kill-agent {
pid=`cat /tmp/.ssh-agent-pid`
kill $pid
}
Next, go to the Start menu, "Control Panel" -> "System" -> "Advanced" -> "Environment Variables" and add a new variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK, whose value should be /tmp/.ssh-socket. Hit OK to make the change persistent.
What happens next? The first time you open a bash terminal, an ssh-agent process is going to be automatically created. This process will listen on the Unix socket domain /tmp/.ssh-socket. Run ssh-add at the prompt to enter the password for your private key(s).
Now when you open another terminal, that will share the same ssh-agent process because of the SSH_AUTH_SOCK definition. Running ssh or any other command that uses ssh underneath will work without having to enter the password for your keys.
It will also work if you run a cygwin-ified version of XEmacs. Tramp, CVS or any other Emacs package that uses ssh will work just fine now.
The only requirement is for these programs to be cygwin-ified, otherwise the sharing described above doesn't work.
Video games are manipulated to create short films with Satire, irony the hallmarks of machinima.
The incredibility long url of the Toronto Star introduces (to me, anyway) Red Vs. Blue, a series of short films created using Microsoft X-Box Halo.
Another example of Machinima, is "In My Trip To Liberty City" by Jim Munroe, a Toronto-based author and machinima dabbler, adopting the genteel perspective of a Canadian tourist while meandering the seamy, violent streets of the game Grand Theft Auto.
I submitted the story to SlashDork (Like in the Morning! @09:24AM, but noooo. Rejected!) but they accepted someone else's submission. Life is curel, fame is fleeting.
Category: Machinima
Update : Looks like the site (http://www.mplayer74.com/) is down and out.
ka1.mpg (~1 Mb)
almost as evil as Ka's evil twin : Astonishingly fucked-up car commercial:
PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. Commercial Databases: It's All About What You Need looks like a useful summary of History, Licensing, Feature Sets, Training and Support, a very brief list of who uses them. Worth passing on to your friendly neighborhood CTO or CIO.
Via Brian McCallister : "Brian's Waste of Time", MIT's OpenCourseWare is now nicely populated. Problem sets, exams, readings, Lecture Notes. 700 courses, materials from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT's schools. Look's like it's time to do some brain expanding.....
In one case a course has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.
I wonder when the first story reference to OpenCourseWare going to appear? Maybe Cory or Charlie or Bill have already? Cory's "Down and Out includes a post-university / educational society that implies a OCW ( OpenCourseWare) like curriculum.
Also, given what has happen to books published under the CreativeCommons license, like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or Free Culture, what are the possibilities for OCW material?
The Globe and Mail : Knowledge management crucial tool for law firms is a nice example / case study of how a large law firm is using Knowledge management (really mostly Document Management ). selective quotes :
"When you're a small group, you know, it's the water-cooler thing,"
Part of McMillan Binch's knowledge management program is to discuss major projects when they conclude and record key lessons learned..The information is put into a project summary
"It's about improving client service"
software usually accounts for about 20 per cent of the total knowledge management costs. Planning and consulting accounts for about another 40 per cent, he says, and the balance goes in internal personnel time, training and maintenance.
To make knowledge management work, a law firm must adapt its structure. Mr. Pery recommends organizing the firm into practice areas, within which most knowledge sharing will take place. For each area, Mr. Pery advises, a major firm should take a qualified lawyer away from billable practice to spend his or her full time as "in a sense, the librarian" for that practice area, overseeing collection and organization of knowledge.
Practising lawyers sit down with members of the knowledge management team at the end of each major project to discuss what information to retain, Mr. Fireman says. This takes 25 to 50 hours of the average lawyer's time a year, he says.
At McCarthy, there was "a period of about 18 months that I would sort of call the period of faith," Mr. Peters says. During that time, adding documents and other information to the firm's new knowledge management system took up lawyers' time, but the knowledge base was not yet large enough to give them much in return. "That's probably the most difficult period."
Now, lawyers are seeing how knowledge management can help them serve clients better. "It's going to be the distinguishing factor between firms," he predicts.
Since the Ka2 is proving SO popular, here some more from Chiseen | where cultural traditions and urban insanity collide
Feed the Models (cause if you don't feed them, they would feed them selves...
and Wok Boarding An ancient sport once favored by chinese chefs lost over time is rediscovered by Team Chiseen.
but Late 4 Work is the best
Category:Humour
Via kottke.org: GooOS, the Google Operating System has a commentary on topix.net : The Secret Source of Google's Power
from Kottke:
He argues that Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on. His last few paragraphs are so much more perceptive than anything that's been written about Google by anyone; Skrenta nails the company exactly: Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer....
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application
HPSC's Annual Fun in the Summer ("FITS") Night, is being held on Thursday, April 22, 2004, at the Lithuanian Hall, 1573 Bloor St. West (2 blocks east of Keele St.; between Keele and Dundas Street West subway stations. Doors open at 7:00 pm and close at approximately 11:00 pm.
During those hours you will be exposed to a wide variety of summer activity clubs, associations and retailers in the Greater Toronto area. These organizations have been invited to exhibit and promote their summer activities and services to you and your friends. Last year this event was sold out with over 25 exhibitors.
http://www.highparkskiclub.on.ca
Robert Scoble (Microsoft blogger at Large) discovers a new piece of the puzzle :
You know, Kunal's OutlookMT feature is, for me, a killer feature. One of those that'll change -- dramatically -- my life forever.The Outlook team and Sharepoint team should hire Kunal to implement this feature ASAP. It is THAT IMPORTANT.[Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]What does it do?
It adds a new folder to Outlook. OK, let's say Bill Gates emailed me right now. Let's say I wanted to post that email out to the world? In the old world I'd need to open up Radio UserLand, copy the email, clean up the HTML, then click post.New "Kunal's" world? Copy the email over to the folder. It's posted. Done. No more work.Do you have any idea how this is going to change knowledge management? You just watch!Now, keep in mind, this isn't commercial quality. Lots of work to do. But he's responsive. I bet that by the end of the week he has it working well enough for almost everyone. The quality difference between yesterday and today is huge.
Third, the real innovation here isn't for public blogs. It's for corporate knowledge management. When I left NEC I took one gig of email with me -- none of that is available to any of my former coworkers. All that knowledge is simply GONE. After 11 months at Microsoft I have hundreds of megabytes of stuff in my "resources" folder. This is a folder where I store anything interesting to me as a Microsoft employee. For instance, the internal link to get the latest Longhorn builds from. Now, if you're a new Microsoft employee, finding stuff like that is hard. It took me 11 months to build up a store of useful stuff. Why shouldn't I share that with my coworkers?
...
This is such an important feature to corporate knowledge management sharing that I can't sit still tonight. I'm serious. This feature has me tingling. It's what I've wanted for so long.
I kid you not!
Kikkoman (Flash)
I've seen this before but that was pre-blog. This is a real company, with a real and very good product. The flash is based on a real (HILARIOUS) Japanese commercial.
and if you think that was weird, then you haven't see nothing yet : Miki Miko Nurse : There is no Escape, give us your brains! dear god.....
Via Nelson's Weblog, Daylight savings complications:
Twice a year as I set my clocks for daylight savings I wonder 'isn't it the future yet? Can't computers do this for me?' Then I remember the complexity that is the unix timezone database. 444k of datafiles (260k without comments) containing facts like 'Louisville, KY didn't observe daylight savings time in 1974.'
This spring, daylight savings time changes at 45 different times around the world. No wonder it's so hard to know what time it is. "
In 1996 Prof. Coren did a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at car-crash data from Statistics Canada. He found there is about a 7 per cent increase in accidents the day after most of the country moves to daylight time.
The official changeover happens at different times across the country: midnight in Newfoundland and New Brunswick, 3 a.m. in Manitoba and 2 a.m. everywhere else.
Ignoring daylight-saving time brings its own complications, though. In Indiana, 77 of the state's 92 counties are in the Eastern time zone but do not change to daylight-saving time in April, except for two Indiana counties located near Cincinnati, Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky, which observe it.and you think you have problems!
Counties in the northwest corner of Indiana (near Chicago) and the southwestern section (near Evansville) are in the Central time zone and also will be springing forward this Sunday with the rest of the nation.
"It's kind of crazy. I work in one county and live in another so I spring forward and fall back on an almost daily basis," said Jeff Cunner, a software programmer who lives near Indianapolis.
"My watch and cell phone reset themselves automatically, thankfully. Otherwise, I'd never know what time it is."
From Die Puny Humans
OH.... My..... God !!
Ka's evil twin, the Ford Sportka. I can't believe they did this!
I'll post it here because it's going to get pulled. KA2.mpg (~944 K)
Update : Looks like the site (http://www.mplayer74.com/movies/KA2.mpg) is down (due to trafic ?).
New : I've now upload the first KA commercial kas lesser evil twin
More : Ford does not approve (what do you expect them to say?)
See also :
Need directions?
Inside Jack and Totally Gridbag
Feed the Models or Late 4 work or Wok boarding
Kikkoman
or Jaws in 30 seconds or Alien in 30 seconds or The Shining, The Exorcist, The Titanic or
SpiderMan in LegoLand
or Just go hunting for more stuff on the Right using Previous or the Archives
or more Humour links
Yes it's real, although a lot of people weren't sure.
Erik Thauvin has a screen shot. (Update : according to Kevin Fox Erik's are faked, but his are real via Boing Boing
Someone commented (can't remember who, sorry) that given Google impending IPO, the SEC might frown on such a joke.
and the real Goolge gag was the job posting for a position at Google's Copernicus Center. (I applied just in case) was because the subject of todays User Friendly (and now I know where all that 419 money is going).
little broadband : high speed internet connections above dial up modems, up to single digit megabits per second speed i.e. < 10 Mbps. This is current cable or dsl modem connections.
big broadband: high speed internet connections above 10 Megabits per second, up to a gigabit plus (a trillion bits per second).
both spoted in David Ticoll's Globe and Mail article (April 1, 2004) : Jumping on Alberta's bandwagon
category:words
Via Globe and Mail Jack Kapica reports. Mr Kapica compares RSS to 1995's heavily hyped PointCast push product / technology and shosw how RSS feeds and RSS Readers are different and address the potential benefits of the earlier hype.
To summarize story so far : RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary , depending on whom you talk to. Its based on XML RSS readers don't take over your computer like PointCast did. RSS reader are pull not push. Unlike PointCast, RSS feeds and Readers are based on open standards not proprietary technology. It's don't require a signed contracts to add a feed to a blog or news web site. this allow a much larger number of sources. And there is a large choice of RSS feed Readers available that work on different OS's , some of which integrate with outlook email or are standalone, or you can write your own (Like me).