apparently, one of the best, and free ...
CBL Data Shredder for Windows functions exclusively on Windows XP.
There are 2 DOS packages available: one with a floppy disk maker and another with a burnable CD-ROM ISO for making a bootable cd.
Showing posts with label misl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label misl. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
for geeks and non-geeks and others .... lol
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Easter Bunny charged..
Drug arrest involving plush bunny gives new meaning to 'Easter grass'
April 5
EAST HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Officers who pulled a man over for running a red light found a plush Easter bunny stuffed with marijuana in the car, police say.
The man had trouble finding his insurance documents Wednesday and asked to look for them in the back seat, police said.
When he stepped out of the car, the officer smelled marijuana and saw some on the floor, police said. The officer searched the car, found two baggies of marijuana in the glove box and saw the bunny. Inside the stuffed animal, which was holding an Easter basket, they found 16 small plastic bags of pot, police said.
The officer found hundreds of empty baggies and a digital scale, police said.
Ian Lawrence, 25, was charged with possession of marijuana, operating a drug factory, possession with intent to sell within 450 metres of a school and motor vehicle charges.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Vancouver Aquarium: two sea otters float around, napping, holding hands. SO CUTE!
Vancouver Aquarium: two sea otters float around, napping, holding hands. SO CUTE!
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Blogs turn 10--who's the father?
Blogs turn 10--who's the father?
Blogging has been around for about a decade now--depending on how you define it and whom you ask."Blogs turn 10--who's the father?"
Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache CNET News.com March 20, 2007
Someone, somewhere created the very first Web log. It's just not quite clear who.
It may not be one of the Internet's grandest accomplishments, but with the number of active bloggers hovering somewhere around 100 million, according to one
Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the "founding father of personal blogging"?
Or did all three merely make incremental improvements on earlier proto-blogs? The answer is most likely "yes" to all of the above. In truth, awarding the title "first blogger" is more than a little tricky because the definitions of blog and blogger are slippery. Any definition should probably include posts sorted by date, with the newest posts at the top and the rest archived for future use (criteria that would eliminate the Drudge Report, for instance).
Winer is a pioneer of Web syndication techniques and editor of Scripting News, which launched on April 1, 1997.
He boasts on his site that Scripting News "bootstrapped the blogging revolution" and that it is the "longest currently running Web log on the Internet." A decade ago, however, Winer wasn't actually using the term "Web log," nor does he claim to have invented the term. Winer did not respond to repeated requests for comment from CNET News.com until after this article appeared. He replied in a post claiming "the first blogs were inspired" by Scripting News.
Barger, a programmer, futurist and James Joyce scholar, is not afraid to say, indeed, he's the guy who invented the term "Web log." In December 1997, he created RobotWisdom.com to feature entirely bloggy collections of links to articles about politics, culture, books and technology that he found interesting.
"Since I made up the word, I assume I get to define it," Barger said in an e-mail message to CNET News.com on Monday. "And by my strictest definition Winer wasn't quite a blog--he mixed up the reverse-chronological ordering too much. So--unsurprisingly--the first 100 percent Weblog would be mine."
Barger said his site amounted to something of a day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits--and because it was online, he called it a "
"Winer called them 'news pages,' but I didn't plan to do mainly news, but rather anything I found that I thought was worth reading or visiting," Barger said in an e-mail. "So at the last minute I needed to come up with a title, and I used AltaVista to see whether various possibilities were already taken (with 'log' being the critical descriptive term). 'Weblog' was being used as a synonym for 'server log' or 'html log' by site administrators, but since they had the other options I grabbed the more general one."
Building on the .plan
But as any Internet graybeard will tell you, early Net denizens were just as active in sharing details of their personal lives and commenting on politics (though, perhaps, not the antics of their pet cats) as the latest generation of bloggers. They did it on mailing lists and through a now virtually forgotten technique called a ".plan" file that was invented in the early 1970s.
A .plan file was a publicly visible text file of any length that could be attached to each individual account on a Unix system and often used reverse-chronological blog-like ordering with newer items at the top. Internet users could edit their own .plan files to include details of their personal life, work projects or musings on the nature of reality.
Many did. One of the most famous .plan files was created by John Carmack, who co-founded Id Software and was the lead programmer on blockbuster video games including Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. (Carmack's .plan file has since been converted to a blog.)
Some of Carmack's frequent updates described programming accomplishments, such as "made qport more random" and "fixed map reconnecting." Others were conversational: "Quake has bugs. I freely acknowledge it, and I regret them. However, Quake 1 is no longer being actively developed, and any remaining bugs are unlikely to be fixed. We would still like to be aware of all the problems, so we can try to avoid them in Quake 2."
The humble .plan file even played a role in the early history of the Linux kernel. In July 1991, as part of his first public post about the kernel, Linux developer Linus Torvalds asked for help with operating system standards. As an aside, he also mentioned a tweak to his .plan file to make it change automatically, and that was what generated far more attention.
Torvalds' Usenet post was eventually seen by Ari Lemmke, who gave Linux its name (Torvalds had proposed "Freax") and who provided an online home for what would become one of the world's most popular operating systems, according to Torvalds' own history.
Putting a 'finger' on blogging's birth
Dot-plan files were read through the "finger" command, which is so antique it actually dates back to the pre-Internet days of the ARPAnet.
It was created in the early 1970s by Les Earnest, who had already invented the first spell-checker and the first successful cursive writing recognizer. Earnest is currently a senior research scientist emeritus at Stanford University's computer science department, an enthusiastic bicyclist and a cycling association official. (Read the rest of an interview with Earnest).
"It was used in much the same way as blogs are now--that is, the .plan file was intended to be just a way to tell people where you were going to be," Earnest said in a telephone interview. "If you were going off on vacation or a trip or something, or were just going to sleep for a while, you could post that in your .plan file. But then people noticed that it could be used as a statement of personal views on things and they started doing that...(For) expressing your personal views on things, it was very much like a blog, a personal blog."
Earnest's creation of the "finger" command and .plan file became an official standard (RFC 742) in December 1977 and was updated in 1991. (Along the way, of course, it also led to innumerable jokes about how to "finger me" among oversexed computer science undergraduates.)
Plan files, or at least instructions on how to read them, found their way onto business cards and into the Geek Code, a mid-1990s method of describing how geeky someone is.
Students used them to keep journals,
Because they were merely text files, however, even the most sophisticated .plan files could not include features we take for granted in blogs today: RSS, CSS, trackbacks, formatted text, hyperlinks, and of course, comments.
Those were gradually added after the Web was created, and Justin Hall was one of the first Web-based diarists to experiment with this then-novel medium. He was profiled by the Times for his very personal diaries at links.net, which began when he was a student at Swarthmore College. Hall is now working on a research area that he calls passively multiplayer online games.
In an interview on Monday, Hall said he started in January 1994. "I was inspired by every home page I saw online--a picture of some scientist and his dog, his collection of old English riddles, whatever--it was so simple and trivial, I thought, it can't be hard to post a page here," he said. "It wasn't hard at all! Once I found a way to post my pages up, I could create more and more interlinked text."
Hall doesn't claim to be the first blogger; rather, he said he prefers thinking of spontaneous appearances of similar sites. "Where was the first printing press with movable type?" he asked. "Good luck tracking that down."
Blogs: The evolution
Sometime in 1971
Stanford's Les Earnest creates the "finger" protocol.
December 1977
The finger protocol becomes an official standard.
January 1994
Swarthmore student Justin Hall begins compiling lists of links at his site, links.net, and continues adding to the site for 11 years.
January 1995
Early online diarist Carolyn Burke publishes her first entry for Carolyn's Diary.
April 1997
Dave Winer launches Scripting News, which he
September 1997
Slashdot
December 1997
Jorn Barger's RobotWisdom.com site apparently becomes the first
Sometime in 1999
• Brad Fitzpatrick launches Livejournal, which he calls his "accidental success."
• Peter Merholz of Peterme.com declares he has decided "to pronounce the word 'weblog' as 'wee-blog.' Or 'blog' for short."
• The word "blog" first appears in print, according to dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster.
August 1999
Three friends who founded a San Francisco start-up called Pyra Labs create a tool called Blogger "more or less on a whim."
January 2001
First crop of blogs nominated for the "Bloggies" award.
October 2001
First version of Movable Type content management software becomes available.
February 2003
Google acquires Pyra and its Blogger software.
May 2003
First official version of WordPress open-source blogging software released for download.
October 2003
Six Apart releases first version of its Typepad blogging service.
January 2004
Boston-based Steve Garfield launches his video blog, considered one of the first such "vlogs."
October 2005
VeriSign buys Dave Winer's Weblogs.com. Around the same time, AOL snaps up blog publisher Weblogs Inc.
February 2006
Veteran blogger Jason Kottke abandons his yearlong attempt to live off of micropayments through his blog.
January 2007
Members of the Media Bloggers Association are among the first bloggers to receive press credentials from a federal court.
February 2007
Freelance video blogger Josh Wolf becomes the longest-serving journalist behind bars in U.S. history, on contempt charges.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Man kills and BBQs girlfriend
Man kills and BBQs girlfriend: Cops
By Monica Rhor March 26
Warning: This story contains graphic content.
HOUSTON (AP) — For at least two days, neighbours at a city apartment complex noticed an acrid aroma, black smoke and leaping flames coming from two barbecue grills on the balcony of a second-floor apartment.
What, neighbours at the Red Oak Place apartments wondered, was going on in the unit where 27-year-old Timothy Wayne Shepherd lived? What was he burning at all hours, for days at a time?
The answer turned their stomachs.
According to law enforcement officials, Shepherd dismembered, and then burned the body of his former girlfriend, Tynesha Stewart, a 19-year-old Texas A&M University student. Nothing remains of Stewart’s body, Harris County Sheriff Tommy Thomas said at a press conference Saturday.
“I just don’t know what to think about it,” said Louis Evans, whose balcony faces Shepherd’s in the quiet tree-lined enclave in northern Houston. “I thought he was a nice normal person. I guess you never know what your neighbours are doing.”
Authorities said Shepherd has confessed to strangling and dismembering Stewart, a college freshman who was home on spring break, because he was angry that she had started a new relationship.
Officials first thought Shepherd had disposed of her remains in a large commercial trash bin that had since been emptied, launching an intense debate in the area about whether the Sheriff’s Department should conduct a massive and expensive search of area landfills for Stewart’s remains.
Stewart was last seen March 15 and was reported missing March 19. The next day the Harris County Sheriff’s Office homicide division launched its investigation.
On March 16, neighbours said they first noticed the unusual activity — and the unpleasant odour — on Shepherd’s balcony.
“The smell was awful,” said Evans, who also became alarmed after seeing a blaze shoot out from the grills. “I was wondering: What is he burning? Not cooking, but burning. There is a difference.”
At times, Evans said, the flames from the grills leapt dangerously close to the roof of the balcony. Evans says he called 911, but when firefighters arrived, the flames had calmed and Shepherd assured them everything was under control.
A leasing agent at the apartment complex also noticed the thick dark smoke and the intense flames and asked Shepherd what he was doing, Evans said. Another neighbour, 18-year-old James Hebert, told The Houston Chronicle that he often cooked out with Shepherd, and even left his grill at Shepherd’s apartment. When he wasn’t invited over, he asked his neighbour what was going on. Shepherd replied that he was cooking for a wedding, the newspaper said.
Dionne Whitaker, 31, who lives in the complex, said she saw Shepherd carry the grill and smoker to a garbage bin a day or so later, the newspaper said.
Human remains generally require extremely high temperatures to destroy, and authorities have not said how it is possible that Stewart’s remains could be completely burned on a patio grill.
“This certainly turned out to be one of the most heinous crimes I’ve ever seen in my 38 years (in law enforcement),” Thomas, the sheriff, said Saturday.
Shepherd, who is charged with murder, is being held on US$250,000 bond in the Harris County Jail. Telephone message left with his lawyer were not immediately returned. On Sunday, the door to Shepherd’s apartment was covered with plywood boards.
Monday, March 19, 2007
2nd oldest grape wine by the greeks?
Ancient Mashed Grapes Found in Greece
Discovery News
March 16, 2007 — Either the ancient Greeks loved grape juice, or they were making wine nearly 6,500 years ago, according to a new study that describes what could be the world’s earliest evidence of crushed grapes.
If the charred 2,460 grape seeds and 300 empty grape skins were used to make wine, as the researchers suspect, the remains might have belonged to the second oldest known grape wine in the world, edged out only by a residue-covered Iranian wine jug dating to the sixth millennium B.C.
Since the Greeks influenced the Romans, who in turn influenced virtually all of Europe, it is possible that a drink made in a humble, post-framed house in eastern Macedonia influenced much of the world’s wine.
"For the Neolithic or the Bronze Age, we have no evidence for markets and a market economy," lead author Tania Valamoti told Discovery News. Valamoti conducted the research with colleagues Chaido Koukouli-Chrysanthaki and Dimitra Malamidou. .
"Production was on a household or communal basis," added Valamoti, who is a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Greece’s Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Valamoti and her team excavated four homes at a Neolithic site called Dikili Tash. After discovering the grape remains in one residence, they studied charring experiments performed by Maria Mangafaon on fresh grapes, raisins and wine pressings to see what would best match the ancient pips and skins.
They determined the archaeological remains "morphologically resemble wine pressings and could not have originated from charred grapes or raisins."
Analysis of the grape remains determined they either were harvested from wild plants or originated from a very early cultivar.
Findings are published in the current journal Antiquity.
The scientists also found two-handled clay cups and jars, which they say suggest a use for decanting and consuming liquids. Charred figs were also found near the grape remnants. The presence of figs likely was not a coincidence, according to the researchers, who mentioned that juice from wild grapes often has a bitter taste.
"Figs could have been added to the grape juice prior to fermentation and the sugars contained in them would have entered the juice," explained Valamoti. "Or, they could have been added to the fermented product after completion of the fermentation process. Honey could be dealt with in the same way."
The world’s oldest wine, a 9,000-year old rice wine from China, also contained honey and fruits.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Digital Penetration: Naked body scanners
Digital Penetration
Invasion of the naked body scanners. Slate: human nature: Science, technology, and life. March 3, 2007
Psssst. Want to see Susan Hallowell naked? Look at the Feb. 24 New York Times. She's on Page A10.
Hallowell runs the Transportation Security Administration's research lab. Four years ago, she volunteered to be scanned by a backscatter X-ray machine, which sees through clothing. She was wearing a skirt and blazer. But in the picture, she's as good as nude.
Last week, TSA began using backscatters at airports to screen passengers for weapons. The first machine is up and running in Phoenix. The next ones will be in New York and Los Angeles. The machines have been modified with a "privacy algorithm" to clean up what they show. But even the tempered images tell you more than you need to know about the endowments of the people seated next to you.
Are you up for this? Are you ready to get naked for your country?
This is no joke. The government needs to look under your clothes. Ceramic knives, plastic guns, and liquid explosives have made metal detectors obsolete. Carry-on bags are X-rayed, so the safest place to hide a weapon is on your body. Puffer machines can detect explosives on you, but only if you're sloppy. Backscatters are different. They can scan your whole surface, locating and identifying anything of unusual density—not just metals, which have high atomic numbers, but drugs and explosives, which have low ones.
Why isn't this technology in lots of airports already? One reason is fear of radiation. That's a needless worry. You get less radiation from a scan than from sitting on a plane for two minutes. If that's too much for you, don't fly.
The main stumbling block has been privacy. The ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have fought backscatters at every turn, calling them a "virtual strip search." It's a curious phrase. The purpose of a strip-search is the search. Stripping is just a means. Virtual inspections achieve the same end by other means. They don't extend the practice of strip-searching. They abolish it.
When the manufacturer of the backscatter machines, American Science & Engineering, introduced the technology in prisons nine years ago, the whole point was to replace strip searches. "The scan requires no physical contact between the operator and the subject, thus vastly reducing the threat of assault against law enforcement personnel and the spread of communicable diseases," the company argued. The rationale, like the machine, conveyed not an ounce of human warmth, which is why the inmates preferred it. Better to be seen than touched. Better to be depersonalized than degraded.
Thanks to terrorism, the rest of us now face the same choice. Under TSA policy, if you set off an airport metal detector or are chosen for secondary screening, you're subject to a pat-down inspection that "may include sensitive areas of the body" such as your chest and thighs. Unless, that is, you're lucky enough to be in Phoenix, where you can choose a backscatter instead.
The impersonality of machines can also filter out racism. Five years ago, the ACLU objected to body scans because they were administered selectively, "based on profiles that are racially discriminatory." But the best way to remove selection bias is to scan everyone. In Phoenix, TSA has put the backscatter monitors in a sealed room 50 feet from the security checkpoint, so the officers who staff them can't see you. All they can see are X-ray images, which capture density, not pigment. To them, everyone is the same color.
Putting a machine interface between you and the examining officer protects your visual as well as tactile privacy. In a strip search, the officer sees you exactly as you are. On a monitor, the image can be filtered. The "privacy algorithm" doesn't obscure every detail of your physique, as pictures on TSA's Web site make all too clear. But that's not essential. Look closely at the pictures. It's not the body that has been rendered indistinct. It's the face.
That's the first key to reconciling airport screening with privacy: We need to see your body, not your face. For those 30 seconds, we know where you are. If your scan suggests a problem, we'll pull you aside. The second key is that the officer who sees you on the monitor never sees you in the flesh. In Phoenix, TSA hasn't just put the monitors in a separate room. It's laying cables to put them in an entirely different terminal. Likewise, the officer who sees you in the flesh never sees you on the monitor. It's like the blind men and the elephant: Nobody has the whole picture.
Which brings us back to Susan Hallowell. The Times twice avoided naming the naked woman in its Feb. 24 photo. It did, however, mention that the machines were made by AS&E. On AS&E's Web site, I found a press release complaining that pictures circulating in the press were obsolete because they'd been taken in 2003. Then I ran across a 2004 article that said Hallowell had demonstrated the technology the previous year. I typed her name into a search engine and up came a 2003 wire story with a photo of her, fully clothed, next to a monitor showing the same image that appeared in the Times. I didn't need to read a word. You could tell she was the same woman just by looking at her face.
Hallowell volunteered for this notoriety. But what happened to her mustn't happen to others. In the age of body scans, privacy means keeping your name, your face, and your nude image apart. That job doesn't end at the security gate; it begins there. Will your scan leak? "Images will not be printed, stored or transmitted," TSA swears on its Web site. Directly above that assurance, the agency has posted four nude pictures—"actual images shown to the Transportation Security Officer during the backscatter process." And you thought airport screeners had no sense of humor.
Enough with the fairy tales. We lost our innocence when the planes hit the towers. Now we're losing our modesty. If we're going to be ogled, at least protect us from being Googled.
CND/US border should have been North to South, humour
It’s The Pitts: United States Of Canada (Best Of)
CattleNetwork_Today 3/5/2007
Somebody messed up. When the politicians and the mapmakers divided up North America longitudinally it was one of the worst mistakes of all time. Instead of a border running from East to West it should run from the North to the South. The Western United States would then be joined with British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Yukon and the Northwest Territory forming a new country which would then be called The United States of Canada. The eastern provinces and states would be united as a new country too... French North America.
I am not suggesting this because I just want Canada's wealth... we already have quite a few of their best hockey players. It’s just that we westerners have much more in common. And I realize that this would create hardships for those good folks in the deep South who’d have to be forever linked to those damn Yankees. I’m terribly sorry that all my friends in the South would have to learn the metric system and how to speak French but, darn it, someone has to be willing to make such a sacrifice.
The dividing line would be the Mississippi River and the Manitoba line. Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana and Arkansas would be sort of a demilitarized zone between the two new countries. Such a division would make it possible for Alaska to feel like it was more connected to the rest of us. And it would also mean that Canadian honkers could fly South for the winter without flying over foreign air space.
French North America would get the politicians and cabinet ministers but we get Texas. Those in the East can have their grain boards, Revenue Canada, the IRS and the CME and we'll take oil rich Alberta. They can have the CIA and we'll take the Royal Mounted Police.
I realize that under such an arrangement French North America would get the industrial states and provinces. But if they get Ontario and Quebec they also have to keep Cincinnati, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland. Besides, what are their factories going to run on without our great reserves of petroleum and natural gas. Speaking of natural gas... they can keep the President and the Prime Minister too, they won't even have to move. But we get the Calgary Stampede. We'll take Washington (the state) but they can have DC.
French North America can have Canadian Thistle, Liberals and acid rain but we get the prairie provinces, the great western cattle country and an all English speaking country. We'll keep Pacific Northwest salmon, Vancouver, Victoria and the western work ethic of the farmers, ranchers and roustabouts. We will be giving up Niagara Falls but we get to keep North Dakota.
I realize this division is going to cause some hardships. Without the newsprint from the great British Columbia forests the liberal east coast media won't get to print all those nasty things they are constantly saying about us in the West. And what will they eat? It wouldn’t surprise me to hear in the future that urbane easterners would eat endangered red legged frogs and fairy shrimp if they get hungry enough. They can have French food... we’ll take hamburgers and French fries. And they can keep their cod and escargot.
I want to be fair. With such a concentration of politicians in the east they’re going to need some place to send their criminals. I suggest we rent them some of our space... in the frozen wasteland of the Arctic. But anybody else who wants to come west for a vacation is going to need a passport and all the proper vaccinations. Even then I’m not so sure we should let them in. The only downside I can foresee with this new division of the continent is that we in the west are really going to have to tighten up our immigration policy and put armed guards on our eastern borders.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
gross, edible body parts ...
Thai Artist Bakes Edible 'Body Parts'
2/24/2007
POTHARAM, Thailand (AP) -- Inside a dark room, realistic-looking "human body parts" are stacked on shelves and hanging on meat hooks. The place looks like a mortuary or the lair of a serial killer, but in fact, it's a bakery. What appears to be putrefying body parts are the bread sculptures of 28-year-old art student Kittiwat Unarrom.
"Of course, people were shocked and thought that I was mad when they saw the works. But once they knew the idea behind it, they understood and became interested in the work itself, instead of thinking that I am crazy," said the fine arts masters degree student.
He hopes his realistic artwork will make people ponder whether they are consuming food, or food is consuming them.
"Everyone's life is rushed nowadays, even when it comes to eating," he said. "When we eat, we don't think about our health or safety, we only think of our taste buds."
As an undergraduate art student, Kittiwat started painting portraits. He then moved to mixed media and finally dough - a natural medium for him since his family runs a bakery.
Along with edible human heads crafted from dough, chocolate, raisins and cashews, Kittiwat makes human arms, feet, and chicken and pig parts. He uses anatomy books and his vivid memories of visiting a forensics museum to create the human parts.
He now is receiving regular orders from the curious and from pranksters who want to surprise their friends or colleagues, but that's a minor sideline.
By the end of the year, Kittiwat's confectionary slaughterhouse will go on display at Bangkok's Silpakorn University. It's his final dissertation, and he hopes it will secure him a master of arts degree.
"When people see the bread, they don't want to eat it. But when they taste it, it's just normal bread," he said. "The lesson is 'don't judge just by outer appearances.'"
how rich are you?
HOW RICH ARE YOU?
Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world.
Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. But where
would you sit on one of those lists? Here's your chance to find out:
Global Rich List
Saturday, February 17, 2007
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