A Blog of Very Little Brain

I assume anyone’s familiar with the Tennyson poem “Charge of the Light Brigade”. This is a recording of the Baron himself reciting the poem on the Poetry Archive site. Very interesting.
Oh, you’ll need Real “Let’s just install about 10 more unnecessary MB of stuff that will redefine the term bloatware and shove our launcher in your Windows startup” Player for that.

Two wackos sue a University for publishing a site that explains Evolution. Their argument? The site is spending public money, which goes against the separation of religion and state.

It doesn’t really get any better than this, I tell you.
BTW, doesn’t that admits that “Intelligent Design” is a poor attempt to bring religion to school?

Just a collection of links

IE Flaw Puts Google Desktop at Risk. Don’t use the damn thing myself (neither MSIE or Google Desktop). Last time I tried Google Desktop, I found a week later that it opened a 750 MB folder for indexing. Uninsallation wasn’t long to follow.

Digg’s Terms of Service. Apparently they have one. Who would’ve thunk it?

New Mozilla SeaMonkey logo. And surprise! it’s not a seamonkey curled around a circle. This time it’s INSIDE! This is what we call open-source innovation, folks!

A collection of links to LISP books. I’m looking for a link to the works of Masoch’s to compliment this one.

Wired article regarding the Star Trek: New Voyages fan project. A must see for the amazing replication of the original sets, and for the ridiculous hairdo of the guy that plays Kirk (gives a new meaning to the Great Bird of the Galaxy). Terrible acting. Go check it out, and while at it, go check Starship Exeter.

The story of the Apple Command Key symbol. “There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain!”. Gotta love Steve Jobs.

Get WinPooch

I have this sitting on my browser for a couple of days now, but only just got to actually reading it. Apparently, Adware makers are suing ZoneLabs.

The case in hand? Zone Labs, creators of ZoneAlarm, the popular firewall software, warn desktop users that products of one 180solutions present a “potential threat to the user’s security and/or privacy”. 180solutions claim this isn’t correct and that ZoneLabs caused many users to uninstall their products.

To the uninitiated, what the products (called Zango and 180search Assistant) do is log keyboard clicks, and use that to launch pop-up ads that are supposedly directed to the user’s taste, based on his browsing habits, which are deducted from the URL he visit via the keyboard logging. Dunno. Sounds like it does pose a “potential threat to the user’s security and/or privacy”. They log my every keystroke, then upload those to 180solution’s servers, which then send to my computer ads that pop-up voluntarily on my browser. I belive this is the exact reason why the customers of ZoneLabs buy their product.

It’s the same thing with the pop-up blockers, and the ad-removers (i.e. Firefox’s Adblock). I read an article claiming those are braking the “social contract” between sites and site’s visitors. Meaning “We give you our site’s content for free, and you have to view our ads”. While this contract’s validity is a whole different debate, there’s a huge gap between this concept and the concept that “you read our site, we give you flashy ads that will hijack your CPU and ram and bandwith, or flood you with pop-up blockers”. I never signed to that. Before pop-up blockers arrived, I would simply not visit the sites that would bombard me with those wretched things. I think any site would accept the tradeoff of either having visitors with pop-up blockers than having no visitors at all. And I don’t see anyone wanting to block Google’s Adwords.

I have to admit, I’m not 100% satisfied with the template I’m now using.
It’s a bit too narrow for my taste, and I have to resize images and it looks awfully small on 1280X1024 (I’ve heard all the jokes already). I’m trying to fiddle with it, but it kills the look, sadly.
I’ll look for other solutions, hopefully one will surface.