Thanks to Tom, I've found a new service for getting flight information. Their data source is the air traffic control network. Go to Flight Explorer and type in the flight number in the box in the lower left hand corner and you'll get all of the flight data you'll ever …

According to an article on CNet, IBM has now powered up and booted the first computer based on the new Power5 architecture of processors. The Power5 is supposed to be available in 2004 and is targeted at high-end servers and low-end workstations.

Doing some XML work? Looking for a good validating parser that will tell you if your data is well- formed and valid? Found it! Elcel has a nice one (that runs under Windows, Sparc, & x86 Linux) at their Software page.

As part of the IEEE standards process, the 802.11g wireless standard is being revised to version 6.1 from the previous 5.0. The proposal is scheduled to become a standard in June, at which point many of the manufacturers of existing pre-standard hardware are stating that they will …

Professor David K. Levine of UCLA has posted drafts of chapters one and two of his new book The Case Against Intellectual Property, co-authored with Michele Boldrin. The first two chapters (in Acrobat format) are a good read about the problems and potential solutions to current-day intellectual property issues. Generally …

A Malasian newspaper last week had an article about what it would look like if someone did a big budget version of the Lord of the Rings with Chinese action stars. The scans[1] are well worth taking a look at. No longer available. ↩︎

In an article on O'Reilly's Macintosh Development Center web site details a method for getting Python and Objective-C to inter-operate directly.

According to an article on Space Today, Russia has announced that they have agreed on plan with NASA to keep the ISS manned while the Shuttle is grounded. The basics are that the existing crew will return to earth on the currently attached Soyuz craft in April. At about the …

A review has been published on InfoSync about the P800, the new phone from Sony Ericsson with the big screen in a small space.

Leave it to Sony to come up with a Portable Wireless Web Server to drag your web site around with you. The info here is in Japanese, but you'll get the idea from the pictures. If somebody wants to read the Kanji and post a translation, I'll be happy to …

An article in Wired describes a series of social-engineering attacks on PayPal users. The attack is based on supposed "Security Alert" messages that are received by users and include Visual Basic components in them (.vbs files). If you receive a note that appears to be from PayPal telling you that …

An article in Wired reports that Symantec knew about this month's slammer worm before most security organizations did and didn't share the information for hours (except with their own customers). The article details complaints from a number of other security groups and ISPs who complained that Symantec should have raised …

An article[1] in The Daily Yomiuri (a Japanese newspaper) reports that a 21 year old man was arrested for attempting to sell a virtual house in the game Ultima Online that belonged to another player. Article no longer available. ↩︎

According to an article on CNet, the Bush administration is supporting a plan by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) to implement ENUM, which grew out of an initial plan by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) to map numbers to the domain name system.

CNet is reporting that FTD (the floral company) had a significant bug that caused personal information to be made available to hackers. Unfortunately for FTD (and the customers) this is one of the busiest times of the year for them. Information from the company indicates that the data that …

For those of you who are fans of Jackie Chan, it's always good to see him working, and he definitely does that in Shanghai Knights, the sequel to Shanghai Noon (Read More below to continue, no spoilers) I can't come out and say that this is some of Jackie's best …

Sometimes, the gnu readline stuff is useful. To install it: Download the latest readlines source A mod must be made to compensate for a file location change in 10.2 which affects the 4.3 makefile. To fix this, edit support/shobj-conf to change line 151 from SHLIB_LIBS='-lSystem' to …

I've been doing some pretty serious python work as of late and have recently had the need to parse some XML. To my delight, I looked into the /usr/lib/python2.2 directory (included with OSX) and found that the xml directory is in there... cool, I thought, they've included …

For those of us who have the occasional need to add Python pieces to our systems, there is a small problem with the Makefile that comes with OS X 10.2. In particular, there is an unnecessary '-arch i386' in the targets line immediately preceding the '-arch ppc' (which is …

According to an article in BusinessWeek, the Canadian Copyright Board is looking into compensating labels for the theoretical loss of revenues that they propose are attributable to piracy. According to the article, it is looking at raising the current $.21 CD levy to $.59 (that's nearly 200%) and adding a …