This past week, Carol & I were in Ireland for the OpenStreetMap State of The Map conference (small, but interesting). However, not everyone who was supposed to be there showed up. Apparently, Thales (large French aerospace company that makes Magellan GPS devices) had put in a €100M ATC system in Dublin …

Some of you may already know about XKCD, an online comic strip that is drawn 3 times a week with stick figures and alternating deep, obscure, or inane subjects. In this election year, it should be no surprise that somebody decided to run a campaign using XKCD-style stick figures. It's …

The Register had an article last week quoting Richard Whitt, senior policy director at Google saying that Google is creating a set of tools to allow users to determine if their ISPs are filtering their access to the Internet. This is going to raise the bar a little...

The Grand Junction Free Press has an opinion piece today called "Where have all the X-es gone?" written by Marjorie Asturias-Lochlaer (apparently a staffer at the paper, since I can't find any national credentials). Although definitely a lament, and not quite a screed, I'm thinking that the minority status of …

The folks at Revision3 have a detailed article about a Denial of Service (DoS) attack which was perpetrated upon them over Memorial Day weekend 2008. The kicker is that the attack was either intentional or negligent misconfiguration on behalf of a RIAA "watchdog" company named MediaDefender. It's unclear whether appropriate …

Well, Apple made for a lively Thursday this week by announcing the software roadmap (although not the hardware roadmap) for the iPhone. There was a lot to take in, and it took forever to download the SDK (ok, in reality, it took only a few hours, but Apple clearly wasn't …

Apparently, the Scottish Government has felt the need to educate Scots on the appropriate nature of cat care. Released this week, they're looking for cat owners to comment before finalizing the document, Cat Welfare Code of Practice. And, if you're a dog owner, you might be interested in the similarly …

Thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for a pointer to these Apple ads of the past from the advertisements section of the web site, Attached. There's not a lot of recent stuff in here, but some of the older stuff, such as the every- ad-page-in-newsweek ad are classics.

Reminding me of the infamous Polish study which considered costs across the social spectrum, government and university researchers in the Netherlands have issued a report in the Medical Journal of the Public Library of Science indicating that people who smoke or are obese live shorter lives and are less expensive …

Warning! Geeky content within. Those of you who know what VLANs are are probably interested in this article. In the past, Apple only supported VLANs (802.1q) when using OS X Server. It wasn't a huge deal, as servers are much more likely to need this than clients, but it …

Well, that's an hour and 38 minutes that we'll never see again... however, I must say that it was not as bad as Meet the Spartans. To say that Untraceable was a bad film is to really be nice to it. If you need yet another film showing you grotesque …

I'm not sure where I got the pointer to this story from the Atlantic, but it's well worth a read for anyone and everyone. Especially if you find yourself unproductive or overwhelmed.

Somebody from HEMA (retail site in the Netherlands) put a lot of work into this advertisement It's well worth the click. Thanks to fark for the pointer. Ed Note (2018-11-23) This page appears to be lost to time and Flash.

A speech given by U2's long-time manager Paul McGuinness details his take on the music industry and the internet and computer/device hardware industries. I think the synopsis is provided by a single question he asks: "Who's got our money and what can be done?" Stay tuned after the jump …

Thanks to Daring Fireball for the pointer to an article by Duncan Davidson describing his experiences with Time Machine for full recovery of a lost hard drive. It's important to remember that although Time Machine is touted as a great way to back up and recover your individual files, it …

Send-up of 300 falls on its sword. Short form: at matinee prices, you still feel like you were ripped off for the full price of the film--thankfully it's barely an hour and a half long. Meet the Spartans is the kind of film that makes you wish that Jason Friedberg …

Some of you know that I run a small fleet of Apple XServes. There are some in two-post racks at the house, and some at our super-secret hosting center in four-post cabinets. We're going to talk about what we've found with rack mount hardware and the older and newer generation …

This is a warning for those using TaxCut (a pretty good Macintosh Tax program) and possibly other installers and upgraders. The TaxCut upgrade installer scans all connected disks looking for copies of the software to upgrade. This is going to become an increasing issue going forward not only because of …

Stick this one in the extremely shady business practices category. In order to add more revenue to the coffers, a paid upgrade from existing TomTom 910 and 510 maps that currently include locations of Starbucks will result in losing the locations of said Starbucks! Hey, that's darned good service for …

Edward Tufte, one of the preeminent authors and speakers on effective visual communication and design has some things to say about Apple's iPhone. Much of his commentary on the iPhone is complementary, but he has some suggestions, which seem pretty reasonable. If you have a chance, take a look. Thanks …