Costume Idea Zone

Can't figure out what to be for Halloween? Check out the Costume Idea Zone. I like "Darth Brooks" personally.

The Best Science Photographs of 2005

Visions of Science has their 2005 winners up (with larger versions of the pictures over at BBC and National Geographic). I particularily like the mosquito hatching.

The Fragile Internet

I would guess not too many people in North America noticed (presumably being asleep), but late last night two separate Tier 1 (or "backbone") ISPs had major connectivity problems. Level 3 and Verio are both Tier 1 ISPs, which means they are two of the relatively few companies that provide portions of the "core" of the Internet. The Internet is designed in such a way as to be able to route around outages such as what happened last night, but any time a Tier 1 ISP has connectivity problems is a problem for everyone. Plus, anyone who's Tier 2 ISP buys transit from that particular Tier 1 ISP will find the Internet much smaller than usual.

The two providers were only down for about an hour, but the fallout of such a significant event is probably still happening. The system will recover from the event though, so that's not the real problem. The real problem is that Level 3 is having serious problems. Just a few weeks ago Level 3 turned off their peering point with Cogent Communications, another Tier 1 ISP, because of some undisclosed contract dispute, effectively disconnecting their customers from anything on Cogent's network. It has since been turned back on, but the incident put focus on a good question: What happens when the Internet, widely regarded as the world's future communication tool and essential to business, disintegrates because of a dispute or problem between two core companies?

I Can(n't) Stop at Any Time!

Yup, bad habits aren't my fault again. Well, maybe starting them is, but getting rid of bad habits is apparently harder that previously thought. It's my brain's fault, after all.

At least, that's what researchers at MIT found in rats.

Touchdown for Team No-Personal-Responsibility!

Damn the Poor, Help the Rich!

Got your attention? Good.

Sounds like our government is at it again, this time we're going to cut spending on programs that help the poor, particularily the people most affected by the gulf hurricanes, and we're going to simultaneously push through some more tax breaks for the wealthy. Because, you know, that'll help the poor suffering people in the gulf. Somehow.

Sometimes I think more effort is spent helping those playing golf, not those in the gulf.

Sojourners has more information, including a way to call your senators and representative and tell them to show moral responsibility in the budget. And don't let anyone convince you that this is somehow going to benefit anyone except the wealthy.

OpenDocument and Microsoft

I've been following the developments of Massachusetts choosing to support Adobe Acrobat (PDF) and OpenDocument formats and NOT Microsoft's XML format for public documents (NOTE: OpenDocument and Microsoft's new format are *BOTH* XML schemas, but have different licensing stipulations). It's a rather interesting case, and seems to highlight the fact that people are fed up with proprietary file formats that limit what you can do with your own creation. In particular, Massachusetts is arguing that the closed and/or limited formats provided by Microsoft are threatening Massachusetts' sovereignty, which is a bit strange at first. However, if you think about it, what would happen if Microsoft went out of business? What would happen to all those documents produced by the government? How would the people access them? What if, rather than going out of business, Microsoft simply decides one day to stop supporting their formats? Or perhaps they change the licensing requirements even further, preventing products from accessing documents in the future? With an open format even if a specific product goes out of business or stops support, another product can be used or created to support it.

Microsoft Word .doc files have frustrated third-party developers for a long time, given that the format is closed and thus has to be reverse-engineered in order to create an interface. Lack of compatibility with MS Word is probably the most often-cited reason for not using OpenOffice.org, and yet this is really Microsoft's fault, not OpenOffice.org's. Microsoft claims to have solved this issue with their XML schema, which is probably what they intend to replace the .doc format with. However, there are several licensing problems with the XML schema Microsoft has created that exclude sub-licensing, which is important to open-source products. Many people seem to think Microsoft did this on purpose to create good PR about an open format, while excluding their current primary competition, open-source products like OpenOffice.org.

It will be interesting to see if other government bodies choose to follow Massachusetts toward open standards.

Here's a link to the FAQ from Massachusetts' Information Technology Division, a Groklaw story about Microsoft's complaining, and a couple of articles [1 and 2] that describes the decision fairly well.

Fall Spider 2

Fall Spider

Caught this picture this morning off our deck.

Sometimes the media makes me MAD

This is rediculous. Tonight I open up my web browser (Firefox!) to my home page, which is a My Yahoo! page with AP Top Stories on it, and I see the headline "FBI Examines Computers in Cheney's Office". Now I don't particularily like Vice President Cheney, but that does not give the media the right to create rediculous sensationalism about a story that HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DICK CHENEY!! The only reason this story is tied at all to Mr. Cheney is because the FBI agent under investigation (for sending classified information to Filipino officials) USED to work in Cheney's office several years ago and the FBI searches for possible past violations as well as current ones.

Grr.