Technology

Last night during the debate, Cheney suggested that you could find out the truth about his connection with Halliburton by visiting factcheck.com (original). At the time, factcheck.com was a spam site with ads for various and sundry scams; Cheney meant factcheck.org. Sometime in the last 12 hours, the owner of factcheck.com redirected all traffic to that site over to georgesoros.com. That’s pretty impressive reaction time; either the owner is partisan or Soros got to him and offered him enough money to make the swapover really quickly. It’s also very Internet-savvy. ...

Fly, motherfucker! Fly! (original)

SpaceShipOne has successfully completed its first qualifying flight. Piloted by Mike Melvill, it reached altitudes of over 63 miles. SpaceShipOne now has two weeks to reach that altitude again; if it succeeds, Scaled Composites will win the X Prize. Words fail me; my delight is manifest. Space!

Sometimes the technology is so damned close, but it’s not quite there. Ulysses is like that; now that I’ve tasted it, I want the perfect version, but I don’t think I can quite use it as it is. OK, so: as a writer, I don’t use most of Microsoft Word. Mostly I want is something I can type into. It needs to do spell checking. It needs to be able to save style information with the document, because I want to be able to mark headers and bold text and so on. It needs to be able to export the style information in a format which InDesign can handle, since that’s what I use for layout these days. It needs to be able to do smart quotes and hyphens. ...

For the record, Vernor Vinge was right (original). I want that slogan on a T-shirt. Last February, it was .bmp files that carried the hack. This time, viewing a JPG on a Windows XP computer that is not running Service Pack 2 can cause your computer to execute arbitrary commands. This is horrible. Imagine what would happen if I stuck an worm image in a bunch of Flickr photostreams. Imagine what would happen if I used one for an LJ icon. Do you read a bulletin board that allows people to upload their own avatars? ...

“For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world’s largest wireless Internet hot spot.” 135 square miles is 3,763,584,000 square feet. Let’s pretend each access point is giving us about 50 feet of range That’s 7,853 square feet per access point, or 7,500 for easy calculations and to allow some slippage. So… around 502,000 access points. That’s 20 bucks an access point even if you don’t allow for wiring costs. But the article says “hundreds, or maybe thousands of small transmitters.” ...

Worth noting: the BBC put out a call for people at the anti-war protests to send their digital snapshots to the BBC. Many responded. The BBC didn’t put up the raw results, which is perhaps a good thing, but I wish they’d filtered it a little less — we wind up with ten pictures. Still, it’s wild to see a major news publication doing this kind of thing.

I just realized that you can subscribe to specific del.icio.us tags just like you can subscribe to specific users. So now any time someone posts something and tags it as “coh”, it shows up in my inbox. Sweet.

The Internet Explorer team has a blog. That’s cool. They also have a wiki. That’s mildly flabbergasting. Looks kind of like it’s working, though.

Another Gmail tool: Convert Mac Address Book contacts to GMail contacts (original)