By
anders pearson
22 Jul 2000
as an exercise in html abuse, i’ve written a program that bitmaps a font with html tables. it’s based on powazek’s bitbet font.
guaranteed not to work in lynx.
yes, it’s utterly useless. that’s what made it fun to write. of course i could probably patent it and sell it to some stupid startup company as a copyright protection scheme (if you are paranoid that someone might <gasp> copy and paste text off your site, you can just do it this way). in that case, if anyone wrote a program that parsed the html code and got the text back from it, they would be violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and could go to jail. laws are stupid.
By
anders pearson
20 Jul 2000
i finally taught myself to shave in the shower.
another victory in my war against inefficiency.
By
anders pearson
20 Jul 2000
i went to Macworld Expo yesterday. overall, quite disappointing. just a lot of companies all competing for your attention so they could try to sell you something. most of the booths were running product demos that all felt like infomercials to me. i spent most of the day biting my tongue when salespeople were trying hand the audience a bunch of shit. it was so hard to not just politely ask the filemaker pro people to kindly stop referring to their product as a ‘database’ (if you’ve ever used filemaker pro, and you’ve used a real database, you know what i’m talking about). i just stayed away from the microsoft booth altogether, lest they call security on me. i also had to put forth a great effort to keep from laughing out loud at the startups with completely idiotic business plans (i won’t even name names here. that’s just too cruel). and as a Free Software bigot, whenever i saw the companies selling programs that merely duplicated the functionality of various GNU utilities, or features that have been in emacs for a decade, i could only chuckle.
i also discovered that if you were a 2600 shirt to a computer conference, you get the weirdest people coming up to you and just starting to talk to you about the strangest shit. this one wacko just walked up to me and asked about the plausibility and legality of hiring a “hacker” to steal the backend of some online gambling site so he could put it up on a server in costa rica with a different interface so no one would know the difference. i informed him that he was an idiot and suggested that he should go fuck himself (in the politest possible way, of course).
but seriously, as far as computer conferences go, h2k kicked macworld’s ass all over the place.
By
anders pearson
17 Jul 2000
here’s a pretty scary theory about those Carnivore boxes that the FBI wants to install at every ISP in the country (as if they weren’t a scary enough thought already). packet radio networks are looking better by the minute.
By
emile
17 Jul 2000
that was a pretty thorough review. there are some stories from the conference at ZDnet located here, and probably as lot of other places, like this story on jello biafra’s keynote.
the volks were interesting enough, very international flavor, and spanning 10-year-old kids to 90-year-olds. broad spectrum.
one other thing was the lock picking seminar from two rather fast-fingered individuals. damned amazing. i must pick up a set or picks.
i was personally proud to have sucessfully driven into and out of NYC without incedent. except for that one damned parking ticket. and no one stole my dice tire caps.
By
anders pearson
16 Jul 2000
By
Matthias Dittgen
15 Jul 2000
what jobs can be done without a computer?
if hackers are not allowed to use a computer
anymore, is that okay?
mitnick is allowed to write again – without computer – but about computer…
could be interesting!
By
anders pearson
14 Jul 2000
why do i love linux today?
with the simple magic incantation:
mogrify -geometry 600×600 -format jpg -rotate ’90<’ -contrast *.tif
i converted a directory full of 30 enormous tif files (16 megs each) to jpgs, resized them, rotated them 90 degrees and upped the contrast by a notch. just that one command. and it executed in under 2 minutes. for comparison, i tried to do the equivalent to just one of them in photoshop on windows 2000 running on exactly the same hardware. it took nearly a minute just to load the single image, let alone do the conversions, and the whole operation required about 15 mouseclicks.
the mogrify command is part of the imagemagick library which comes installed on most modern linux distributions for free. photoshop costs many hundreds of dollars. hmmm….
By
Matthias Dittgen
14 Jul 2000
Ever thought of the people who pay for the internet?
In germany there are now “flatrates” in discussion.
You have to calculate how long you are online, and then
you can compare what you would pay for with an
internet-by-call offer….
Hard to imagine?
But that is reality. You pay not for the information, no no!
You pay for having the chance of getting informations.
Of course, at university, there are public computer-pools…
I am really unhappy with this situation, and especially today.
I had to try several times to dial-in, and only to notice,
that university subnet (my computer inclusive) is down, and
I can’t receive any emails.
This is not acceptable! And I can’t find any reason for it.
Grrrrr.
By
jp
13 Jul 2000
calling all devoted cat owners… check out the guy’s hate mail archive too. he’s got all of france and most of greater europe hating him, just look at this excerpt: “BUT UR @ STUPID TELEPORTING CATS TO NOW THIS STUPID ELEPHANT MAN AND U ARE LIKE I LIKE SHOTING ROCKET LANCHER WAT IS INFLATION? LET ME TELL YOU THAT EVERYONE IN FRANCE NOWS WHAT INFATIONS IS BECAUSE AMERICANS!”
no wonder they sucked in the war.
now where’d my kitties go…