Finished Gulag: A History last week. A little long but a great read. Made me think about all the material witnesses we are holding in this country and the prisoners at Guantanamo. We really need to hold ourselves to a higher standard, we need to either openly and fairly prosecute these people, or let them go.

The Next Step in the Spam Control War: Greylisting seems like a sound idea, and doesn’t seem like it would cause much pain for most users.

A nice little four bar linkage simulator – Halloween

So to say anything outrageous, I just need to find someone else who has said it and point to them – Wired News: Bloggers Gain Libel Protection – which means I can just do some anonymous post somewhere on some service and then point to it. I guess libel is effectively dead then for individuals…

Just finished A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to a Quantum Computer. I’d say just an average science book. It didn’t really help me understand quantum computing components or algorithms that much. And also spent too much time on explaining classical computer terminology (explaining a NAND gate and its role as a universal constructor, explaining a Turing machine, explaining NP complete, explaining public key crypto, etc). In the author’s defense I’d guess this is a very hard book to write, I don’t think it is easy to explain quantum effects to those not deeply versed in the subject.

National Do Not Call Registry – how long til we see a story that this database was cracked or leaked, and some telemarketer now has the absolute best list of numbers to call?

Here’s a good and very thorough plan for a nice halloween prop – The Grave Jumper

Just recovering from the flu, been off net for a while. Just saw this – Random Hacks: The Missing Future – what a great article about the opportunities in the software industry from the eyes of a younger person. This ought to terrify Microsoft – there was a time when they had the hearts and minds of all young developers, but that time has clearly passed. It is just not cool to tell your friends “Hey I got my MSCE certificate”, nor does it seem to present great economics to young people.

This little gadget from aaron is cool – Google AdSense (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog) – while google seems to think I am hard drive crazy, I liked the results for each of my category pages, they were pretty focused.

A great article in the print Economist 6/14 issue about the US auto industry and its impending demise. The article is behind the fee firewall, but some pithy highlights: The GM pension fund is underfunded by $19B, which is equal to the market cap of GM. GM has 2.5 pensioners for every active employee – and downsizing only makes the situation worse. They face declining domestic share. It just doesn’t look like there is a way for them to survive this. Ford is in little better shape. They both seem like bankruptcy candidates soon, which means the pensioners will get screwed. I hope the government doesn’t step in and try to save to corporate entities, I’d rather see our tax dollars go to protecting the pensioned workers and towards retraining the current workers, rather than protecting the corporate entities.

Found this in my visitor logs – The Center for Public Integrity. Lots of good sunlight on government practices up here – for instance this article on the quasi-VC fund run by the FCC.

My cheapo connectstor NAS box died recently. Just started whirring and whirring, unresponsive to any remote CIFS or HTTP request. I tore it apart and mounted one of the raided 120G drives in a USB2.0 drive enclosure and started looking at it directly from my desktop machine.

First I tried PartitionMagic on it. Good news – the volume was recognizable. So-so news – it was an ext2 format volume, the connectstor box runs linux of course. PartitionMagic couldn’t seem to do much with ext2 volumes, I wanted to get the data off the disk.

Google suggests Paragon Software’s Ext2FS driver for windows. For $30 seemed worth trying, but their ecommerce site, hosted in europe somewhere, couldn’t seem to take my MasterCard. probably some little trivial problem but I didn’t have the patience to figure out.

Next I tried Explore2fs. Very nice windows utility, and I could see all my files, hurray! But trying to copy them out to my windows desktop hung the app. Some of the files made it but not all.

Next I found the Ext2fs project on sourceforge. A real live ext2 fsd for windows. Easily installed but pretty cryptic mount instructions. I had to know the disk id and volume id i was trying to mount, and i had a little trouble discovering them. But back to Explore2fs, it told me the disk and volume id, and then i could mount using Ext2Fs.

I am now happily copying all the files over.

Orrin is clearly off the deep end here – I have to agree with the opinions expressed at Moore’s Lore, Orrin’s support for destroying property to protect copyrights is nearly criminal.

Great article about Lowe’s and how they manage their shelfspace. Their use of software to examine buying behaviour and plan out merchandise displays is fascinating. And it is interesting to see how their use of MarketMax gets pushed out to their suppliers – what a great pull for MarketMax. Found via Anil Dash (whose website is curiously unresponsive today).

At ignition this week, what is even worse than spam, is the flood of NDRs we are getting. Because some spammer has chosen to use a forged return address of bogusname@ignitioncorp.com, and is sending tons of spam to randomly created email addresses. we are thus getting a flood of NDRs.

it is ridiculous that the mail protocols that we use for our line of business permit this sort of chicanery.