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.

I made a lot of changes under the covers of the blog this am. Changed a lot of details about security, directory structures, etc, related to my upgrade to Win Server 2003. Everything should be working, there shouldn’t be any externally visible difference, but let me know if something seems busted.

Great news for Ohio State – ESPN.com: NCF - Buckeyes reward Tressel for national title with new deal. While our coaching situation is solidified, our opening opponent, UW, is even more muddled with Neuheisel fighting his departure, Gilbertson admitting to participating in a pool (in a minor way).

Thanks Jason for this.

It is mind-boggling to me that this book exists –Amazon.com: Books: Bioinformatics for Dummies

Both of these come from markpasc.org – Shareware Amateurs vs. Shareware Professionals by Steve Pavlina – a nice dissertation on the right and wrong ways to figure out what product to build; and Eric Sink’s article on product positioning – the fundamental point being that marketing begins well before you develop your product, not afterwards; and that you better be able to simply articulate what your product is for.

As Jason says, Textamerica rocks. The perfect complement for the Nokia 3650.

My dad swears by this for fixing dings in his car – www.800webmall.com - Detailed Product Information. Lots of great “as seen on tv” gadgets up here.

The new Casios are out – a review of the EX-S3 can be found following the link at PhotographyBLOG -:- Comments; and the new Z3 with optical zoom is out. I have loved my current 2megapixel Casio, I am going to have to get one of these.