What Skippy Can't Do It was a link of the day a bit ago, but I missed it. However, the list of 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the US Army is hugely funny. Thanks to Brad for pointing it out to me :)

Random Linkness First comes a new themes site, similar to sunshineinabag, but not. Competition is good, so go visit http://www.themedepot.org

Second is a site similar to f*ckedcompany, but it has lots of internal memos (.com).

Something to do this afternoon :)

Mac OS/X vs Linux Interesting article via OSNews on the new OS/X vs Linux.

Only on the 'net... I really don't have anything to say about this registe story (via fark).

Features I'd love to see... ... especially the "extend deadline" one :) Webdiva passed me over a LOTD reject, but I love it, so I'll post it here!

New Linux Site This page was passed onto me this morning, and it looks quite good, even for "just another linux web page". It's got code exchange, and sections for the doers and the decision makers out there that are interested in linux. Head over to http://linux.ittoolbox.com and check it out.

A guide to loosing your mind Perfect timing... K5 has a good guide to loosing your mind. Take notes people!

Shaolin Soccer Thanks to Dave for giving me the inside tip on this movie coming soon to a theatre near you. It's called Shaolin Soccer and is, well, just that. There was some fear that the name would be changed to Kung Fu Soccer, as westererns were too stupid to figure out what "shaolin" was.... *sigh*... looks like that's not happening though. If you dig a bit you can even find a trailer! The movie has actually been out for a couple of years already, they are just getting it ready for the N. American audiences.... course, if you know where to find it, you might be able to pick up a full copy already :)

Extreme Programming Links and Info Thanks to Asim on the SPUG list there's a bunch of good info and links on extreme programming and perl. Read more for it... Here are the links on Extreme Programming that I promised at the last meeting:

BOOKS
"Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change" by Kent Beck. Overview of XP philosophy. Short readable chatty. "Test Driven Development" by Kent Beck. Available online at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/testdrivendevelopment/files/TDD17Jul2002.pdf. More development focused. Includes lots of code samples, ideas for testing techniques. Again very readable, mostly due to the chatty humorous style.

WEBSITES
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki The Wiki. Publicly editable web site. Contains living discussion on different ideas including XP. If you have questions about specific parts of XP - e.g. does pairing work over the internet - this is the place to go.

http://www.xprogramming.com/software.htm Download unit testing frameworks for different languages here.

http://seattlexp.com Seattle XP Group. Information about monthly meetings and weekly pair sessions at Tully's on 45th in Wallingford. Pairing sessions are on every Thursday (except the second) and are from 6.30 pm to 9.30 pm. Bring your laptop with a project or come ready to pair with someone else.

MAILING-LISTS
Send a blank e-mail message to these addresses to subscribe. To read archives go to http://yahoogroups.com and search for the lists by name.

extremeperl-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Focus on Perl and Extreme Programming. Low volume.

extremeprogramming-subscribe@yahoogroups.com General XP discussion. High volume.

extremeprogramming-seattle-subscribe@yahoogroups.com More focused on Seattle area announcements and events. Low volume.

refactoring-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Focus on refactoring. Medium volume.

testdrivendevelopment-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Focus on unit testing and test driven development. Medium volume.

SPUG on SPAM I missed it this month, but the notes from the Seattle Perl User Group's talk about Spam filtering with Mail::Audit and Mail::Spamassassin are available online in openoffice/staroffice format. Update - here's a office 9x version for those who are too lame to use OpenOffice :)

Twitching in the night... The Straight Dope has some information on why we twitch while falling asleep. Not the normal topic for UFies, but it happens to me sometimes, and I always kinda wondered why. Anyone else have this happen to them? Via fark.

X-Men 2 Trailer Online Oh yea baby, there's a first look at X-Men 2 at the apple trailers site. It looks.... "exciting" shall we say :)

Vim TnT Best VIM tricks ever!

Spam Laws Spam Laws.com is a pretty self explanitory site. Covers 26 states and 26 countries. Via cruel.com.

Couple from K5 Just a couple of noteworthy stories that recently hit the frontpage of K5 (well, not really recently....). The first is a joke contest (pretty self explainatory) and the second is a howto for novice sky divers, something that I'll need when I decide to throw myself out of a plane with nothing but a nylon bedsheet between me and mush :)

Sharing the Pain I recieved this from Tig this morning, and just had to share. "Hello Ladies..."

Harry Potter and Satanism Spent some time lately going through the archives at snopes.com (the urban legends site mentioned earlier, and found this gem, which points out that "... If The Onion's parody has demonstrated anything, it's that we should be worrying about adults not being able to distinguish between fiction and reality."

Quality Images Speaking of images, if you like the Image of the Day, you'll love Cellar.org's Quality Images gallery.

Urban Legend Images Ever get one of those amazing images attached to an email from someone you don't know, and after viewing it you wonder to yourself, "could that really be real? or is it a fake?" Well at the image gallery at snopes.com you can find out!

Pluto Nash on Mr. Cranky Well, I was looking forward to this movie, but after seeing the Mr. Cranky review of Pluto Nash I think I may have to take a miss, even if there are midgets involved :)

Flashy Thing Hmm... this is odd....

Winamp3 Betanews has a story on how WinAmp has officially released version 3. Personally, my experience with it (on a cel-533, winxp, gobs of ram) is that it's sloooooooooooow, has some cool extra functionality (crossfade, nice playlist editor, cool skinning etc), but some stuff that doesn't really belong in an mp3 player, such as the ability to be a video player (I double clicked on a divx file and found a sloooow winamp popping up. Anyone else have any experience/comments on the new winamp...

Usability Articles From the desktop-devel list:

Two short articles are at this link:

http://www.asktog.com/columns/048GoodGrips.html

The first is a great example of accesibility bolstering usability for everyone, and provides some explanation of why and how this often happens. Its basic point is that both in the long term (old age) and at various short instances throughout our day (holding on object in the other hand, etc) well integrated accessibility-driven improvements can benefit everyone.

The second addresses the problems of branding taking precedence over usability, and how this is ultimately a marketing failure (Various Ximian people might do well to read this wrt to the evolution icon, menu entry, and title bar vs. the HIG).

Tech Job Seekers ScoobyD put me on to JustTechJobs.com, a very cool site that lets you look for just (for example) Perl. Very cool concept. The number of listings could use some boosting though, at least in this area :)

KDE vs MS posting security fixes I know this is going to shock you, but the SSL security flaw mentioned elsewhere a day or so ago has already been fixed by the KDE folks in CVS. Microsoft has yet to respond to the flaw in any way. Big surprise huh? :)

Random Linkageness A great couple of finds from Cat5. First is a bunch of IRC quotes, some are offensive, some hilarious, some... well, you just had to be there. The second is in retaliation for me playing him the Lenard Nimoy Bilbo Baggins song... well, he found a video of it. I think I understand why Nimoy did the video now, check out the 70's hotties!

What Java Needs Via a /. story comes 10 Reasons We Need Java 3.0. The comments on the story are good too :) Any comments from the java programmers out there?

New search.cpan.org For all the camel heads out there, it looks like the search engine at CPAN is out of beta. The new search engine is all shiny and new, and written completely in python! (Ok, everything is true except for the last bit :)

For other Crazy Cat People Another great friday Image of the Day, this one of a cat and mouse, living together. My favorite comment from the thread is: "It's just an unusually patient cat. She's tasting him. When he's perfect, she'll eat him."

Gnome Development Tutorials There are a couple of excellent tutorials on http://eddy.writelinux.com. It is a two part (part 1 and part 2) series on developing apps with glade and anjuta.

Speaking of spam.... I haven't used spambouncer... has anyone out there? It looks similar to spamassassin, but has categories (virus, spam, might be spam, etc).

The Economics of Spam This page has some interesting numbers that explains why spam is so popular. Course, if you do it you're going to hell, but that's besides the point... I mean, money is money right? *sigh* Personally my objection to spam is more along the lines that any tom dick and harry can do it from their basement. At least sometimes spam is "legitimate" marketing from real companies, that actually respect the remove@ rules. Of course, no one ever responds to remove@ anymore, because the spammers are using those addresses to collect legit emails. Bah, shoot them all. </rant>

The Onion on Worldcom The latest what do you think on the onion is quite good... "What do you think about the worldcom scandal?"

Windows API Broken? Say it ain't so! An article on the Register has some info detailing how the windows messaging API has no authentication or verification for messages sent between programs (for repainting, etc), which could cause a serious and "irredeemable" problems. Any windows programmers have any comments on this? Or did you know that the API is broken long ago? :)

Looking for an XFT patch Hey everyone.. in the galeon aa-howto from long ago, I mentioned that there were .debs of mozilla 1.0 compiled with the xftp patch. Well, that site is no longer up, and the only patches for mozilla to xft rendering rely on xfree86 CVS bits. Does anyone know of a patch that will apply cleanly against a mozilla 1.0 tree that ads the xft rendering? Please? If so, comment or mail me.

Kitten Pictures From Keth comes a great site for crazy cat people.... head over to Rate my Kitten.com and indulge in cuteness.

Caving Story Mithrandir has put up a link to a great page with the story of discovery in a local cave. Very neat story, as long as you're not claustrophobic!

mod_perl Technology Comparision Yohimbe sent me over a cool link with charts and graphs comparing the abilities and limitations (as far as requests / sec and memory usage) that different mod_perl type technologies have. They include embperl, php, html::mason, and a whack of others.