More like OS/X People wanting to make their Windows (xp) system look and feel a bit more like windows will appreciate this unsupported product from stardock.com, which is calledObjectDock and makes your windows taskbar look very much like OS/X. Very nifty stuff.

In order to develop Object Desktop, Stardock develops all kinds of test programs internally to see what Windows is and isn't able to do. Stardock developed ObjectDock as a research project to see if Windows XP could reasonably handle the kinds of visual effects that are available on Apple's MacOS X. [...]

Granted, it's not as sexy as the OS/X one, but it's a start, especially for those of us who don't have a few extra grand lying around to pick up a mac...

1701-D in Lego Via WWDN comes a great page with details of the Enterprise-D in Lego. Very cool.

apt-get.org announced apt-get.org, the unofficial repository of apt sources.list sources has been opened. Kudos to debianplanet.org for the note. This site looks like the place to go when you say "where would I find .debs of xxx obscure package..."

Happy Birthday Iambe! A quick note to say Happy Birthday to my dear friend Iambe who is celebrating her birthday today. I hope you have a good one my dear friend. Hugs and best wishes for today.

-- arcterex

Boss The Movie My friend BSpudd wrote in with this:

I figured you might get a kick out of this, if you haven't already seen it.
http://www.yeahthemovie.de/html/yeah_boss.html
check out boss_dancing

Absolutely hilarious... the animators behind this are very good!

Reason #23 Not To Have an Affair Especially if you happen to own a nice airplane. "Ouch" is right.

Heaven Help Us Whoever thought that this was a good idea should be locked up next to the guy who said "Blair Witch" was good, lets make another" (and another)...

Another Xandros Review OSNews has a nice review of Xandros Desktop 1.0, which goes nicely with with last review I posted.

Hello Ladies This will only be funny to sickos and those familiar with usetnet, but a post on a.h.b-o-u caught my eye this morning.

ThinkGeek Reloaded Minor plug for ThinkGeek, who have redone their site since I last saw it. Looks good, but still far too dangerous to go to with credit card in hand.... so many toys, so little time...

Artwork ArtUproar.com has a nice selection of desktop backgrounds and other things (program skins, game skins).

Webmail Back Well, I finally took some time hacking around on the webmail and it appears to be working again. Please let me know if you find any problems with it.

And on another happy note, you can now just go to http://mail.ufies.org and you will be sent to the right place :)

Longhorn Info [OSNews] Interesting preview information on about the Windows "Longhorn" Alpha.

Evolution 1.2 Review Footnotes (the gnome news site) has a link to a nice review of Ximian Evolution 1.2. Lots of screeshots and other good info.

Go Canada I know I risk certain death from the black helicopters, but I find this story about an aid to the Canadian Premier who called Bush "a moron".

No offense, but if I could get myself heard to more than the faithful few I'd call bush a moron! Or worse, a monkey.

Hollywood's Lord of the Rings Foz has a link to the answer of a question that has been on my mind lately.... What If Hollywood Made The Lord of the Rings?

Best ErrorDoc I found the following on a site that is being slashdotted. It's nice to know that people are starting to create custom slashdotted pages.

Cute kitty Cute kitten.... if you're the devil that is :) They have a gallery of other cats though, far cuter. Thanks Iambe for the link.

IE Exploit One more reason not to surf with IE.

Happy Birthday! Well, 5 years ago today a guy named JD put a funny picture he doodled up online. This picture, and the 1825 that followed it (not counting magazine extra and so on) spawned not only a community, but an addiction.

We as ufies have taken down servers, gotten together, made new friends and even made new loves because of that one little comic. Our Fearless Leader has braved the good, the bad, and the ugly, and has done pretty damn well IMHO.

So JD and AJ, Dustpuppy, Erwin, Miranda, the Chief, Smiling man, and the rest of the gang (both there and not there anymore), a huge congrats on your 5 years of hard work and a very Happy Birthday!

Shiver The HisTory of Michael Jackson's face is not suitable for children, or anyone with a weak heart and good eyesight. In fact, just close your browser now. Thankyou.

VI Switch Old I'm sure, but closely related to the story yesterday about the Canada switch parody ad. This time comes VI Switch, via Inluminent.

New Tunez I haven't been to MC Hawking's crib for a while, but it looks like he's got a couple of hot new tunez for your listening, and downloading pleasure.

Openwebmail Wierdness *sigh* well, openwebmail was working ok, then it eat all my mail (or appeared to anyway), so I've taken it off till I can figure it out. Anyone else who has had this email me and let me know and I'll restore your inbox from backup.

Best Parody EVER! A fantastic YAASP (yet another apple switch parody) was found over at petebevin.com's weblog... this one has a nice patriotic twist (well, for us Canajuns anyway :)

Cool .sigs While in search of a new .signature file for my emails, I ran across a couple of good sites. There is the site of Previous Sigfiles-- Used in my Emails and of course coolsigs.com.

Then we have another smaller collection which has more organized by theme. Other pages have lists with many quotes.

Webmail As you may or may not have noticed, webmail (imp anyway) is broken due to a bug in the php4-imap package. Due to this I've moved the current webmail links off the main page (out of temptation) and put up Squirrelmail, another decent webmail implementation. The link to the right points to this right now, please use it to access your mail until I can get the other webmail fixed up.

Update: *sigh* looks like squirrelmail is b0rked as well. I'll get it all going one of these days. Lets try another one!

Rolling Stone Also Gets It Seems a little magazine called Rolling Stone took a rather heavy handed (yay) shot at record execs in an ad in the New York Times.

The ad, titled "A Big Fat Thanks to Record Execs," reads, "Because of you, millions of kids will stop wasting time listening to new music and seeking out new bands. ...

Rememberance Day Just a reminder to take a few minutes today to sit back and think about those who have been lost to us in war and times of conflict.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Geek Jelousy I am, shall we say, a bit jelous of this guy's hardware collection. It would be kinda neat to have 60 monitors and 40 or 50 desktops (and laptops, and...).

The first reply (spook) puts it best in my opinion:

*jaw hits floor*

*urine soaks pants*

That's just... words escape me. You are my new god.

Bushisms Related to previous story comes a daily Bushism.

WWDD? Probably horribly offensive to some, but I got a laugh and a half from this alt.humor.best-of-usenet post. Personally I go by the "what would delmar do" philosophy, but that's just me :)

Another Switch Parody Via fozbaca.org comes a great parody of Apple's switch campaign, featuring a favorite character from the dark side. Head over and watch it.

Correct Moronic Microsoft HTML Demoronizer:

This page describes, in Unix manual page style, a Perl program available for downloading from this site which corrects numerous errors and incompatibilities in HTML generated by, or edited with, Microsoft applications. The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.

Sounds nifty, I will have to try this out. Via vsbabu.org

Daredevil Trailer There's already been a teaser out for a while, but a new trailer for the upcoming (feb) Daredevil movie is out, and it looks great. Of course it shows a bit more of the story, and the actors (love their choice for Kingpin), and really makes me want next year to come quickly!

Tom Petty Gets It According to a rolling stone article, Tom Petty Is Pissed, and rightly so. Coming on the heals of an interesting slashdot discussion on cd protection, I think this bears a little discussion.

My uncle doesn't agree that if you reduced the cost of CDs, you'd reduce the piracy. I say maybe yes, maybe no. You might not reduce the piracy, but you'd turn more profit from CDs I think. Right now I'm working for myself, doing the contract programming gig... money is tight. The decision on whether to buy (for example) the new Elvis CD (the 30 #1 hits one) would be a lot easier if the price wasn't over $20 (Canadian). See, if it cost, $3.00, or even $6, that's almost pocket change, and combined with what you can find in the couch, it's affordable. But with CD prices what they are, going in and buying more than two or three CDs is going to be a major purchase. When I filled in my collection of U2 CDs a while back I paid over $100 before I walked out of the store!

Anyway, I think that the opportunity to have consumers do impulse purchases would dramatically go up if CD costs went down. Then it would be worth it to them to just grab a CD instead of downloading from Kazaa or whatever. Of course, this leaves out the issue of buying a 12 track CD with two songs on it you want to hear, and the rest "filler" :)

Erhmm... anyway, Tom's got some good stuff to say about this, how he won't charge over $65 for a ticket to a concert (when he's being told he could charge $150), radio, and lots of other stuff. Kudos to Tig for pointing it all out.

Evolution 1.2RC1 Released Subject pretty much says it all. There look like a bunch of fixes and all sorts of goodness.

All Hail The Prez In another blinding display (pardon the pun) of his leadership, Mr. Bush was caught with with his eyes closed, so to speak. Thanks Fred for passing this beaut on.

KazaaLite 2 Out Yup, your favorite ad free peer 2 peer sharing tool has gotten an upgrade. Not hugely visible changes, but pause and resume, ignoring of "fake" (foo.jpg.vbs) files, and the ability to "rate" files for quality are some of the upgrades. This is apprently to help get rid of the bogus files that the RIAA has apparently been seeding into Kazaa. I still can't get it to work under wine, but it's pulling in stuff just dandy under windows :) So head over to kazaalite.com and upgrade.

Perl? Style?!?!?! Speaking of perl and breaking of it, I ran across a good node on perlmonks all about Perl Styles for Large Projects.

Personally I learned a lot from Effective Perl Programming (Hall and Schwartz) and The Damian's Object Oriented Perl books. While it's cool to write nifty one liners like those found in the famous japh file, I know from personal experience that you have to adopt a much more "readable" style of coding if you intend to ever look at the code again.

Which you will by the way, whether you think so now or not :)

Server Upgrade Woes Just as a note for ya'll, the server was updated this morning, and it looks like some stuff has busted pretty good. Perl 5.8 is causing problems here and there, and php4 is in-operable (apache won't start with it loaded in). There might be some db problems with people using MT as well.

Anyway, I'm working on these, cursing all the way, and hopefully it'll all be fixed up RSN.

Things that are busted:

• php not loading (fixed by commenting out the imap module)
• php imap auth for webmail (known bug 163003... hope it's fixed soon!)
• perl 5.8 probs (at least I think so, the one error turned out to be code error, not a perl 5.8 related error)
• MT db (database upgrade problem, but the solution posted here seems to work. Just back up your db directory, then go in and type db3_upgrade *.db *.idx, and all will be well!) Mucho kudos to foz (and the guy he got it from)) for pointing this out to me!
• imap non-ssl/tls authentication (fixed, though I don't like this... I may/should just force everyone to use SSL/TLS)

Thought for the Day This one TradBrad passed along, today's Ozy and Millie cartoon.

Interface Cruft I found an interesting article in a thread on galeon-devel this morning. EntitledWhen good interfaces go crufty, it relates to cruft through the ages, and how it relates to good (and bad) UI design. I'm sure that foz and Engel will enjoy this one :)

XFMail 1.5.3 Released Subject says it all... head to the announcement to get all the info on new features, download locations, etc.

Upgrade Time! I'm working on an upgrade to the latest version of the content management software, so things might be all messed up here. If they are, just ignore it, it'll be back RSN!

Update: Looks like all went well, we're back up with MT 2.51, a database backend, and nicely trackback enabled! Wh00p!

Bear in the Tree From the ever-famous IOTD comes a great friday shot of a bear cub rescue. As one guy said: "WOW. Great ornament. Can't wait to see the finished tree."

Subversion Docs From foz comes a link to Single-User Subversion, and it looks like, just like they did for the CVS book, red-bean.com has Suvbersion: The Definitive Guide online. It is a work in progress, and will be published sometime in the future by ORA. Some points are still missing, but it seems quite nice, and a good reference for people wanting to try out the source control system called Subversion.

PSI 0.8.7 Released A new version of PSI, a great multi-platform jabber client has been released. It runs on both linux and windows, supports SSL, and has a host of new and improved features! Hit the download page now! Read more for the new features... From the README file:

Changes
-------
  New in 0.8.7:
  - Multiple Jabber logins at once
  - Much improved Jabber resource handling
  - New contact tooltip shows information about all resources logged in
  - "Self" contact, so that you can access your other resources
  - Groupchat
  - Server account unregister capability
  - Contact list now reports presence errors
  - New auth/ask icons instead of "need authorization" psuedogroup
  - Events from hidden contacts cause only those contacts to appear
  - Ability to use proxy when registering
  - Connecting animation
  - New "busy" animation
  - Normal message dialog now has JID auto-completion support
  - Optional feature to send URLs detected in the clipboard (like Licq)
  - Finding messages in history now locates instead of filtering
  - "What's This" information available to many dialogs
  - bugfix: crash when changing status
  - bugfix: proxy port reset to 8080 when modifying account
  - bugfix: can't close register dialog
  - bugfix: can't ignore SSL warnings during register
  - Quite a few other things..