Chopper for OS/X Chopper for OS/X. Via Derek.

BrowserSpy Ok, it's kinda cool, and kinda scary. BrowserSpy can show you information about your browser, java, js, software installed, font information, etc. Of course, probably 50% of the functions are either "Internet Explorer only" or "Windows XP only". Some mozilla only as well, and even a NS4 only.

Latest Porn Scam Spam This is funny stuff. According to this article, the latest scam is to blackmail (by email) someone into paying you or else they'll put pornography on your work computer.

I can assure you that the thread of fark has a laugh or three in it. Some of my favorites:

• " So, basically, now there's a way to get porn on your computer by NOT paying for it?"
• " Please save the images to C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop
  Thanks!"
• "I won't be able to send them the money until I get the guys in Nigeria paid off."
• "yeah, what's the catch?"

Hey, I laughed!

Zip Code Map zipdecode is a java app that lets you see where zip codes are used and what areas for. Very cool. Link via Mac-Mike.com.

Linux Eye Candy A nice thread has been put together with many links to eye candy for your linux desktop. Lots of things in there I'd never heard of :)

New Demotivators Oh happy day, the new 2004 Demotivator Calendar from Despair Inc. is here!

Horrible Plastic Surgery Another one from Yahoo!. This one is showing the before and after of famous celebs and the Awful Plastic Surgery they go through. Never before have so many good looking people been turned into wierd freaks except in hollywood.

Day in the Life A Day in the Life was found via Yahoo! Picks, and displays a new photo, taken within the last 24 hours, from a(ny) photographer. I'll be watching this one.

Merry Christmas! Howdy all ya'll. Just wanted to say Merry Christmas! I'm hanging out with my good friend Yohimbe and a gaggle of geeks and folks I've never seen before (or see here every Christmas) and having a great time. Hope that everyone's celebrations go well, Santa is good to you, and you, your friends and family have a safe, but fun and fantastic, Christmas and new years!

Who Got Saddam? Tig had the scoop that the big "We got him" propaganda campaign annoucement maybe should be "They got him". Seems that the Kurds captured Saddam and turned him over the the US, who held him from 8:30 that night till 3pm the next day, no doubt just in time to get the news to come at just the right time.

I haven't decided if it's true or not, but it doesn't sound too far fetched to me.

Wal-Mart Business Practices Interesting article on Wal-Mart over at fastcompany.com. Good read for anyone lovin' Wal-Mart.

Santa Toss A flash game, Santa Toss. Thanks tig.

Instructions:
Click once to get the elves running. Click again (when you think you should) to start pulling down the catapult. Release the mouse when you want to fling santa.

OO Is Not the Be-All and End-All Interesting discussion of OOP over the top is a bad and scary thing. The article that prompted this might have been a joke (hard to tell, it seems serious enough), but it's still an interesting read as I wouldn't doubt that this has happened at some point.

Java iTunes Clone jTunes is an iTunes clone written in java with full daap (rendezvous) support. Anyone tried this?

3D Pong Todays addictive game, Curveball (3d pong) brought to you by Darren Barefoot.

Using The GIMP There is a good article on using the Gimp. Shows off a lot (but nowhere near all) of my favorite little graphic apps abilities. Not sure why they chose to use the 1.2 version and not the 1.3 (development but very usable and stable) version.

Winamp 5 Released Winamp version 5 has been released, and looks pretty nifty. Doesn't appear to be as crappy as 3, and could be the needed update to 2 that many have been waiting for.

Interestingly enough, the main pages for winamp.com and www.winamp.com are different....

XP SP2 Details Some of the changes for Windows XP in XPSP2 look like they might actually be on the right track. Improvements to IE, the firewall, a pop up blocker!!!!! (not enabled by default, but prompting when the first pop up arrives), proper mime type handling and some other good looking stuff that sounds like it'll make XP a bit nicer to work with. Welcome to the year 2003!

Of course, unless you buy a new computer, you'll have to install it, and if you're installing your original XP from scratch, you'll still be screwed until SP2 is installed, but I guess it's better than nothing. Anyone want to take bets on when the first new or old vulnerabilities show up in it? BTW, it's not in beta yet though.

Wallpapers at Softshape Some nice wallpapers over at softshape.com, via the gentoo wallpaper forum.

Tha Shizzolator Ask Snoop will help you translate a web page as only he can do. Thanks raskal.

Native OS/X Openoffice Interesting, while looking at the updates for OpenOffice to put in native widgets and $othercoder pointed to NeoOffice.org which is:

NeoOffice is a mildly functional prototype office suite used for exploring technologies for use in OpenOffice.org. It is a free software distribution intended for Mac OS X developers. It is a sandbox for testing out potentially unstable and ugly technologies that are not appropriate for a maintainable source base.

Cool!

Linux News Aggregator As Khensu pointed out, aggregators under linux suck. Liferea looks like the start of a nice one... not pefect, but nice looking. Looking forward to trying it out.

YoYo Championship Japan YoYo Championship. All I can say is I'm not quite that skilled. By a long shot.

GNOME2 Wishlist and Reply Burtonini has responded to the GNOME 2 Wishlist that was posted on osnews today. I have my own wishlist which has been posted in part to various gnome lists and completely ignored.

KDE 3.2 Screenshots Some screenshots of the new KDE 3.2 alpha builds can be found here and here. Changes I've seen from a quick look appear to be a new konqueror look (a la finder), better file selector dialoge (with preview integration of files such as mp3), new protocols to go with fish:// such as fonts:/ and system:/, new itunes clone mp3 player, nicer background options (run apps like xearth), better anti-aliasing options, mouse cursor selector, ximerama config, better bookmark management in konq, nicer tabs in konsole, nicer preview throughout, and a ton of other stuff. Once it's compiled I'll have a better idea how much of a huge update it is :)

GNOME Wish List The Gnome Wish List on OSNews.com.

Animals and Wide Angle Lenses What do you get if you combine animals and a wide angle lense? Probably a collection of images like this. It's just a directory listing, no gallery, but if you look through you'll find some gems like this or this (currently my wallpaper at work). Thanks again foot_note for his combination of web ferretting and addiction to animal pictures :)

Doodlez Shorts Very cool stuff here. One of the guys at work pointed this out to me. Doodlez 2 minute shorts from Cellar Door Productions are shorts that play in between shows on Teletoon. They are simple yet well done and just neat to watch. Enjoy!

Horribly Cute This very cute picture from my buddy foot_note. I wonder if it's a comment on MS hardware?

Evolution 1.5 Released Evolution version 1.5 was released today. Screenshots and the announcement with download links. Looks like this is a major overhaul both of the frontend and backend. Looking forward to checking it out.

The Zero Install System The Zero Install system lets you run software remotely from others servers. Kinda interesting stuff, but isn't this what we were/are bitching at Microsoft about doing?

IIS Hall of Shame The Windows Webserver Hall of Shame contains some lovely screenshots of IISs (in)famous stability, reliability, and performance.

Webcleaner Anyone used WebCleaner? Looks like it's a standalone web proxy page ad/gif/popup blocker combined with a gzip compressor, and other nifty bits. I use squid + a banner blocker so I don't have need for this right now, but it looks interesting.

Daemon Tools for Linux CDemu for Linux is very similar to Daemon Tools for windows. It allows you to mount a bin/cue CD image as a virtual CDROM. Pretty handy for those who don't have the disk space to use bin2iso anyway.

Longhorn UI Notes Some good Longhonr Notes over at Gritstone & Chips. Basically some things that were broken then fixed are back again, and others that were never fixed still aren't. However, as from what I've seen the Longhorn UI is nothing like what it'll be in 2+ years when it's released, and is just a hacked version of the Windows XP UI (except for some of the new tray, window border and the new ugly space wasting crap on top of all the explorer windows of course). Anyone whose seen it will know what I mean.

/home is Restored! Oh thank the hardware $DEITY! Much appreciation for everyone's good thoughts, prayers, etc, and Fred for going in and finding that the issue was a bad cable on the SCSI drive. The original /home has been restored and if you put anything into the new /home it's now found at /var/home/<yourusername> That dir will be going away in a couple of days so if you did put anything in it since 10pm last night or so get it out of there as soon as you can.

Some changes will be happening though, a second SCSI drive will go in to act as a mirror, and a firewire harddrive will be set up for use of offsite backups.

Oh, and to everyone who said they didn't mind and they were looking at re-doing their websites anyway, sorry about this :)

Yay!

An OS/X user Reviews KDE FreeBSD, KDE and Me is a review of KDE from someone with an MacOS background. Looks like it's interesting, note to self to read this.

Big UFies.org Hardware Problems (again, and worse) This time sadly your /home wasn't safe. There were errors coming from the SCSI drive indicating that it couldn't be talked to. Fred will be getting the drive sometime tomorrow morning (around 8am PST) with a new hard drive, cable, and prayers that the drive is just being finicky and isn't completely FUBAR. I don't have high hopes though. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst I guess.

It looks like some websites content and images will be available through a google search via the "cache" keyword. IE: go to google and type in "cache:<site>" where <site> is the site you are trying to recover. If you're lucky you'll be able to get data and images from a relatively recent snapshot of your site. Hitting the wayback machine might contain bits and pieces as well. I'm just hoping all my users had backups for my own sanity.

Again, I'm really sorry about this folks and I'll be working tonight and tomorrow to try to get the system at least up with a /home on a different drive so people can log in, and hopefully the drive will be ok, but if not... :(

Sorry guys.

I'm trying to recreate home directories for those who had them before, email me if you can't get in, don't get a /home/<yourusername> or whatever. Assuming that the drive is pooched of course.

Management Lessons Some funny stuff from my buddy Jason:

MANAGEMENT COURSE...

Lesson One:

An eagle was sitting on a tree resting, doing nothing. A small rabbit saw the eagle &asked him, "Can I also sit like you &do nothing?" The eagle answered: "Sure, why not." So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the eagle, and rested. All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.

Management Lesson?
"To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up."

Read on for more....

---

Lesson Two:

A turkey was chatting with a bull. "I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree," sighed the turkey, "but I haven't got the energy." "Well, why don't you nibble on some of my droppings?" replied the bull. "They're packed with nutrients." The turkey pecked at a lump of dung, found it actually gave him enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree. The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch. Finally after a fourth night, he was proudly perched at the top of the tree. He was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot the turkey out of the tree.

Management Lesson?
"BullShit might get you to the top, but it won't keep you there."

---

Lesson Three:

A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold the bird froze and fell to the ground in a large field. While it was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on it. As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, it began to realize how warm it was. The dung was actually thawing him out! He lay there all warm and happy, and soon began to sing for joy. A passing cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate. Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung, and promptly dug him out and ate him.

Management Lesson?
1) Not everyone who shits on you is your enemy.
2) Not everyone who gets you out of shit is your friend.
3) And when you're in deep shit, it's best to keep your mouth shut!

Babylon 5 Returning? Will Babylon 5 return to TV? Rumors are out there....

Buy Security From Microsoft Dana's security blog has a pointer to an article which notes that Readers Wouldn't Buy Security Products From Microsoft. I'm in total agreement. Lots of interesting comments on this one, with many good points. As I noted elsewhere, Microsoft can't write a word processor that isn't vulnerable to attacks and viruses, why should people trust them to write security software. They write user friendly OSs and decent applications, but much as they'd love to sell you otherwise (and I'm sure they will be telling people how wonderful a security company they are as much as they are starting to hype Longhorn), they should stay out of the security market.

Sadly, they probably won't, and will go in with all their resources, marketting, bloggers and programmers and probably squeeze some of the security vendors out of the market (ie: zonealarm) as they try to sell us on the "no, you can trust us this time" marketting hype that's no doubt coming.

As Dana noted they have a chance with Longhorn to prove they can create a secure OS. It'll be here in 2006 (or later), so you can see that as either a huge opportunity for security products and/or alternative OSs to jump in, or sad because the people that are being hit by viruses and worms aren't the sort of people that do anything to their OS from the time they buy their new computer (ie: the stereotypical mom, dad, granny and grampa).

Really Slick Screensavers Based on the screen shots, the Really Slick Screensavers GLX port is just that.... Pretty sexy looking!

Mandrake LiveCD Announced MandrakeMove Bootable Linux CD Announced. Very cool.... I used a couple of liveCDs recovering the UFies.org box yesterday. Knoppix sadly didn't support the extra IDE PCI controller I have in it, and the mandrake 9.2 install disk, while supporting the hardware, didn't have a decent set of tools for use for recovering the system. You can download the ISO from their mirrors. Will update if I find a non-european mirror or bittorrent link.

Longhorn Leak Review A two part Longhorn PDC Review in video format (wmv).

What To Do with Your Illegal MP3s So you have some downloaded evil, anti-american and completely unpatriotic MP3s that you are feeling guilty about. You want to comply with the RIAAs rules, but how? Send Them Back! deals with just this burning question.