OS/X Usenet Reader Yea, remember that thing called usenet, where the net used to socialize and meet back in the olden days? Panic is a very sexy looking usenet reader for OS/X with music streaming, image display, and all sorts of other nifty looking stuff. Good work Stevenf!

Kill Bill Vol 2 Trailer Out The trailer for Kill Bill- Volume II is out on the Apple.com website. Funky. Another one that looks interesting is King Arthur.

Allison on Linux vs. Microsoft Jeremy Allison had a great comment on something that scoble said about Linux and the desktop. Hope you don't mind me quoting you here Jeremy:

You can't beat it. You need to accecpt that it is there, a valid part of the computing landscape, like the Mac. You need to port your desktop apps to it and *try to make money on it*.

Remember doing that ? It's what you used to do before the monopoly. Before you tried to destroy what you can't control.

You can't destroy Linux. You need to work with it.

My favourite recent quote from Bruce Perens :

"Imagine what it took for Microsoft to piss off so many people that they're all willing to work night and day without pay just to bring that company down."

Spamassassin Rules of the Day Lately I've been seeing Spamassassin's accuracy go down and down and down. A message on the gentoo-user list pointed me to the Spamassassin Wiki and in particular the Rules Du Jour page. Basically new rules to help deal with the constantly changing battlefield of fighting spammers that you can download whenever suits you (or via a handy cron entry) and in theory SA's accuracy will go up.

101 Dumbest Business Ideas 21st Century Digital Boy points out Business 2.0's list of the Best of the Worst. The list includes such fond memories as webcamguy and the XFL.

Top 10 ROTK Nominations Slashdot commentor AtariAmarok has this great list of the top 10 nominations for Return of the King.... (read on for the list, or click on the above link). 10. Biggest scifi/fantasy genre movie WITHOUT a character that looks like the Oscar statue (Bye, C-3PO!)
9. Best performance by mountain beacons
8. Biggest elephants
7. Best Evil Lighthouse in any movie in all of 2003.
6. The National Cherry Tomato Board would like to make sure that John Noble is nominated for best actor for his work as Denethor.
5. "Most Costumed Geeks in Theatre since Star Trek 6"
4. Best use of recycled pointed ears left over from collapsed "Star Trek" franchise.
3 rings for the elven kings
2. Best title ripped off from that of 3rd "Star Wars" film.
1. Those cheesy green ghosts didn't get nominated for "Eddie Murphy Haunted Mansion". Let's nominate them for their ROTK cameo instead.

Gates on Linux Security

On the day that a the nice big Windows Outlook Worm is filling up email inboxes (mine included, since yesterday morning), news.com has a story called Gates takes swipe at Apple, Linux security.

"A high-volume system like (Windows) that has been thoroughly tested will be by far the most secure," Gates told the audience at the Developing Software for the future Microsoft Platform conference...

What crack is this guy smoking? Of course he follows this up with:

"To say a system is secure because no one is attacking it is very dangerous," [regarding os with less market share].

Following this logic Windows is the most secure OS in the history of the universe. While his intentions are correct. If FooOS has only 5 users and is completely unknown then it's security is untested compared to one that is in use by a larger population of the net. However, according to the January stats, apache has 67% of the servers on the Internet. Sorry Bill, the logic doesn't hold.

Of course, when you're talking to a bunch of MS developers you can't tell them the truth can you? I wonder if they actual believe this stuff? There was no indication that he was talking about the next generation windows (longhorn) which is touted to be much more secure either, but the current one.

Sorry Microsoft, you're still full of it.

Thanks to Christophe letting me know about it.

History of the Mac Neat article on the history of the mac including images and anecdotes, very neat reading. Thanks NSLog();

Fred on Biodiesel Jane found that Fred is famous (again) and has a full story in the Richmond News. Good job! Makes me want to consider a TDI when my current car dies :)

Donation Drive Well, we are back and mostly going as before. Still on borrowed hardware, but new things are coming down. Iambe today put up a request for donations which I greatly appreciate. This will be used for improved hardware (motherboard/cpu power/ram/proper raid controller?) and to help keep the box running in general. I don't expect much, but every little bit helps, and my huge thanks to all or any who would be kind enough to click the paypal donate button in the right hand column.

Urban Terror 3.2 Released Whooohoooo! Looks like the Quake 3 total conversion Urban Terror have released their 3.2 version. Highlights look like a return of the m4 and a couple of new maps, as well as some interesting server side mods that allow you to do things like create a pistols only server. I'm getting 260KB/sec off of the kickassctf.com mirror of the files by the way guys, so you local fellows might want to try that one out first. Of course, the update is only 40megs as well, so it's not the 300meg beast the previous release was :)

Four Wheeled Mac Tatra Mac G4 - fastest Mac on the four wheels? has a great set of pics of the setup of a g4 with OS/X set into a car. Wish I could have a couple of those!

Back Up Well, after yet another ordeal we're back up, temporarily at least. The intermittant problems that have been plauging this box lately may be due to either a buggy or slightly incompatible motherboard. The entire box has been temporarily replaced by the good graces of my friend Neil who lent his home system for me to use until the matter of the "real" ufies.org box is fixed (or until he goes stir crazy from lack of computer and steals my home system).

The upgrade did not happen because of the hardware problems we found (detailed here The box is slightly slower and has slightly less drive space (any users logging in will note that /home is pretty full right now :) so if you have large backups or files in your home directory that you can afford to lose I'd appreciate if everyone can do a bit of cleaning.

Much thanks, stay tuned, and appreciate the patience.

-- alan

More Network Traffic Monitoring Tools vnStat - network traffic monitor for Linux

Apache on OS/X So if I were to be looking for a nice pretty GUI for configuring and running apache would iTools 7 for Mac OS X & Mac OS X Server be what I'm looking for?

New Pixar Animation A new Pixar animation, called Bounding' is available to the world.

Better Spam Fighting? The CRM114 Discriminator - The Controllable Regex Mutilator - better than Spam Assassin? Anyone using this? Via random($foo).

UFies Scheduled Downtime Thursday, Jan 22 I put out an announcement of UFies.org downtime to the mailing list today. Thursday we'll be down from around 9am PST till sometime in the evening. Read the link for full details, but in short the box is going to get it's entire OS upgraded/replaced, hardware will be tested, and cables will be replaced, and the end result will be a much more stable system (both hardware and software) <knock on wood> If you've gotten me to install custom perl modules or programs on the system email me at alan at ufies.org and I'll make sure they are re-installed on the new system. If you have a shell account neither your mail nor your home directory will be affected, unless I really screw things up, so make a back up anyway :)

Funny Video 'The Man Behind The Motion' is an interesting video about the life behind the onscreen viewing of a motion capture artist. I have Dana to thank for this 7.5minute quicktime extraveganza :)

Optimizing MySQL 4.x on K5 Kuro5hin has a good Tweaking MySQL (4.x) Primer.

Jersey Girl Trailer Out A trailer for Kevin Smith's latest film, Jersey Girl is available.

Free USB Network Adapter Other than there being no option to ship to Canada, what's the catch with this free network adapter (after rebate)? Via boing boing.

Check Your MP3 Quality EncSpot by GuerillaSoft is a nifty little windows app that will check the quality of a folder of mp3s and report back to you. Sounds like a good way to do spot checking for dups, select the higher quality file, etc.

SunRun Time of Year It's the 6th Annual Team UFies Vancouver Sun Runners! this is a 10K FUN run/walk/toddle/etc around lovely downtown Vancouver on 18 April 2004. Join your fellow geeks in various forms of pre-and post-race mischief, raise money for BC Athletics and Raise-A-Reader (http://www.raise-a-reader.com), get your name in the paper for personal glory, and most importantly of all, acquire a limited edition UF artwork. C'mon out and join the fun. http://sunrun.ufies.org or mapleleaf at shaw dot ca.

Images of Venus Very cool, some Images of Venus original and restored data from various probes. Via jwz.

101 Ways to Save Apple 101 Ways to Save Apple , via random($foo).

Outside the Inbox Spam Inspired Songs Today's Penny Arcade pointed me to Outside the Inbox (as well as it's own amusing commentary on spam).

Outside the Inbox is a compilation of songs inspired by and titled after the subject lines of mass-email (spam).

I've only listened to one song so far, but I look forward to listening to the rest!

Links to Follow I found A Whole Lotta Nothing through a toally unrelated search for things, and it has a few pages that I'll have to check out when I get home from work. Of note that I glanced at are the social software ideas and the ten years of my life photoblog.

Mars 360 QTVR How cool is this. A Mars Fullscreen panoramic image in Quicktime VR. These are cool for a lot of things, but this is from another fscking planet! That's awsomely cool. Well, unless it's from a sound studio in hollywood, but that's another theory :)

The Art of Fark DarrenBarefoot has written up a nice little essay on Deconstructing Fark PhotoShop Contests. Some nice notes in there for you who are new to the whole scene, and don't want to make some hugely embarassing mistake.

Procmail and Multiple Filters It's been a while since I've visited spider's page, but I was pleasently surprised to see a short tutorial on setting up procmail with multiple filters. IE: send incoming email through spamassassin, then bogofilter, then sort into mailboxes. Nifty stuff. Sad that we have to resort to filtering through so many different programs just to make email usable, but sadly that's the way it is these days. Until we get to draw and quarter the spammers of course.

He also has a gentoo migration guide as well, for moving to gentoo with minimul downtime.

Pepsi Addict Wow, this guy really needs to join pepsiaholics anonymous or something. Brought to you through RealLifeComics.

Why to Avoid .biz ICANNWatch notes Why .biz is the Spam TLD, via Taint.org.

Digital *ist Firmware Update For all you lucky bastards out there with a Pentax *ist Digital digital SLR, there's a firmware 1.10 update that fixes a few things.

By the way, I hate you all that have this camera. Please buy me one! :)

Ok, that is all.

Bush in 30s Foz put up a link to Bush in 30 Seconds, a great site where you can view anti-bush videos, each 30s long. Some are very good.... gotta agree with foz, 'in my country' is great, but I also like the polygraph one.

Windows Cartoon Joy of Tech has a different look at windows security. Of course, you could easily substitute the RIAA or the american government into the cartoon without losing anything :)

Kitty Attitude Test I'm going to have to give the Kitty Attitude Test to my cats.

Doom 3 Preview Online Shacknews pointed to Computer gaming world's DOOM 3 preview. Sounds great, and a different-yet-the-same feel (FPS but slower paced and single player focused) from iD. There will be multiplayer though. And good stuff it sounds like. Beserker mode sounds like fun!

You'll have objectives, an in-game PDA, missions that include escorting NPCs and that sort of thing. Sounds great, I can't wait! No release date yet though, still "when it's done" :(

Minor Burp Well, even though I just mailed out an announcement that UFies would be down tomorrow for hard drive install and whatnot, a kernel update today had some strangeness, and we were down for a couple of hours. Again thanks to my hardware monkey fred (*duck*) we are back up. Just a matter of the new kernel not putting in reiserfs support even with it loaded in properly. Very odd. Maybe an update of the tools is needed to be compatible with the new kernel or something?

Anyway, things are back up and going, no harm, no foul. Not sure about when the actual scheduled downtime is going to happen though. Stay tuned.

Orion Deep Field Mosaic (Cool Space Image) Ooooh. This is going to be my new wallpaper.

FeedDemon Author on Piracy Nick Bradbury, author of Feed Demon and (IIRC) Homestyle, one of the best HTML editors out there (still), has written a good post on On Piracy and how it affects people, and what you may be downloading when you download pirate warez. The only thing I don't agree on is his assertion that companies like microsoft are not on warez sites because they have the resources to sue software pirates.

The Rules of SPAM The Rules of Spam