Ridiculous credit card receipt signatures
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
Do people that check receipt signatures against the credit card signature *really* check that closely? Well, this guy attempted to find out by making signatures more and more ridiculous.
Random NYTimes registration generator
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I really loathe online news sites that force you to register in order to view their content. There are enough excellent sites out there that do not require you to register so I happily shun the ones that make you register (what nefarious things are they doing with that data anyways?). Random NYTimes.com registration generator.
Pursuit of an Ebay scammer
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
There’s a story at Fast Company about the pursuit of Jay Nelson, an Ebay scammer. “Though Nelson never wielded a gun, Higgins started thinking of him as the John Dillinger of the Web — someone who excelled at a particular kind of crime and was brilliant when it came to eluding capture. In contemporary terms, Nelson’s case was the Internet version of Catch Me If You Can.”
Endangered species
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
A link to pictures of endangered and extinct species which is rather depressing. After looking through these it becomes apparent that the cause of extinction or endangerment is very rarely natural catastrophe or biological disaster but the side-effects of human choices.
#commits channel on freenode.net
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I hang out on IRC, ok, I idle alot on IRC, mostly on irc.freenode.net since it is the major network for open source projects. I just discovered the channel #commits which shows in realtime CVS commits of different projects – neat!
Google Zeitgeist
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I forget about Google Zeitgeist – Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google. It’s interesting to check out every once in awhile.
PHP easter egg
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
Appending the string ?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42 to a PHP page will show an easter egg of the pointy hair walrus-looking author.
New ibooks
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve been waiting a few months for Apple to update their ibook line and yesterday they finally did it. Not a big update as it was only a hdd size increase, 100MHz boost, and 32mb dedicated video across the board. Unfortunately, for the entire 12″ line they have adopted the unpainted inner plastic and opaque white outer casing instead of the previous translucent-shell-painted-white exterior, silver interior and metallic silver hinge – here’s a comparison, pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4. I really don’t like the cheap aesthetics of the new 900MHz ibooks and will probably buy one of the old 12″ 800MHz ComboDrive models.
Mapping social networks
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I was reading an article the other day about how social network mapping of online communities started and wondered when someone would start a project to map one of the biggest social networks today, AOL Instant Messenger. Well, lo and behold, today Buddy Zoo was announced. This morning when it hit slashdot I surfed on over and there were around 10,000 people signed up. As I write this there are now over 400,000. Wow, what the slashdot effect can do. Keep in mind that there are millions of AIM users and I can only drool over the type of social network analysis that AOL can do.
Harvard students and p2p
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
At Harvard, students caught sharing copyrighted songs and movies online more than once will lose their network access for one year. Great! This will likely push file sharing further underground. Perhaps some geeky Harvard students will develop a new P2P network that is encrypted, anonymous (the client-side encrypts with a series of keys of the nodes it will pass through), and stealthy (thwart detection techniques like traffic analysis). Will file trading ever be immune to legal attack from the MPAA and RIAA?