Siddhartha ***** : May we all find the ferryman within to guide us across the river.

Cat Who Placed Post Office *** : Cat with a sixth-sense for mail helps solve an aging missing person case.

Corpse Had a Familiar Face *** : Newspaper reporter with a big head talks about murder in Miami.

Harry Potter 6 ***** : Best Potter in a long time, the joy of the first novel is back!

Why Men Earn More **** : Women are underpaid (for the same work), right? I thought so too until I read this book. Written by a former officer of NOW.

Cat Who Played Brahms ** : Another in the series. Add a star if you liked the first one, otherwise just more of the same. But I'll probably read at least one more.

Cat Who Ate Danish Modern ** : Murder mystery with an interior design twist and a cat.

Balancing Your Family, Faith & Work * : Way too religious for me, although the first chapter is an interesting mini-autobiography of the author's life.

Essential X-Men, Vol. 1 **** : Great background reading on X-Men history (graphic novel).

Blink *** : Interesting collection of psychological studies, but maybe only for Gladwell fans.

Cat Who Could Read Backwards *** : The first in a really long series, already formulaic, but a fun read.

Hungry Ocean ***** : Fascinating glimpse into commercial fishing and the life of a woman swordfish boat captain.

The Truth About the Drug Companies ***** : Drugs are expensive, but drug companies have to spend lots of money to develop them, right? Not true, as this book explains in great detail. New York Review of Books review.

Fencing Master **** : Neat period mystery/thriller based in Madrid in the 18th/19th century.

Imperial Hubris **** : Well written overview of the issues of US involvement in the Middle East.

I was going through some tenshi logs today from my mail server and the following entry caught my eye:

postfix/smtp: D4D0A10733E: host mx3.hotmail.com[65.54.244.72] said: 452 Unable to accept message because the server is out of disk space. (in reply to end of DATA command)

Wow. Glad I'm not a Hotmail user!

I switched over to lighttpd on one of my web servers today, making this the first time I haven't used Apache on a Linux box.

It all started out as a "routine" update of all of the installed packages on my Gentoo-based server. For the most part, these updates are fairly straightforward, which is one of the biggest reasons I like Gentoo -- my system is always up-to-date without too much work.

Some packages don't upgrade all that cleanly, however. Database servers (like Postgres and MySql) often can require a dump/restore before upgrading. This is a little bit of an inconvenience, but otherwise not that big a deal. Upgrading Apache has always been a chore, though, and this last upgrade was so bad that I decided just to chuck Apache altogether on Gentoo. From reading the Gentoo Forums, I can see that I am not alone.

Lighttpd is refreshingly simple and easy. It has everything I need (virtual hosts, PHP, and eaccelerator support), doesn't have tight module dependencies like Apache, has a super easy config file (unlike Apache!), and -- most importantly -- seems immune to the config file madness going on at Gentoo right now.

If you want to see lighttpd in action, my web service Urldiff is now using it. I'm going to give it a trial period and, if all goes well, I'll be switching over prestonhunt.com and trainster.net as well.

Google Transit is awesome. And the debut city is Portland! According to the FAQ, this is because Tri-met has a really good backend database already (which is evident if you use the Tri-met Trip Planner.

Like all Google services, Google Transit is currently in "beta" status. Unlike most other Google services, it really is beta quality: I've run into quite a few bugs, and the Tri-met trip planner gives faster/more accurate trips. But the user interface is truly excellent and intuitive. It will definitely become my default public transportation trip planner once they tweak it so the routes are as good (or better) than Tri-met's.

On a side note, the cost "savings" versus driving that they cite really irk me. I think it's very misleading. The basic costs of owning a car are sunk costs for me: My car is paid for and I have to pay the insurance no matter how much I drive. So the real cost is really just the gas and wear and tear, which comes to anywhere between $2-4 depending on how you calculate it. Taking Tri-met to work currently costs $3.60 roundtrip, and will be going up to somewhere between $3.80 and $4.00 next month. So I think if you already own a car, then public transportation is actually more expensive... of course, the real benefit is not having to deal with the time and hassle of heavy traffic.

I just learned that you can now schedule TiVo recordings directly from Yahoo! TV. I just tried it out and it works great, very easy to use. It'll be nice not to have to go to the hassle of logging into tivo.com just to record a show.

Britney Gallivan has solved the Paper Folding Problem. This well known challenge was to fold paper in half more than seven or eight times, using paper of any size or shape.

I picked up a Honeywell VisionPro 8000 on ebay for $98 this week. I have been looking for a new thermostat for quite a while now to solve a difficult heating situation at our condo: The downstairs is always about 10 degrees cooler than the upstairs. If we run the fan continuously, the temperature will eventually normalize between the upstairs and downstairs. The problem is that running the fan all the time is annoying (loud, especially when trying to sleep) and costly.

Almost every thermostat on the market has a physical fan switch, which means that it isn't very flexible (either "always on" or "auto"). What I've been looking for, and what the VisionPro 8000 has, is a programmable fan. The VisionPro actually goes one step further and has a "circulate" mode where it randomly runs the fan 35% of the time. So now the fan is programmed for "always on" from 6-8am, "circulate" from 8am-6pm, "always on" again from 6pm-11pm, and then "auto" from 11pm-6am (which means it will only run if the heater turns on).

It was really hard to find this thermostat. Home Depot and other retail stores don't even carry it yet (only available to "installers"... or people with Internet connections). Once I knew what I wanted, ebay was far and away the best price around.

So far so good... our downstairs is warmer!

Jim and I just developed Presto's Presentation Timer, a little Windows app that you can use to help keep your presentations on-time. Check it out and tell us what you think! It should be available on download.com in a couple of weeks.

Is it just me, or isn't it remarkable how similar Personalized Google, NetVibes, and Start are?

Our washing machine (a Gibson front loader, manufactured by Frigidaire) stopped working last week -- wouldn't drain water. The owner's manual and Frigidaire web site were completely useless. I tried calling the Frigidaire customer support line printed on the label on the machine, but they were only interested in selling me extended warranty coverage or referring me to a local repair person.

I spoke with my friend Thom at work who encouraged me to try self repair. He pointed me to repairclinic.com which had an excellent diagram showing exactly how to remove the front panel and the location of the water pump. It also had a suggestion in the user forums to lay the drainage hose flat and see if any water came out -- which would indicate that the hose was unclogged and that the pump was to blame.

We did this, water came out fine, and so I removed the pump. Aimee had already called a couple of places in town and found replacement pumps for around $80. As I removed the pump, I noticed something clogged inside the pump's rotors. After removing it and reintalling the pump, everything started working perfectly again!

So thanks to the web, we saved ourselves probably $200 in doing the self repair. What's interesting to me from a web perspective is just how useless Frigidaire's support for their product was and that free community-driven web sites were able to provide so much more value. How hard would it have been for Frigidaire to have schematics and repair instructions and suggestions up on their web site for owners who were willing to try? They just don't get it.

I haven't tried any of these yet, but this Interactive Voice Menu cheat sheet will undoubtedly come in handy at some point! The author also has a good perspective on outsourcing IMHO.

One needs to look no further than tv.com for an example of how an aquisition can ruin a great web site.

The original tvtome.com was everything a TV watcher could ask for: Simple, clean web site design, easy to access episode information, user forums, and so on.

Then mp3.com/Gamespot bought them out, changed the web site name to tv.com, threw in a bunch of gratuitous Flash, graphics, and ads, changed the episode numbering system (making it almost completely useless), removed the user forums, made it a lot harder to navigate the site, and in the process of all of these "improvements" also managed to make the web site reponsiveness way slower.

Luckily, I've found a replacement: EpGuides.com. It's not as full featured as TVTome was, but it's got the part that counts right, and I'm a believer.

Here's proof of what I'm talking about: Battlestar Galactica info on tv.com and epguides.com. Let's say you just want the episode information. Which one does that job better?

Remember that eighties era game show, "Press Your Luck"? You know, "Big money... no whammies..."? Here's a fascinating story about a guy who figured out their pseudo-random number generator and won big.

Tokyo Flash -- these guys have some crazy watches!

I just spent quite a while searching around on the web for Diffie-Hellman test vectors. I couldn't find any (beyond some trivially easy explanatory examples). It's hard to believe that there isn't something out there...

Ah well, in the interests of making the web a better place, and in the hopes that somebody will find this and tell me whether these values are correct, here are the Diffie-Hellman values I'm trying to check: I have no idea if they are correct or not.

(All values are expressed as hexadecimal, most significant bit first.)

a = 4400 51d6 f0b5 5ea9 67ab 31c6 8a8b 5e37 
    d910 dae0 e2d4 59a4 8645 9caa df36 7516

b = 5dae c786 7980 a324 8ce3 578f c75f 1b0f 
    2df8 9d30 6fa4 52cd e07a 048a ded9 2656

p = FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF C90F DAA2 2168 C234 
    C4C6 628B 80DC 1CD1 2902 4E08 8A67 CC74 
    020B BEA6 3B13 9B22 514A 0879 8E34 04DD 
    EF95 19B3 CD3A 431B 302B 0A6D F25F 1437 
    4FE1 356D 6D51 C245 E485 B576 625E 7EC6 
    F44C 42E9 A637 ED6B 0BFF 5CB6 F406 B7ED 
    EE38 6BFB 5A89 9FA5 AE9F 2411 7C4B 1FE6 
    4928 6651 ECE4 5B3D C200 7CB8 A163 BF05 
    98DA 4836 1C55 D39A 6916 3FA8 FD24 CF5F 
    8365 5D23 DCA3 AD96 1C62 F356 2085 52BB 
    9ED5 2907 7096 966D 670C 354E 4ABC 9804 
    F174 6C08 CA18 217C 3290 5E46 2E36 CE3B 
    E39E 772C 180E 8603 9B27 83A2 EC07 A28F 
    B5C5 5DF0 6F4C 52C9 DE2B CBF6 9558 1718 
    3995 497C EA95 6AE5 15D2 2618 98FA 0510 
    1572 8E5A 8AAA C42D AD33 170D 0450 7A33 
    A855 21AB DF1C BA64 ECFB 8504 58DB EF0A 
    8AEA 7157 5D06 0C7D B397 0F85 A6E1 E4C7 
    ABF5 AE8C DB09 33D7 1E8C 94E0 4A25 619D 
    CEE3 D226 1AD2 EE6B F12F FA06 D98A 0864 
    D876 0273 3EC8 6A64 521F 2B18 177B 200C 
    BBE1 1757 7A61 5D6C 7709 88C0 BAD9 46E2 
    08E2 4FA0 74E5 AB31 43DB 5BFC E0FD 108E 
    4B82 D120 A93A D2CA FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF

g = 2

g^a mod p = 
    5a0d 3d4e 049f aa93 9ffa 6a37 5b9c 3c16 
    a4c3 9753 d19f f7da 36bc 391e a72f c0f6 
    8c92 9bdb 4005 52ed 84e0 900c 7a44 c322 
    2fd5 4d71 4825 6862 886b fb40 16bd 2d03 
    c4c4 cf47 6567 c291 770e 47bd 59d0 aa53 
    23cf ddfc 5596 e0d6 558c 480e e8b0 c625 
    9983 4d45 81a7 96a0 1981 4687 8916 4504 
    afbd 29ce 9936 e86a 290c 5f00 f8ba 986b 
    4801 0f3e 5c07 9c7f 351d dca2 ee1f d508 
    46b3 7bf7 463c 2b0f 3d00 1b13 17ac 3069 
    cd89 e2e4 927e d3d4 0875 a604 9af6 49d2 
    dc34 9db5 995a 7525 d70a 3a1c 9b67 3f54 
    82f8 3343 bd90 d45e 9c39 62dc 4a4b f2b4 
    adb3 7e91 66b2 ddb3 1ccf 11c5 b9e6 c98e 
    0a9a 3377 abba 56b0 f428 3b2e aa69 f536 
    8bc1 07e1 c225 99f8 8dd1 924d 0899 c5f1 
    5346 2c91 1a82 9307 8aef ee9f b238 9a78 
    5483 3fce a61c fecb b49f 828c 361a 981a 
    5fed ecf1 3796 ae36 e36c 15a1 6670 af96 
    996c 3c45 a30e 900e 18c8 58f6 232b 5f70 
    72bd d9e4 7d7f c612 46ef 5d19 7657 39f3 
    8509 2843 79bc 319d 9409 e8fe 236b d29b 
    0335 a5bc 5bb0 424e e44d e8a1 9f86 4a15 
    9fda 907d 6f5a 30eb c0a1 7e36 28e4 90e5

g^b mod p = 
    dc14 c6f6 d85b 3d58 b54a bb30 6d55 6829 
    2ed7 85d3 9ed7 3643 666a 1b4a 4684 654f 
    88bb edf0 414c 59c7 0dd9 90b4 47b3 c325 
    0a4a 2367 3ea9 361a 79be 3376 0906 ef12 
    7627 fa9e 7f91 07e7 3675 9cff 990c 44fc 
    e240 7e7c e1c7 d61a 83b8 5c82 85a9 bf94 
    7cc1 e582 642a 8a86 3e4e 0d57 f258 4b25 
    5229 c4d3 5355 1e86 ac2b bce4 13c7 e554 
    1cc2 e68d 7101 d578 30cd e1c9 1bd4 8c03 
    d190 1472 01f3 9697 f65c c2f4 45e8 5162 
    3bea 585c 8205 d8e8 ca91 b54d aefb 6fe5 
    ac46 e942 b5ea 6e04 495b d2f6 cb11 88c1 
    b44a 342e 5dab 2917 165e 0935 d743 69b7 
    6698 68c9 d4d5 b148 33f3 1e56 9499 1e73 
    353a 33f5 f4dc 61ff 5752 517b 7180 6da2 
    e47e fc78 d22d d8da c4f1 1501 9d57 5d60 
    b787 6140 4413 bff6 e314 329b f1e5 2b92 
    38f8 7964 a5a3 00c7 26c0 950f ac94 6459 
    3c30 6ece 4d92 813f d714 2e16 18b3 efbb 
    3fea 25f9 e177 0859 2507 d8be 73ef d569 
    761e 7ff4 b016 edd0 c5c3 85a8 ec16 1a44 
    f2d6 7c1c 6b39 7d8f 6c3f a797 bcd9 5e3f 
    b8f4 ecba 7ebf 6620 570e f491 4e75 eaf9 
    752b a471 faf7 ccc5 5373 069c 2153 1194

SharedSecret = (g^a mod p)^b mod p = (g^b mod p)^a mod p = 
    bcec d344 c6f4 2f35 aced 542b 7ceb 684a 
    623b f9ad 3ebf 2a64 9afc be7c 9fd2 127e 
    1d2b 08ba b247 3cdd bf44 fa3f 98a5 6ad7 
    5ee7 5a66 e0dc 0bfb c246 fb57 9a6d 5275 
    3222 ea82 e4fc ee51 fef5 3d24 af4c 5f00 
    fdba f7b3 c55a 0e4f 8b5f 2e27 51b5 ca3f 
    9898 8ca3 08b5 11bd 2e35 7767 84dc 852f 
    8519 9eb0 52aa 12a3 b4f5 e9ca be79 8610 
    11a6 c34e 9b11 6f06 fcb3 b59e e739 75cf 
    6529 118f 63b0 68f2 2422 cbac 11e1 18f1 
    fc3a 06c7 9787 f8c0 ee90 f878 64b9 fac6 
    5f75 6725 6abd 1da2 1122 d83e 4026 e9d4 
    835e 5e77 10cd 5ab4 7e88 7d10 dd75 56bf 
    5f27 679d 634a a1c2 f8a8 cfc3 1859 cb72 
    d0e0 8efa 9b01 a88b 213f b604 63fa eb63 
    2449 7b77 4420 76cf 81b9 9556 34dc eeeb 
    bcc1 9b17 1857 d823 d190 798f 391e 1910 
    b7ce eccc baa5 0856 32cf 7660 bb06 9b82 
    721f 7c33 61a4 512b 8a25 ac32 f16e a332 
    2e87 2f54 d2db 8ea7 b815 e125 cd47 b0c6 
    2a51 ae42 5f6c 6956 8ec4 3bb8 810f 62e8 
    447c cb19 0f59 ad1c 212a 50aa 20f0 66c5 
    732c a60e 6728 ea2b c91a 82fe cc80 6f81 
    3330 a694 4aff c69a 562f 3501 514c c70f

SHA-256( SharedSecret ) = 
    2d42 85c2 3196 26f2 c2c7 2c5a 2855 3f54 
    41d2 c521 8c0c fbb6 60cc 57a1 dfa1 a68f

Update: Diceware's Big Number Calculator was built for large numbers! I've verified the numbers above with it.

Oooooh: iPod Nano. I want.

I got an email from Kodak today: "We've missed you at the Kodak EasyShare Gallery. We're happy to store all your memories, but we do ask that you make at least one purchase every 12 months to keep the images stored in your account. [...] We may soon begin deleting stored images. Don't risk losing your photos! All it takes is one purchase to renew your storage for another year."

Thanks a lot, Kodak. Mistake #1: Changing Ofoto's name after buying them. Mistake #2: Changing the rules on users after they've gotten used to the system. I know Kodak has to make money, but this isn't the right way to do it. I predict a mass exodus over to Flickr.

Here's a cute addictive little game: Stackopolis. I've made it to level 9 so far. Here are the first nine level codes: statepen, parklane, msoffice, dwelling, glassbox, raadmaan, toyblocs, balderun, pavement.

I returned our Yellow Tang ("Tangy") to the fish store yesterday and traded him in for a Longnose Hawkfish ("Poindexter"). He's settling in ok, although the Koran ("Mo") is picking on him a bit.

In other aquarium news, the Bupple Tip Anemone has gone missing. Sigh. It's probably my fault: I had put a trap in the tank to catch Tangy and didn't notice that the BTA had left his usual crevice at some point during the night and was sitting on the sand bed... directly below where I stuck the trap! So he got pretty smushed. He was still alive as of yesterday, although on live support. I can only hope that he's hiding somewhere and recovering.

I just installed Google Talk, but I don't have anybody else to talk to on it :-( Give me a holler if you're playing around with it and let's test it out! Seems like it might be a while before it replaces Gaim or Trillian.

PWNtcha is a project that tries to crack captchas. Their main project page has a pretty good overview of the various varities of captcha out there. James first turned me onto CMU's Captcha Project several months ago when we were talking about ways to stop comment spam. Luckily, my site doesn't appear to have been infiltrated yet. I'm sure it's only a matter of time...

Aquarium update: The Koran is getting picked on a bit by my Tang, but is otherwise looking frisky and is eating a bit. The starfish appears fine, but mostly hides. The nudibranch has disappeared completely. The urchins are doing great. But the anemone has had a tough time. My clown is giving it too much attention and it is constantly shrinking down and ejecting its stomach. It has never really secured its foot down anywhere either, leading me to believe that it hasn't found its ideal place in the tank yet.

The Register does it again: Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New "Intelligent Falling" Theory. Be sure to look closely at the picture in the article. I love the hand flicking the ball off the counter and the equation on the bottom of the screen: dx/dt = 1 Cor. 1:10. Too funny...

Impressive: praying mantis eats hummingbird.

I did a major aquarium restocking yesterday. My tank is now the happy home for a Koran Angel, a Bubble Tip Anemone (which my clownfish loves), an Orange Linkia Starfish, a Purple Urchin, a Pencil Urchin, a Lettuce Nudibranch, and a bunch of hermit crabs and snails.

I ordered these over the Internet from saltwaterfish.com. Great experience. Everybody arrived alive and healthy and seemed to acclimate well to my tank. I was a little worried about the Koran last night as the other fish were picking on him, but he seems to have settled in ok today.

Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr! A great manifesto by Cory Doctorow on why digital rights management systems are bad all the way around. In addition to being a great read content-wise, I am really impressed with the Acrobat presentation format!

Jason Clarke created this helper to solve the puzzle "Whose Fish?". I started to use the helper, but found it easier to just use an Excel spreadsheet that I created (warning: spreadsheet has the answer, so don't look yet if you want to try the puzzle yourself). I used to be terrible at these sort of puzzles, but I found using the spreadsheet made it quite easy and I had no trouble getting the right answer.

PostgreSQL is such an awesome database. MySQL is like a child's toy in comparison. I don't know why Postgres isn't more popular among web developers. The latest feature I've come to love and depend on in Postgres is check constraints. They even have regular expression support.

The Fable of the Keys: Maybe the Dvorak keyboard doesn't live up to the hype.

Open letter to the Kansas school board and the origins of the universe according to the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory.

According to the site, the Optimus keyboard "will be real" and will probably use organic LED technology. Hard to believe that this would be affordable, but it could be truly revolutionary to computing if and when it arrives.

A few copies of the upcoming Harry Potter book were sold by accident in Vancouver last week. When I first heard the news, I thought "big deal". So a few copies got out ahead of time, who cares? But then the article goes on to say that Canadian Judge Kristi Gill "ordered customers not to talk about the book, copy it, sell it or even read it before it is officially released at 12:01 a.m. July 16." She also ordered them to return the books to the publisher.

This doesn't sound like something that should happen in a democracy. What about the rights of the people who bought the book? I would love to see the legal basis on which the judge made her decision... just doesn't make sense to me. The book seller sold the books. Their fault. Period. Don't blame the customers!

I've gotta give credit to Apple for their podcasting support in the most recent iTunes update. They've done a great job and I think there will be a substantial rise in podcasting's popularity and "mainstream adoption" as a result. I've already listened to a couple episodes of Northwest Noise, one episode of TinyPodcast, and a few episodes of some podcast done by airline pilot -- all on my iPod as I've been walking around town, thanks to the seamless iTunes integration. Now, if only NPR would get on the bandwagon and start offering some podcasts...

"We are a nation of minorities and in a nation of minorities, it is important that you don't cherry pick rights. A right is a right and that is what this vote tonight is all about." I like that. It's what Canada's prime minister said today after Canada's parliament voted to approve same-sex marriages.

My friend Eric sent me this hilarious cartoon explanation of the superparamagnetic effect from Hitachi's web site. Caution: Geek humor ahead.

I read about Google Public Site Search over on James's blog and decided that I too had had enough with Atomz. Atomz was good in its day, but their ad-dominated re-design, limit on the number of pages they will index, and older-style search algorithm are no match for the Google juggernaut.

Aye-yah, I've been struck by the Windows XP Hibernate Bug! This bug wins the award for the absolute worst error message I have seen: "Insufficient resources exist to complete the API". Luckily, Google to the rescue!

Here's what happens: I suspend my laptop and stick it in my backpack. Plenty of battery left at this point. After some period of time, Windows decides it's been suspended long enough and decides to hibernate. So it wakes up and then the bug strikes (see unhelpful error message above). Unfortunately, it doesn't go back into suspend, and proceeds to completely drain my battery until it's completely dead.

This is a really annoying bug, one that makes the suspend feature on my laptop almost useless. (I've tried disabling suspend, but the bug still happens.)

If anybody knows how to fix this problem, please help :-)

63.225.87.115, who are you?

For at least six months now, my home WinXP machine has been unable to update itself due to a problem with Windows Update. Every day, the yellow shield icon would glare at me from the tray, making me feel nervous that I was neglecting important security updates.

The offending patch had something to do with Microsoft.NET. Every so often, I would dutifully try to install the update, only to have it fail for no reason at all (messages like "The update failed to install" were not very helpful in diagnosing the problem).

I dug around a bit, figured out the hotfix number, and tried downloading the patch .exe directly from microsoft.com and installing it, only to have it prompt for an .msi file halfway through the install. Again, no help was given on how to proceed or fix the problem.

I was finally able to track down some help with Google (link1, link2): I had to download dotnetfx.exe, unzip it to a directory, download the patch, run the patch, and (when prompted) point the patch to the unzipped directory to get a file that it needed. Once I did all of this, the patch finished installing and I could return to the serenity of a taskbar tray free of the yellow shield.

My big question is: What gives with the error reporting? Why wasn't more information given on the reason for the failure and how to fix it. Even better, since my copy of WinXP knows that it was in trouble, and since I am a registered user of a valid copy of XP, how come my OS couldn't "phone home" and report the problem so that somebody from Microsoft could help me fix the problem.

Anyway, I'm posting this here in the hopes of helping out any other poor souls who are currently trapped in a similar situation.

I ate lunch at a Subway yesterday that had a sign on the door announcing the end of the free sandwich stamp program due to "counterfeiting". The program is going to cease to exist sometime in August. I went to Subway's web site, but couldn't find anything about it, but then saw this article on Yahoo that confirms it.

For cheapskates like me, this royally sucks. The free sandwich card has been a staple of my fast food dining since I was a little kid (I still remember "double coupon Wednesdays" in Atlanta).

You would think that Subway could investigate some sort of scannable card to defeat forgery. I think they are just taking the easy way out to rid themselves of the program. Too bad... I can definitely say that they will get less business from me as a result.

I just finished Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Blink, a book about the automatic, subconscious analyses that take place in the first few seconds of doing just about anything (things like meeting people, eating, playing sports, looking at art, avoiding obstacles while driving, etc.).

I have been a long time admirer of Malcom Gladwell from his numerous articles in New Yorker over the years, and I thoroughly enjoyed his book The Tipping Point, thus it should come as no surprise that I enjoyed this book as well. It certainly isn't comparable to "Tipping Point", and in particular it seems to lack a unifying theme to tie everything together, but it certainly is an enjoyable romp through assorted psychological studies that help to unravel our minds.

Fox 12 has an interesting list of Multnomah County ex-convicts by ZIP code. Luckily the zip code of my condo is pretty far down the list.

Interesting political typology quiz. I scored as a "liberal" (along with 19% of the population). They have a full list of all of their types as well.

I used Movielink for the first time a while back. Overall, I give it a big "thumbs down". Here's why:

• Doesn't work on Firefox
• Lengthy registration process
• Then had to download and install their MovieLink Manager
• Time restrictions: 30 days to start watching once you download, 24 hours to finish once you start watching. I bought 3 movies, but one of them expired because I didn't watch it in time.
• Video quality is not that good (xvid is better)
• Defaults to their crappy player, but can view with WMP if you browse to the directoyr on the HD - c:\program flies\movielink\data\content\xxx\
• SLOW downloads!!! Probably the worst part. Between 700k-1Mbps on average.
• Andromeda Strain: $1.99, 4.5 hours to download!!!!
• They flash annoying, flashing ads all over the place while you are downloading
• Way too many steps to rent a movie -- need "one click"
• No reviews, or a way to sort by reviews, or ways to sort by most popular (need merger with IMDB)
• Leaves a freakin' process running in the background all the time, sucking up 7-10MB of RAM!!
• They don't let you delete/cancel/close your account from the web!!

Google is doubling gmail accounts to 2GB. Woo hoo! They are doing it in an interesting way. I logged in just a few minutes ago and noticed that I had "1059 MB" available. I did a reload a few minutes after that, and then I had "1060 MB" available. So it seems they are trickling it out a bit at a time to all accounts just in case there are any problems.

I've had my Nokia 6820 cell phone for several months now. My first reaction to the phone was that cell phones haven't advanced very much in the 3+ years since I bought my last phone (a Nokia 8620). Sure, the 6820 has a color screen, low quality camera (which I never use), a cool fold out keyboard, Bluetooth support (which I use with a BT headset sometimes), and a speakerphone (which I use all the time). But the phone's OS and user interface are begininng to show their age. I think my next phone will be a Windows smart phone (like the AudioVox).

Some annoyances about the 6820:

• The current call time isn't displayed while you are making a call.
• You can't store your voice mail password in a write-only area of the phone, meaning that you either have to enter it in each time, or store it in plaintext as part of the voicemail quickdial key.
• The center joystick is badly overloaded: If there is any text on the screen (say, after you've just entered your voicemail password), you can't change the volume because the changing the volume requires the center joystick, but when there's text on the screen, the center joystick moves the cursor around.
• You can synchronize Outlook's calendar with the phone, but there is no way to silence the calendar alarms. This is very annoying, either during meetings, or in the middle of the night when you are trying to sleep. I have completely stopped using the calendar feature of the phone because of this. Probably the number one thing I dislike about the phone.
• Upcoming calendar appointments should be displayed on the main screen. If I want to see them, I have to unlock the phone and hit right on the joystick, click again to select the day, and only then can I see the appointments. Annoyingly, the screen's view does not automatically advance to the next appointment, but starts with the first one of the day -- even if that time is long past.
• Slow and convuluted menuing system.

Despite these shortcomings, I am overall pretty happy with the phone, but I am disappointed that Nokia dropped the ball on these minor points. The 6820 would be an incredible phone if not plagued by these nits.

Finished my taxes this weekend. Discovered too late that several web sites (including turbotax.com) offer free federal filing (state costs extra, but those are usually pretty easy once the 1040 is done, so you can just do that one by hand).

This is the last year that I'm going to use regular TurboTax (the one that runs on Windows). Their interview process is way too cumbersome now (questions like "Did you own a farm?" or "Were you employed in the clergy?"). And it didn't transfer my data over from last year's return properly. Worse, TurboTax messed up my county income taxes and deducted them incorrectly from my state return, which would have cost me money (Multnomah County tax filers using TurboTax: Double check your Oregon Form 40... TurboTax probably messed it up if you itemize your deductions!).

Web-based services seem to be the way to go now. Or I may just use this awesome Excel-based 1040 form that I found. If you have pretty straightforward taxes (W2, 1099, itemized deductions, etc.), using this Excel spreadsheet lets you bypass all of those annoying interview questions and knock out your taxes quickly.

My server had its first denial of service "attack" today, and it came from the most unlikely of places.... Google! It's not really their fault, as you can read about below in my short story entitled, "How I went head to head with the GoogleBot... and lost":

At around 4:00am, the GoogleBot latched on to my server and started pounding a couple of PHP scripts that are very CPU intensive (one of them resizes pictures, another is very database intensive). For some reason that I'm still investigating, my web server (apache) started gobbling up memory to try and keep up with the requests from the GoogleBot, eventually causing the machine to become completely unresponsive. See below for a graph of free system memory -- see if you can find the point where the GoogleBot found the server :-)

Now, Google follows proper web crawler etiquette and was only requesting a page every few seconds, but due to the resource intensive nature of the pages being requested, that persistent yet relentless load was enough to bring my server to its knees. I'm to blame for not having a properly coded robots.txt file, and also for not employing sufficient caching of the CPU-heavy scripts.

But I think Google has some culpability too, as they should be able to detect when they are crushing a server (based on a sudden rash of "404 not found" errors or other metrics) and they should back off for a while. They should also periodically check robots.txt for changes once they've started crawling a site (I quickly added a "Disallow:" line to protect my scripts, but the GoogleBot didn't seem to check it and kept on going.) The total GoogleBot access count according to my weblogs is currently 22,207 and climbing (they are still hitting my server every few seconds).

At first I suspected a hardware error since my server would crash at random intervals after being rebooted. It turns out that this random time was just the amount of time it took GoogleBot to re-latch on to my server after knocking it out of commission.

In debugging this, I swapped out every piece of hardware possible on the system before looking at the software installation as the possible culprit. Wondering if somebody had found a security exploit, I made sure that all of my Gentoo packages were up to date, and also recompiled the Linux kernel to the latest version. Recompiling the kernel turned out to be the pivotal action, as one of the new features was some sort of fail safe that starts killing off processes if the system runs out of memory. This enabled my system to stay alive long enough for me to see the server logs, which revealed a gazillion requests coming in from 66.249.65.239 (which, a reverse DNS lookup revealed as a googlebot server).

For now, I have simply blocked that IP address from accessing any pages on my server. Once things have settled down, I will re-allow access (don't want to be left off of the Google search index!). By then, my new robots.txt file should be in effect, and hopefully I won't have any more problems.

No hard feelings toward Google, of course. It's really my fault that this happened... amazing that it took this long for this sort of thing to occur!

Slate writes about A Dangerous Loophole in Airport Security. I had wondered about this exact scenario sometime last year when I noticed that they were no longer checking IDs at the gate. It really makes me wonder if all of this airport "security" is really good for anything except causing a lot of inconvience.

I was featured on the 5:00 news the other night (KGW Portland). The piece was about the popularity of pedometers. They filmed me walking around at work and using my website, trainster.net. (If you don't want to register, check out BugMeNot).