Well, the holiday weekend is done and gone. It was a pretty good weekend, I guess. A ball game on Thursday, staying home and watching a movie Friday night, poker on Saturday, and out for a few beers last night. About the only thing I got accomplished was cleaning the kitchen enough that we could play poker, and I woke up feeling tired this morning (I think I need a break from the warm weather, but it looks like that’s coming tonight). Oh well, a bit of a late start today, but it’s back to the work-week. Wish me luck.
- Says here that on Mac OS X, you can crash screensaver locked with password and get the desktop back . Looking at the rest of the thread reveals that it takes between 1280 and 1380 characters. Sheesh. Last Monday evening I was talking with mpp and we were talking about buffer-overflow bugs that he was reporting on Crays in the early 1980s. When trying out some new software, one of the first things he would do is just hold down a key, letting it repeat and see if the the software crashed. Most of the time it would. Haven’t people learned anything in the intervening twenty years? Apparently not (although OpenBSD fixed all the buffer overflows a few releases back).
- Crunching the Market’s Numbers: Risk, Yes; Reward, Maybe. The big news is that stock markets follow a power-law distribution rather than a gaussian distribution. That makes a big difference in the kind of strategy you might want to use.
- Website turns tables on government officials, with Government Information Awareness. Dossiers of goverment officials, created with publicly available information, and supplemented by contributions by pretty much anyone who chooses to add information. Not all that different from Felon Poindexter’s system, really. Expect slow access times, but a growing amount of information. Very handy when you’re trying to figure out who to vote for, too. [endwar]
- In the Fight for Privacy, States Set Off Sparks as concerns over government invasion of privacy has moved from just those of us on the fringes into the mainstream.
- Gun law’s author hit right on target profiles Joe Olson, who teaches law at Hamline Law School and wrote the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. Sounds like a pretty darned good guy:
If you don’t have a gun, if you don’t have power—it doesn’t have to be guns, but it has to be real, personal power, individually and as citizens—if you don’t have that, then whatever you have is only there at the sufferance of government,
Olson said. - The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive? Well, for some people, being offline for a few minutes is a major crisis. Sheesh. There’s a reason I like baseball. Taking a few hours to just watch a game develop is a fun chance to slow down. Or shutting off the computer long enough to actually listen to what someone’s presenting at a conference. Heresy! Cory doesn’t think it’s a problem for him, saying we’re not Emailing ourselves to death.
- Finally, this weekend, It was the first Saturday night with Minneapolis bars open until 2 and things were pretty much as normal, but an hour later. That’s about what I saw, too.