The Unreal Estate Boom, an article in this month's Wired about fully virtual economies in the online role playing universe. I was amazed at the amount the goods in Ultima go for in the real world.

SmillieGames - hours of potential time wasting.

The case of the 500-mile email via mpt.

Due to the recent server crash I also had an email configuration problem. Those of you who received relay errors sending email can retry. Sorry for any issues.

The server seemed to have rebooted last night. I guess the UPS wasn't good enough. Hmmmm.

I went to the Mr. Scruff gig at Roxy Blu put on my Milk. Off the hook. Jonathan was spinning downstairs at Surface and really got the crowd into it early. A slap in the face with some Michael Jackson followed up by Chicken Lips was the highlight. Mr. Scruff was phenomenal upstairs in the main room and there should be some audio at the Milk site soon.

Joel on Software - The Law of Leaky Abstractions

I forgot to post this before but Slashdot is driving much attention to it so I figured why not now. When good interfaces go crufty. Matthew makes many great points about interface components that we have come to accept and find comfortable but which are unecessary. It's hard not to think of an application having a Save command or a File Dialog but they're really unecessary, and confusing for the novice user.

You know computers are getting faster when cellular phones are running games from the early nineties. Slashdot pointed to a Doom port for a Nokia 7650.

I've been using POPFile as my new Spam filter. It uses Bayes Theorem techniques to build buckets for classifying email types. I basically set up two buckets, mail and spam and used 2000 legitimate and 2000 spam messages to train POPFile.

POPFile is a Perl script that works as a POP3 proxy. It uses statistical probability based on the training set to determine whether new mail is classified as mail or spam and tags messages with an altered subject or with the header X-Text-Classification. I use the latter method since Mozilla (my mail client) can filter based on mail headers.

So far, out of about 250 email I've had four false positives and one false negative. I'd rather have it the other way around but each false classification is collected by myself and re-inserted back into the proper training set.

Via Slashdot - Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo!

This article, like many on Slashdot sparked quite a religious debate over programming languages. Personally I like Java/J2EE with Cocoon up front or JSP if more people need to be familiar with the language. PHP appears to work just as well but the case can be made for almost any language available. Nothing is perfect for every situation kid. There's always classic computer science tradeoffs.

It's too bad Java has threading problems on FreeBSD according to Radwin's presentation. It's seems as if that was their only reason to not use Java.

Downloading The Mind from CBC Quirks and Quarks. Available in MP3 and Vorbis.

I know that consumer technology isn't always built to be durable but I've lost another device due to failure and I'm getting rather suspicious of myself now. Is there a way to measure one's magnetic field in relation to the average?

My latest to go is a Palm III. I had a Palm IIIx that went just over a year ago and got a Palm III that was available but hardly used. Now when I turn it on the screen is dead. If I hit reset the backlight comes on with a barley audible whining noise. Scratch another.

So far over the past three years the damage is,

1 Palm IIIx

1 Palm III

1 Gateway Laptop

3 Brand name hard drives (Maxtor and Fujitsu)

1 Logitech Joystick

3 Vtech cordless phones (going on four)

1 3Comm Ethernet hub (sill works but damaged capacitor whine hurts my ears, or so I'm told that's what that sound is)

Now perhaps I'm rather adept at picking brands the die easily, but these are not cheap no-name brands. I buy them for the name. I don't know why I bother though, it doesn't seem to matter. I'm now sold on extended warrenties.

Google counts for various periods of projection.

one to two years111184,100

two to three years11180,000

one to five years111119,100

two to five years111154,100

five to ten years111170,000

ten to fifteen years1118,300

fifteen to twenty years114,970

Edward H. Adelson has posted one of the most interesting optical illusions I've seen. I had to check it in Photoshop like Jason Kottke just to be sure.

I finally read The Simpson's Generation by Chris Turner in the 10th anniversary issue of Shift on the train ride home last night from Burlington.

"We were being told - in emphatic terms - that the thing we were defending and the way to defend it were one and the same; we were the great globalized Republic of Buying Stuff, and so we should bravely go on buying stuff to protect our right - our most basic, most cherished right - to buy more stuff."

To those that have been wondering where I am, and why I'm so off the grid, I'll be catching up on work and bills then I should be returning to a regular routine.

The digital box costs $8.95 per month, and the single TechTV channel would cost $2.50 per month. I can justify the cost of the channel but the box doesn't give me enough redeeming features for $9.00 a month. If the box had video on demand (PVR, Tivo, ReplayTV) then I could totally justify it, but VOD when it arrives will be extra. For now, no thanks. After my preview I think I'll shut it off unless the VOD is a great deal.

Database 'xxxx', OID yyyyy, has disappeared from pg_database

Probably the next thing is to look at pg_database and try
to understandwhy all the rows are showing as dead. There 
are a couple of toolsaround that can dump out the contents
of tuple headers. I'd suggestpg_filedump 
(http://sources.redhat.com/rhdb/tools.html), 
but it isintended for 7.1/7.2 and you'd need to do a little 
surgery to make itwork on 7.0 files. (I think ripping out 
the code that expects an LSNfield to be present in the page 
header would be enough.) If you checkthe PG list archives 
you will find references to one or two olderprograms in the 
same vein; there might still be something availablethat 
will work on 7.0 files without modification.

regards, tom lane

The honking of celebratory horns went until at least 12AM outside my window. I'm sure the partying went even longer down on lower Yonge St., King St. and all across the country.

It's February 25, and it's 13 degrees celcius outside right now. Serendipity perhaps, or maybe all that celebration warmed up the country. I'm going for a walk to soak up all the smiling Canadian faces.

Several National Post articles were moving and humourus today. Canada's Moment of truth, A nation at a standstill, Shooting from the Lip, and my favourite for the day; Canada turns fear of failure into poise by Christie Blatchford.

I feel like today should be national holiday. Hey, fifty years to the day. Not a bad idea at all.

Today Charles and I put in 6 servers, 1 media bay, 1 switch, 1 monitor / keyboard tray, 1 console switch and a mess of cables into our rack at Q9. It took 8.5 hours from pick-up of the machines to pack up at Q9. Not bad really but tiring. Our demo is incredibly fast now due to all the new equipment and an incredibly well connected hosting facility.

It's another late night as I update content on web sites and tie up loose ends. I believe this is the third "past two a.m. night" this week.

Pictures from the Unit 301 4.0 party are now up. Not too many this time. I forgot there was a camera after the first hour.

Stay tuned!