found_drama

• What’s the matter with this guy!? (Good thing it was all a hoax…)
• The YH-920 is cool because it supports Ogg and supposedly will have a battery life of 10 hrs. But the price is still a bit too high. And it’s not as sexy as an iPod. And USB 2.0 can still kiss my lily white ass.
• Good for the Netherlanders! Nigerian scammers busted! Are there more of them out there? Will it hold up in court? Are these even the droids you’re looking for?
• Maryland voting machines busted!? No way! And I thought everything from Maryland ran smooth as clockwork.
• Hell hath no fury like a woman’s Google search.
• Microsoft’s smart bunch.

Via Blogdex as usual… This one being especially for Mike… Amazonster. An interesting social-networking idea for sure. Opt in/out mentality to go along w/ this of course. How public do you want you buying habits/history and some of that peripheral data. Not that it isn’t already all in there and (to a certain extent) accessible.

The timing on this is interesting given last night’s conversation about private P2P networking. There was some wrangling about that not-so-recently w/r/t/ Waste and secure P2P’ing etc. The guy I was discussing this w/ last night pointed out that there was some limited private P2P’ing to be had using Kazaa. Specifically, he was talking about block lists and the use of Kazaa Lite to keep out malcontents and spyware (respectively). My counter to this was that I didn’t want to necessarily use AdAware (just one more app to track etc.) and it would take forever to accumulate block-lists that are going to do any good. The amount of initial investment that would take is pretty steep (time/attention-wise). Instead, I proposed private P2P scenarios in which you access to someone’s library is by invitation only. And vice versa. So this way you only wind up browsing thru known and trusted libraries. Granted, this doesn’t (on its own) solve the spyware problem (depending on the specifics of who is making this tradeware in the first place) but it may go a ways in keeping out malcontents. It’s about protecting yourself. And about knowing where you can turn and holding someone accountable (for what that is or is not worth) when Klez29b shows up gnashing teeth in your filesystem somewhere.

I bring up (only briefly) that it would also be nice to trade and chat using some level of encryption. But I’m like that when it comes to privacy. *ahem* Well then…

Granted, semi-private networks like this would (in a way) totally defeat the P2P purpose of making the world your oyster. Closing off the trade circle may tighten it up w/r/t/ matters of trust (vis a vis virii, malicious code, improperly tagged files, etc.) but you’re cutting yourself off at the same time. You decrease the likelihood of being able to get something a little more esoteric. A flip side to this would be that (if set up properly) you can browse through friends’ libraries and find stuff that way and get exposed to it. (Had some neat finds using this method when SoulSeek was working for me…) But when it’s not available from the (say…) 20 ppl on your sharing list, you wind up screwed. Not that there still aren’t plenty of instances where a balls-out free-for-all P2P mayhem session still winds up being totally fruitless. Sometimes what you want just isn’t out there.

So is this “trusted”, semi-private P2P network really a better idea? Depends on your goals, I guess. Sounds good to me.

The third installment of this rivetting series!

After about a week or so of using these VNC-wares, I think I’ve got the knack and am pretty set with them and am ready to write up my report.

osx2x-to-WinVNC: The first one I got going. And the one that seems to work best. On Detonator-3, WinVNC seems to have a plethora of easily configurable options (see below). It sits politely in the tray awaiting connections (in server mode) and has (in client mode) allowed me to grab a window in which to view KetelOne. On KetelOne, osx2x is so simple it hurts — just click new connection, punch in the host, and specify type. That’s pretty much it. It hasn’t hogged memory and done nothing else unexpected. Even better, it handles cmd-tab’s well — and by “well” I mean, it doesn’t hang the system temporarily (*ahem* more on this later) and there’s been no noticeable lag in system event responses or anything like that. Top notch all around (so far).

WinVNC screenshot


osx2x screenshot

Win2VNC-to-OSXvnc: “The other way arounnd” — here’s to rocking the fullsize keyboard and trackball to run both machines. “The way I wanted it” — strictly for the full size action — and because the keyboard/trackball are already hooked up to the PC. On KetelOne, OSXvnc is proving to be a pretty solid and stable VNC server that isn’t too terribly complex in its configuration or anything like that. It has a decent GUI for its options — but I’m leaning twd setting up shellscripts for launching it (etc.) based on location and what not. The only weird hiccup I really experienced the whole time was the initial couple of sessions where the screen saver would launch (even after turning it off) every time the cursor left the screen. Fortunately, the ppl at Redstone were quick in responding to my inquiry (less than 24 hrs!) — letting me know that the cursor shoots to bottom-right corner on “exit” — which is where I had hot-cornered my screensaver. Hmm… Not too bad. As for Win2VNC… It’s also brutally simple and typically connects w/o fail to KetelOne. However, it isn’t as good as osx2x about several things. First of all, alt-tabs are handled badly and wind up causing the mouse (and sometimes the keyboard too) to stop responding for several minutes. This sometimes seems to get resolved with some right-clicking but not always. Also, the option key seems to be mapped to the same key as the Win key … so you lose lots of keyboard shortcuts b/c every stroke of “option” opens the Start menu on the PC and the mouse freaks out all over again. Some other weird system events seem to cause this too. An AIM chat Window launched on the PC and the focus freaked out. Not so sure what all this means (besides the occassional pain in the ass) but can’t really complain about something that didn’t really cost a dime. So… The bug list for the Win2VNC ppl: Fix the key-handling.

The Non-Expert: IKEA Adventure. Too true? Or guilty pleasure?

Per Mike’s request, here are the gratuitous screenshots of my desktops for all to see…

First up: Detonator-3:

…as you can see, pretty sparse. Next up: KetelOne:

What’s on my Dock? Finder, Sherlock, iChat, Safari, Mail, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, Word, Excel, jEdit, Fufu, Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Quicken, Stickies | Home, Favotires, minimized Mail, Trash!

OK… Maybe this is totally and I do mean totally random. Any maybe I’m the only one who will give a shit about this in the whole world but… Doesn’t it seem just plain wrong somehow that a text book would have decent cover design?

Apparently the good folks at McGraw-Hill Science (etc.) felt that Raymond Chang’s Chemistry, Seventh Edition was deserving of some pretty sweet design acumen to grace it’s cover. And perhaps this is a change for the best (all things considered). However, when I think “text book” (even “chemistry text book”) the mental image that comes to mind is that of a vaguely gradiented color like puke-green-to-light-puke-green or some bold solid like burnt-buttered-toast … maybe (if the graphic designer was really cutting edge) that put some irrelevant illustration on the cover — like a flower or some kind of animal in motion.

This just messes with my head a bit too much.

Some awesome image work by this guy Edward Burtynsky (via BoingBoing). As much as I hate to use words like this — there’s some really visceral stuff in there. I’m sure the “real” prints carry a lot more weight than these digital reproductions — but they’re all pretty damn neat. Especially if you (like me) are into subversive and/or apocolyptic. My favorite is below:

Feng Jie #9

Additional shout-outs to the local images! Rock it Barre!

So… osx2x on KetelOne and VNC on Detonator-3 later and we have success! The reverse of what I was originally going for… But just the same it’s a huge leap. The weirdest part so far is cmd+C’ing everything on KetelOne and then trying to remember that I still need to ctrl+C stuff on D-3. Paradigm shifts in weird, very small degrees. Getting warm though. Which is nice in this cold weather. Again, my hat’s off to Tao of Mac and CrazyBob (which we’ll be returning to later, for obvious reasons)

So far the only truly irritating thing about the VNC experience is that the sensitive screen edge contaminates Exposé. Here we go trying to whip out our many windows and next thing we know, we’re on the other screen. Grr…

UPDATED: Revisiting CrazyBob paid off. osxvnc and win2vnc later and we can now swing this both ways. Which is totally sweet b/c now I can totally justify the upgrade to the keyboard I want. Now if I can just get KetelOne to stop launching the screensaver everytime I leave the screen…

Glossed over it on Tao of Mac but returned to reading up on osx2x after a co-worker randomly chatted me in the middle of the day to ask if I’d heard of it. At first my wires crossed on it and i was like is that some alt x-window mgr or s/thing? not so much… Funny… All of the sudden, this comes up a bunch of times in the span of like 3 days.

The interesting part is that I’d basically all but resigned myself to the ol’ *le sigh* of back and forthing w/r/t/ keyboards/mice. But this may very well X that whole thing out of the equation. Now to spend 15 minutes playing around with it. (Add’l hurdles to get it func’ing at work — but all due course… anyone know of a cheap 2-port fast ethernet hub?)