Back in 1997 Marcus Ranum came up with the concept of Artificial Ignorance. Rather than rely on an intelligent system to report interesting data, he used a stupid system to ignore boring data. By definition, anything left over has to be interesting. A nice way of approaching a difficult problem — in this case, log file analysis.
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I found this site today: a PVC flamethrower. This is truly the most wonderful device ever invented, no?
06 February 2018: updated URL
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Well, Google finally released their Jabber-based chat service. It looks like it could be a beautiful thing.
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Therion is a really cool bit of free software for making maps of caves. I almost wish that I were a spelunker.
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Practical Common Lisp is an excellent introduction to and tutorial for ANSI Common Lisp. The author guides one through the creation of an MP3-streaming server, all the while introducing one to the amazing features of this most powerful of computer languages.
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I just found a link to freeshell.org, which offers free Unix shell accounts. It sounds very neat, like Unix accounts were in the good old days: large numbers of users online all the time; chatting with your friends; playing games. They also offer email and web space.
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Years ago in school I was introduced to Lisp; my opinion was not very favourable. It appeared to be a goofy theoretical language, useful for exploring functional programming and maybe for AI work, but not for solving real-world problems. I don’t believe that I’m alone in having gotten that impression; for some reason all too many college CS programmes focus on teaching C and Java.
Be that as it may, I had the sneaking suspicion that Lisp might actually be far more practical than it had appeared.
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A eight-character password is hardly sufficient to protect your data; a multi-word passphrase is necessary. But how should one be chosen? Diceware Passphrases are chosen completely randomly using a large list of English words (I would recommend adding a nonsense word in the middle of the phrase in order to confuse anyone knows that you use the system).
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The Linux Cookbook (perhaps more accurately called The Unix Cookbook) is a collection of various clever ways to do things on the command line. Worth a look, even if just to see how folks used to do things. Me, I still use the CLI for just about everything — it’s fast and pleasant to use, and doesn’t get in my way.
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Industry maven Michael Malone believes that there’s something rotten in Redmond — could Microsoft be on the beginning of its long slow descent?
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The Geek Code is a convenient shorthand for representing one’s geekiness. Mine is:
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GCS d+ s: a- C+++ ULSA++++ P--- L+++ E+++ W+++ N++ o+ K w--- O-- M- V-- PS++/-- PE++ Y+ PGP+ t--- 5++ X-- R tv--/+ b+++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h+ r--/--- !x-- ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ Well, I think it’s cool …
3 February 2018: updated link
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emms is the Emacs Multimedia System; it allows one to play audio and video (hence the ‘multimedia’ …) from within emacs. Emacs, of course, is the Swiss Army text editor.
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