Scott's Blog

I agree with Tim Anderson's article . Microsoft is blowing it with Internet Explorer. IE market share is declining. That in itself is no surprise. IE is associated with a huge number of security issues, and aside from critical fixes Microsoft pretty much abandoned it years ago. I know that an IE team has reappeared in Microsoft, but I find it hard to believe that much will be forthcoming at this stage. Let's also note that the current 80% or 90% share attributed to IE is overly flattering. It's difficult to measure real browser usage, but it's apparent that the switchers tend to include the folk who are best informed and most active on the Web. In other words, it is the most influential people who are switching. It would take a near-miraculous improvement in IE to win them back now. What I find so odd is how hard they fought Netscape (and won) and now they have let IE lapse. On the other hand this site shows that the IE versions have 89% of the market and Firefox a

I know I'll forget this again, so I'll blog it. from itertools import izip xlist = [1, 2, 3] ylist = [5, 6, 7] for x, y in izip(xlist, ylist): print x, y Outputs: 1 5 2 6 3 7 This also works for more than two lists. Zip() and map() also work but izip() should use less memory and perh

I was surprised to hear recently an environmentalist mention (in passing) about DDT in birds. I thought it was well known that the DDT scare was phony, that DDT does far more good than it does harm, and that everyone, including evironmentalists, should help dispel this myth. Here are some links: Why DDT was banned...The lies of Rachel Carson Carson's book started the whole war against DDT. Malaria Still Winning The part about DDTs is in bold. Insecticides This site is less biased, and does show some harm in birds (shell size), but not humans. What the World needs now is DDT , title says it all (long) NY Times.

I've often felt that openly showing weakness (by saying "I don't know", for example) is a sign of inner strength. Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses ? for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it... Herman Melville [via the Cluetrain Manifesto ] It's the weak and insecure that pretend to know something they don't, or never admit to making mistakes. Perhaps this is an indication of Bush 's character?

Interesting post here about how lazer eye surgery is getting cheaper, better and has high patient satisfaction all because it isn't covered by insuring. A coworker of mine recently got some lazer eye surgery done. I asked him about it, he said this company's health plan is great, it fully covers the cost of the surgery. Then he quit.

I don't read the newspaper much, mostly because it's all in Portuguese . Since I sit infront of the computer all day, every day - that's where I get my information. So here's two related links: Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I'm not making this up): They didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses. [ Wired link ] And a somewhat funny distopian future where the New York Times goes offline in 2014 and google and amazon merge to become googlezon.

I was listening to Dave Slusher 's podcast and he kept saying "I don't want to bikeshed this, but..". I didn't know that expression so I turned to google and found this nice site . Here are some interesting links in that page: Bike shed effect Moen's law of bicycles Froggery

This site has a list of 46 free utilities and is Windows centered. My notes: Naviscope to speed up your internet connection (need to check this one out). Xplorer2 Lite , a file managment tool. I kinda miss Midnight Commander perhaps it's similar? Hot Key utility. Not sure if I need that, but it would be nice to have a key to pause and play my tunes or podcasts from within any program. At the moment I'm using FoxyTunes which is pretty useful for this. Registry cleaner Easy Cleaner , hmm should probably clean up my registry sometime. Gadwin screen capture program , I may need this. I've been using Gimp 's screen capture then cropping the result, which works ok, but is slow if you want to do a bunch of screen shots. Stardownloader download accelerator free of ads and other junk. I haven't used a download accelerator since going to bittorrent. Free DLL Cleaner , although disk space is cheap, not sure if it's worth the trouble. Proc

Google bought this company for some reason, but it's very cool. Basically, it's satellite images of the entire world . For many large cities it goes right down to a level where you can see individual cars. Here's an interesting comment from one user: The pictures of Toronto were taken around spring - summer 2002 - I know because that's the year we put in the red cedar chips in the front yard (and boy don't they show up well in a satellite photo), and my truck is parked in front of the house. We moved out in late August that year. posted by Dipsomaniac at 7:36 PM PST on November 21 [via Metafilter] I spent hours looking at Montreal (where I lived when I was young) and São Paulo (where I'm working during the week). I don't really know where I am in São Paulo, but I know that I'm close to a river, plus I'm working at an upper floor in a tall building ( Torre Norte ) so I can look down for features. In a few minutes I was able to find my bu

I've heard about the del.icio.us site for a while but didn't understand what it's all about. There's a lot of buzz about it and some are saying it's the Next Big Thing . My take is that it's a way of saving your bookmarks on the internet. Here's an article that describes it a bit better. I actually use bookmarks a lot less now than in the past. Important stuff I put in my blog, which I can search later. Also I use RSS feeds for everything else.

Via Listamatic I found these sites: Real World Style . I've been looking for this site for a while. I thought I blogged it, but I didn't. What I like about his site is how he makes the images break out of the frame (like the giraffe's nose). I did the same thing with Victor's head on my blog's image. The form stuff is actually so-so. But here's the real gem . He standardized his forms and used the < fieldset > and < label > tags which I didn't even know existed.

I'm bookmarking these pages on CSS: Yahoo!'s CSS redesign . A description of Yahoo!'s changes and some issues. Sort Table . Make all your tables sortable. Ugly as hell but does the job with minimal work. The ThrashBox . Method to make a pretty rounded corner box with title. Sliding Doors . Perty tabbed navigation.

Two show's I don't seem to get here with Sky TV but appear to be popular: Peep Show The Office I'll probably have to snarf it via bittorrent .

I have a 3.5 year old and found two games that both he and I enjoyed. The best was The Simpsons Hit & Run. He likes it because he can pick from a variety of cars and characters (once I unlocked them all). He can also walk and drive, there's a lot of freedom in the game. Another game that he likes but is unable to play by himself is Jedi Knight Academy. He's unable to play first person shooters with the keyboard and mouse - he can play The Simpson's since it works with the joystick. Perhaps I need to buy a gamepad for him to be able to play Jedi Knight. Some may say that Jedi Knight is too violent, and it is near the limit of what I want him to play in terms of violence.

In images , made me laugh out loud via Metafilter

Scathing article in Slate and I totally agree with this one. Despite their self-identification as the party of entrepreneurial, competitive small business, the Bush crowd has shown itself to be a relentless advocate for non-entrepreneurial, competition-averse large businesses.

If you look at some of my blog posts you'll note that I often link to Wikipedia . It's because the information there is often succinct and accurate. Garry Robinson mentioned his experience editing a Wikipedia entry after watching Larry King and the Crown Prince Albert of Monaco, a show that I watched yesterday too. I've also changed an entry there that was probably written by a Brazilian and had some minor gramatical mistakes that I fixed. Wikipedia is really an amazing encyclopedia created by people like you and me.

This article gives a doomsday scenario that may be likely in three years if Dubya doesn't make some drastic changes: Stuff at Walmart will no longer be cheap. Japanese cars become luxury cars. Gas goes to $5.00 a gallon. Coffee and hot chocalate and candy becomes a holiday treat. People start candying apples again for halloween. People stop emmigrating here except for the really desperate ones and the Mexicans. European vacation becomes synonymous with six figure incomes. Interest rates for everything jump up from car loans, house loans, credit cards, etc. Stock market no longer is a credible source of retirement income for middle class - all those 401k's cya so long bye bye. And you have your choice between 25% across the board cutbacks in all government services or runaway inflation. People lining up out the door to get a chance to sign up to go to a foreign country and kill people for a paycheck. Whoring becomes a highly competitive profession as a lot of women try to get

I remember in the great movie Blade Runner where Deckard zooms in on a digital image taken by a security camera util he gets down to the flakes of skin. I felt that way with this 2.5 gigapixel photo , currently the worlds largest. If you're brave you can try and find the people that I found by clicking the above image (I dare you!).

Born to run, arg now I've got that song in my head! . Here's an article that explains that evolution made humans marathon runners. Basically big butts indicates that we evolved to run not walk. We are born to run. According to new research, our bodies are highly evolved for running long distances, an ability that allowed our ancestors to conquer the African savannahs. I remember seeing one of those nature shows where they showed how these Africans would find an bull antilope with large antlers (because they are heavy - duh) and literaly run them down until they collapsed. The show explained that running on two legs is more efficient than four hooves and being able to sweat and carry water makes us able to run for longer distances than most prey. I figure soon we'll evolve a large flat butt so we can sit in front of a computer for 14 hours a day.

There's a beta of Google Local which is used to "Find local businesses and services on the web.". Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to work for Brazil but here's an example in the US, find some water parks near my mom's home . It's a funny coincidence that I was talking with my friend Martin Giroux just yesterday how it would be handy to search for businesses near my location. I've done it many times with the normal google but with limited success. This version is cool because in the results it actually shows a map and has icons in the locations found. From a technical standpoint it probably scans the web page looking for something that looks like an address then looks up the address in a database to get the latitude and longitude. I find this far more useful than say Froogle or google image search which has been around for longer, plus from an economic standpoint, I'm far more likely to look at the google ads shown.

I have three Wacom tablets . My wife has one and I have two (one for work). I've had my oldest tablet for about 10 years, so it's not a bad investment (about $220,00 USD). The Wacom is nice because it's pressure sensitive (nice for drawing), you don't have to touch the pad to make the mouse move, there's no wire (or battery) on the pen, and you can use a normal mouse as well (you don't have to choose one or the other). I initially bought the tablet because I was having repetitive stress type injuries and wanted something different than a mouse. In order to use it for wrist problems you need to change the sensitivity settings to real high. For the past few years I've used the mouse with the left hand and the tablet on the right, but I still use the mouse more frequently. The other reason I bought the mouse was to do drawings on the computer. Unfortunately, I never really picked up the habit.

There's one site I always go to for reviews of digital cameras, dpreview . The depth and breadth of the articles is outstanding. Even has video animations of the LCD displays. My only complaint is that it doesn't review the lower end cameras as much. Highly recommended

The scholar.google.com is now online. Did a search on my wife's name and her article came up first. No such luck with my name, however :-( Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Here's a Salon article (Salon day pass required). Some choice quotes: But to most Americans "freedom" still means untrammeled private-property rights, open markets, workaholism and the belief that somehow we'll all die rich. ... Opinion polls revealed an explosion of anti-American sentiment, even in nations like Britain, Italy and Poland that remained officially within the "coalition of the willing." In several European countries, the United States is viewed as more dangerous to world peace than Iran and North Korea, and George W. Bush may be even less popular in Scandinavia, for example, than he is in the Arab world. ... [...] the European Union now has a much larger population than the United States, and a slightly bigger economy. ... Much of American "productivity," Rifkin suggests, is accounted for by economic activity that might be better described as wasteful: military spending; the endlessly expanding police and prison

This is a music video and comentary ala Denis Leary about the conditions of the world in 2004. ... I walked behind this guy the other day. A homeless guy asked him for money. He looks right at the homeless guy and says why don't you go get a job you bum. People always say that to homeless guys like it is so easy. This homeless guy was wearing his underwear outside his pants. Outside his pants. I'm guessing his resume isn't all up to date. I'm predicting some problems during the interview process. I'm pretty sure even McDonalds has a "underwear goes inside the pants" policy. Not that they enforce it really strictly, but technically I'm sure it is on the books. via Metafilter

Slashdot has a thread talking about the 2004 Election Weirdness but one reply by EMN13 caught my eye. ...Frankly, I think you're looking at democracy and elections entirely too religiously... Democracy pretty much fails as a type of government... Elections don't guarantee any sort of optimum government. They don't require the elected government to in any way actually do what they said they will do. They don't require any sort of competency whatsoever. People actually making the choice aren't actually competent to make that choice. You don't hire people based on the gut feeling of the guy next door, do you? Elections are really expensive. Just think about that lost productivity, etc., in addition to the obvious costs of the process itself. Elections are very coarse grained. You might choose an idiotic president just to get a good staff and party, or the other way around. ... [ EMN13 ] I found myself nodding my head a lot wi

The FCC has increased the fines for public radio and TV broadcasts. The way it works is that someone complains to the FCC of an already broadcasted event and the FCC looks at the footage and then decides if it will fine the TV or radio station and how much to fine them. Unfortunately, a TV or radio station can't go to the FCC and say "we are going to air this, are we going to be fined and by how much?" and the FCC says "We can't tell you, because that would be censorship". Of course that is not true - it wouldn't be sensorship, only if they weren't allowed to show it. If a TV station knew they would be fined $10K they might say, we'll pay the fine, no problem. The problem is they don't know if they will be fined, nor by how much. So you have the policy of "When it doubt, throw it out" like TV's self sensor of the movie Saving Private Ryan. This press release talks more about it, also here and a good one here . Update: Fox

Sophie's maze has a nice button example here . I like the effect and the fact that she's added the option for an icon as well. Here's the actual image that she uses for the background and for the checkmarks: At Listamatic there's a nice one too which uses no images.

My dad came visit me a few years ago in Brazil and before he flew down he was particularly worried about the terrible heat that must exist here. I can see why he might think that way. If you think of Florida, it's gets very hot and humid even in the winter time. The southern-most point of the USA is in Key West Florida (been there) at about 24 degrees north of the equator. Now where I live in Belo Horizonte it is 19 degrees south and São Paulo where I currently work during the week is at about 23 degrees south. So both these cities are closer to the equator, and thus theoretically hotter than Florida is. Now I've lived here for 6 years and I've seen maybe 3 days that it was really insufferably hot. In Belo Horizonte the weather is nearly perfect. There are seasons where it rains a bit more, but more often than not it's a sun shower, rather than cloudy and overcast all the time. Also, when it gets hot it is usually dry, so you don't feel the heat when it is hot. I d

Here's a review of a few places that sell computers with linux pre-installed. Vendors like Dell, Gateway and others. The surprise for me is that none has linux installed on low end machines. In theory you can save $300.00 not installing Windows XP on a machine. If you're are buying a $1000.00 machine this would be a significant savings. My guess is that Microsoft is pressuring these vendors by saying if you sell these machines without Windows you will have to buy Windows at the retail price instead of $50.00 or whatever they normally charge for Windows pre-installed. For the high end machine they can absorb the cost but for low end machines their hands are tied. via slashdot

A number of US states have enacted (or may soon pass) laws that allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control if their beliefs (read: fundamentalist Christian dogma) dictate otherwise. Via Boing Boing

Dunstan Orchard has a very nice web site done up with CSS and Javascript. One nice effect is that the top banner is an illustration of the current weather conditions where he lives ( 90 banners in all) via metafilter

The Kyoto Protocol (also here ) was rejected by Bush again. Previously, the administration said repeatedly that there is some doubts that greenhouse gases would cause global warning, despite a huge amount of evidence to the contrary. The US is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Canada has ratified the treaty, in fact - only the US and Australia has not ratified it. Australia doesn't want to sign it because they fear that the US will have an unfair economic advantage (Canada and Japan were afraid too, but signed it anyway). The administration claims that it doesn't want to sign it because of some details in the Protocol (like the fact that China isn't involved). It's all BS, the administration doesn't want to sign it because of powerful energy lobbies. See Bill Moyers on PBS with Ode to Kyoto: The energy industry's stealth campaign to confuse the public and stop Kyoto also Wikipedia . Treaty doesn't do nearly enough, it's just a stepping st

I've often wondered about the IMF which hands out huge loans to countries and expects these countries to pay back these loans plus interest! The first mistake is that the country shouldn't have accepted these loans, but I'm sure a little corruption can go a long way... Here's an elightening interview ( mp3 , 45 minutes into it) and the text from a former international banker. It's not about the IMF, but here's a snippet. We've built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that. [John Perkins] Perkins also wrote

Here's a particularly good rant. Reminded me a little of the separatism movement in Canada. Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep. link

More thoughts about the music industry. This is the only industry in the world that can see thousands of its retailers close, reduce the number of products it sells via cutbacks in artist rosters and albums released, cut back marketing and promotional dollars and then blame a reduction in sales on someone or something other than themselves. ...[ Mark Cuban ]

An old friend of mine, Sandy Walsh, has started a blog . Here's his feed too.

Clayton Christensen gave a great talk at the Open Source Business Conference 2004 called Capturing the Upside . How can I beat powerful competitors? Companies should look for situations where they can introduce disruptive innovations that harness asymmetries of motivation. In other words, they should pick the fights that powerful competitors either cannot or will not contest. They can do this by either seeking out non-consumers who will welcome a simple product or by launching an attack on the low-end of an incumbent's market among customers the incumbent is actually happy to lose. By the way, IT Conversations has lot's of great talks like this you can download for free (although I think registration is required).

The O'Reilly site has an ON Lamp article which reviews some of the Wiki 's that are available. I was hoping they would give a thumbs up for Moin Moin , a Python based Wiki. They didn't pan it but they said it wasn't as feature rich as some, and not as easy to install as others. For me however, I'm stoked because Moin Moin is written in Python, what more could you want?

Here's the problem I've had installing Apache 2 on Windows XP: (OS 10048)Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted. : make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80 no listening sockets available, shutting down Unable to open logs Solution: after exiting from the excellent Skype and I was able to install (using Apache -k install) . So Skype appears to be using port 80 or something and caused some grief installing Apache - good to know.

This article talks about some issues with Python's memory managment: I began looking for my memory leak by creating a minimal test that ran a big search. Next, I added " del reference " statements one variable at a time, trying to find which one was holding on to memory. I deleted all my variables and still my program's size did not change. Next, I added calls to force Python's cyclic garbage collector to run, in case I had circular references that were keeping the objects from being deleted. Python still consumed a gigabyte of memory. Finally, I turned to Google to see if anyone else has had a similar problem. I turned up a mailing list thread about Python never returning memory to the operating system . It turns out that this is a flaw with the Python interpreter. People work around it by spawning multiple processes or using data structures on disk. Then I was curious, why would Python choose to never free memory? Many hours later, I now know far more than I

Kitty-corner is correctly called catercorner , now I know. From the word of the day mailing list at yourDictionary.com .

I didn't know about Squid before. From the Postgres perfomance mailing list I noticed a recomendation to use Squid to reduce the load and speedup your server. ...I've found that our CMS spends more time sending a 23KB image to a dial up user than it does generating and serving dynamic content. This means that if you have a "light" squid process who caches and serves your images and static content from it's cache then your apache processes can truly focus on only the dynamic data. Case in point: A first time visitor hits your home page. A dynamic page is generated (in about 1 second) and served (taking 2 more seconds) which contains links to 20 additional files (images, styles and etc). Then expensive apache processes are used to serve each of those 20 files, which takes an additional 14 seconds. Your precious application server processes have now spent 14 seconds serving stuff that could have been served by an upstream cache. I am all for using ups

I really like the modern kids movies like Shrek (and Shrek II ), Monsters Inc.. All of them are highly recommended, I've seen some of them lots of times. Some more I'd like to get is: The Incredibles The Triplets of Belleville Spirited Away

Dan Gillmor sums up what the continuation of Bush's presidency means for America. The Republicans have an even stronger congressional majority. They have shown how gladly ruthless they can be in using their power. Bush and his allies have never believed in compromise. They have even less incentive to govern from the middle now, even though the nation remains bitterly divided. There's no secret about what's coming. We don't have that excuse this time. Here comes more fiscal recklessness -- as we widen the chasm between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else, cementing a plutocracy into our national fiber, we'll pay our national bills on the Treasury Bill credit card for the next few years. Many economists expect a Brazil-like financial crisis to hit the U.S. before the end of the decade. If we muddle our way though the near term, we'll still have left our kids with the bill. Here comes an expansion of the American empire abroad, a fueling of fear and loathing els