Into The Weeds

It appears that Tuesday's episode of Frontline will deal, at least in part, with Second Life. The trailer (embedded below) has some good bits in there about the use of SL for collaboration and both business and social/pleasure stuff. So, check your local PBS listings and set yer tivos and stuff!

"We came, we saw, we kicked it's ass!"

Trust me, it's catchy. Watch it twice.

From an entry on ugliesttatoos.com(site is somewhat NSFW but this entry isn't):

That said, in a few years there will be a generation of adults for whom The Goonies is not the nostalgic icon that it is for us. And those people are going to ask you why you have a tattoo of a retarded pirate on your arm. If there are any measures you can take to prepare yourself for this outcome, you should probably do it.

...and that's sad.

For those who are not aware, when I went to MIT I lived in the East Campus dormitory, on the hall known as Second West (a.k.a. Putz). These days, Putz has a pretty neat group of people and an informal tradition of holding "slug talks," or opportunities for someone to give a brief presentation and have a chance to share some knowledge with the group. Most of these so far have been computery in nature, and specifically computer-sciency. I hear there's going to be a good one next week on neural plasticity and long term potentiation (LTP -- it's how we learn and form memories in our brains pretty much).

Since my day-to-day life deals with computer science in a more practical and hands-on way, the topics that I have chosen are more practical in nature. Last semester, I gave a talk about MySQL in production, and specifically how we use it at Linden Lab to make Second Life work.

Just last week, however, I gave a slugtalk describing how DNS works out here in the real world. I think it went pretty well. Download my slide deck as a PDF here.

"Founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, what is now Yahoo GeoCities was one of the first services to offer an easy way for early Internet surfers to publish their own Web pages."

GeoCities, once one of the 10 most visited domains of the entire internet, and repository of around 10 terabytes of people's home pages and information dating back to 1994 is shutting down today. Ken Gagne says all that needs to be said about it in his excellent ComputerWorld blog post today. Soon we'll be losing such gems as my high school friend Josh's Phiggity-Phat Home Page from c. 1996, featuring amazing gems on Fred Couples, David Carradine, Peter North, and the A-Team. Such a loss, indeed. Thankfully, the archive team is working on saving it. Also, check out XKCD's tribute to geocities in today's comic.

An awesome retro news report from 1988 about the super scary Morris Worm. Centered on MIT, it features none other than jis himself a few times. And an amish part-time virus hunter cum MIT student? Courtesy of The Scottographer .

Some good quotes: "the students were safe ... their computers were not." "the suspect, somewhere.... a dark genius."

Take the following with a grain of salt. I'm just kind of bored and figured it's been a while since I've blogged. Here are some experiences of mine (in chronological order) that might be construed as product and/or brand endorsements:

• HP Color LaserJet 2550n - September 2005: Paying $500 for a color laser printer turned out to be a financially and technically sound decision after all. In the 4 years that this printer has been around, the toner cartridges have been replaced once, and the printer is still in 100% working order. Contrast that to any of the ink-jet printers out there that break after a year, and need $50 ink cartridge replacements regularly (even when they're not being used and just dry out). These days, however, it looks like consumer-grade color laser printing is starting to go down the ink-jet road with small-quantity metered toner cartridges and shoddily built hardware.
• Dell 2405FPW - August 2005: Sure, these days 24" LCDs are pretty standard, but back then it was a pretty big leap. It still holds up beautifully 4 years later and has put several CRT screens to rest.
• TiVo Series 2 DVR - December 2004: Just see this entry from 2006 for some of the reasons why TiVo is a life-changing experience. And no, I still don't mean the crappy standard HD DVR that the cable/satellite companies foist upon us. These days, however, Comcast (in Boston at least) offers a DVR with the actual TiVo software installed. I find it quite serviceable, and a definite improvement over the craptastic regular DVR, but it's still not the whole experience. The 'ol Series 2 is still going strong, and I'm considering upgrading to a TiVo HD cablecard unit at some point.
• Power Mac G4 - October 2003: It's hard to believe that it was 6 years ago that I made the switch (see this blog entry from '06 for some pontification on the subject). That G4 tower has been such a horse that it's still sitting here under my desk in use as a secondary system for bittorrent clients, file serving, and DVD/CD burning. Unfortunately, with Snow Leopard's removal of support for the PPC architecture, the end of the road may be coming soon.
• Ikea "Poang" Chair - August 2002: Who knew that a $70 wood and fabric chair could be so comfortable, durable and not too bad looking either?
• Sony 24" wega TV - December 2000: Almost 9 years later and it's just as good as the day it arrived as a christmas present. I know, not a "purchase," but it deserves to be on here anyway. It's not HD, but has a great picture and I can easily see it lasting another 9 years.

On my way into the office this morning I did something I usually don't do. I grabbed a copy of Stuff Magazine because on the cover was none other than everybody's favorite bassist with the stylin' threads and handlebar mustache, Zachariah Hickman:

Turns out there's a section inside about 11 Bostonians with signature looks, and of course he's featured prominently in it. He calls it: "cowboy suits, seersucker, and general haberdashery." General haberdashery, indeed. Figured my pickin' partners would enjoy this.

This video is pretty awesome in a "glad that's not me" and "I hope they have offsite backups" kind of way. At around 5:21 watch the plate glass window fail, and then at 6:10 the video switches to a camera in the machine room. Servers and water don't mix.