Slashdot ran a story about the rumors of a new Indiana Jones movie coming in 2005. I waded through the comments for my readers and found the gem... follow a link to a link and get to this story about a group of kids who created a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark over six years starting at age 12.

I want this t-shirt. I showed this to a friend who then pointed me to the Propaganda Remix Project which has posters with similar sentiments.

My nephews visited this weekend (along with their parents). The 4 yr old introduced us to a phrase that we should all try to use in conversation:

Checkerboard pizza! Oh my gosh, I'm going to poop on my shoes!

I may have to create a new "away" message with this phrase.

I'd heard that last month's earthquake in Algeria affected internet connectivity in Turkey, but I didn't really comprehend how this could happen until I found this map of the undersea cable that provides Turkey's main connection to the 'net. (For those, like me, who are a little undereducated about North African geography, here's another map which shows where Algeria is relative to Morocco.)

Here's a brief example of how my mind wanders...

I received a weekly email from O'Reilly with short blurbs about new content on their site including a link to a story about an Old School unix adventure game... which reminded my of the Infocom "interactive fiction" games I used to play on my Commodore 64.

A quick google search later and I've found a site about interactive fiction games for the Palm platform, including winning entries from the annual interactive fiction competition. Another google search found a site for downloading actual Infocom game files, along with links to executables for playing these games on Win32, java, linux, and palm platforms. (Disclaimer: I'm not sure of the legal status of these games.)

This is certainly more than I needed to know. I don't have much free time as it is.

At lunch yesterday with some co-workers, these otherwise bright technical people insisted that 802.11b networking is very secure. There is ample evidence available which disproves this, even for those networks using 128-bit encryption. For their benefit, I offer this article from wired.com, links to AirSnort and WEPCrack utilities for testing the security of a network, and this entry and this entry from the AirSnort FAQ (hold your mouse over the links to see the the subject of each FAQ entry).

I saw SeatGuru.com mentioned in this month's issue of Consumer Reports. It shows the configuration of seating in the different types of airplanes for the six largest US airlines. The seats are color coded -- from green for a very good seat to red for a bad seat. Hold your mouse over a seat and they tell you what the seat is like.

I'm just appalled and I'm surprised at how surprised and appalled I am.

It seems that during last month's walkout by Democrats in the Texas legislature, the Republicans talked to some of their friends in Washington and got some help tracking down the Democrats from federal agencies including the Dept. of Homeland Security, the FAA, and the FBI. Didn't John Ashcroft assure us that the extended investigative powers would never be used against private citizens?

See this story and this story from the Washington Post.

Notes for a future project for my home network: set up a pseudo-printer via Samba to generate pdf documents. See this article from Linux Magazine and this thread from comp.os.linux.admin (via google groups).

Put on your headphones if you don't want your co-workers to hear Gollum's foul mouth, close your door if you don't want your co-workers to hear you laughing, but watch Gollum's acceptance speech for his award for "Best Virtual Performance" at MTV's Movie Awards.

What started as a quest to confirm my vague memory that version 2.4 of the Linux kernel can handle more than 2GB swap space led to much more the than I need to know about virtual memory management in linux and then to a friendlier site for kernel newbies.

I find that the tenets of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development ring true in my software development experience:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Scott Ambler's site agilemodeling.com has a few good introductory articles. The Agile Alliance site has links to many more articles from different sources.

I seem to recall seeing an article when I found these pages in which the author promoted the idea of writing as few test cases as possible before writing code (contrary to standard extreme programming practice). Instead, he emphasized writing a test case for each debugging session/bug fix and saving each of those. Three weeks later, I can't find this reference. Please let me know if you see it.