General

I'm hearing a growing chorus of people calling for government intervention to halt the increase in gasoline prices. My response to such calls is this: If you want the price to drop, change your travel habits. Kick the habit. Get off the juice. The price is increasing due to two very real reasons, neither of which are under the control of 'greedy oil barons'.

One thought that has been popping into my head over the years, is that the internet has turned everybody (well, maybe not everybody, but sometimes it sure seems like it) into a surrogate data-entry operator.

Quick Take:
Here's a collection of humorous bits about engineers and engineering, from a cow-worker.

Link

I had the 'honor' of rescuing yet another victim of a pre-installed software nightmare. A new co-worker was working with his notebook (a Hewlett-Packard, recent vintage, less than a year old with Vista Home Basic installed).

The complaint? Minimum five (yes, FIVE) minute boot time from power-on to desktop interaction.

After a cursory examination, I found that it wasn't a hardware problem, nor was it due to memory limitations: the system had 512MB RAM, Vista was using just over 300MB with no other applications running (yes, that's a lot, but this is Vista, after all).

Blocking Firefox is a Bad Idea

A friend of mine forwarded me a link to WhyFireFoxIsBlocked.com (no, I won't link to them, because I won't feed this particular bit of link bait.) He asked: what are these people smoking?

My initial response probably makes him wonder what I've been smoking!

AdBlock Plus Is Not The Problem

In a nutshell, at least one webmaster has (and perhaps others have) decided to try to block site visitors who are using Firefox, because of the existence of a popular extension called AdBlock Plus, which has the ability to allow one to visit web sites and never see any ads.

I've been reading up on the issue, and it seems that Firefox-blocking webmasters' position is may be summarized as:

• Firefox users with AdBlock installed are engaging in "theft" (their words, not mine) because they are visiting sites that depend on commercial advertising revenues to support the site, and
• AdBlock developers have taken steps to circumvent webmaster attempts to detect and defeat AdBlock use by site visitors.

(There are other, non-essential and even more inflammatory arguments made about some Firefox users and promoters, but I won't bother with them here because they have nothing to do with the matter at hand.)

If you dig lists and list-making, here are a couple of quick, fun finds I want to share with you all.

Simple Checklists

Want to keep a list of things for your private consumption, or to share with others? Need reminders?? Try ZingLists.

"My Dog is Better than Your Dog" lists

Want to make a list and share it with the world? Want to rank things by popularity? Want to see how others rank the items on your list? Try UnSpun by Amazon.

In the news: another SNAFU related to malfunctioning anti-virus software. See: Symantec breaks Chinese XP systems due to a false positive.

A huge legal battle is forming around the HD-DVD crack posted on numerous websites, including Digg.com. Many sites have pulled the crack (which consists of nothing more than a series of hexadecimal digits making up a decryption key) under legal duress - It appears that Digg.com started to comply but has reversed its position, citing pressure from the Digg.com reader base.

So, it appears that a legal battle is brewing, and Digg.com may be the one to challenge the vastly hideous DMCA in court.