Centauri's Thoughts

After all this time, finally, people are starting to get it. Hamas is NOT helping the Gaza strip, they are using the people for human shields, like the cowardly animals they are.

I'm surprised that its finally hitting the MSM, but it is, perhaps because some Palestinians themselves are finally talking.

Even Arab countries are split on the issue.

This is great! The more processes they find to liberate hydrogen, the better.

This one uses two sets of specially formulated aluminum, one acts as a base, and one as an acid, and they break the bonds in water molecules to liberate the hydrogen.

This process happens at room temperature and without input of more energy.

Read the full details on physorg.com here.

I have been a programmer for many years, and when I was first learning computer languages, I thought I could solve all the worlds problems in this language I was working in. After all, I was proficient in it, and could see many uses for it.

After some time and few more languages, I began to learn that each language has its strengths and weaknesses. Although I can make most any language I am familiar with, do what I need it do to (with some coaxing), I lost those magical goggles that said any one language was perfect for all things.

That brings me to the power of scripting and pipelining. lets say you have something like this:

grep mystring Myfile | sort | cut -f1 > newfile

grep could be a C program, and sort could be a ruby script and cut could be a perl program. Of course, in this example, they would most likely ALL be C, but the point is they don't have to be.

Its a matter of using the best tool for the job. Some are good at string processing, some are tooled for the math, some can deal in arrays and hashes extremely well. The point is to understand the strengths (and weaknesses) of each language, and make the best decisions you can on this (given that you understand each language sufficiently well).

I suppose this is why I explore so many different languages, and try to do my standard program project in each one to learn the basics of the language (my standard project is to make a rolodex, which incorporates the entry and edit of name, address, city, state and zip, phone number into a collection of records, with full add, edit, update and delete abilities)

I have been a long-time reader of "Iraq the Model" and after reading todays post, felt it was definitely worth sharing with all!

The Security Council resolution 1859 states, among other things, that Iraq is no longer a threat to its neighbors, region, or the world. The United States has succeeded in transforming a bellicose, autocratic state into a friendly one that is making steady progress towards becoming a self-sustaining democracy — the international community is finally coming to recognize this transformation.

and...

The headlines for those cynics do not go beyond the throw of a shoe, whereas my headlines look into the future and speak of a new Iraq. My headlines speak of agreements with our friends in American industries who will help us have 24 hours of electricity and equip a strong army dedicated to serving and protecting the Iraqi nation. This is a future where Iraq’s billions are used in transparent contracts to build the country and improve economic ties with our true allies and friends, not in shady deals for building palaces, supporting terrorists, and procuring tools of aggression.

See all of it here.

Thousands of Microsoft's Zune media players - the software company's answer to Apple Inc.'s iPod - unexpectedly conked out Wednesday and showed users an error message, prompting references to "Y2K for Zunes." The problems appeared when people tried to start up their devices.

Frustrated users lit up Microsoft's online support forum for Zunes with more than 2,500 messages by Wednesday afternoon.

Late Wednesday, the Redmond, Wash.-based company said the outage affected only the 30-gigabyte Zune models and was caused by a problem with their internal clock. Microsoft expected the problem to clear up as the clocks ticked over to Jan. 1, though users will have to jump through some hoops to get their Zunes back to normal, including letting the batteries die down completely before the devices will restart successfully.

They cant even do a leap year, and they want to put their software in cars?

Reference

Microsoft Corp.'s Internet browser lost a notable number of users during the last half of 2008, according to recently published data, a trend that underscores the growing competition in a market long dominated by the software giant.

Maybe because its buggy and a security problem?

According to data from research firm Net Applications, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser registered a 68 percent market share in December, compared to a nearly 74 percent share as recently as May.

Thats still 68% too much

Firefox captured a 21 percent market share in December, compared to 18 percent in May, according to Net Applications, while Apple's Safari captured a nearly 8 percent share in December, compared to a 6 percent share in May.

Good for you, Firefox!

Reference

And its about time!

Today is the official first day of winter, and in astronomical terms, the shortest day of year (but certainly not the coldest, that takes another month or so).

Its also one of the Pagan celebration times called yule.

Four years from now, it will also coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar, although that calendar is cyclical, and will restart another long cycle the next day.

Some think it means the end of the world. We'll see.

Serious flaw in Internet Explorer not fixed yet

The flaw lets criminals commandeer victims' machines merely by tricking them into visiting Web sites tainted with malicious programming code. As many as 10,000 sites have been compromised since last week to exploit the browser flaw, according to antivirus software maker Trend Micro Inc.

Many security experts, meanwhile, are urging Internet Explorer users to use another browser until a patch is released.

I say use ANY other browser and give up on IE completely. Its too tightly bound to windows, and always will be because M$ made it that way on purpose in the Netscape-IE browser wars eons ago.

Reference

You know its really an abuse of all of our time and effort when we have to develop a system like CAPTCHA.

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo. reference

Spammers have no ethics, morals or respect of other peoples time. They are lazy and greedy, and want the world to provide them a free ride.

We have to spend a lot of time making sure our own software cant be abused by them. e-mail, blogs, forums, comments. anywhere that data can be entered is potentially at risk.

I know I shut down my OWN forums and blogs a few times because of spam.

I have CAPTCHAs now, but this war is far from over.

Since the system rebuild, I had a chance to start some things over, and one of those was getting java and eclipse (using apache tomcat) working on my machine.

This is only the beginning, of course, I have a long ways to go. Luckily, I can learn a lot only by studying code and practicing (as I did to learn C).