Here’s an equation that, when graphed, draws itself.

Our brain hurts.

Whoa. This is at once incredibly nerdy and very well-considered.

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

Go read it. It’s not long. (Widely linked; we got it from JWZ.)

(Patrick: Email me your response to avoid the suckery that is the heathen comment engine.)

Boing Boing reports that George Clooney and SciFi are making a miniseries out of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.

Please God don’t let them fuck this up.

We’ve long found Ford tedious, precious, annoying, but this bit redeems just about everything. On the misuse of the phrase “guilty pleasure:”

[But] Justin Timberlake is not a guilty pleasure. Putting oven cleaner in your daughter’s Similac is a guilty pleasure, or smearing birdseed on your balls and visiting an aviary. Having a thing for Sting’s lutework —

Goddammit. As I was drafting this my web server, which resides in Texas, was hacked into by Spaniards. Spamming Spaniards, or at least someone coming in through a machine in Spain. Off I go to set up a new, clean, new device that will present more of a challenge to intruders.

There’s already a level 70 in the new WoW expansion.

This is precisely the same as “we don’t have a problem; Bob drinks WAAAAAY more than we do!”

While on a business trip, you buy (a) the WoW expansion and (b) a new mouse to play it with, as you left your travel mouse at home and find playing games with the trackpad on your laptop unsatisfying.

Amusingly, in the utterly anonymous shopping center where our hotel is, there’s an EB Games. EB was sold out, unless you’d thought to pre-order the expansion at this particular podunk pissant hole-in-the-wall shop. However, around the corner there is an Apple store.

The Apple store had a shelf full. Blizzard has, for most of its history, shipped Mac and PC versions of their games on the same day, and on the same media. We expect many folks have left the EB shop disappointed with no idea they could get their jollies just 100 yards away.

We post this from gate B-62A at IAH in Houston, where an open wireless access point called “co_crew_wireless” allowed us in, presumably a Continental network. We reckon either they know it’s open and don’t care, or don’t know it’s open and intend for it to be a corporate network only, or it’s someone’s attempt to sniff traffic and such for nefarious purposes.

If the latter, good luck, buddy. We do everything over SSH anyway.

Mark Frauenfelder points out that 1-880-free-411 and 1-800-411-metro are free, ad-supported information lines. Stop paying your carrier, listen to a 12-second ad, and get the same info for free.

Nice tip.

Crap. We just lost the Game.

Some gases are sufficiently heavier than air that it is possible to trap them in a box and float”lightweight items on them. (Widely linked.)

We forget where we found this, but it’s been open in Firefox all week. We like it. Enjoy.

If this behind-the-scenes video is any indication, Walking With Dinosaurs will be a must-see show when it reaches the US.

(Otherwise known as the “um, duh” category for technical types, natch.)

David Pogue over at the NYTimes has an illustrative bit up today (well, Thursday) about just exactly how insecure traffic is at a public wifi hotspot. Your computer itself may be secure, but the data you send out is pretty much open for perusal by anyone who can get on the network.

While this isn’t news to at least some of you Heathen, we figure it’s a big enough topic that we may as well cover it here. Go read Pogue, or follow along with our summary.

The Intarwub — a series of tubes, of course — is basically insecure. Mail and web traffic move all over the world in completely unencrypted packets. This wasn’t that big of a deal in the years before wireless, since getting access to a network involved plugging in an actual cable; sure, the guy in the cube next to you could read your incoming mail, but he’s probably got better stuff to do, and (furthermore) probably isn’t a nefarious identity thief.

Well, enter Wifi. Now every self-respecting coffeeshop, sandwich place, pizza joint, etc., has a $99 Linksys and a DSL connection, the better to attract customers with. This is great and all, but there’s a downside. All that traffic that was moving over a physical wire is now in the air, unencrypted, and anyone with a smattering of technical know-how can sniff the network and get access to everything you send or receive.

No, really.

This is actually a HUGE deal for business travellers, since lots of biz hotels use wifi instead of wired connections in the rooms — meaning a bad guy could just check into room 105 and leave his laptop running all night, merrily capturing packets for later analysis.

Scary, huh?

Some of you are now wondering “But Mr Heathen! My bank/webmail/dominatrix/catfish purveyor/whatever web site says they’re secure!” This may be true! There’s hope! Web browsers have, since forever, had the ability to negotiate a completely encrypted connection to a given server. This is what that little lock icon means (Firefox goes one better by turning the address bar yellow when the connection is secure). This technology is called “SSL” (for “secure sockets layer”), and it’s pretty robust. A network-sniffing goon could still get at your network packets, but he’d get only gibberish if the traffic was encrypted (and while SSL is breakable, few will go to the trouble when there are plenty of plaintext packets to sniff).

Gmail and, we think, several other webmail providers have an option to encrypt your mail session with SSL. So do most banks as well as any online retailer worth a damn (though they probably won’t offer it until you get to the part where you put in identifying details or credit card info). Also, some kinds of email can be sent over SSL as a matter of course, which is an excellent idea for road warriors (ask your sysadmin).

So, there are a few important takeaways here:

1. First, secure your home wifi. Use WPA encryption if you can, WEP if you can’t, and consider even applying a MAC filter. This “MAC” has nothing to do with Apple or cosmetics; every network device (wired or wireless) has a unique Media Access Control address; it’s a string of letters and numbers. All modern home routers have the ability to limit their service to a list of known-good MAC addresses (or, conversely, keep known-bad MACs off the network).

2. When you’re in Starbuck’s or whatever, be careful about how you read your mail and what you do online. Just reading the news? Don’t sweat it. Reading your email? Probably time to think about some countermeasures. Shopping or doing something sensitive for work? Go home, or get secure.

3. If your email provider offers an encrypted method of getting email, USE IT.

4. If you must do sensitive things on an open or near-open wireless connection, consider using any of the fine personal Virtual Private Networking tools mentioned in the comments to Pogue’s piece. We don’t use any of ’em, so we can’t tell you which one is better.

(What do we do? Something terribly geeky, but very effective. We use a technology called “SSH tunnels” to manage email and web browsing on the road, which sends all our traffic to our secure server in an encrypted “tunnel” before it goes out to the Internet at large. Sniff our coffeeshop packets all you want; we’re locked up tight. (This is sort of like a primitive VPN solution, but it’s quick and easy if you know what you’re doing, and even then nonsavvy can use it if a savvy type sets it up for them. (HDANCN?)))

Jamais Cascio has found a LEGO factory that makes LEGO cars, i.e. someone has made a machine to play with LEGO. (There’s video linked from his blog post.)

Nanobots and grey goo cannot be far behind.

Or, rather, there is if you plan on upgrading to Vista. Bruce Schneier points us at an exhaustive review of all the ways Microsoft is removing functionality and making Windows less useful as part of the changeover to Vista. Here’s it in a nutshell: Vista is going to be chock full of Digital Rights Management “features” that no user would ever want, let alone pay for. There’s more analysis of the paper elsewhere, but only the really geeky of you will read the whole thing, so I’ll include the executive executive summary as a teaser:

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

Word.

This woman — a/k/a “Winnie;” don’t miss the second link — has an Erdos-Bacon number of 6.

This is widely seen as exceeding Portman’s score of 9.

Via McSweeney’s, Richard Dawkins speaks to a kindergarten class about Santa Claus.

Don’t know his name? You damn sure know his work. Shugart helped develop the first hard drive 50 years ago at IBM, and later left to found Seagate. He was 76.

(Yes, that means he was doing world-changing work in his mid-20s. Feel good now, you lazy bum?)

It’s no secret that, here at Heathen, we prefer Macs and Open Source tools to the Microsoft juggernaut. We didn’t care all that much until about 1998 or so, when we realized how awful Windows was on a laptop — for example, sleep never worked right, and if recent experience is any indication, it still won’t, even on XP — and how much easier things seemed to be for our Powerbook-using colleagues. We were doing project management consulting at the time on Internet software, so we lived in Office, which meant we could make the jump with little or not trouble. We jumped, and were MUCH happier — even moreso when Apple went to OS X, which gave us our geekiest heart’s desire: Unix with a good front end.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying it’s been a coon’s age since we actually had to DO something with Windows. “Get a Mac” has been our advice to friends and relatives for years, and we back it up with a growing inability to troubleshoot “modern” Windows installations (not that the tech support people are much better; “nuke it from orbit,” a/k/a “wipe and reinstall” seems to be the standard bit of advice for a Windows machine with some odd problem).

Today, though, we’re working with a piece of software our firm wrote to integrate our main product with client back-end systems. It’s Java, so it’ll run anywhere, but we’re testing on an XP machine because that’s the target platform for the current client.

Holy CRAP XP sucks ass. Just a few fun things we’ve discovered:

• Can’t find the Control Panel window you just opened? That’s because the Control Panel is actually an instance of the “Windows Explorer” file manager. This in contrast to, say, the Services manager, which IS a program. Is interface consistency somehow antithetical to the Windows worldview?

• XP Pro and XP Home have drastically different expectations user-wise; among them are the location of the home directory for the system user. Why is this? What the fuck, Bill?

• WTF is the Windows equivalent of “tail -f”? Is there such a thing? How else do you watch a goddamn log?

Grrrr.

Check out Undercover, software to install on a Mac to facilitate recovery in case it’s stolen. Obviously, the primary market is laptops, but it works for any OS X machine. There’s even an example of recovery on the site, including pictures of the thief (possible because all new Macbooks and Macbook Pros have built-in cameras). In that case, the laptop was recovered by police within 3 days thanks to the information reported by Undercover to the monitoring service (which led them to a physical address, supplied by the thief’s ISP).

From Craigslist NY.

Or, why you still can’t divide by zero no matter what those fools say.

It has come to our attention that many of you aren’t keeping up with Heathen, or perhaps other sites you wish you had time to read. We admit, it’s a daunting task. However, the Web has answered at least part of this problem with the idea of feeds.

Most blogs today have a feed you can access with a special program called a feed reader (or news reader). You give these programs your list of feed addresses, and they obligingly go out, check for new material, download it, and present it for your review in a neat interface. Obviously, this is way more efficient than manually visiting each site, or even than having a folder of links to be opened as tabs simultaneously. You just leave it running in the background, and it shows YOU when, for example, BoingBoing has new material. Most of them also cache the info, so it can be read when you’re offline.

We here at Heathen use a program called NetNewsWire, which is really the go-to feed application for the Mac. It’s not free, but it is very strong and quite worth the modest cost. There are, of course, alternatives, including both Thunderbird (Firefox’s mail-reading sibling) and Apple’s Safari, but neither have the capabilities or flexibility of NNW.

On a PC, you of course continue to have the option of Thunderbird, but you can’t have NNW. However, the firm that owns NewNewsWire also makes a Windows app called FeedDemon that we suspect is also cool (though we’ve never used it). It’s also not free, but it is cheap. We’re sure there are free and open-source options as well, but have no idea what they may be.

Enjoy.

2006 has been a banner year for Heathen, since we crossed 4,000 total posts and then, two posts ago, made 2006 the first 1,000-post-year.

Like you care. Heh.

If you’ve ever worked as a vaguely technical person around people who Just Don’t Get It, this poorly drawn but hilarious cartoon is for you.

We now have a custom favicon. Heh.

Game Over.

The new version of Parallels Desktop allows Intel-based Macs to run Windows apps side by side with Mac apps without the clumsy “Windows in a window” separation we’re used to from products like Virtual PC. Also, Mac-style keyboard shortcuts Just Work, as does copy-and-paste and drag-and-drop file manipulation.

The largest container ship in the world just launched. The Emma Maersk is a quarter-mile in length, making her bigger even than the largest aircraft carriers. Her capacity is better than double “regular” container ships, and she cruises at 27 knots. With a crew of only 13.

Wacky.

We here at Heathen enjoy The Daily WTF as much as any geek. It’s a little bit of “we’re glad we’re smarter than that!” and a little bit schadenfreud, sure, but it’s fun.

Today’s entry, however, is the first to actually trigger that “oh my sweet lord NO” quesy feeling in the pit of our stomach. Maybe it’s because we’re at a client site even as we speak, and maybe it’s because we can see how this might happen, but it’s still pretty horrifying.

In the ring this time: Stan Lee and Jack Chick.

As it turns out, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a completely legitimate english sentence.

(Via Laura Lemay.)

Dude, we’re totally posting this from a gas station.

Here’s 100 fantastic shots courtesy of everyone’s favorite space telescope.

Found at BoingBoing:

The iconic cold-war base Cheyenne Mountain is being retired. No word yet on when WOPR will show up on eBay.

Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog quadruped robot can negotiate uneven terrain, and even resists being kicked over. Also, it looks very, very weird. (YouTube link.)

We’ve talked for years about wanting to build a dynamic, omnibus historical timeline, with just about every kind of event mapped onto it — nation-states, dynasties, empires, global events, wars, advances, discoveries, etc. — so that when someone says something about, say, the Hundred Years War, you could consult the timeline and see the historical context. Oh, and, by the way, what was happening in China then? The way we’ve been kicking it around, it’d be a database-driven tool that would allow filtration by geography, subject, etc., for dynamic views of history at a glance.

We didn’t figure we were inventing the idea of an omnibus timeline, and we were right: Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools weblog points out Rand McNally’s Histomap of World History (crappy name, neat idea). It’s a 4-foot-high chart showing much of what we’re talking about, though of course in dead-tree form it’s not possible to filter; you’re stuck with the view they give you. Still, it seems awful darn cool, and we’d love to put one on our office wall. At ten bucks, why not?

(Oh, by the way: we’re pretty sure this is the 4,000th installment of Heathen. Yay!)

We’ve been shaking our heads at Gartner for years now, but this one really takes the cake. Via /., we hear that Gartner thinks Apple should get out of the hardware business. Er, right. How about their record breaking quarter just now, or the runaway success of the iPod? Failing the obviousness of those, how about something that should be clear to people who bill themselves as analysts: Apple kit just works because they own the whole product. Making the hardware gives them control of far more aspects of the product, which translates into the overall better user experience common to Apple products.

But it’s actually even stupider that just missing all those points: Gartner actually thinks Apple should outsource to Dell. We don’t know what they’re smoking (or how they’re making money), but we sure would like some. Have the folks at Gartner compared an Inspiron to a Powerbook lately? We’re guessing not.

Update: Mac pundit John Gruber of Daring Fireball agrees.

What if Clippy came to PHP?

(If you don’t get it, you’re probably better off. Hat tip to Mike.)

There’s now a GoogleMaps for Treos. You can zoom in and out, and scroll the map with the stylus. Awesome.

We’ve hacked the comment plug-in to require some additional attention for those of you prone to participation. Just read the instructions and you’ll be fine.

So, this morning we woke up to discover that the domain name for IBP had expired (on 8/30, no less; that it worked until yesterday was a grace period). Visits to the site redirected to Network Solutions. Oops. Turns out, the owner of record was the founding artistic director — who left in 2001, and whose email presumably hasn’t worked since. Double Ooops.

After consulting with the managing director, we — in our dual capacity as Head Nerd and President — got on the phone to NetSol to see if we couldn’t get this taken care of. Sure enough, we could, even if we’re not on the domain record already. Great!

Heathen: “So, what’s your annual rate for domains now?”

Them: “$34.95, but it drops to $19.95 if you buy five years, which is a much better deal!”

Heathen: (paraphrased) “OMGWTF!!!!!!!1!!!1!!!!!”

Er, right. NetSol — perhaps the 2nd least favorite network company, behind Verisign — is still charging NEARLY FORTY BUCKS A YEAR for basic registrations. To put this in perspective, the official Heathen registrar, GoDaddy, charges $8.95 for single year registrations, with discounts for multiyear. NetSol is charging over 350% of the prevailing OpenSRS rate, with no value add.

When we picked our jaw up off the floor, we managed to ask how they could possibly justify this, and also about the process involved in transferring the domains to another, more reasonable, less evil registrar. This was, apparently, the keyword, and presently we were on the phone with someone in Customer Care — presumably, the prior department was “Customer Assrape” — who offered us $8.75 a year. When asked how they could possibly justify the higher rates, especially when they back off so quickly, we got a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. However, the upshot is that Infernal Bridegroom’s .com and .org registrations are now fixed. And next summer, when we get close to the expiry again, we’re totally moving these over to an OpenSRS registrar that doesn’t try to fuck us.

(Via BB.)

Comments should be fixed now.

Lisa2.com is a web site about the Apple Lisa that claims to be h osted on one, but Netcraft knows better.

On the other hand, this site really is hosted on a Newton, so there you go.

We have an old Newton. Can newton.mischeathen.com be far from springing to life?

So, this afternoon Mike mentioned trying Thunderbird as a one-stop solution for both email and RSS feeds, which sounded kind of interesting. It would have to be VERY good to get us to switch from using the native Mail.app plus the standalone NetNewsWire. Mail is no great mail client, but it wins by being completely integrated with the Apple Address Book, which in turn syncs seamlessly with the Treo; there’s no way we’re going back to multiple address lists. NNW, on the other hand, is legitimately excellent. Still, always intrigued by the prospect of new software — and free software at that — we downloaded T-bird to give it a look-see.

A very brief look-see, as it turns out. We can’t seem to make T-bird arrange itself in a way that doesn’t look like ass and waste acres of space; even its version of the layout we use in both Mail and NNW wastes so much space it’s useless to us. Mail.app and NNW aren’t free or Free, so we’d like to find alternatives, but at the end of the day we also can’t backtrack on functionality or interface. T-bird loses on both counts.

Of course, if we were like Mike, we’d still be reading email in emacs, so we expect T-bird will frustrate him for wholly different reasons. Heh.

Techdirt: Gartner Admits They’re No Better Than A Coin Flip. We’ve read their pronouncements for years, and for just as long it’s been very, very clear that they’re a marketing company, not a research firm.

Inforworld asks — and answers, in detail — “Is Windows inherently more vulnerable to malware attacks than OS X?“

The answer is pretty clear (yes), but the reasons why are enlightening, even for the not enormously technical. Simply put, OS X was designed to be secure and multiuser from the ground up (based as it is on Unix). Windows views those bits as afterthoughts, and performs accordingly. Attempts to secure Windows without a ground-up redesign are pretty much doomed to fail, as we’ve seen. Apple, with its much smaller market share, has made enormous strides in hardware and software by being unafraid of dragging their customers through potentially rocky transitions: ten years ago, they moved from Motorola chips to PowerPC chips to achieve better performance, and it worked well. Five years ago they introduced an entirely new, only sort-of backward-compatible OS, but have still managed the transition fine (modulo some holdouts). Now they’re changing chips again, from PowerPC (whose growth and development has become moribund) to Intel, and by all accounts that’s going pretty well, too.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has chained itself to the altar of backward-compatibility forever, which in turn means it’s held back by design decisions made before Michael Jackson got creepy.

Pluto isn’t a planet. Damn liberal media.

HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE.

Do not ask us about Java or JBoss.