Marshall Brain, the man (I almost said brain, but the pun was so bad it hurt) behind HowStuffWorks, recently posted a nice, short presentation about how to make a million dollars. Basically, save $5 a day or start a business and become an entrepreneur.
I saw Marshall Brain speak once about his entrepreneurial endeavors and thought he was an interesting guy. During a lull in the speech when he was talking about HowStuffWorks, he asked the audience to ask him how something works. Someone asked about a hair dryer and Marshall really lit up describing all the details of such a common appliance. To this day, hair dryers and toasters still remind of his description of the nickel-chromium alloy called nichrome that's used in their heating coils.
Via Jeff Nolan, I came across this proposal for saving California's schools that puts the amount of money being spent on education in perspective.
Tom McClintock, the California state senator who wrote the proposal, asserts that kids could be getting brand new books, new desks, having class in executive office space rather than run-down school buildings, and given health club memberships instead of gym classes for the amount of money being spent on education.
He makes a great point.
Here's a very troubling article describing how MD5 collisions can be used to switch the content of a digitally signed postscript document. It's time to move on to stronger hashing algorithms.
Irrlicht looks like a very cool project and, despite being at version 0.10.0, appears to be stable and in use by quite a number of applications. I especially like the focus on ease of use, the great (easy) tutorials, and that fact that .NET is supported.
Here's the description from the web site:
The Irrlicht Engine is an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written and usable in C++ and also available for .NET languages. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines.
We've got a huge active community, and there are lots of projects in development that use the engine. You can find enhancements for Irrlicht all over the web, like alternative terrain renderers, portal renderers, exporters, world layers, tutorials, editors, bindings for java, perl, ruby, basic, python, lua, and so on. And best of all: It's completely free.
If you want to hear the news about Apple switching to Intel processors straight from the horse's mouth, Steve Jobs' keynote speech is online in QuickTime format here on Apple's website. It's amazing to see how well planned and polished the presentation is, but not too surprising given the source.
The rumors are true. Apple is switching from PowerPC to Intel.
It's funny that not too long ago Apple was claiming their G5's were like have a supercomputer on your desktop and now they're ditching the PowerPC. The big question is whether Apple is going to allow OS X to run on generic PC hardware. At the very least, I hope Apple's high hardware prices come down.
I suspect one reason Apple is able to bet the farm on this transition is that they can rely on the profits from iPod sales and iTunes to sustain them until they can get the Intel machines to market.
I just upgraded my blog software from MovableType 2.65 to 3.17. The primary reason for the upgrade was to be able to try out a new plugin to fight blog spam called SpamLookup. I used to use an old version of MT-Blacklist, but decided I was still spending too much time deleting the blog spam that got through.
Rather than just maintaining a list of blocked URLs, SpamLookup actually checks comment/trackback IP addresses against some DNSBLs to see if the user/script is using a known bad IP or an open HTTP proxy. If the IP address looks all right, SpamLookup check any URLs in the comment/trackback against SURBL to see if the URLs are known to be advertized in SPAM.
I'm hoping SpamLookup will lessen the manual burden of deleting comment spam, but it's effectiveness remains to be seen. I haven't had a major comment spam attack yet, so I'll just wait a few hours :)
Even if SpamLookup doesn't work any better than MT-Blacklist, MovableType 3.17's comment moderation and NoFollow features should at least prevent the spams from showing up on my site and boosting the spammer's rank on Google.
Update: After about 18 hours of operation, SpamLookup has blocked 73 comment spams (a fairly light load actually). It took me a few hours to get the configuration the way I wanted it and to realize I had to clear the cache that was using the old settings. After that, it's been completely hands off and working flawlessly.
Just after I finished reading all the hoop-la about OpenOffice's OpenDocument 1.0 file format being standardized, Microsoft followed up with a great Channel9 video about the new file formats coming in the next version of Microsoft Office.
I have to say I'm excited about the possibilities both new XML-based file formats open up. For example, it should be easy to generate documents, spreadsheets, or presentations on the fly from a web application or an automated process. It will be interesting to see a whole slew of third party tools and scripts spring up for automating document parsing, generation, and modification. It should also be much easier to convert between the two formats, although this is obviously much more of a benefit for underdog OpenOffice.
The Microsoft Office 12 file format is particular interesting because it's actually a zip file with the various parts of the document (text, formatting, embedded images, comments, macros, etc.) all saved as separate files within the zip. This should make it pretty simple to programmatically change images and apply different formatting to document files. Now if only Outlook would use an open/accessible database format...