Digital makeup, cabinet beasts and the golden section

Posted on December 30, 2002 by Pace Arko
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Back buttons, client-side and server-side code

Posted on December 30, 2002 by Pace Arko
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Joe, we hardly knew ya

Posted on December 24, 2002 by Pace Arko

Should I stay or should I go?

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Paranoia on Parade! Grepping the spoken word

Posted on December 22, 2002 by Pace Arko

One of the chief things that intelligence agencies have been lusting after for many years is the ability to pick out certain key phrases in spoken conversations that rush over global phone lines on a daily basis. Bright sparks have been working on this for decades and now it may become commonplace.

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Not enough sleep in the last two days

Posted on December 17, 2002 by Pace Arko

Here’s an idea: what if we are thinking too much of ourselves? What if the history of each human personality, from initial state to final state could be represented as a huge binary number? It would be a pretty damn good seed to use for generating pseudo-random numbers, wouldn’t it? Maybe we’re not god’s version of television; maybe we’re just god’s srand function for a software application of incomprehensible size and unfathomable purpose.

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Vibrating wires, teeth from stem cells and Web accessibility

Posted on December 13, 2002 by Pace Arko
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Bad news

Posted on December 12, 2002 by Pace Arko

I guess it was only a matter of time before this happened but today I dropped my laptop and cracked the screen. The system appears to boot up fine but the screen is divided into a mess of white and black patches and fault lines and the other half, clarity. Looking at various repair sites, I see that a new LCD panel runs about 399 bucks for an Inspiron 3800. Heck, I could buy a whole, used Inspiron 3800 for 500 on the auction sites.

Sigh, I guess could run the laptop as a Linux server and just use another monitor as a head when I need it. Another innocent laptop destined for RE-PC.

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Pattern recognition improves, more spam expected

Posted on December 11, 2002 by Pace Arko

There used to be this web-based mail service called MessageTo that used a clever test to automate the process of updating an e-mail user’s whitelist. Sadly, but not surprisingly, research has cracked this clever test. The test was hard to implement in an accessible way regardless.

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More artficial life stuff

Posted on December 11, 2002 by Pace Arko

Paul Davies, a physicist from the UK, says that information theory and nanotechnology are likely to be areas from which artificial life will emerge. He also seems to think that we won’t be able to fully understand how chemical evolution produced life on the early earth until we create artificial life ourselves.

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Spam and solar energy

Posted on December 10, 2002 by Pace Arko
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