February 2005 Archives

I've long been proud of Mac OS X's lack of viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, and adware. Compared to Mac OS X, Windows is like the bad part of town that is covered in graffiti and has lots of broken windows. My friends would regale me with tales of reinstalling the OS and buying all manner of programs in an ever-elusive chimera of security and stability. Luckily, I never have really had to deal with it since the only tech support I generally have to do is for my mother-in-law and she uses a Mac. (The tech support, by the way, consists of setting up her email and that sort of task.)

Today I had the pleasure of getting knee deep with a nasty Windows trojan. I normally would shrug off such requests because I know how quickly they can overtake your free time, but I had to help this time since it looked like I may have caused the problem in the first place.

My Dad's computer with Windows XP Home Edition was acting up: he would get on and surf for a bit until the computer unceremoniously stopped taking any requests for web sites. Once he was at that point, he would have to restart or log off to be able to use the Web. Since these intervals were only two to five minutes long, this was an unendurable issue. The reason why I was involved is because I installed a firmware upgrade for his Linksys WRT54G so that the power levels could be boosted. The problem came up shortly after I did that and so he thought that I might know what had happened (and, more importantly, how to fix it). Say it with me, Dad, correlation is not causation.

In trying to track down the problem, I discovered that the computer's anti-virus definition tables were outdated. So I rebooted and installed the latest version. It found the trojan (and several other viruses) quickly after that and so I deleted it. A quick reboot and the problem remained. I scanned again and found the same file again. I suspected that this little bugger had inserted itself deep into Windows' bowels.

After a few hours of wrestling, installing new programs, and researching, I finally found a description of the trojan that fit perfectly. The trojan payload was using a rootkit to repeatedly re-establish itself and spread its grip widely. I deleted the files, deleted the numerous registry entries, and turned on all of the services that the trojan had disabled, which included Automatic Update, the Windows Firewall, and the Security Center. Another reboot and the system was finally whole again.

I now have a heightened appreciation for the anguish that Windows users experience. Several times I was prepared to tell my Dad that I had had enough and that he would need to re-install. In the end, it might have been a quicker proposition. I recommended several things before I left: keep the anti-virus files up-to-date, use Firefox if you can, and seriously consider switching to a Mac.

Saturday I went to take a tour of the Park of Four Waters at the Pueblo Grande Museum. The site, located perhaps a half mile south of the museum, isn't open to the public except for one guided tour on the last Saturday of the month when it's cool. I've wanted to attend one of these tours for the last several months but something always came up. I'm glad that I finally went because it was quite a memorable experience.

I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to history: I can get really excited about very mundane things. For example, I've spent twenty minutes looking at and contemplating head of the Old Crosscut Canal that joins the Grand and Arizona Canals. I studied it from a variety of angles, took in the adjoining land, and imagined the people designing, building, and maintaining it. I then spent several hours researching this one particular canal. Water is such a vital part of Phoenix history that I bristle when people act like it's unlimited or can't appreciate the struggle that the early settlers went through to make the desert hospitable.

The Park of Four Waters is a small section of land where two ancient Hohokam canals are preserved. The Hohokam dug approximately 500 miles of canals. Their extensive canal system inspired Phoenix founder Jack Swilling to start his own canal project to irrigate the Salt River Valley. The canal he dug with his employees—known as the Swilling Ditch or the Town Ditch after he left Phoenix—is located not far from this place underneath one of Sky Harbor's runways. This, and the fact that many of Phoenix's early canals were made from widening and deepening Hohokam ones, is a testament to the sagacity of that ancient people.

The two canals we saw were actually considered two channels of a single canal. One channel was cut like a V so that water would flow faster and farther; the other was cut like a semicircle, which kept the water moving rather slowly so that it wouldn't decimate lateral canals. One wouldn't be faulted for missing the significance of these two ditches since they looked like rolling hills. The fact that they have lasted for at least 600 years in much the same condition was awesome.

Near these two Hohokam canals was a modern canal of uncertain origin that looked to join the Grand at the point of the Old Crosscut. It was fairly wide and deep but entirely made out of concrete. It followed the same line as the Old Crosscut would have if you continued it down to the Salt River bank, but the Old Crosscut would never have followed that route since it strictly joined two canals. That's why I'm not sure of when it was made, what it was called, or even who built it.

Its origin is suspect because it was likely built by the Salt River Project though it would have gone right through the Tovrea stockyards and could have been a private canal. This, of course, merits further research. I will also post a gallery of the hundred or so pictures I took since the Web is a veritable desert when it comes to the Park of Four Waters.

There's a subculture of the blogging world that's gaining some traction called podcasting. In a nutshell, bloggers (and it's only bloggers at this point) record mp3 files that are basically audio versions of a blog entry, which their readers/listeners download and play. The term comes from the iPod that people often use to play these files on. It's different from radio because it is delivered over the Internet and it's different from Internet radio because the listener must download the entire file—in other words, there's no streaming.

Astute readers might note that there aren't any mp3 files from me on this site, even though there are several blogs and a variety of other content available. I did this because I respect my readers: I have a very nasal voice that doesn't record well. I am a much better writer than I am a speaker and I don't want to waste both our time.

Unfortunately, the majority of podcasters don't have my reluctance. They produce their verbal vomit in bulk. Lacking any professional broadcasting skills, they don't prepare adequately, overuse verbal crutches, and speak in an untrained voice. Sitting through one of their recordings is an exercise in patience: I'm not sure I've ever listened to an entire entry (episode?).

The Internet is an excellent tool for broadcasting: it's cheap and the quality is comparable to radio. When a program is produced professionally, the value can be incredible. Take IT Conversations for example. It consists of well-done interviews with important—and interesting—people in information technology. The interviewer is competent and the editing is crisp. It could easily be played on regular radio if there was an audience for it: there certainly wouldn't be one in a local market, but globally there's a massive niche.

Podcasting suffers from the same problems that blogging does: any amateur medium generally yields amateur results. Put another way: there's a reason why radio personalities and journalists earn a salary.

Royal We 1984: awesome video parody of the original 1984 ad from Apple where the instrument of brainwashing isn't the corporate monoculture, it's the iPod. Very well done. {via}

Skiing Game in Ant: if you can believe it, someone created a skiing game that runs in the build tool Ant. That is freakin' cool! I can't wait to try it out in NAnt. {via}

Sorry about the lack of updates. I've been working feverishly on migrating this beast to TextPattern and watching Law and Order. (Last night, Sandi had enough after two and a half episodes: she said that they're all the same. I know, I don't understand her either sometimes.) I'll post something tonight or tomorrow about the change from using WordPress and the decision involved.

I'm breaking radio silence because of this "There's No Place Like 127.0.0.1" door mat. How cool is that!

Google's got a new toolbar version out and it's got a lot of nice features. Of course, I'm a Mac guy at home so I can't use any of them and a Firefox user at work so I can't use it there either. It's still nice because it gives some of my friends and co-workers the chance to do stuff that I can do in Firefox with some small effort (keywords and such) which aren't really possible with Internet Explorer.

Of course, the Google haters are out in force. They blithely drop any context in an effort to smear Google. For example, Microsoft's SmartTag was to be an OS-wide feature that was present unless a user turned it off or the site developer included a special tag in his page to disable it. Google's AutoLink isn't automatically on by default and can be turned off by clicking on the AutoLink button. A user has to actually download the toolbar and then they have to click on the AutoLink button to create the links to Google properties.

That makes a lot of difference in my mind since it's akin to downloading a Firefox extension that manipulates site content. The user has to make quite a few decisions before it does its thing. Microsoft's feature required quite a few decisions to make it stop.

[UPDATE (2/27/05): Winer's kept up a pretty steady pace of complaining this week. Thankfully, someone's posted an excellent entry defending Google and a similarly excellent reply to his response.]

[UPDATE (2/28/05): Someone went ahead and crafted a Javascript bookmarklet to transform content on Scripting.com in an absolutely hilarious manner. Bing!]

[UPDATE (3/4/05): Finally, some well-reasoned and moderate comment on the controversy over at Kuro5hin.]

I wanted to skewer Bell Road Toyota for a recent experience I had there. I've already left the same review at Dealer Rater, but it's worth it to leave it here as well. Hopefully, I can steer someone else away from their bait-and-switch tactics.

I filled out an application on Bell Road Toyota's web site. I was pretty quickly called by Doreen from the Internet Sales Department. I explained my situation over the phone: my wife and I have twins and so would have to do our stuff separately. She said that that was fine and that I just needed to come down to start the ball rolling. She seemed very nice on the phone. Little did I know that my situation was just what she needed for a little bait-and-switch action.

When I got there we got down to business. I knew going in that my trade-in was going to be the problem so we tackled that pretty quickly. She said that it was going to be upside down but that it was doable. With that squared away, she pulled my credit. She said that my credit was good and that I qualified for a $520-525/month loan at 60 months for a 2005 Toyota Sienna with $3,000 down. This is almost exactly what I was hoping to get. She indicated that my wife would just need to come down, pick out a color, sign her part of the paper work, and then once I signed my part we could enjoy our new vehicle. I left quite pleased at the experience because it was quick, painless, and no pressure.

My wife got there and picked out the car she wanted. Then Doreen dropped the bomb: the loan was going to be $580/month at 60 months with $3,000 down. That was way out of line with what we had agreed on and I told my wife to decline the whole thing. My wife called me as soon as she got out of the dealership and told me the whole story. As I was preparing to let Doreen know about my displeasure and attempt to save the transaction, Doreen called me.

I asked what the heck had happened. She told me that the original estimation for my 2000 Dodge Durango didn't include a $2,000 new car rebate from Dodge and that was responsible for the bump in payments. I thought that that sounded fishy so I suggested that I could put an additional $2,000 down to keep everything as it was before. She said that that would only bring the payments down to $560/month so I asked if we could bump the term to 72 months. She said that that would get it down to $540/month. I replied incredulously that this wasn't adding up in my mind and that there was something she wasn't telling me. She said she was sorry and she took full responsibility for this mix up--I think full responsibility to her meant that she admitted that there was a mix up.

Basically, Bell Road Toyota attempted to sucker me out of my money at every opportunity and did a classic bait-and-switch with verbal assurances to try and get me to pay more. I wouldn't do any business with them and I would heartily recommend that people avoid this company.

If you want to help other people to avoid this awful dealership, please link to Bell Road Toyota with this blog entry as the href. They deserve it: I have never had a dealer so baldly lie to me and I've had some doozies in my time.

I had to restart today at work. I'm using Windows 2000 and I haven't restarted once in the last 66 days, 7 hours, and 26 minutes—a personal best!

My second best uptime record was over 47 days on my PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.3. A power user running Mac OS X will rarely have an uptime over about 45 days because Apple releases OS and security updates that require a restart and you mustn't pass those up. Microsoft rarely updates Windows 2000 and most security updates are related to Internet Explorer, so you can get much higher uptimes.

Long-time readers will know that I am slowly moving my sites from UplinkEarth to DreamHost—way too slowly, in fact, since I am paying $29.90/month for one and $19.95/month for the other—and simultaneously trying to set up a CMS to handle everything.

I've flitted about between different systems, liking this feature of one but this feature of another one. Last year, I finally decided to go with TextPattern. TXP, as its called, is an excellent CMS that implements separation of content from presentation and a page model that sits well with me. When I decided on it back in October, I was floored by how much better of an implementation it was than anything else out there (and I evaluated at least a dozen CMSs and perhaps five seriously).

I really liked WordPress, but it didn't meet my needs as a blogger and an essayist. There's just so many different types of content at the Bill Brown Information Center that WordPress's one-admin-per-blog and one-blog-per-directory limitations were too much. In fact, I ended up using it for Found on the Web and I couldn't be happier with it.

We're now halfway through February and TextPattern's 1.0 release has been delayed repeatedly with the last announced release date being January 10th, 2005. I can't wait forever for what could end up being a third release candidate bundled up as 1.0. In the meantime, WordPress released version 1.5 and the new version offers static pages, a major requirement of bbrown.info.

Do I remain in limbo waiting for a single developer in France to decide to finish up the 1.0 release and risk finding out that it's the same as the 1.0rc2 that's out there with a few bugfixes? Or do I prepare the migration of bbrown to WordPress with its several developers, active development, and vibrant community, hacking in what bits don't fit?

The decision seems pretty clear, doesn't it?

I'm not a big fan of Valentine's Day and neither is my wife. Our annual tradition is to go to McDonald's for dinner (replaced with In 'n' Out once it came to the Valley—no sense slummin' it) and not exchange gifts.

I have always believed that every day should be Valentine's Day. You shouldn't have just one day where you express your feelings towards your loved ones: you should do it at every opportunity. They're your loved ones for a reason.

We also don't like being told what to do. Hallmark et al have convinced many women and men that a card is the bare minimum, flowers are a nice touch, and gifts are perfectly appropriate. Such things are not expressions of love in and of themselves; you can't be cold and distant all year yet expect a gift of flowers to tide your lover's heart over.

As far as holidays go, honoring love is certainly a great reason to have one. Love is one of the highest values you can achieve and not a day goes by that I don't thank my lucky stars that I married the amazing woman that I did. Unfortunately, most people have a pretty wrongheaded view of love: they believe that the best kind of love is the one commonly called "unconditional." Suggesting that someone loves you no matter what is exactly the opposite of the kind of love displayed and celebrated on February 14th.

I heard an interesting observation about Valentine's Day on NPR today. Some psychologist type was saying that we should morph Valentine's Day from a celebration of love to a celebration of being worthy of being loved. I like that way of looking at it since it casts it into a sort of annual re-evaluation of your attitudes, behaviors, and feelings on the subject of love and those who you've given it to. Anything that inspires us to better ourselves, to inch ever closer towards moral perfection is dandy in my book.

To that end, I have to ask you, "Are you being the best husband/wife/partner you can be?" If you're not, then you have to look at your relationship objectively and figure out where you're messing up.

For all you Mac OS X laptop owners out there, there's a new version of uControl out for 10.3.8 since the old version got broken by the update.

While you're evaluating your trackpad-remapping needs, you might also want to look at unnamed utility that doesn't require a modifier key to be pressed. You use two fingers to horizontally or vertically scroll and you can even do an iPod scroll wheel motion to move up and down the page. It's an interesting idea and the execution is pretty nice once you unlearn the modifier key muscle memory.

uControl is still necessary, though, because it's got a lot of other great features that this quick hack lacks.

I decided to go to the Phoenix Zoo on my lunch hour today to do some rollerblading. It's been awhile because I've been busy with work and running errands on my lunch hours. It felt good to strap on the ol' inline skates again and skate hard for about an hour.

While there I discovered that there are two new lions in the lion enclosure. This is huge news because the single resident of the enclosure, Pima, was widowed when her lion life partner (are lion marriages legal in Arizona? It's hard to keep track) died a few years back. They look like they're pretty comfortable in there: they're laying around—note how I omitted the obvious pun—just like Pima always does.

The other cool thing that I did was something that I'd always wanted to do but never got up the nerve: grabbing hold of the safari train and hitching a ride. I only went up one hill because then the train stopped (I don't think on my account) and people got out to take photographs. The kids in the back rows enjoyed my crouching, that's for sure.

We bought a 2005 Toyota Sienna LE last night. It took awhile for me to become comfortable with turning into a mini-van guy because my parents owned a mini-van—a 1987 Ford Aerostar XLT, for the record—and I always thought it was a heinous monstrosity of a vehicle. It was woefully underpowered, lacked the cargo space of a van, and drove like a truck. The fact that we've got two kids and another on the way was one factor in the decision.

But the main one is that mini-vans have come a long way, baby. The 2005 Toyota Sienna is replete with niceties that evince an amazing attention to design and it's got 3.3L V6, which is a step down from the 5.9L V8 in our Durango but still quite respectable. The Sienna has sliding doors on both sides and the huge windows on those doors roll up and down! That's quite a nice innovation on Toyota's part that seems completely common-sense once you see it. ("Why shouldn't they roll down? Every other car in existence has rear windows that roll down.") There are 14 bottle/cup holders in the vehicle. The second and third row of seats can be removed and folded flush with the floor, respectively. There's a ton of locking modes that automatically unlock or lock the doors depending on the situation.

The coolest feature to me is the one that I'll probably never use, but is suggestive of the overall thoughtfulness of the car: the passenger seat has a sensor in it that disables the passenger-side airbag whenever the seat's occupant is less than 66 lbs. It's a nice touch that really underscores the Sienna's family orientation.

I would be remiss if I didn't let you know about Google's every move—that's what fanboys do.

But you would be remiss if you didn't check out Google Maps. It is simply, awe-inspiringly incredible. This is what Yahoo Maps and MapQuest wish they were. They are doing some truly amazing stuff behind the scenes.

[UPDATE (2/9/05): It's even neater than I thought. Joel Webber digs into the source to expose its shiny underbelly. {via}]

[UPDATE (2/13/05): I've shown this new Google property to several people and, to the man, they have said that they'll never use MapQuest again. This is going to be big.]

[UPDATE (2/15/05): The Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog has some comparisons among the search engines' localization features.]

I took my first real stab at open-source development today when I made LogZipper.NET available to the world. It's a console application written in C# and requiring the .NET framework. I wrote it mostly over the weekend using a command-line parser from the C# compiler team and SharpZipLib from the developers of SharpDevelop. I definitely couldn't have done it without those two libraries—well, I could have but it would have taken me a lot longer.

I wrote this application because we needed a tool at work to rotate log files and zip them up. It was becoming a big pain to manually process the hundreds of megabytes of log files our web servers were processing each and every day. With the addition of some new subsystems, it was on its way to several gigabytes per day. Moving those enormous files over the network was tedious and it was only going to get worse.

We searched and searched for a free utility out there that would do this. I was familiar with DNStran, which my LogJammer shell script uses to perform much the same task (and more since it also does DNS lookup). Finally, we found the closest thing and requested a quote for customization to our needs. He offered to do it for $1,000 with source code. I thought this was a reasonable amount but much more than it needed to be since this wasn't a complicated application.

Or so I thought. At first, I was going to rotate the log files using the date values stuck in the file's metadata. I dropped that idea when I downloaded some log files from this site's web server for testing purposes. After downloading, I realized that the file create, modify, and write dates were all the same—the moment they were transported to the local filesystem. I eventually decided to use the pattern mask that was available as one of the command-line parameters.

There's still a lot to do. You're welcome to download it, modify it, and offer suggestions on how to make it better. I'd love it if you file any bug reports over at the project page. I've also set up the home page for LogZipper.NET that will eventually contain links and additional documentation.

Why do I use index cards instead of my Palm? It's not the sensual experience of curling up with them, I can tell you that. Index cards ≠ Moleskines.

I use index cards because they're always handy. I can slip a stack of perhaps 20 index cards into my pants pocket and it's ready to go as soon as I pull it out. My laptop, though slim and light, is a pain in the butt to get out if I need to find a number. Everything gets worse when I'm trying to drive: I can keep one hand on the wheel while I—literally—thumb through the index cards but a Palm requires two hands. Don't even get me started about finding a phone number on my laptop while driving. I've done it and it is scarier than hell.

They're always ready. I don't have to worry about batteries or proper lighting conditions. I don't have to translate to Graffiti™. I don't particularly have to worry about running out of memory. In short, low tech is reliable in a way that high tech equipment can never be.

There are downsides to index cards: they can get wet; there's no effective backup; there's a finite amount of space per card; you have to write small to fit things on them; you have to copy stuff from digital to analog and vice versa if you have information stored in more than one place; mistakes can make it look not so pretty; and it's slightly bulkier than a PDA because you have to carry a pen (or risk being somewhere without one).

Until I can afford a Tungsten T3, I'll stick with the index cards. And maybe not even then since it's a battery hog.

Matt Haughey offers up a few other password-generating schemes that I hadn't thought about before. I like them better than passphrases, which seem to almost guarantee that you'll get them wrong, but there's still the issue of which song for which site. And what if you pick "867-5309"?

I've already worked up my scheme, so I suppose I'll stick with it.

[UPDATE (2/14/05): Robert Hensing makes a much more convincing case for using passphrases than the link above. I'll have to think about this a bit more: I'm fairly convinved since I care about security but I do maintain over a hundred passwords—of which there are at least 70 unique ones. The migration will be a bit of a pain.]

[UPDATE 2 (2/14/05): I've changed my main work password to a 37-character phrase so I can see how comfortable I am with the idea. I think the key thing to remember about passphrase usage is that dictionary attacks, hash comparisons, and the other current techniques don't fundamentally know what style of password you're using. If the attacker knows your schema, then breaking it becomes much simpler: he can forego dictionary comparisons if you're using sentences. If your passphrase comes from a movie quote, it wouldn't be too difficult to download all of the IMDB quotes and run a hash comparison against it.

The trick is, as I see it, to use such quotes that are easily to remember but substituting one or more letters with their hax0r equivalents. That totally defeats a straight hash comparison attack and a more-or-less random changing increases the possible combinations astronomically.

I think, in the end, that a 37-character password is going to be uncrackable even without such hax0r modifications. It won't stand the test of time, naturally, since both hardware and software are advancing apace but it's a good opening salvo with future scalability.]

[UPDATE (2/17/05): After the second time calling our help desk today to reset my network password, I think I'm going to end this crazy experiment. My password was "I could make your life a living hell!" from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It was definitely easy to remember but easy to mistype. The worst part of using passphrases is that if you lose your place, punch two keys at the same time, or lose confidence in your space bar application, you must start over from scratch. And if you make a mistake twice, the most important thing in your life suddenly becomes getting the password right on that third attempt.

I messed up on that third try two too many times. Passphrases: good in theory, bad in three-tries-and-you're-out practice.]

There's a longstanding tradition among the Web savvy that when someone uses your images on another page without downloading them to their own machine—in effect stealing your bandwidth because you're still hosting them—you're supposed to replace the image they thought they wanted with a really tasteless one. You know, to teach them a lesson.

I've always dreamed of someone doing this, but in the going on five years I've had Web sites no one ever has. Last night, I discovered someone that had. (Unfortunately, they did it on January 21st and I didn't get around to messing with them until now.)

To Leandra, whoever you might be, I apologize that your friend decided to use an image of my daughter and that I had to replace it. If you don't like the picture now adorning your comments, I suggest you complain to her.

Hee hee,

This story about a blind painter who gets surprisingly close to reality is astounding. He paints shadows, gets perspective right, and paints animals that he could never have seen.

The one thing I am most curious about is how prevalent such a capability is among the blind. As the article notes, artistic ability is not fostered or developed in blind children like this guy was. If it is common (though unrefined due to lack of encouragement), then sight may not be as vital as I thought.

I would also be interested in this guy's background. He might have learned about shadows and perspective through books about art and painting. A lot of nature guides are quite descriptive about their subjects. Still, though, the nature of concepts is that you acquire the referents from reality and the language of such descriptions is inevitably couched in visual terms.

I let the Ayn Rand Centenary pass without comment yesterday. I just didn't think I could add anything substantive to the celebration. I have stated my gratitude for Ayn Rand and Objectivism elsewhere on this site and I stand firmly behind the sentiment of that essay, even if the style is a little immature. I wish Ayn Rand had lived to be 100 because I would be very interested to read her take on the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of Internet entrepreneurs, and the developments in genetics.

I haven't done much writing of late on the subject of Objectivism because I haven't been active in graduate school for awhile. The needs of grad school really spurred my writing output: it's hard to muster up the will to research and write an essay for no external purpose. I also haven't blogged about Objectivism because I didn't really have anything to add. Objectivism informs my writings even when the subject matter isn't explicitly Objectivist.

I haven't been an outspoken Objectivist for several years—instead I chose to quietly pursue my studies and focus on integrations. This Metafilter thread, though, was too much for me to stay quiet.

I cannot believe how dismissive people are of her philosophy. Metafilter certainly attracts the pedant, but I hadn't encountered such a patronizing tone in a long time. At first, it was disheartening because people were making pronouncements about Objectivism while stating that they had read The Fountainhead in high school. Then I realized that there rhetoric was so over the top that ambivalent lurkers might conclude that where-there's-smoke-there's-fire and seek out Atlas Shrugged.

In the week leading up to yesterday, my Google alert was buzzing with activity. Combined with the recent press surrounding ARI's op-eds, I thought Objectivism was actually gaining some traction within the culture. The articles in the nation's newspapers were similar in tone to the MeFi thread, though.

In that thread, I stated:

I also enjoy the people who casually dismiss her philosophy as only adequate for youngsters. "Oh, wait till you grow up, sonny, then you'll understand." Have you noticed that most of the Objectivist intellectuals out there are not young? I'm sure that you would just casually dismiss them as stunted in their development, but it just shows how intellectually snobby you are. I am 30 years old and have been an Objectivist since I was 14. Time has emboldened my Objectivism, whose implications I understand far better than I could have appreciated at such a tender age.

Newspaper writers also denigrated her ideas as the folly of youth. It makes me wonder how the average adult reader would react to such condescension. Would they avoid investigating her views because they've passed a certain age? It seems likely to me, especially given the firming up of one's personal philosophy—used loosely since most people are not explicit about their beliefs—over time.

How does that bode for Objectivism as a philosophic movement? I would imagine that it will spread in the future because of the association with youth. If more young people are exposed to it, then a higher number of them will probably adopt it as their own. Do we forsake the mass of adults then as irretrievable? ARI's programs seem to be aimed towards that end; I don't think it's necessarily a bad strategy though the young are not typically the best source for donations.

"Hide Your iPod, Here Comes Bill": Apple's iPod is prevalent on Microsoft's campuses, garnering something like 80% share of the Microsoft employees who own portable music players. And Microsoft management doesn't like it.

Google is now a domain registrar. Given Google's history of making inexpensive things free, this doesn't bode well for current domain registrars.

On the other hand, Network Solutions is still the top domain regisrar even though it charges four times what GoDaddy does. It's probable that there's enough domain registrations to go around, but a free domain registration is a different proposition than a reduced-cost registration. The introduction of any cost to a transaction automatically limits the number of people and the removal of any cost tends to reduce the prices of competitors (and drive them out of business if they can't compete).

Google is definitely the company to watch in the Web world. It's the Southwest Airlines of the Internet.