Monday, April 30, 2007

What's behind today's epidemic of teacher-student sex?

A rather long, but poignant and well thought out piece that has more depth than I expected.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The Unit...

Last week on the Unit, they had an episode about a "hostage situation" where several Mohammedan terrorists celebrate the anniversary of the Beslan Massacre by making a bunch of D.C. high schoolers hostages. The news gets out. The Unit is called in. They train with D.C. SWAT and enter the building. Bombs are detected and disarmed. All bad guys are terminated.

Joe Farah points out that this -- years after "Columbine" -- still isn't the case.

Bah.

My ministry...

has been described by my wife as: "making sure that the computers of our visiting missionaries run properly." (We live close to our church, have a large basement and a penchant for hospitality and a desire to know the missionaries we support.)

Now, as you might have guessed, these are usually PCs. I'm a Mac guy. But, since I work with PCs all day, I know too much about them.

So when the, generally non-techno-savvy, missionaries come for an evening or 4, I hook 'em up to my DSL via wireless connection for their edification and ask them what they use to combat various types of PC malware.

I recommend Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware SE, ZoneAlarm and AVG.

And, as I learned last night, I should also recommend that they do backups more often. Our visitor had a Dell laptop that would emit a "tick-tick-tick" noise every 3 seconds. Doing a hard drive check revealed 20+ cluster errors in a variety of files. I was able to get the system files from my PC laptop, but some of the family photos and 3rd party programs are probably gone.

Proof of success of the endeavor was that E-Sword(.net) was successfully re-installed and working. :^)

Monday, April 16, 2007

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Oh! The savagery...

(to Dan Brown's writing "style") and I enjoyed every bit of it!

more

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Speaking of O'Reilly...

Tim O'Reilly has released a Blogger's Code of Conduct...

I've put in a script that monitors the level of discourse on the main page. It's on the right -- you can't miss it.

You can get yours here.

Friday, April 06, 2007

Monday, April 02, 2007

First it was JPEGs...

Now we're not even safe from animated cursors in Windows. :^/

All you ever wanted to know about ß

How could I have missed this?

Perl 7 has just been released!
Perl — not just for scripting any more!

With this release, Perl becomes not only the best scripting language available, but also the best application programming language. Incremental compilation technology transparently compiles every Perl7 script directly into memory as optimized native code, resulting in a system that combines the convenience of scripting languages with the power of compiled languages. (Odd how Java manages to achieve just the opposite...)

67 times faster than Perl5 — 50% faster than C!...