Cool: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/09/howls-moving-castle.html

I dreamt that I had to go back to the office in the middle of the night because I had neglected to return all gold hamsters  to their cages.
I had removed them from said cages earlier that day while changing their IP addresses (the hamsters', not the cages').

Failed epically in keeping up with my Friends Page this week. I was even going to post something about this really neat piece of software that I stumbled across.
Then someone posted a link to tvtropes.org on metaquotes .

Thank you.

Happy Birthday, bunnyjadwiga!

Hovering your mouse pointer over the current line when reading a large body of text, akin to using your index finger to indicate your position in a printed volume, can be useful.

Trying to position said mouse pointer over the current line when going through a phone list stuck to the wall next to the monitor can be an indication that a vacation may be in order.

The nice thing about telnet (the tool, not the protocol) is that it is not restricted to talking to telnet servers. It can be used to interface with just about any text based protocol (SMTP, HTTP, POP3 and a good number of others).
This stems from the fact that the telnet protocol itself is about as bare bones as you can get: The client sends text strings to the server and vice versa and that is pretty much it. The other factor that contributes to its wider usefulness is that telnet can connect to other ports beside the default telnet port (23).
Getting useless error messages from your Web browser? Just open up your favourite terminal and type 'telnet www.example.com 80'. You will typically be greeted with a message similar to:

Trying 208.77.188.166...
Connected to www.example.com.
Escape character is '^]'.

This is basically your telnet client's way of saying 'we have a connection'. If you want to, you can simply close your terminal, having established that the server is up and accepting connections, or you can issue a simple command to establish that the server is doing what it is supposed to do. For example, typing 'GET /' should show you the HTML source of the front page of the web server in question, and end the session gracefully.

A word on ports: Above we used port number 80 to connect to a HTTP server. All telnet clients I know will also accept the name of the service: 'telnet www.example.com http'. I found it useful to remember the port numbers for some of the more important services, anyway: You never know when you'll run across a telnet client that doesn't know about service names. Also, there are other, more flexible tools that will only accept the port number for a service.
IANA has a list of all well known port numbers (along with a large number of others) at http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers.

I love you!

You know how everybody has been telling you to not use Telnet, ever, because using Telnet is like having your user name and password displayed in neon signs? This is certainly true if you use it the way it was originally intended, that is, to obtain an interactive login to a remote server. For that purpose, SSH is infinitely more appropriate.

One good and decent use for Telnet that I can think of is the initial signup for the Super Dimensional Fortress, a free service that allows you shell access to a NetBSD server: Just open a command window, type 'telnet sdf.lonestar.org' an follow the instructions. After the initial setup, of course, you are only going to use SSH to connect to your free account, right?
 
One thing that Telnet does well is to debug text based Internet protocols, like HTTP and SMTP. Granted, there are highly specialized tools to do that, but it is amazing what you can do with a simple Telnet session - and Telnet still comes preinstalled on Windows and many flavors of UNIX.

I have been using Telnet extensively in the past to dig around in the guts of recalcitrant mail servers or quickly check whether a web server is up and listening. Currently, I am working on organizing what I have learned this far. So tune in next week for details about using Telnet for purposes for which it was probably not initially designed.

Found in the Directory of Wonderful Things:

( Nano, Nano! )

Snopes dug up a story that really annoyed me when it first came out over a year ago; turns out it still gets me fuming.

Essentially, a writer for the Washington Post convinced a wildly successful violinist to play in a subway station, and said violinist did not get standing ovations. Which apparently means that people don't have time to appreciate beauty any more.
From the summary by Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post writer: 'Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?'

Hello? Excuse me? Now there is even a moral dimension to music appreciation? What if I disagree with the popular assessment of the quality of the performance? I can say with some confidence that if I was in one of those $100 concerts, I would be quite impatient for it to end - it just would not do anything for me. What if there were more people who feel that way but don't care to admit it because they don't want to be known as intellectually (and now even morally) deficient?

If that was so, would the postulation of absolute values of beauty not seem rather foolish? Probably even if it was not so, actually.

I admit that I am one of the people who would have walked past the virtuoso without as much as a second look, no matter whether I was in a hurry or not, just because the kind of beauty expressed in his work is not one I really care for. I am willing to bet that there are plenty of forms of beauty that I appreciate, which would leave people who bemoan the decline of our culture over stories like this unmoved.

And yes, I do feel a tad defensive about this kind of attitude.
I'm working on it.

After seeing one of the goals of their Lame Duck Presidential Challenge met, CodeWeavers is giving away free copies of their occasionally useful CrossOver suite.

The part I really liked: Their original site got dugg to death, so they quickly changed to a much lighter design that is streamlined to get those free registration keys out without much glitz and/or fanfare.

As marketing gimmicks go, this one is rather nice.

That's me.

The new WGR614L arrived Thursday evening - and kept its stock firmware until around noon today.
That's almost two days. Do I get a medal or something?

And for the record: Yes, it still works.

I was a tiny bit skeptical when I checked out amazon video on demand and it said that it runs on Macs or PCs, but it seems that a PC running Linux is still a PC.

I don't anticipate using this service much, being that I can't even keep up with hulu, but it is nice to see that people are beginning to stick to standards as opposed to coming out with new browser plugins every other day.

Happy Birthday, stefsoap!

**HUGS**

NETGEAR Launches Open Source WGR614L Wireless-G Router

Yummy.