ToolbarCop is a browser extensions manager which can eliminate the following browser add-ons selectively from Internet Explorer:
 Browser Helper Objects (BHO)
 Toolbars
 Standard Toolbar buttons
 Context menu Extensions
 Third-party download managers &
 Third-party Protocol Handlers and their residual entries remaining in the registry.
 Horizontal / Vertical Explorer Bars (side-search bars)
 Startup applications originating from RUN registry keys

I've been getting a lot of "registry change denied" popups, related to the ITBarLayout "Browser Helper Object". It appears that the recommended solution is to get and run a piece of software called ToolbarCop. Has anyone else here played with it, or have the same problem?

Elonka

ToolbarCop

The Vatican newspaper has published an article saying "intelligent design" is not science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary theory in school classrooms only creates confusion.

Vatican paper article says 'intelligent design' not science

Security and Privacy in Games
Speaker: Elonka Dunin (Gen Mgr, Online Community, Simutronics Corp.)
 . . .
Session Description

It isn't just cheating anymore. Malicious software attacks are a real threat to any application that is accessible over the network, and many of the common patterns in game development expose real vulnerabilities. These roundtables offer a forum for technical discussions of how risks can be analyzed and mitigated, and development patterns and technologies to protect the next generation of games.

FYI, in case anyone's attending GDC 2006 in mid-March, I'll be hosting two Roundtables on "Security and Privacy in Games".

Elonka

Game Developers Conference 2006: 'Security and Privacy in Games' Roundtable

Dan Brown's book Angels and Demons is a detective story about a secret society that wants to destroy the Vatican using an antimatter bomb. In the book, the antimatter is stolen from CERN.
 . . .
Hover over the images below to find out what is truth and what is fiction . . .
 
[Q:] Did CERN scientists actually invent the internet?

[A:} No. The internet was originally based on work done by Louis Pouzin in France, taken up by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in the US in the 1970's. The web however was invented and developed entirely by Tim Berners-Lee and a small team at CERN during 1989-1994. The story of the Internet and the Web can be read in "How the Web was born". Perhaps not as sexy as Angels and Demons, but everything in "How the Web was born" was first-hand testimony and research.

CERN's debunking page

(1/12/2006 update): Somebody in DC wrote to me with a concern about CERN's page, which I'm repeating here verbatim: I take issue with what the CERN folks said. They are simply incorrect. The "internet" is really an extension of ARPANET. Which was funded by ARPA (the precursor to DARPA), BBN Tech was one of the prime movers in that space. France, (she has done some wonderful things over the years) did not have very much to do with the internet (please remember the internet is more than the web). BBN's work on the ARPANET was done in the 60's (1962, I think). Louis Pouzin did work on packet networks, but claiming he 'invented' the internet is hubris.

CERN's 'Fact and Fiction' page about Dan Brown's novel 'Angels & Demons'

własność Rodryga hrabiego Dunina. - Majętność ta, dawniejsza siedziba Nieżychowskich, od roku 1898 znajduje się w rękach obecnego właściciela. - D..wygodny i przestworny, zbudowany został w pierwszej połowie zeszłego wieku przez .esnego właściciela Nepomucena Nieżychowskiego.

One of the things that I find frustrating about researching my heritage, is all the different ways that names can be spelled. For example, I've done many searches on my great-grandfather's name "Rodryg Dunin", but it was only today that someone (from Poland) showed me this site, with an actual picture of his home. The name is listed as "Rodryga hrabiego Dunina", which (I think) is the possessive form, so a rough translation would be "belonging to Count Rodryg Dunin".

In any case, I'm delighted to see this image. It was one of those "OMG" moments for me.

More Google searches to do now....

Elonka :)

(in Polish) Information about Rodryg Dunin's Granowko estate

Decius wrote:
Well, its that time of year again. MemeStreams is now handling about twice as much traffic as we where in 2003.
 . . .
You'll also notice a bunch of interesting new statistics that Rattle set up after he made session layer changes in mid-year to support them. They might tell you something about how much traffic your individual blog generates, if you are one of the top posters.

Happy New Year!

Very interesting data, thanks! I knew my own memestream got a lot of traffic here, but not how it stacked up against the other users. I also enjoyed the data on which specific pages are generating the most traffic, like about the "Funny Cat Videos". It's good insight into human nature!

Elonka

RE: Statistics for memestreams.net (2005)

With worldwide sales of more than 40 million copies, including 4 million in Britain, The Da Vinci Code and its blend of conspiracy theories, shadowy secret societies and thrilling adventure has already spawned an industry of its own.
  . . .
“Disguised on the jacket of The Da Vinci Code, numerous encrypted messages hint at the subject matter of Dan Brown’s next Robert Langdon novel.”

A faint grid reference written in reverse on the cover leads, with an adjustment of one degree, to a sculpture called Kryptos in the courtyard of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Kryptos is covered in about 1,800 letters of code, much of which is still a mystery despite its location at the workplace of some of the world’s shrewdest cryptographers.

I wonder if the folks at the NSA cringe every time someone refers to the CIA as being the crypto agency. Or whether they see it a good "cover" for their own mission. ;)

UK Times Online: Codebreakers rack their brains to solve Dan Brown's new poser

For those in the St. Louis area: New Year's Eve party at RivalZ (home of St. Louis 2600), 270 & Dorsett, starting at 10 p.m., going probably until dawn. $5 is being requested, which gives access to all the different parties in the building. Food, drinks, music, over a hundred gamer/hacker/fandom/tech-geek partiers, sounds like fun!

Elonka :)

Update: For anyone unable to attend, there will be a live stream of the main room's sound over the web via SHOUTcast. If you'd like to listen, tune in to: http://70.135.29.116:8000/

March 2006 Update RivalZ is now closed. :/

Rivalz Technology Cafe - New Year's Eve Party for the St. Louis gamer/hacker scene

Take a look at the ten images below. Some of them are photographs
of real objects or scenes, others are created by computer graphics
(CG) artists. Test your ability to tell which among the array of
images are real, and which are CG. If you want a closer look, click
the image to see a larger view of the picture. Once you've decided
what's what, click either CG or REAL to begin the tally of your
score. Work through each of the ten images. When you've finished,
you'll be prompted to get your score.

I got 7/10. A couple of the answers definitely surprised me though.

Elonka

Fake or Foto?

Page view odometer rolled over to 1.4 million this week.

Total   618,288
Average Per Day   1,373
Average Visit Length   1:55
Last Hour   28
Today   262
This Week   9,613

PAGE VIEWS

Total   1,400,234
Average Per Day   2,422
Average Per Visit   1.8
Last Hour   61
Today   534
This Week   16,955

The Kryptos site, incidentally, is *not* the draw. It's been holding pretty steady around 400 visitors/day. The huge traffic lately has been almost exclusively for my "Unsolved Codes" page. Traffic quintupled last week, and the #1 culprit is the "StumbleUpon" service. I don't know what this means exactly... Perhaps they changed their algorithm, or perhaps my site got enough "thumbs up" votes that it was bumped up a notch in viewability, or maybe StumbleUpon itself just got more popular, and my site is riding the wave with it . . .

Referring pages, ranked by website:

2,147 stumbleupon.com    53.7%
521 google.com    13.0%
57 google.ca    1.4%
48 google.co.uk    1.2%
41 elonka.com    1.0%
41 en.wikipedia.org    1.0%
37 search.yahoo.com    0.9%
26 matt-thornton.net    0.7%
24 google.co.in    0.6%
18 google.com.ph    0.5%
12 google.com.sg    0.3%
12 google.de    0.3%
11 google.com.au    0.3%
11 images.google.com    0.3%
9 google.se    0.2%
7 members.aol.com    0.2%
7 search.msn.com    0.2%
7 wired.com    0.2%
6 aolsearch.aol.com    0.2%

Google google google. I don't even know what country that half those suffixes are, heh. .ph, .sg, .se . . .

elonka.com Odometer