Cool perl script that guesses languages. Almost as good as having a mom at the world bank.

Me: Guesses slavic languages in general when I type english alphabet equivalents of Russian words. Pretty good.

TextCat Language Guesser Demo

Edward Tufte's new book, Beautiful Evidence, is now available. The table of contents and introduction are shown below.
The book is 214 pages, full color, and clothbound. Orders are shipped within one day.

This is his most beautiful book yet, but just as packed with essential information as the other three books for application developers, graphic artists, executives and anyone seeking to communicate through graphics.

I just got mine in the mail, so they're shipping now. Highly recommended, if only as a coffee table book, but worthy of lengthy study.

Edward Tufte: Books - Beautiful Evidence

After the tremendously successful 2000 and 2003 security tools surveys, Insecure.Org is delighted to release this 2006 survey. I (Fyodor) asked users from the nmap-hackers mailing list to share their favorite tools, and 3,243 people responded. This allowed me to expand the list to 100 tools, and even subdivide them into categories. Anyone in the security field would be well advised to go over the list and investigate tools they are unfamiliar with. I discovered several powerful new tools this way. I also will be pointing newbies to this site whenever they write me saying “I don't know where to start”.

Respondents were allowed to list open source or commercial tools on any platform. Commercial tools are noted as such in the list below. No votes for the Nmap Security Scanner were counted because the survey was taken on a Nmap mailing list. This audience also means that the list is slightly biased toward “attack” tools rather than defensive ones.

I dunno if this is accurate.

Top 100 Network Security Tools

lowfat - document viewing with a twist

created at February 7th, 2006 |
Contents:

The problem
A solution
Arising challenges
Potential usage
Current status
Screenshots/Videos
Near term goals
Far ahead future
Sponsoring
FAQ
The problem:

Todays file-management interfaces are more or less the same for the last 10 years. Ok we have thumbnail-previews in our icons to reflect the actual file-contents, but it is still only a stand-in or substitution for the real thing. But it’s not very real-world-like, where you have e.g. a bunch of photos or document-sheets that you just can look at to see what’s in them. It’s not really a seamless experience. On the other hand there are desktop search-tools like beagle and Spotlight, which help us find the kind of things we are currently interested in from our huge heaps of personal data. Thus we don’t see the unhandy clutter of hierarchical file-systems. Would it not be great if the computer could show us just the stuff we currently interested in, in a natural fashion where there’s only our documents and hardly any UI at all?
A solution:

Enter “lowfat”. Its goal is to bring that life-like and natural display to the desktop, alongside with a flat hierarchy of our files, when combined with todays search-engines. The aim of lowfat is to be an engine to view and handle your documents with life-alike behaviour allowing for example to seamless zoom, pan and rotate them. Furthermore it should support the user by making sorting and arrangement - according to certain criteria - of the currently viewed documents available.

Current (and even not so current) hardware is capable enough to allow these kind of things. Common graphics-hardware and CPUs are mostly idle during general desktop-usage, when you are looking through your files in your file-manager. This processing-power can be put to good use by “lowfat”.

Another potentially FOSS super-desktop.

digital home of MacSlow » lowfat - document viewing with a twist

Amusing map.

Map of Software Wars : Microsoft V FoSS

Jan. 27 For the more than 20 million Americans who suffer from migraine headaches, the debilitating pain can cause missed workdays and lost social opportunities. But many may be surprised to learn that experts now fear migraines may also cause something far worse — brain damage.

Son of a bitch, my poor brain.

Do Migraines Lead to Brain Damage? : ABC News

Yousef Mohammad demonstrating the TMS migraine zapper on himself. Credit: Yousef Mohammad/OSU

Whoah.

Man Zapping his Brain with Electromagnetic Field to Prevent Impending Migraine

In a recent study, researchers tested a device called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, or TMS for short, on a small group of 43 migraine sufferers.

The TMS generates a strong, one millisecond magnetic pulse that interrupts the symptoms leading up to a migraine, called the "aura" phase. Many migraine sufferers report zigzagging lines or bright flashes of light in their vision during this phase, as well as spreading blind spots and tingling sensations in their arms and legs.

EMP those damned migraines before they start.

New Device Zaps Migraines - Yahoo! News

BumpTop aims to enrich the desktop metaphor with expressive, lightweight techniques found in the real world.

More bumptop linkage. The icons need to be more verbose... I need a title along with a picture. But... this is good stuff.

BumpTop Prototype - HoneyBrown.ca

The 3D desktop prototype for Windows, called BumpTop, does some must-see-to-believe wrangling of digital documents as if they were physical pieces of paper. Reminds me of the touchscreen prototype I saw at ETech in March. Words don't do this justice; just hit that play button.

The icons need to be more verbose, but this is really neat. Is this what Vista should have been, something interesting?

BumpTop desktop emulates physical documents - Lifehacker