In an alternate universe, with better cinema, Todd Solondz gets all the credit and attention given here to Kevin Smith. Solondz continues to reign as New Jersey's best indie director.

This movie taps the same vein as Happiness and Storytelling. Not quite the sadistic beat-down of Happiness, and the sex scenes are not as "good" as Storytelling, but it will still have you feeling horrible laughing at it. Every character is unlikable in some way, and every one of them will drop at least one line that will make you groan. In the end, the messages are all positive, but you must survive through the presentation to see it.

A followup to Welcome to the Dollhouse, the movie begins with Dawn Wiener's funeral. And, you guessed it, she killed herself. This one follows Aviva (played by several different actresses) through her adventures with low self-esteme, abortion gone wrong, hardcore Kansas Christians, abortion doctor killing re-born ex-cons, and a Solondz size dose of characters that reek of New Jersey in all the wrongest of ways.

imdb: Palindromes (2004)

This project attempts to take the first steps toward such an exploratory data environment for e-mail corpora, using the Enron e-mail corpus as a motivating data set. The interface--currently named "enronic"--unifies information visualization techniques with various algorithms for processing the e-mail corpus, including social network inference, message categorization, and community analysis. Though still in a developmental phase, enronic shows promise as a platform for more tightly coupling manual and automated data analysis.

Exploring Enron - Visualizing ANLP Results

A London man described as the "world's biggest computer hacker" has been arrested.

Biggest? Does that mean he is fat or something?

The unemployed former computer engineer is accused of causing the US government $1billion of damage by breaking into its most secure computers at the Pentagon and Nasa. He is likely to be extradited to America to face eight counts of computer crime in 14 states and could be jailed for 70 years.

Most of the alleged hacking took place in 2001 and 2002. At one stage the US thought it was the work of the al Qaeda terror network.

Nope, he's not Al-Qaeda.. Keeping that in mind, here is where it gets amusing:

Friends said that he broke into the networks from his home computer to try to prove his theory that the US was covering up the existence of UFOs.

Friends said he was desperate to prove that the Americans had mounted a huge cover-up to deny his belief that aliens had visited earth.

"He's been interested in UFOs for some time and believes the Americans are holding back information - although he didn't find any proof."

"The truth is out there."

'World's biggest computer hacker' attempts to break into The X-Files

What follows is an overview of what's happening on the Internet right now, and what we expect to happen in the coming months.

I admire Schneier and all, but this article is a piece of self-serving shit.

We expect to see ever-more-complex worms and viruses in the wild

We expect to see more blended threats: exploit code that combines malicious code with vulnerabilities in order to launch an attack. We expect Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) Web server to continue to be an attractive target

[Worms targeted at a specific entity] are another trend we're starting to see.

We expect to see more attacks against financial institutions, as criminals look for new ways to commit fraud. [...]

We also expect to see more politically motivated hacking, whether against countries, companies in "political" industries (petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, etc.), or political organizations

Well, I predict that people will continue to make obvious predictions. These predictions (with slight modifications) could apply to any of the last 10-15 years or so.

Schneier on Security: Attack Trends

Last week I posted a notice about a State Department-sponsored workshop on blogging.

Yesterday the following notice was sent to the same mailing list, in advance of the event (which was held today).

THIS SESSION IS OFF-THE-RECORD; IT IS DESIGNED TO BE AN INFORMATIVE WORKSHOP FOR JOURNALISTS AND NOT AS A SUBJECT FOR REPORTING.

I am not making up the ALL CAPS thing. That is exactly how it appeared in the notice.

Isn't it ironic, don't you think?

First Rule of Blogging Workshop: Do Not Blog About Blogging Workshop

Google seems to be really on top of indexing MemeStreams, but this is still worth implementing. I'll look at it in some detail and put it into plans moving forward.

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.

With Google Sitemaps you get:

* Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
* Fresher search results
* A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes

Google Sitemaps

Episode 99 - Kryptos

Airdate: 2005-06-08
Length:1:31:48
Size:15.69 MB

Hosts:StankDawg & Elonka

Fun 90-minute episode this week. Main topics: Privacy, Identity Theft, and Kryptos.

Binary Revolution - Episode #99

Well, the Bush-Nazi comparisons are deja-done, so of course now we have to move on. Seen on the MARC commuter train (between Baltimore and DC) today, this picture pretty much sums up the new "National Security:"

Report any unusual activities or packages to the nearest conductor.

Articulatory Loop - Read, Repeat, Remember

The huge influx of cash at the turn of the millennium led to the whole Web being built in the image of the Bay area. The website patterns that started there and - just by coincidence - happened to scale to other environments, those were the ones that survived.

Absolutely true...

California's subtle influence on computer culture

Hiring troubles at Microsoft.

The post is a self-described tirade about the trials of working with Microsoft managers who ultimately make employment offers. A chief problem is the way these managers are self-absorbed, suggests Gretchen Ledgard, a senior technical recruiter at Microsoft. "(T)hey can't seem to get it through their heads that 1) Microsoft isn't the only place hiring, 2) Working at a big company isn't everyone's dream, and 3) Redmond is not the first place people say they want to move when they wake up in the morning."

Ledgard doesn't pull any punches in the rant, and admits the situation makes her wonder if her job is worth it.

"So I guess I've just been really tired of (pardon my bluntness) the entitled, spoiled whiners lately," she said. "So much that it's made me question my desire to continue working in a recruiting function for this company."

Recruiting headaches at Microsoft | CNET News.com Blog