Friday 3/29/02 §
Fear the turtle. Washington Post article about college sports mascots describes "Ibises swooping onto the football field to taunt opposing teams." A Friday chuckle. (Obscure Store)
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Thursday 3/28/02 §
Some nice free fresh fonts (TrueType) from Ecco Domani. (growlers)
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Last night I posted a long reply to Michael Fraase's response to my article of the previous day on the topic of copyright. It ended up pushing everything else off this site's front page, so I've moved both my original article and the follow-up to a page of their own.
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Wednesday 3/27/02 §
Everything Forever: Learning to See and Model All Possible Universes. A thought-provoking mix of cosmology and philosophy. Read it. (abuddhas memes)
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They are painting the top of the Space Needle an ugly brownish-orange color. You can sort of see it in this live Webcam picture, although the color is not very good in that picture. It might just be primer for a complete paint job, though.
Update: It appears that they are repainting the top of the Needle (the "pagoda") in its original color for its fortieth anniversary. That hideous orange is called "Galaxy Gold." I'm sure it was all the rage back in 1962.
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Japanese cellular giant NTT DoCoMo is working on a sensor that detects the movements of the muscles used in speech, with the goal of allowing people to "talk" on the phone by merely moving their mouths silently. (In science fiction stories, this is usually referred to as "subvocalization.") Although it's not explicitly mentioned in the article, this technology obviously has great potential for improving speech recognition as well; the prototype system is already capable of recognizing vowels with 100% accuracy. (Meerkat)
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Tuesday 3/26/02 §
Visitors from Arts & Farces: what you're looking for is here.
Turning Torso is an intriguing building planned for construction in Sweden. It consists of nine cubes stacked on top of each other, each skewed ten degrees from the one below so that the building as a whole makes a 90-degree twist by the time it reaches the top. (leuschke.org)
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Wired has an interesting piece on the Griffin PowerMate, a USB knob control with a pulsing blue light inside, and its designer, Takahiko Suzuki of Nagano, Japan. (Follow Me Here)
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Some guys in the Seattle area are saving previously-logged land from suburban development by buying it up, paying for it by cutting down the trees. There's much more to it than that, but in all, it looks like a clever solution to the perceived problem of sprawl: tie the value to be extracted from the land to its long-term preservation, rather than focusing on short-term gain. Everyone involved in the deal even makes a profit -- how very libertarian. Of course, the plan still has to pass IRS muster (the deal revolves around the use of tax-exempt bonds), and nobody knows whether it can be sustained in the long term. And environmentalists still would prefer to see all logging stopped on the land so it can, over the next few centuries, return to its natural state. Still, compared to shopping malls, most environmentalists agree that controlled logging is the lesser evil. (Edgecase)
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Monday 3/25/02 §
Knight Rider: The Next Generation (my title, not theirs) coming to the big screen in 2004. I loved this show when I was in my teens, but I'm pretty sure I'd be embarrassed to buy a ticket to this movie twenty years later. (Fimoculous)
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Ruby is a fairly new object-oriented scripting language (in the vein of Perl or Python) with several novel and interesting language features. It's big in Japan (where it was invented) and is gaining steam in the U.S. Read an executive summary, peruse the reader comments on the same page, then, if it sounds interesting, you can read a whole book about it online for free. (dangerousmeta)
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Sunday 3/24/02 §
American Indian creation myths is just one fascinating part of The Book of Gods, Goddesses, Heroes and Characters of Mythology. Conspicuous by their absence from this online reference are Judeo-Christian and Islamic figures, although it seems fairly comprehensive otherwise. (Flutterby)
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You know how sometimes the moon looks really big and sometimes it looks a good deal smaller? Well, some of that is due to atmospheric effects and/or perspective (a moon near the horizon tends to appear larger than one high overhead), but part of it is real. The moon's orbit is elliptical with an eccentricity of 5.49%. This means that the moon actually appears about 12% larger at perigee (when it's closest to the Earth) than at apogee (when it's furthest from the Earth). John Walker has the details, including the math and some pictures.
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Friday 3/22/02 §
Thanks to a wanker who posted some crap to a comment thread here today, I had to add anti-wanker technology to the site. The technology is now in place and should reduce future wanking up to 60%.
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I've uploaded a couple AppleScripts I put together. One randomly selects songs from your iTunes library up to the capacity of your iPod (assuming your entire library won't fit on the iPod, of course). The other moves all your iTunes files into a single folder on disk. You can get 'em on the download page. Enjoy, and naturally, let me know if you have any problems.
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Thursday 3/21/02 §
These high-speed photographs are amazing enough before you realize that they were taken by students as young as 14. (The photos are in PDFs, presumably to keep them from being swiped easily.) (february 7)
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Best. 404. Ever.
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Jessamyn went to San Francisco for a week to cat-sit for some people who went to SXSW and took some pictures. Keep going, there are some real gems in there.
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Microcontent News's Google Translator is a "bookmarklet" (a JavaScript contained in a bookmark) that translates whatever Web page you're viewing from French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, or Italian into English, or the closest machine-translated facsimile thereof. The best part is, you don't have to tell it what the source language is. Google already knows, because Google has almost certainly already indexed the site. Just put the bookmark on your browser toolbar and voilá. Now I can read Miguel Cardoso. (He actually writes fine in English and is a regular MetaFilter participant, but his blog's in his native tongue, Portuguese.) (cheesedip)
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Wednesday 3/20/02 §
Enjoy some old-school Apple II geekery at Steven Frank's Beagle Bros Online Museum. (Also be sure to tour the Lego medical center named in their honor!)
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Tuesday 3/19/02 §
The world's best toothbrush? I always wondered what those guys did after they stopped making monitors. (the girl with the infrared eyes)
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Freakin' bright LEDs. An ordinary red light-emitting diode might put out as much as half a candela, while a "high-intensity" red light-emitting diode might put out 5-10 cd. The Luxeon Star/0 puts out 660 candelas, which makes it on the order of a thousand times brighter than the wimpy red LEDs. It's not just available in red, but also in white, green, blue, royal blue, cyan, red-orange and amber. (Yaysoft)
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The art of pen spinning. Don't miss the videos. (leuschke.org)
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Firebird 1.0 is a new open-source relational database. Well, not so new, actually -- it's been around in one form or another since 1988, and was owned by Inprise/Borland until 2000. Distributions are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X (yay!), with FreeBSD, Solaris, and HP-UX to follow. I'd be interested in hearing how it differs from other open-source databases, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. (I did manage to find an article comparing MySQL and PostrgeSQL.) (dangerousmeta)
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Monday 3/18/02 §
JerryKindall.com is under attack! Asian Bastard has declared me the "most techie" weblog he reads according to his link-o-graph. But danelope has declared: "I must now become the most top left (techie weblog) link on the page. This is war, Jerry."
Needless to say, I will defend my position by any means necessary. Let the battle begin!
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When designing a UI, keep your messages succinct, but not so succinct that they become confusing. Good piece, but I take issue with one of the examples. The author, Dr. Howard Tamler, notes that "Build window," a command in a development tool that opened the Build window (the window for compiling and linking a program) is ambiguous, and could be interpreted as a command to build a window, which is a reasonable interpretation in some development tools. His suggested improvement, though, is "Window for builds," which is awful. First, menu commands should be verb first (in fact, he notes that this convention is the reason "Build window" could be interpreted in the first place). So a better command would be "Open Build window." However, it can be made even clearer and briefer by simply changing the command to "Build...", with the ellipsis indicating that a new dialog or window will open. So this example actually does not support Tamler's thesis. (Noise Between Stations)
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Happy spiders. (memepool)
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As part of designing a role-playing game, M. Joseph Young created a theory of how time-travel would work. He's set up a site that analyzes popular sci-fi films, using these rules to make sense of the plot (or to point out plot holes). Of course, as far as we know, time travel isn't actually possible, but a surprising amount of rigorous thought went into this site, and no fan of science fiction should go without reading it. Of particular note is his analysis of my favorite mind-bending time travel films, 12 Monkeys. Other films discussed include Terminator (1 and 2), the Back to the Future series, the Bill & Ted movies (the first one, according to his analysis, is surprisingly well worked-out for a comedy), various Star Treks, and Frequency. (aqua hydro)
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Sunday 3/17/02 §
The Vocabula Review explores the hermeneutics of hello. (Follow Me Here)
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The Theory of Relativity in words of four letters, or shorter. Now, who can do it the Mad Ape Den way? (leuschke.org)
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I didn't actually get to see Ice Age yesterday. Instead, I had one of the most bizarre theatergoing experiences of my life. I arrived about half an hour before the film was to start and got in the long, long line to buy a ticket. The line did not move the entire time I was standing in it, and it was cold. With about five minutes to go until showtime, I decided I wasn't going to be able to get in, so I left. As I drove out of the parking lot, I passed the place where I'd been waiting, and the line was completely gone. The only thing I can figure out is that the 100 or so people in the line were abducted by aliens in the sixty seconds it took me to get to my car. Clearly, I left just in time.
I'm going to try to see the movie today, but, for obvious reasons, at a different theater.
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Meant to link this a while ago: Blue sky, blue cranes. A mundane subject captured in an interesting way by a local blogger. Sticka-boom, sticka-boom. Proof that almost anything can be interesting when seen through the right set of eyes.
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Linotype's free Font Explorer package ($10 shipping) includes the complete type libraries of several foundries in encrypted format, plus a book containing samples of every font, and five posters. You also get 18 free fonts, half of which you probably already have if you have a computer. If you just want the posters to brighten your walls, you can get them by themselves for $6 shipping. (Life and Deatherage)
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Saturday 3/16/02 §
When I think of a balding, middle-aged, white English guy, "urban" is not exactly the first adjective that springs to mind. Nevertheless, last year, a motley crew of "hip-hop and R&B superstars" and "world-class producers" recorded a Phil Collins tribute album, christened it Urban Renewal, and unleashed it upon an unsuspecting Europe. Rapper Lil' Kim actually has the video for her rendition of "In The Air Tonight" on her site. Is this one of the signs of the Apocalypse, or just an incredible simulation?
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The Towers of Light WTC memorial in wide-screen panorama. (Scroll it to the right.)
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Friday 3/15/02 §
Are there some bilingual shenanigans in the new animated film Ice Age? According to one of the user reviews of the film at CitySearch (scroll on through to the second or third page, you'll find the message easily, as the guy posted it like twenty times in an attempt to pull down the film's star rating), the phrase "doom on you," chanted repeatedly by several characters in a certain scene, sounds a lot like the Vietnamese phrase for "go fuck yourself." Heh. That's pretty sly if it's intentional. I'm going to see that film tomorrow.
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The Mountains of Pi is like the movie, except, you know, real. (sapphireblue)
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Speaking of the St. Bees broken limerick I posted last week: a useful guide to bees and pseudo-bees. (randomWalks)
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The latest adventure of that self-promoting gasbag, Michael Moore, has been widely linked on other Web sites already. Moore is encouraging the perception that he was nearly arrested for autographing books in San Diego. In fact, however, the issue was not him autographing books, but occupying the auditorium he'd obtained later than he'd promised. I'm sure it wouldn't have mattered to the cops if he and his disciples had been square-dancing.
It is of course possible that the San Diego police hassled him more than they would have hassled others, but they were well within their rights to ask him to clear out. To claim, as Moore does in his very second sentence, that he has "just escaped" arrest, is melodramatic and, at the very least, disingenuous. No, Mike, the cops came and reminded you of your promise, and gave you a choice of keeping it or being arrested. It's a pretty sad state of affairs when the police have to remind a grown man of his commitments, isn't it? To Moore's credit, he (reluctantly) did the right thing, ignoring the idiot who told him she was willing to be arrested with him.
Moore is spinning his "ordeal" to make himself out as the humble, downtrodden victim of The Man, but this is because, as I noted earlier, he is a self-promoting gasbag. Michael Moore is all about Michael Moore. Anything he manages to do for "the little guy" is purely incidental to the further glorification (and remuneration) of Himself. I can barely believe people actually fall for his schtick, but they do, in droves.
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glenn mcdonald walks home and another beautiful photoessay comes with him.
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Thursday 3/14/02 §
I had always assumed that any blue tint you see in water is due to reflections from the sky, but apparently water really is blue. Here's why. The entire Causes of Colors site is very cool and worth getting lost in for a while. (The Flangy News)
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Witness now the twisted progeny of Aleph and Bet: The Alphabet's Bastard Children. A couple of the links don't work, but there are some provocative ideas about writing systems here. (Bifurcated Rivets)
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According to Salon, the Indian comedy Monsoon Wedding is "breaking art-house records across North America." Ebert & Roeper also gave it high marks recently on their television program. It was shot in just thirty days on a small budget. Salon has a review of the film, an interview with the filmmaker, and this handy (and unexpectedly fascinating) viewer's guide to the film.
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The return of the Amiga is back. That's not an error -- I do in fact mean that the idea that the Amiga will return is what has returned. So far the idea of the Amiga's return has come back more frequently than the actual Amiga, and I can't say I expect this to be much different. (Meerkat)
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Nine Planets Mag Dot Com has an interesting reading list for college dropouts. Some of the choices seem dubious to me, but most look pretty meaty. Take the list with you next time you visit the library... (Edgecase)
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Improving the way humans walk. (New York Times via Follow Me Here)
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In 1997, Dean Stark was targeted for a vicious smear campaign on USENET, allegedly by a psychotic ex-girlfriend. Thanks to Google Groups, this ordeal has been immortalized for posterity. The man truly has my sympathies. (MetaFilter)
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Wednesday 3/13/02 §
Ever wonder exactly how Zip or StuffIt or JPEG or MP3 makes your files smaller? It's pretty technical, but the Data Compression Reference Center has that information and more. (Neat New Stuff on the Net via meryl)
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A writer's Hollywood dream comes true. (Obscure Store)
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Tuesday 3/12/02 §
The same government that is supposed to be protecting us from terrorists just sent visa approvals to two of the WTC hijackers. Six months to the day after 9/11. Ordinarily I'd file it under "bureaucratic incompetence," but the perfect timing leads me to believe that perhaps it's someone's idea of a joke. (Thx Warren)
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Apparently it's possible to use PQAs (Palm Query Applications, a.k.a. "Web clippings," basically compressed Web forms stored on your device) with a Handspring Visor and an Internet connection and, say, a VisorPhone by bogarting a few files from a Palm VII. Or you can use SureWave Browser. (Guess who just got a VisorPhone?)
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Binaural recordings are recordings made with a pair of microphones installed in the ears of a dummy human head. (I am not making this up.) When listened to on headphones, such recordings have an astonishing sense of place. They sound real in a way that ordinary recordings simply do not, even when they're crappy recordings (1.7MB MP2). This is what technologies like SRS, Spatializer, and QSound are trying to duplicate with HRTF (head-related transfer functions) and other sophisticated audio processing -- except without the "sophisticated" part.
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Monday 3/11/02 §
Do not eat. (hit-or-miss.org)
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A great new article at Kuro5hin picks out two leading writers of "hard" science fiction, Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter. The discussion thread's worth reading too, as it discusses what what exactly makes science fiction "hard" and mentions other writers who might appeal for those who like lots of science in their scientifiction.
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A Japanese company is making what may well be the perfect mouse for Mac OS X. It is encased in clear plastic and has no visible buttons, like Apple's Pro Mouse, and it has an optical sensor down below. But unlike Apple's Pro Mouse, it has a distinct left and right click. It has a scroll wheel, which is illumunated by a blue (aqua!) LED when you scroll. The mouse is not available in the US at the moment, but the guy who posted the pictures linked above is trying to put together a bulk order for interested stateside Macheads.
Update: You can buy it here in black or purple. (I can't vouch for the merchant, though; never heard of them. Order at your own risk.)
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Not even CBS could stifle the raw emotional power of their "9/11" special. Robert De Niro's completely unnecessary framing segments couldn't ruin it, nor could the trendy vertical bar used as a date separator in the titles or the pretentious letterboxing of video footage. Nor could the simple fact that much of the footage of the disaster proper seemed to consist of firefighters either standing around or running away from the World Trade Center. (Only one of the two brothers who shot this footage was in the World Trade Center during the attack, and he never left the ground floor -- the real life-risking was going on in the stairwells, but there is no footage of that. You just see a bunch of guys milling around in the lobby, spending a seemingly interminable amount of time talking on their radios and looking worried.) None of that mattered. Seeing it all again was like seeing it for the first time. Worse, because this time we know what's coming. The inevitability of the death and destruction hones the pain, and the anger, to an even keener edge.
I had managed to put 9/11 out of my mind. Doing so allowed me to be functional again, to resume some semblance of a normal life. This made it fresh again. I'm not sure yet whether that is good or bad. It might be that we needed to be reminded. We have slipped back into business as usual. Maybe now is the right time to remind ourselves of everything we lost, to reassess whether the ruts we've fallen back into are the right ones for the world we now live in.
A more cynical prediction: With the nation's outrage freshly rekindled, now would be an excellent time to launch a new military action with full public support.
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Friday 3/8/02 §
M&H Type in San Francisco's Presidio is the last full-service type foundry in the United States. They make fonts the old-fashioned way: out of molten lead. Lewis Mitchell, one of the last practitioners of the trade, is now 72 and is seeking an apprentice so he can take a day off each week. (rebecca's pocket)
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The 3D Effect: will computer-generated animation make traditional animation extinct, as Steve Jobs predicted? As far as I'm concerned, this article misses the point by classifying Warner's The Iron Giant and Disney's Tarzan as "traditional" animation. Both were in fact heavily dependent on computer animation: the big metal guy in the former was entirely computer-generated, while Disney invented a new computer technology called Deep Canvas for the latter. In fact, Disney was using computer animation in its "traditional" features as early as Aladdin.
The dichotomy between "digital" and "traditional" animation is entirely bogus. Although South Park looks like it's still made with construction-paper cutouts, it's actually digital now. The constantly-squirming outlines of Dr. Katz, a Comedy Central show from a couple years back, were done with an Adobe Illustrator plug-in. (A friend of mine was terribly disappointed when he learned this, as he had assumed the look meant that every frame was painstakingly hand-drawn.)
Today, even live-action films often have digital effects in them, simply because such effects are often less expensive or less labor-intensive than doing it the traditional way. And in animation, "less expensive" and "less labor-intensive" are essentially the same thing. I would not be surprised to see even "traditional" animation go entirely digital; with off-the-shelf tools like the upcoming LivingCels from Creature House, it's more than feasible. (also not found in nature)
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The origins of monotheism may have been discovered in Jordan. (Follow Me Here)
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In India, "[c]itizens are sometimes punished by making them hold on to one another's ears while standing up and sitting down repeatedly." (PhotoDude via dangerousmeta)
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Thursday 3/7/02 §
Augh! Someone's squooshed the Cingular guy to make the TheoryTech logo! Logoed has TheoryTech's and other logos, some of which are good, and others of which (despite the site's stated intent to showcase good logos) are mediocre, or at least unintelligble. (february 7)
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Way back in September, I wrote about getting a good set of headphones so I could enjoy my tunes at the office. The $40 Panasonic RP-HT1000 phones I mentioned turned out to sound terrible, although they were very comfortable. I ended up choosing Grado Labs' SR-225 headphones. Since Magnolia Hi-Fi didn't have the SR-225s in stock the day I went to buy, I bought a set of the less expensive SR-125s instead, but after breaking them in for nearly a month, I took them back and upgraded to the better cans. In the treble, the SR-225s are noticeably smoother than the SR-125s, which were strident in comparison. And they're rather more comfortable, too, thanks to a softer ear cushion. Right now, I've got these cans plugged into a Wow Thing from SRS Labs, which is in turn connected to the iPod, and I'm very pleased. It's easy to forget you're wearing headphones and get lost in the music.
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Wednesday 3/6/02 §
Guide horses for the blind. Who knew? (Acetylene)
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How do you mark nuclear waste disposal sites so that the warnings can still be read in 10,000 years? Sandia National Laboratories charged a panel of experts with the task, and they came up with some interesting ideas, including a multi-tiered system of signs, "forbidding earthworks," and comic strips of a sort. (Scott McCloud would be proud.) (MetaFilter)
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It's easy to mount an Apple iDisk under Windows 2000. Just go to "My Network Places," double-click "Add Network Place," and enter http://idisk.mac.com/username/ (inserting your user name, of course). Enter your iDisk user name and password in the next dialog. Now your iDisk is in "My Network Places" (actually, your Network Places, not mine, but it's called mine even though it's yours). The same, I'm sure, can be accomplished with other flavors of Windows, such as XP -- as long as the version of Windows you're using supports WebDAV.
Once you have accomplished this, you will discover that mounting and working with your iDisk under Windows is noticeably faster than doing the same under Mac OS or Mac OS X. Yay Apple.
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Tuesday 3/5/02 §
Bill Amend, the plugged-in creator of the comic strip FoxTrot, has taken down the official Web site hosted by the syndicator of the strip. Instead, he's now posting to a Weblog-style site in free Web space at mac.com. He writes: "Basically, I wanted to get away from the big, complicated web site model and fool around with something smaller and more personal for a while." You can still read the strip online at UComics. (GlennLog)
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Dennis Hwang is the guy behind the cute cartoons that appeared on Google during the Winter Olympics. Hwang does not work in Google's art department -- he is the art department, when he's not programming. (Dane Carlson)
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Yamaha has announced technology that allows CD-R recorders to draw "watermarks" on the unused portion of a disc. (danelope)
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A "sermon" on pornography and shame from the official Web site of a popular USENET smut newsgroup: The Mark of Cain. (Probably not safe for work.) (Flutterby)
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Monday 3/4/02 §
Scott Rogers has accused me of linking to a page about broken jokes. I hadn't, actually, but it is in fact exactly the kind of thing I'd link to, so now I have, and his statement of yesterday is retroactively true! Oh what tangled Webs...
I'm reminded of this "broken limerick" from one of Douglas Hofstadter's books (Metamagical Themas, I think). I'm quoting from memory so it may not be verbatim, but it goes something like this:
There once was a man from St. Bees
Who was stung on the arm by a wasp.
When asked, "Does it hurt?"
He replied, "No it doesn't;
But I'm glad that it wasn't a hornet."
It is so very difficult to find someone who understands that this is funny.
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Caught the Jeremiah pilot last night on Showtime. In case you haven't heard of this show, it's a new post-apocalyptic science fiction series based on a European comic book. J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, is an executive producer and a writer for the show, which is what's got the fanboys creaming their jeans. Although the show looks a bit like a retread of other post-apocalyptic SF such as Mad Max, The Postman, and even Dark Angel to a certain extent, in reality it's apparently the other way around: the Jeremiah comic was the inspiration for much of that brand of fiction.
I'm not sold on Luke Perry as the title character, but I liked Malcolm Jamal-Warner (yes, Theo Huxtable, except all grown up and with dreadlocks) as his sidekick, Kurdy. The show's primary flaw is that many of the characters in it seem, well, a little too nice, considering they were all pre-pubescent children when the plague hit; it's not quite Lord of the Flies enough. I think Straczynski is just used to writing for "regular" TV and wasn't quite sure where the limits were. Maybe he should have taken the hint from Showtime's slogan: "No Limits". Reportedly, future episodes get a good bit grittier, and I know that new shows do take a while to find their voice, so I'm willing to give it a chance.
The acting and production were generally fine, the characters weren't forced to say "frigging" when they wanted to say "fucking" (although Kurdy did use that euphemism once, you read it as him not wanting to offend Jeremiah), and there was even some nudity. All in all, it was interesting enough to get me to TiVo the next episode, and more enjoyable than anything the Sci-Fi channel's showing on Fridays now that The Invisible Man has been canceled.
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Paul Graham writes about developing Web-based applications at Viaweb, which was sold to Yahoo! and became Yahoo! Store. I don't necessarily agree that Web apps are the future of computing, at least not in the near term; can you imagine trying to do digital video on a Web application? Ow. But there's some really interesting stuff there about developing such applications. (Ponderous Ponderings)
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Is Kaycee Nicole back from the dead? See message #38, dated 14 February 2002, here. Or is it just a sick joke? (Easily Amused)
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Famous con man "Count" Victor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap -- twice. And that was just one of many successful scams he pulled off in his career. (USS Clueless)
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Alex Good "thanks" the publishing giants for protecting us from the unholy legions of those who would publish their own books. (dangerousmeta)
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Saturday 3/2/02 §
Mac advocacy meets Jack Chick tracts in The Little OS. (Flutterby)
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I'm in the process of building a new Web server and am interested in finding three or four other people to share the cost with. I intend to either upgrade to business-class DSL here at home, or else colocate the box at a local ISP. I'm leaning toward colocation, since that gets me more raw bandwidth and several IP addresses.
The server is a dual-processor 500MHz Celeron box with 768MB RAM and dual mirrored 60GB HDs. It will have Windows 2000 and Microsoft IIS as the Web server, with ASP, PHP, Perl, Python, and MySQL also available, for starters. And a mail server of some sort. I'll install anything else on it you need (ColdFusion, Movable Type, etc.) although if you need commercial software, you'll have to pay for it yourself or else arrange with the other server users to split the cost. You'll get 10GB disk space for your sites and at least 10GB/month bandwidth. You can have as many sites as you want hosted on the server within those parameters. You only get one real IP address, though, so if you're hosting more than one domain it will be hosted "virtually."
I'm thinking $80 a month for a quarter of the server (i.e. I get three other people besides me) or $60 a month for a fifth of it (I get four other people), plus the same amount for a setup fee. This covers the colocation costs; I'll cover the hardware. If you're interested in sharing a server with me, e-mail me.
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Friday 3/1/02 §
Rael Dornfest's blosxom is an inelegantly-named but very simple (less than thirty lines) PERL script for putting up a Weblog on a UNIX box, including Mac OS X. (Boing Boing)
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World's longest Slinky. (Eric Hancock)
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