Adam's Blog

To those who think Israel is the problem in the Middle East conflict, I dedicate the following: 1. Israel became a state in 1312 B.C.., two millennia before Islam; 2. Arab refugees from Israel began calling themselves "Palestinians" in 1967, two decades after (modern) Israeli statehood; 3. After conquering the land in 1272 B.C.., Jews ruled it for a thousand years and maintained a continuous presence there for 3,300 years; 4. The only arab rule following conquest in 633 B.C.. lasted just 22 years; 5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem was the Jewish capital. it was never the capital of any arab or Muslim entity. even under Jordanian rule, (east) Jerusalem was not made the capital, and no arab leader came to visit it; 6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in the bible, but not once is it mentioned in the qur'an; 7. King david founded Jerusalem; mohammed never set foot in it; 8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem; Muslims face mecca. if they are between the two cities, Muslims pray facing mecca, with their backs to Jerusalem; 9. In 1948, arab leaders urged their people to leave, promising to cleanse the land of Jewish presence. 68% of them fled...

I'm so pleased to share that CRACKED magazine, one of my favorites as a young teen even though it was often just a second rate MAD magazine, has recently been resurrected. The new version is more like a teen-aimed Maxim, but man is it funny. Here are some choice articles currently featured on the website: First, a genius article called Why does everybody hate Kimmmy Gibler so damn much? An in-depth review exposes the Tanner family for what they were: a bunch of self-centered, underachieving, possibly gay, misfit assholes. The 7 Best '80s Movie Girlfriends No clue how Pamela from Teen Wolf made the cut when it CLEARLY should've been Boof, but a great list nonetheless. Obviously, Elizabeth Shue had to be on the list for one of any number of roles. The only people ever to guess the "joke" answer on Double Dare CRACKED passes us to College Humor for this one, where a family picks the "joke" answer, standard on every question on Double Dare. I can't believe the father let these poor kids go with this answer. 8 Important Lessons Learned from '80s Cartoons Good stuff. Good stuff.

As you can see, I've made some minor tweaks to the stylesheet for sethadam1.com. I am preparing to add the last few features and then stabilize Small Axe for a Fall release.

Eugenia released a little web-let called "MobileQuo" the other day, and it caught my eye. I downloaded it and hacked it up and made some changes. 1. This version is more secure - it won't let the content of the feed break your HTML. Update: Apparently, the desired behavior is to render the HTML, not to preserve the markup as markup, so the new version Eugenia has released reflects that change. So code will be rendered, including javascript, so beware!! 2. This version outputs friendly errors. The 1.0 version can fail if your php.ini isn't set up right, or output a blank page if there are certain errors. 3. This version is more portable and doesn't rely on a particular PHP configuration. 4. Most differently, this version can cache the results. This way, each reload won't hammer an RSS feed. Rather, the results can be cached for a perdiod and fed from cache, and then when the cache expires, it reloads the cache. The source code is here: MobileQuo. Note that you will need to upload a blank WRITABLE file in your MobileQuo directory. Then just use the rest of the code from Eugenia here.

I've been meaning to post a bunch of great links for awhile, so I have several saved up. Coolest Monk Ever This dude can balance himself on ONE FINGER. This is incredible. Leia's Metal Bikini Leia's Jedi-era metal bikini as worn by fans. Yummy! A note on OS X's kernel_task This one is a little nerdy, but it's an excellent article on WTF kernel_task is and why it's always present Bullet Bill Play Super Mario Brothers as.... the bullet?! Girl caught stripping by mom A girl with a webcam and a boyfriend gets caught by her mom. Hilarious! CRAZY Russian Experiments This video, thus far thought to be real, is from a 1940's Soviet lab. Amongst the things on the film: keeping a dog's HEAD alive without the body (about 5:32 in) and killing a dog and bringing it back to life. Yes. Seriously. Family Guy Behind the Scenes Did you know that Cleveland is a skinny white guy? Watch the cast recording some lines.

Last night, Mandy had us all over for a martini party. Keith tended bar and we even got Dan on the phone. Here are some pictures.

Now that I've successfully used most of the features on both flickr.com and Picasaweb, I decided I would write a short review of the two services. The need for online photo storage is certainly a very real one, and different services have different objectives. Here's a short breakdown. Read more for the review.

I've gone ahead and transitioned my photos from flickr to PicasaWeb. Picasaweb is simply so much easier to navigate. Yes, it's true, there's no easy way to include a photo in multiple albums. Yes, this is completely anti-tag-based-systems and therefore contrary to everything I preach about Gmail, but the fact is that many people simply don't "get it" when it comes to Flickr, and I find myself frequently trying to explain to less technological relatives show to use it. I love it, but it's simply too complex for the Average Joe to follow. Picasaweb, on the other hand, integrates freely with Picasa and iPhoto, which makes it VERY attractive, it's cheap ($25 a year for 6GB storage), and it's drop dead simple. So for now, I'm on Picasaweb.

This is a repost of something I just wrote as a comment on OSNews: Shadow copies, at least in the current Volume Shadow Copy implementation, are most definitely NOT "exactly" the same thing as Time Machine. While VSC is very similar, it's designed to do snapshots at certain times. This is fine for most restores, but in general, if you modify a document several times, you only have the version at the time of the snapshot. As I understand Time Machine, it does a snapshot at modification time, so you have each modification. This might seem like a marginal difference, but in reality, it's anything but trivial. This is a world of difference and nothing like this currently exists in a usable form in the base install of ANY consumer OS today. So while it may not be a new idea, it certainly IS innovation.

I'm not going to blog this, because every other site on the Internet is going to over-report it, but the WWDC started today and the Keynote held few major surprises. For me, the biggest thing announced is Time Machine, the version control system built into Mac OS X Leopard. I wonder if it's built on Subversion or CVS or something new. Let's not forget that Microsoft already has volume shadow copy, which is already deployed and as far as I'm concerned, invaluable to daily business. But alas, until spring...