Recently in Technology Category

  Movabletype 4.2 was released today. I have completed the upgrade. The speed improvements were immediately noticeable!

  I have always been pretty good about backing up my desktop. My laptop, however, never gets backed up. I occasionally copy important files over to my desktop, but that's it. So, after a virus and a bad sector on the hard drive made the laptop start acting up, I had to rebuild from scratch. I decided it was time to have a single backup solution that works for all of my machines. So, I bought an HP EX475 Windows Home Server. So far, I'm very happy with it. It just sits in my basement with a gigabit network connection and my machines automatically backup every night. I've only found 1 gotcha so far. It says it allows remote access to your home machines, which it does... as long as you are running Vista Ultimate. If you are running any other version of Vista, you can't remote in.

  I have updated Movabletype to version 4.1. Now I have to figure out what's different. I see the create entry screen has changed. It will take a while to find out what else is new. In order to take advantage of everything you have to update your templates and that's more work than I'm up for right now...

I received an email from an old co-worker recently. He pointed me to a web site about how to make money from blogging. I did a little poking around and found a few sites that talked about making a six figure salary from blogging. However, they were very generic. I decided to start an experiment. I have created a new site at http://www.canicashin.com to document all of the steps taken and whether any money was earned. Check it out!

  Microsoft has now made Virtual PC a free product! If you have used any virtualization technology (VMWare, Microsoft Virtual Server/PC, etc) then you know how great it can be. This is especially true if you like playing around with beta products but don't want to screw up your machine. Try it out... it's free! You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx

  Microsoft has made it possible to try out office 2007 without having to download and install it. It does require you to have or get a Live ID (previously passport) login and to install a citrix browser plugin but it works really well. Check out the Office 2007 Test Drive and start learning the new and improved interface now!

Apparently, the Catholic Church figured the best way to avoid the ethical problems with embryonic stem cells was to fund research of other stem cells... whatever works!!!

MSNBC - Scientists grow adult stem cells from nose

  According to John Dvorak, apparently bloggers are just Conformists in the High Tech era. He also states that the blogging community is relatively small and many high tech people just aren't interested. What do you think?

  I'm not sure if this should be titled "Where there's a will there's a way" or "someone has too much time on their hands", but a researcher at the University of California has developed a technique for tracking PCs that are behind firewalls using clock skews. Check it out at Connected Home or Engadget.

  If you create a technology for one purpose, why not see where else it can be used?

workers for Microsoft Research said they have been using database and antispam software to identify previously unseen patterns in genetic mutations of HIV. Working in collaboration with doctors and scientists from the University of Washington in Seattle and Australia's Royal Perth Hospital, the researchers plan to propose designs for new HIV vaccines based on the newly discovered patterns.

  DEMO is a conference for launching emerging technologies. There are no long drawn out PowerPoint presentations here. Each presenter is given EIGHT MINUTES of stage time. There are a lot of cool products here. They range from Blogging products (surprise surprise!) to a product that will let you play your own instrument with a full orchestra right in your own home! And of course, someone was nice enough to blog all the demos for us as it was happening. Check it out at Blogging DEMO

  PC Magazine has published a list of their Top 15 Firefox Extensions. It's an interesting read. I added the About This Site Firefox Extension v.0.1.2 extension.
  A couple of others that I like that are not listed in their top 15 are:

JustBlogIt! - Right click on any web page and select "JustBlogIt!". It will open up your blog and put the link in the Entry. It will also pick up on any trackback URLs specified in the meta data and add a ping entry. I use it with Movabletype and it works quite well.

Web Developer 0.9.2 - This adds a ton of items interesting to web developers to the right click menu. You can disable things, Gather information (including viewing the response headers), edit the CSS on the fly to see how it affects the page, run all different types of validation and much much more. If you only want the CSS piece, the "Edit CSS" plugin works well too.


  There are many extensions for firefox. Most of them can be found by going to Tools -> Extensions -> Get More Extensions.

Here's some cool short snippets from Popluar Science...
Weird Science - Popular Science

Cut the risk of a hangover by taking a pill made from a cactus.

FDA OK'd use of maggots to treat chronic wounds.

Commitment might be genetic... at least in moles.

Water for astronauts going to Mars may come from a new toilet.

a male salmon has spawned trout hatchlings.

We use Sabine SWM7000 wireless microphone systems for an annual conference that we host. I was trying to flash the firmware and was having problems where it was reporting the firmware as corrupted. So I thought I would call Sabine and get some tech support. Well, to my surprise, the message stated "We are closed until January 3". Now, I understand people taking vacation over the holidays, but who shuts down the ENTIRE company???? What kind of crap is that?
Luckily, I finally found the answer on their web site. I don't know why I couldn't find it the other night or why I didn't find it when I *SEARCHED* their documentation, but it's in BOLD on their web site.

Judge awards ISP $1 billion in spam damages

There are federal and state laws against SPAM. Other countries, such as the UK have anti-spam laws. Lawsuits are being filed. Microsoft, AOL and EarthLink have many of them in the hopper at any given time. Recently, a spammer was given a fine AND jail time. Now, an ISP has been awarded $1 BILLION in damages from a SPAM lawsuit. Why is it then, that even after ALL of the fines AND jail time, I still get the same or MORE spam than ever? I get somewhere in the vicinity of 400 spam emails a day. I realize that my spam problem comes no where near the almost 4 million spam emails that Bill Gates receives in a day. However, it's still VERY irritating to have to sort through all that crap to find REAL email. I have that mail account setup such that anything not on my "white list" is automatically junk, but sometimes I need to get to something I haven't white listed yet and have to go through all those SPAM mails to find the one I actually wanted.

How many SPAM mails do you receive a day? Have you found that the lawsuits or SPAM filtering technology are helping at all?

Sony music has decided to take another stab at copy protecting their music CDs. You'd think they'd learn. If I can't rip a CD that I PURCHASED to my computer AND copy it over onto my MP3 player so I can listen to it while I'm travelling, I won't buy it! New CD copy-lock technology nears market | CNET News.com

Along the same news trail, Downhill Battle has pledged to send a lump of coal to the RIAA and the MPAA for every $100 donted to the EFF, Public Knowledge or IPac organizations. I already support the EFF. Read the news story on CNET or just go and donate!

Google released a new tool in beta called Google Suggest. I think it's really cool. As you type, it drops down a box with known search terms and the number of results for that search term.

According to Webster, BLOG is the #1 word of the year for 2004! This does not surprise me at all. There are thousands of people blogging now and many many sites that exist mainly for finding blogs. Some of these include

BlogExplosion
Technorati
weblogs.com
blo.gs
and many, many more...

Then there are the sites that host blogs...
Google owns Blogger
Microsoft just released the beta of it blogging service, called MSN Spaces
and Six Apart, the makers of Movabletype (the software THIS blog runs on), own Typepad

So, with hundreds of site and thousands of bloggers (probably understated), it's no wonder the Blog was the #1 word of the year!

It appears that scientists are starting to make some amazing breakthroughs using stem cells. A story in the Australian Herald Sun reports:

A SOUTH Korean woman paralyzed for 20 years is walking again after scientists say they repaired her damaged spine using stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood

RIO DE JANEIRO, November 23, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Brazilian scientists have successfully transplanted adult stem cells into a woman's brain, facilitating her recovery from a brain hemorrhage that left her paralyzed and unable to talk.

Maria da Graca Pomeceno, 54, had bone marrow stem cells taken from her pelvis and injected into her damaged brain. Local television broadcasts showed her walking up stairs and talking.

If these reports are true, then medical science is indeed taking some great strides forward. It would be wonderful if we could cure spinal cord and even brain injuries!
There is another story, however, that I find disturbing. It talks about injecting human stem cells into animals. This allows them to grow human organs, a liver or kidney for example, in an animal such as a sheep. This is all well and good for organ transplants. It is the injection of human stem cells into the brains of mice to grow mice with brains consisting of mostly "human" brain cells, along with other statements in this article that I find rather disturbing. A bioethicist, Joseph Fletcher, even "suggested that it would be ethical to create parahumans, e.g., human/animal hybrids to do dangerous and demeaning jobs." Do we REALLY need to do these kinds of things just because we CAN? Who gets to decide which actions are right and which are wrong? There are so many different countries in this world that have different views and ideals. One country may ban an action while another supports it.
The future excites me and scares me at the same time.

I decided to do a little test of a few of the search engines to see what was returned from my website. Now everyone knows that Google is king of the hill right now, right? hmmm.... my search was "mustang site:mjonesweb.com" (without the quotes of course).

Google - 0 results returned (and yes, it has indexed my site)
MSN - 1 result returned
Altavista - 2 results returned (the correct answer)
Lycos - 2 results returned, after scrolling through MANY paid results
Yahoo - 2 results returned
AllTheWeb - 2 results returned

This kind of surprised me, especially since Google just started touting that it has doubled the size of it's index to over 8 billion web pages. The "My Cars" page existed at the time that Google first indexed my site, so why doesn't it have it in it's index? Google is supposed to be the best at relevance. It has my home page in it's index (search on alienware site:mjonesweb.com and it shows up), but it doesn't return it when you search on the word car. The word car IS on that first page. This is definitely an indicator that you just might be missing the boat if you limit yourself to just ONE search engine.

In all fairness, my blog does PING Yahoo every time I update it.

I started grid computing with the SETI project. Then I switched over to something that hits a little closer to home. I have now donated over 3 years of CPU time to Grid.org. I originally signed on for their cancer research project and then allowed for all non-profit research. My CPU has worked on Cancer, Anthrax, Smallpox and now the Human Proteome Folding Project. While the app allows you to run it only when the screen saver kicks on, I allow it to run all the time and it rarely affects anything I'm doing. I highly recommend that you stop wasting all those spare CPU cycles. Put them to good use in helping the world cure disease (or find alien life). You can read about it at Grid.org. Then just download the app and let it run!