The Home Depot Bet - Home Depot Bet Weblog - Coming Soon : Many people asked what it was like to spend 16 hours in the home depot. For those who want to know I provide you with a transcript of the journal that I kept during the event. It is raw and unedited so be warned. Due to the state of insanity that I was in on this strange day I take no responsibility for what I wrote. File under bizarre behaviour.

I love Friday nights. c/o NTK, I get to discover 10 Things you genuinely never knew about......The Queen Mother

The Register : The industry group set up to help drive the Government's broadband strategy is due to publish its final report on Monday.

The report claimed that the pricing of ADSL is a "huge issue" and warned that the proposed price point of around £50 a month is regarded as a "death knell for ADSL".

Instead, the BSG said the cost of ADSL for home users should be between £20 and £30 a month, which would put it on a par with countries such as Korea and Singapore.

To which I say "Bollox" The magic price point is £10 per month. And £20 pm for 1Mb/s symmetric with no restrictions. If they really want to see some demand, that'll do it. Come on guys, light up that fibre! Now with Moore's and Gilder's laws are those prices really so unreasonable? I was paying £10 pm 8 years ago for 14.4K, The same price now for 256K is not so ridiculous.

The Register : Music sharing operation KaZaA has responded to a Dutch court's order to cease infringing copyright by stating that it is impossible for it to do so. The bext thing for KaZaA to do right now is declare bankruptcy and go out of business. Shortly after leaking their protocols of course. I hope they've got the balls to do this, although I suspect they'll be suckered into trying to keep going and end up racking up huge lawyers fees.

When will the RIAA realize that pandora's box is open? KaZaA's code is currently exposing and distributing more MP3s than at Napster's peak.

What if your name was an Acronym? BOND = Being Optimized for Nocturnal Destruction!

Sending a malformed SMS message to some Nokia phones can crash the phone and lock the user out.Link [thanks, bOing bOing] I'm not in favour of cracking, but this is rather cool. You can kill some Nokia cell phones with a carefully mal-formed SMS message. They need to be reset afterwards and possibly need a new SIM card afterwards or they don't even turn on. So the big question is whether you can combine this technique with a PDA and scanner to deliberately target the infuriating person at the next table in the restaurant. Not that I'd encourage that sort of behaviour!

In an act of guilty patriotism, liberal SUV owners are finally swapping their gas-guzzling behemoths to help reduce America's unsustainable dependence on foreign oil. [thanks, Alternet.org] D o you believe this? I don't believe this! It's an American's goddess given right to take the kids to school in an 8litre V10 Dodge Ramcharger Light Truck, "because it's safer". 

Yaysoft.com - Redefining Pointlessness A weblog directory derived from weblogs.com stats.

Web Services Architect : Articles : UDDI - the Weather Report : 48% of the production UDDI registry (tModels tested only) has links that are unusable. These pointers contain missing, broken or inaccurate information. Hmm? More work needed here by the UDDI.org. Should we take this as another reason for building an independent distributed registry but using the UDDI standards?

I've just come across another mailing list discussing the use of weblogs in Knowledge management. Particularly for business use inside corporations and de-centralized workgroups. It's the aptly named Klogs list and has nothing to do with the Dutch! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs 

Take your Unix Netscape bookmarks files plus this http://bk2site.sourceforge.net/ to make this http://www.multiagent.com/ completely automatically. How cool is that! I wonder if this could be done with Internet Exploder? Maybe by auto-FTPing the bookmark folders to a *nix webserver?

BroadBand Britain : The aim of the campaign is to generate an independent on-line petition to illustrate the depth of feeling of the British business and consumer publics - "We want a million signatures by Christmas!"

Craig asks "Why is this man smirking?" -- referring to John Ashcroft and his ever-present smug. Well, I'll tell you why... Evil Emperor Asscroft is smirking because he loves watching freedom shrivel and twitch as it dies --writhing in pain-- as the dark lightning crackles from his powerful fingertips. Emporer Asscroft cannnot contain the deep, sick pleasure he feels inside... seeing how Operation Enduring Evil is proceeding so well. [thanks, blackholebrain] I've just seen Dubya on the TV. He was telling a joke about how they said they'd get the Afghanis (or Taliban as they're usually known) on the run and now they were on the run. Apart from finding this really offensive, I wonder about the lack of gravitas in Dubya. Even when he's serious he has this unfortunate habit of smirking at the camera. We're also getting the propoganda build up about moving into Iraq, Somalia and Yemen next, now this one's nearly over. Presumably they all have oil that we need? Or do they all grow poppies? Or am I just a cynical old bastard who shouldn't ask these questions, because that means I don't care about Sept 11? For more on this and other questions, try today's Mike Hume column in The Times.

A new, miniature, fuel-powered engine the size of a shirt button could prove to be an alternative to the run-of-the-mill battery. By Louise Knapp. Mmmm! Hydrogen powered, gas turbine, electricity generator, with a rotor that does 1-2.4 million rpm, and generates 20W. And all in a 1cm3 package (without fuel). Butane or similar would be a whole lot easier than hydrogen, but pretty cool nonetheless. [thanks, Wired News]

OJR First Person: "Online News Users Have to Pay" Interesting rant about the state of online news.

puppet poppy pipeline regime. No comment, no opinion, just a link to a rant from someone saying I'm Mad As Hell and I'm not going to take it any more. And in the process describing a fairly coherent conspiracy theory about western states and in particular the USA.

10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001 (Alertbox Nov. 2001) : We saw a greatly increased emphasis on the intranet as a collaboration tool that lets employees exchange information through discussion groups and other features. The intranets also emphasize communication by encouraging departments to post news and other information of interest to different groups. [from UseIt] Also in here. One of the key ways to make it easier for average employees to contribute to the intranet is to use a good content management system (CMS). Instead of having everybody design their own web pages, a CMS handles the mechanics of posting and lets people focus on their content and message. I'm pretty cynical about Jakob (Guevara) because too much of his advice is self evident, and frankly the design of his own website sucks. But this one's right on.

This suggests to me again that the combination of /code, blogs and RSS news has a place in Intranets. Drupal is almost ideally placed for this, combining the whole thing into one codeset. Just add Apache and MySQL and it's almost complete. The one thing missing is a single extra stage in the submission queue to allow a manager role to vet submissions.

OK, Here's the deal. Take your 500 CDs and rip them to MP3. Take an old 486/DX120, install a SoundBlaster 16 card in it, put an old 3com 3c503 NIC into it, find a cheap 20gb HD, scrounge an old 36X CD player, install SuSE Linux, trot down to Goodwill and find a nice Kenwood 75 watt-per-channel stereo amplifier for $29.95 and a pair of bookshelf speakers for $7.95. So, for about $120 you have a complete Linux system with 20gb of music on it. Run it from an rlogin session running mp3blaster but, because it also runs Apache, set it up to broadcast music to every computer in the house. Export an X11 session to listen to internet radio and control it on any X/box. Set up SMB and NFS shares to allow the machine to be used as a file server AND music server. Run a Grokster client to up and download music from the 'net. ssh into the firewall, rlogin to the mp3 box, and wake your kids up in time for school from 1,000 miles away. Then run a Handspring or a Compaq with a wireless card and headphones for portable music round the house.  [thanks, Slashdot]

I hasten to add that the story above wasn't me. Like DiveintoMark says, "A lot of effort went into making this effortless".

iButton: Digital Jewelry An insanely great product. 64K of Java powered memory in something not much bigger than a watch battery.

SiliconValley.com - Dan Gillmor's eJournal : Associated Press: FBI Develops Eavesdropping Tools. At least one antivirus software company, McAfee Corp., contacted the FBI on Wednesday to ensure its software wouldn't inadvertently detect the bureau's snooping software and alert a criminal suspect. Dan quite rightly calls for a ban on using McAfee's products. But how real is this? Have the FBI really developed a keystroke logging Trojan? I wonder what the EU would have to say about this?