Project Insomnia

Project Insomnia is many things, but in this context it is simply a "braindump" of whatever I happen to be thinking/reading/watching/doing at the moment. Parental guidance suggested.

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

You Can't Get Away From It

SBC is now providing WiFi access at SBC Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, reports CNet News.com.
Baseball fans bored by the slow pace of a game or wanting more statistics and information will be able to connect computer devices via Wi-Fi at San Francisco Giants home games this year, the team announced Tuesday. The Giants' ballpark is, after all, called SBC Park, for telecommunications giant SBC Communications.

"We've created, if not the largest, one of the largest hot spots in the world," said Larry Baer, the team's chief operating officer. "We're the first professional sports facility to provide people universal Wi-Fi connectivity."
I'd probably use it.
|| Andrew, 9:29 AM || || link ||

Monday, March 22, 2004

Watson.cat, Rita.cat, Linus.cat?

ICANN surveys proposed Net domains | CNET News.com
The other proposed suffixes include .cat, .post, .asia, .mobi, and .tel.
What would a .cat site be, anyway?
|| Andrew, 3:46 PM || || link ||

Tuesday, March 16, 2004

He said this. He actually, with a straight face, said this.

"If you’re going to make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you ought to back it up with facts." -- George W. Bush, 03/16/2004.
|| Andrew, 11:10 PM || || link ||

Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Anything's better than "Say Hey, Come Out And Play"

Chronicle staff writer George Raine has a well-written piece about the advertising campaigns and strategies for the Giants and A's this year.
The A's campaign to sell tickets at Network Associates Coliseum, like their style on the field, attempts to attract ticket-buyers by promoting a hip, young roster and a winning tradition. It's a stereotype both teams hate, but the Giants "old money" is countered by the A's "bootstrap" image.
Note: There's a spoiler in there about a clever A's ad coming up this summer.
|| Andrew, 9:15 PM || || link ||

Thursday, March 04, 2004

Now Learning

NSIS is the installation SDK used by, among others, WinAmp. The output packages it creates are much smaller (less overhead) than comparable InstallShield packages, but the downside is that there is much more for the install programmer (me) to do to create one. The InstallShield IDE lets you automatically insert event handlers, functions, dialogs, and files to install; all of this (apparently) has to be manually scripted in NSIS. The tradeoff in size may or may not be worth it. I have a requirement to make the next version of the installation package as small as possible, and if I can lose the 1MB of overhead of an InstallShield package I'll be well on the way to fulfilling that requirement.
|| Andrew, 4:01 PM || || link ||

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

Spy vs Spy

Flexbeta today has a nice comparison of the top two privacy utilities: Ad-aware vs Spybot S&D.
I installed Windows 2000 on VMWare Workstation, installed the 28 applications and other plug-in, then I created a snapshot of the current virtual pc state (similar to creating a system restore point found in Windows). I then installed Ad Aware, ran an update to have the latest fixes, and scanned the infected virtual computer as many times possible until Ad Aware stated that all infected files were fixed. Afterwards, I ran Spybot S&D to see how many files Ad Aware had failed to detect. After recording all the information, I reverted the virtual drive back to the original state (before I installed Ad Aware) and did the same except this time I installed and scanned with Spybot S&D first and ran Ad Aware second to determine which files Spybot S&D failed to identify.
Pretty interesting, and good testing methodology.
|| Andrew, 9:54 PM || || link ||

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