It's an old house because...well...it's 14 years old and a little run down [nobody has lived in it for 4 years]. But it's a new house because I just bought it. Horay!!! I'm a first time home owner.

It's actually in better condition than I first thought [and better than my photos make it look], but there's definitely a few rough edges 'round the place. That's all well and good though because I'm into the ol' DIY and this is the perfect opportunity to get into it.

All up it's 2 floors and a loft. I'm hopeing to get moved into it before winter sets in, which is only 3-4 months away, but there's a few vitals that are required before that can happen. Worse case is I have to wait until next spring [at least 7 months from now].

Whatever the moving date, I'll be posting the progress of this home project along the way, so you can all watch it evolve.

Read all of “New/Old House”

Damn...I've been so busy the last few weeks. I've got emails up to my eyeballs, so to any friends and family - forgive me - I'll get back to you soon, I promise.

I've been helping out a small company over here to set up some business processes [nothing too major, and not the main time consumer at the moment]. One of the needs of this company is to send emails to about 1600 customers. This is not spam, in the sense of sending out information to random users on the net, more like a newsletter for customers that require updated information to the services they are already using and depending on.

I'm into web applications - especially as a tool for small businesses. It's a balancing act, but having a web application supply the needs of small businesses often out-weighs the need for desktop applications. The benefits are well documented, but if you're having problems convincing yourself, read

Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters [which I've mentioned before]. It's got a great introduction/argument for the benefits of web applications from both the developer and customer POV.

Anyways, after a bit of research, I came across MailChimp.

MailChimp is a powerful tool for design-it-yourselfers that makes sending email newsletters fun, easy, and affordable.

There's not really much about sending newsletters that I would identify with fun - well...maybe writing it and receiving some replies - but MailChimp makes the process easy, and that's a big starting point to build on. If you've ever tackled MS Words mail merge functionality, you'll know it's full of bugs like not supporting hyperlinks in the document and sending emails in the BCC field which can be rejected by some spam filters.

Apart from the ease of use and simple, intuitive interface, MailChimp is just a great idea. And I love great ideas. The name has a lot going for it as well, although I think MailGimp is even better. I can imagine a few good logos for that name.

Just started watching the Blog Con videos that I downloaded via ibiblio's new torrent repository. It's full of useful bits of information and discussion.

Some of the topics are about generating hits, allowing comments and when & how often to post. It's nice to finally see a BlogCon after some many years of reading posts about them.

Google News is at last providing both RSS and Atom feeds to not only it's main news sections [Top News, World, US, Business, Sci/Tech, Health, Sports & Entertainment], but also any search you perform at the site. This is a major bonus for anyone who wants to research news about certain topics, because rather than visiting the Google News site every now and then, you can let your aggregator do the work for you.

It'll be interesting to see how this impacts some of the other news/feed sites. Also whether anyone tries to start scapping the feeds for their own use. Google's Terms of Use for the feeds are as follows;

We invite you to make noncommercial use of Google's RSS and Atom feeds on your website subject to these terms, Google's Terms of Service, and the Google News Terms of Service. If you incorporate our feeds onto your website, please also:

1. attribute the feeds to Google News.
2. attribute each news item to its provider, using the provider name as it appears in the Google News feed.
3. include a link to the Google News cluster of related articles for each news item, using the link provided in the Google News feed.
4. identify the search terms used to generate the feed.

We reserve all rights in and to the Google and Google News marks. We also reserve the right to terminate any use of the feeds on grounds that we deem appropriate. You may not redistribute Google's feeds.

Bad Astronomy has a good post related to a certain high profile politicial's endorsment of Intelligent Design. It's starts...

The basic problem with Intelligent Design (ID) is that it’s wrong.

The problem is, that’s not the worst problem. It’s not just wrong, but really wrong, spectacularly wrong. And worst of all, it’s actively wrong.

Wikipedia's entry on ID, fittingly politically correct, also plainly states reasons why ID is full of crap.

Despite ID sometimes being called Intelligent Design Theory, the National Academy of Sciences has said, intelligent design "and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because their claims cannot be tested by experiment and propose no new hypotheses of their own, instead they find gaps within current evolutionary theory and fill them in with speculative beliefs. The scientific community does not recognise ID as a scientific theory and considers it to be creationist pseudoscience. Both the Intelligent Design concept and the associated movement have come under considerable criticism.

Imho, people can believe in whatever religion they want, but when they start trying to force others to believe...at best it's disgusting, at worst it's genocide.

And make no mistake, as much as the supporters of ID would like to make it a scientific argument, it's nothing but forced religion. And the name change from Creationism to Intelligent Design is a lame attempt at marketing/propoganda. It gives religion a bad name - something religion doesn't need any help with these days.

The comments associated to the BA post are worth reading. Here's a taste.

When i first decided to write a comment to this article, I was planning on defending Bush. After all, (if you read the Knight Ridder article carefully) all I would have endorsed is the acknowledgement in public schools of the fact that lots (way too many) of people believe in “intelligent design” and that this concept, flawed as it may be, should be mentioned along side of evolution. After thinking about it, I changed my mind. Intelligent Design has no place in (public) schools, because crap theory propoganda should not be funded by the government (i.e. people) even if lots of simple-minded folk believe.

I don't watch much TV these days, so the telly is mainly used is for DVD & co. However sometimes when I need a break from reality I'll veg out in front of the box. These veg out sessions use to get so frustrating because of the crap that's on TV, but since I've moved to Japan, this hasn't been a problem. Partly because I can only understand about 50% of what is said, but mainly because the Japanese really know how to make TV shows.

To a westerner, most Japanese TV shows will make you think of 1950-1970 games shows on acid, but for veg-out sessions they have a lot of value.

For instance, I just finished watching a show about - how big a fish a cat would carry. I @#$% you not. The show consisted of hidden cameras in a empty block where a few stray cats where known to live. The commentators [which included some sort of cat specialist] would weigh dead fish, then place them in the middle of the field, and sit back and wait. When a cat approached, the commentary would begin.

The fish got up to 2.1kg before the cats would stop dragging them away into the bushes to eat. After 2.1kg the cats would just nervously nibble for a while.

Below are a few pics to share the joy - sorry about the quality, but it was a spur of the moment photo shoot. Damn funny show tho'.

more photos here

Read all of “Japanese TV - Super Cats”

It's spreading like wildfire in the mac-blogsphere, so I may as well add my 2c worth.

Firstly, it seems lile the people at OSx86 discovered TPM functions in the kernel of the Intel release of OSX. This is bad, bad news...and something I remember reading that Apple wouldn't do when the switch move to Intel was annouced.

In any case:

Here is a complete list of all functions that the TPM driver provides, as well as the global variables.

Cory has the most straight forward description of what the results might be if Apple continues down this path.

People working with early versions of the forthcoming Intel-based MacOS X operating system have discovered that Apple's new kernel makes use of Intel's Trusted Computing hardware. If this "feature" appears in a commercial, shipping version of Apple's OS, they'll lose me as a customer -- I've used Apple computers since 1979 and have a Mac tattooed on my right bicep, but this is a deal-breaker.

...

The point of Trusted Computing is to make it hard -- impossible, if you believe the snake-oil salesmen from the Trusted Computing world -- to open a document in a player other than the one that wrote it in the first place, unless the application vendor authorizes it. It's like a blender that will only chop the food that Cuisinart says you're allowed to chop. It's like a car that will only take the brand of gas that Ford will let you fill it with. It's like a web-site that you can only load in the browser that the author intended it to be seen in.

What this means is that "open formats" is no longer meaningful. An application can write documents in "open formats" but use Trusted Computing to prevent competing applications from reading them. Apple may never implement this in their own apps (though I'll be shocked silly if it isn't used in iTunes and the DVD player), but Trusted Computing in the kernel is like a rifle on the mantelpiece: if it's present in act one, it'll go off by act three.

I enjoy using my Powerbook very much, although I'm not as attached to it as your average Mac user [It's not a religious thing or anything - definitely not tattooable], and spend an equal amount of time in front of my Linux workstation that I do in front of the Powerbook.

I've been exposed to Macs all my life and have used them frequently in working environments, but I only bought the Powerbook for two main reasons;

• OSX is based on the BSD kernel, and therefore it's basically Unix.
• the hardware is awesome [compared to any other notebook out there].

...but I'll drop OSX [maybe not the Apple hardware ;)] like a rock if this turns out to be true and there is no workable way around it. OSX performs well, it's stable and has a great UI, but most flavours of Linux and BSD also perform well, are also stable and KDE/Gnome aren't that far behind in the UI game.

It'll be interesting to see what becomes of all this.