Gadgetopia

Logo Wear : Wikipedia Merchandise : CafePress.com: Be cool, wear Wikipedia gear.

A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank : The guy who wrote the false entry in Wikipedia that led to the big brouhaha last week has come forward. He was slowly being cornered by someone, and knew it was just a matter of time before he was found: Using ...

Google Maps now integrates with Wikipedia and Panaramio. You can see related Wikipedia articles and images from any spot on the map by clicking the More tab.

Usenet Psychic Wars With Wikipedia: This is absolutely hysterical Unable to accept that Wikipedia's policy of presenting a Neutral Point of View means that an article on Sollog would have to include both pro- and anti-Sollog material, and unable to force other Wikipedia editors to accept his version of reality, ...

Wikipedia:Featured pictures visible: Almost two years ago, we talked about how Wikipedia is a handy place to find copylefted images of stuff: As if Wikipedia wasn't useful enough already, it also happens to be a great archive of public domain and Creative Commons-licensed images. Now MetaFilter points to Wikipedia's Featured ...

Parents For The Online Safety of Children: This site is very much against Wikipedia, calling it a pornographic Web site. They have a press release that points to many Wikipedia articles that display images that may or may not be pornographic, but are related to the topics being discussed. The ...

John Byrne VS Wikipedia: John Bryne is apparently a cartoonist of some kind (here's his Wikipedia page, which makes the post recursive). Anyway, he got uptight with Wikipedia the other day. [Bryne's page was ] originally an informative retrospective of his entire career, detailing not only the work he's done ...

Wikipedia notes death of Benoit s wife before body found: This is deeply weird. Investigators are looking into who altered pro wrestler Chris Benoit s Wikipedia entry to mention his wife s death hours before authorities discovered the bodies of the couple and their 7-year-old son. Benoit s Wikipedia entry was altered early Monday ...

One million Wikipedia articles: This is awesome. They just hit 400,000 a few months ago. The site has really gathered steam this last year. The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the one millionth article in Wikipedia [...] Nearly 2,500 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day, along ...

Talk:John Kerry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Speaking of Wikipedia, there's a fascinating and somewhat acrimonious debate on the discussion page for the John Kerry entry. I normally wouldn't link to what may be just be a flame war, but it really gives you an idea of how hard it ...

As if Wikipedia wasn't useful enough already, it also happens to be a great archive of public domain and Creative Commons-licensed images. I wrote up a post on my personal blog about the future of "downtown." I needed a few pictures to illustrate it with, so, in a stroke of ...

I'm seeing a lot of sites that lift Wikipedia content. I know that all Wikipedia content is GPL-ish, but I get a little annoyed that these sites are obviously spidering Wikipedia and then running ads around the content they lift. While technically not wrong, it seems like a pretty cheap ...

College: Wikipedia not source for papers: Interesting. Perhaps a little bitter. The school's history department recently adopted a policy that says it's OK to consult the popular online encyclopedia, but that it can't be cited as an authoritative source by students. The policy says, in part, "Wikipedia is not an ...

Wikipedia celebrates 300,000 entries today, and that's just in English. There are 717716 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Wikipedia, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as articles. Excluding those, there are 300241 pages that are probably legitimate articles. There have ...

According to his Wikipedia page, my hero Weird Al uses Wikipedia to subtly slam Atlantic Records in the video to his latest masterpiece. Yankovic had gained James Blunt's permission to parody "You're Beautiful". However, after Yankovic recorded "You're Pitiful", Blunt's label, Atlantic Records, recanted this permission. The parody was pulled ...

At Wikipedia, Illustrators May Be Paid: Wikipedia will pay artists who create illustrations for a specific list of articles that need them. I wonder if this is the start of a trend. The woman running the project for Wikipedia, Brianna Laugher, says the plan is to create a list of ...

The case of Wikipedia: I'm actually linking to a section of a larger article. The complete article is a little slow, but there's a nice section here on the Wikipedia the awesome online encyclopedia that's often a first-stop reference for me. Another secret of the success of Wikipedia is ...

Some Errors Defy Fixes: A Typo in Wikipedia s Logo Fractures the Sanskrit: The Wikipedia logo apparently has some bad characters in it. [ ] users of Wikipedia have described obvious mistakes in the design, a globelike jigsaw puzzle with characters from various languages on the pieces. Two of the characters ...

I'm tempted to start a blog solely for linking to great Wikipedia entries. One of my morning rituals is to hit the random page link at Wikipedia and see where it takes me. I've found some fantastic articles that beat anything in a paid resource. Take a browse through the ...

I Must Take Issue With The Wikipedia Entry For 'Weird Al' Yankovic: Excellent parody over at The Onion lampoons Wikipedia and the people who edit it. So, technically, I have become the subject of an Onion article. I knew it would happen one day. To whomever or whatever is currently ...

Letter to our readers and contributors: This is either heartbeaking or inspiring, I'm not sure which. It turns out that Wikipedia is failing under the load created by its popularity. ...the three servers that currently host all of Wikimedia's projects in all languages are simply not enough, especially as two ...

Microsoft in hot water over Wikipedia edits: Microsoft was sick of having their Wikipedia edits to the ODF and OOXML articles reverted, so they tried to pay an "independent" party to change them. Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would ...

What would happen if you made a Wikipedia entry on yourself? I was browsing Wikipedia this morning, as I have a tendency to do (I started with Pontius Pilate and ended up at David Beckham figure that one out), and I got to wondering what would happen if I ...

I'm of the opinion that tales of Wikipedia's inaccuracy are widely overblown, but if you ever read any Encyclopedia Brown books as a kid, Adam Cadre's Wikipedia Brown is hilarious. "Wow, [the zoo's koala population] tripled in six months?", Officer Clancy asked, whistling. "Yes, it's true", said the zookeeper, "We ...

Recent changes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Have you ever taken an opportunity to look at the "Recent Changes" page at Wikipedia. At the time of this writing, the last 50 changes were within a 1 minute, 50 second span. I'm seeing three changes in the same second. The last ...

WikiWisdom: I asked for it, and someone went and did it... A weblog dedicated to wikipedia.org? Why not. The content is free, after all. The Wikipedia offers hundreds of thousands of articles of information - that's right, hundreds of thousands. Of course, many of those hundreds of thousands are rather ...

7 July 2005 London bombings: The Wikipedia article on today's bombings in London is already huge. The bit at the top with the hotline numbers is just evidence of how much of a fantastic resource Wikipedia has become. The image above shows just how past the page is updating (times ...

Index of /wikipedia/en/: You can download all of Wikipedia in XML. I thought about doing it, then trying to open it up in a browser just for fun, but the directory listing dissuaded me. The entire dump all all pages is 14.1GB -- and that's compressed. And XML usually compresses ...

Wikipedia:Unusual articles: USA Today had an article on this Wikipedia entry. This page is for Wikipedians to list articles that seem a bit unusual. These articles are valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are somewhat odd, whimsical, or... well, something you wouldn't expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. I really ...

Wikipedia Class Action :: Lawsuit [www.wikipediaclassaction.org]: This was bound to happen at some point, I suppose. Very interesting to see how this is going to play out. How long before the "Wikipedia Defense Fund" pops up? WikipediaClassAction.org is currently gathering complaints from the entire Internet community, including individuals, corporations, partnerships, ...

Mozilla Firefox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The featured article at Wikipedia today is a huge, detailed piece on Mozilla Firefox, thus bringing together two of my favorite things. With Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation aims to develop a small, fast, simple, and highly extensible web browser (separate from the larger ...

Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy: Wikipedia has again modified its policy and is slowly starting to lock down even tighter. The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from all editing, mostly because ...

Wikipedia Needs $20,000: Here's some interesting perspective on the evolution of Wikipedia. Three years ago today, they were in a panic because they needed $20,000 to buy some new hardware. Today, they just happen to be in a middle of another fund raising drive. As of this writing, they have ...

Jon Udell: Visualizing change: I wish I was Jon Udell, as he gets everything he asks for. This time he along with some help from Andy Baio got someone to write a script that animates Wikipedia changes inline. See the picture at the above link, and he apparently ...

Wikipedia Article Revisions Now RSS Enabled: No one will change my page on Oceanic Airlines without my knowledge again. Wikipedia has added RSS feeds to the 1.25 million entries in the encyclopedia. This means you can now more easily track the revision history for important articles, such as those about ...

Growing pains for Wikipedia: Apparently there were a couple of scandals over at Wikipedia last week involcing Adam Curry and a former Kennedy staff member. Accordingly, there's a big, philosophical change in the works over there. Thus, to avoid future problems, Wales plans to bar anonymous users from creating new ...

March 11, 2004 Madrid attacks: I don't mean to keep harping on about Wikipedia, but this article will demonstrate what a fantastic resource this is. Someone has been meticulously tracking the terrorist attacks in Madrid and fleshing out the corresponding Wikipedia page. This page has more detail than I've seen ...

Wikimedia servers - Wikimedia's Meta wiki: Ever wanted to know exactly what hardware powers Wikipedia? Here's a detailed list of their servers, their CPU stats, and the OS they're running (all RedHat 9 or Fedora, it looks like). To see how these servers handle the load, check out the Ganglia ...

Wikipedia:Bounty board: You can post bounties at Wikipedia -- money you put up in exchange for someone to do...something. Would you like to improve articles without having to write them? Or have you ever wanted to make money for Wikimedia without paying it yourself? Now you can do both! The ...

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake: If you haven't looked yet, Wikipedia is once again doing an insane job keeping track of developments in the Southeast Asia tsunami disaster. Currently on the page is scads of information about what caused the tsunami, what a tsunami is, what the currect effects ...

I, ROBOT / ** (PG-13): Wikipedia got a mention in Roger Ebert's review of "I, Robot," posted this morning. Asimov's robot stories were often based on robots that got themselves hopelessly entangled in logical contradictions involving the laws. According to the invaluable Wikipedia encyclopedia on the Web, Harlan Ellison and ...

Wikipedia entry on Herseth marred: South Dakota got dragged into Wikipedia controversy today, with some apparently strategic vandalism of the Wikipedia page belonging to our (sole) House Rep Stephanie Herseth. [The changes] read: "She opposes abortion rights, citing her new found change of heart after announcing her pregnancy..., has been ...

Wikiseek - Search Wikipedia and its external links: An external search engine for Wikipedia. Not sure how this is any better than a site-specific search in Google, but I like the concept The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, ...

Slashdot has posted an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. In the usual SlashDot style, the ten highest-rated questions from the community were the ones they asked. Good stuff. It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. ...

2004 Summer Olympics: There's some fantastic coverage of the Olympics over at Wikipedia. If you just want to know who won what without all the frou-frou associated with the news outlets, this is a great stop. They have a little box on their home page, and this section will show ...

Here's a page listing the top Wikipedia pages, ranked by number of edits. There are a lot of administrative pages in the list, but the top actual pages are: George W. Bush (the discussion page for this would be ranked fifth) Hurricane Katrina Jesus Adolf Hitler United States September 2005 ...

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion: Every couple of weeks, I go browse Wikipedia's "Votes for Deletion" page, which is where veteran Wikipedians decide which articles stay and which go. You wouldn't believe the things that people try to put up. You get a lot of comments like these on an entry for ...

Hurricane Ivan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Wikipedia coverage of Hurricane Ivan is just phenomenal. They have hotlinked satellite images, all the latest announcement and statistics, links to about everything you need to know, etc. Like the Madrid bombing coverage and the Olympics coverage, Wikipedia again gets the official "Pretend ...

Nupedia: I got to reading about Nupedia last night, which was the predecessor to Wikipedia (there's big article at Slashdot about all this). Nupedia was actually the anti-thesis of Wikipedia in the sense that its articles were extensively peer-reviewed. It was an attempt to create an encyclopedia as "good" as ...

Blah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: I just had to post a link to this. "Blah" is a word that I use when I need to test something by printing out a garbage string (I think I got this from Joe). I was making a little widget to query Wikipedia ...

Wikipedia:WikiReader: Another little-known construct of Wikipedia. WikiReaders are collections of articles from Wikipedia on a certain topic, in the form of PDFs published for download and intended to be printed, and also to be sold in printed form. Here's a script to do the PDF conversion.

It s been another year, so it s time to re-evaluate my theory that Wikipedia is becoming a standard reference and will soon be the number one hit for notable people in the world. Consider my two previous discussions here: The Formation of a Standard Reference from two years ago. The Formation ...

Heavy metal umlaut: the movie: This is an awesome, awesome screencast from Jon Udell about the evolution of the a single page on Wikipedia. Jon scrolls through several years of this page, noting how it grows from one sentence to over a thousand words, and examining various editorial themes and ...

Fans bounty on referee: New Zealand rugby fans are furious with the referee they believe contributed to their surprise loss to France. They ve begun mass-vandalizing the referee s Wikipedia page and using it to post apparent threats and bounties. The entry says Barnes suffers from a vision-related disease which results in ...

WikiProject: Here's the interesting concept of the Wikiproject over at Wikipedia. A WikiProject is a collection of pages devoted to the management of a specific family of information within Wikipedia. It is not a place to write encyclopedia articles, but a resource to help coordinate and organize article writing. They ...

J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, dropped a bombshell on fans this morning when she announced that Albus Dumbledore had been gay all along. This was also a bombshell to Wikipedia, for different reasons, and the result is fascinating to follow. Some people apparently ran right to their ...

Here's something they need to add to Wikipedia: a world events database. So many notable things happen in the world from day-to-day that it'd be nice to have a database of them, a running record, a blog, if you will. Wikipedia has yearly and daily entries, like this one but ...

Citizendium aims to be better Wikipedia: They're in for a tough road, I think. This has been tried before with Nupedia. It's be interesting, though, to see how the two extremes do. Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week's official launch. Its volunteer base ...

About a year ago, I opined that Wikipedia was quickly becoming a "standard reference," meaning it was a base repository of information about a subject -- the starting point. This is reflected in how high Wikipedia rates when searching for notable people. What I think this points to is the ...

Wikipedia is a bit like a duck. Calm on the surface, and paddling like crazy underneath. Authors often have long discussions over what should go into an article. As you might imagine, this can lead to some truly excellent nerd fights. Wikipedia has a page highlighting some of the lamest ...

Google: An explanation of our search results: Google bought their own AdWord for the "jew" search term and uses it to link to a page explaining why the first link is an anti-semitic site. If you're confused, here's the background of the problem. If you use Google to search for ...

All your base are belong to us - Wikipedia: I'm glad Wikipedia is finally takling some serious issues. Some great history here. "All your base are belong to us" is a stock phrase arising from an interesting translation used in the Sega Genesis version of the Japanese video game Zero ...

Errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia: Here s how to flip your competitor off, virtually speaking. This page catalogs some mistakes and omissions in Encyclop?ia Britannica (EB) and shows how they have been corrected in Wikipedia. Some errors have already been corrected in Britannica s online version.

Monopoly (game): Here's the Wikipedia entry on Monopoly, notable to geeks for a very cool rendering of the gameboard via an HTML table. Nicely done. (The link above has a bookmark which will take you right to it.) The text of the B & O and Pennsylvania Railroad spaces is ...

Mozilla - Wikipedia: After uncovering the truth about ping, I was determined to unearth the mystery of another engimatic Internet name: Mozilla. Wikipedia took all the fun out of it. The name Mozilla had been used internally for the Netscape Navigator web browser from its beginning. It was a contraction ...

Wikimedia Commons: The last few days have shown me that I'm really out of touch with everything that's available over at Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Commons [...] is a repository of free images, sound and other multimedia files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files uploaded to this repository ...

Inside the world of Wikipedians, there's drama, politics and love: Interesting article about the core group of people who sit around and maintain Wikipedia all day long. Rather than get a job after graduating from University of Toronto in 2004, Pulsifer lives with his parents, does temp work and spends ...

I found today's featured Wikipedia article quite interesting. Sudoku (Su Doku) is a number puzzle of sorts, popularized in Japan in 1986 and more recently in other countries in 2005. In a nutshell: The puzzle is most frequently a 9x9 grid made up of 3x3 subgrids (called "regions"). Some cells ...

Flying wing - Wikipedia: Here's a really interesting Wikipedia article on why "flying wing" aircraft are attractive. Fascinating and well-written. [A traditional aircraft with a long fuselage and a tail], while simple and safe, has several drawbacks. Locating the control surfaces at the end of the tail means that the ...

Dropping the Bomb on Google: Apparently the Google bombing of the term "jew" hasn't been as effective as we reported earlier. The offending site is back in the top spot as of this writing. Wired has some more background behind the campaign. Mobilizing some 125,000 petitioners, Weinstock said he was ...

List of content management systems: Wikipedia is hosting a fantastic list of content management systems, many with their own pages.

Main Page - Uncyclopedia: Wikipedia meets The Onion. Nice parody, though there's something in there to offend everyone. They even use MediaWiki.

I was reading today about how Wikipedia is going to release a CD or DVD of all its content. Very cool idea. This got me reminicising about "The Golden Age of CD-ROMs." Remember when CD-ROMs were the big thing? From, say, 1996 to 1999 or 2000. Remember when Encarta and ...

I'm a big fan of wind power. I drive east on I-90 every few months, and there are three or four small wind farms between here and Blue Earth, Minnesota. I love the look of those big white windmills, spinning on the prairie. There was an article in the local ...

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody: Clay Shirky gave a heckuva talk at the Web 2.0 Expot about what he calls the cognitive surplus. Here s the theory After the industrial revolution, Americans had something new: free time. And we needed to figure out what to do ...

Eric Allman: This is a really interesting Wikipedia article about an apparenty interesting guy that you interact with indirectly everyday. The quote is even more interesting. Read it.

I was browsing through Google Video last night (that's where the Duron post came from), and I got to thinking that there's so much good stuff in there, but there's a bunch of crap too. And none of it is really organized beyond the general search that comes with it. ...

Patent Fight Rattles Academic Computing: A company that markets a "learning management system (LMS)" has been awarded a apparently astoundingly broad patent, and they've announced their intention to sue their largest competitor. Blackboard Inc. has been awarded a patent establishing its claims to some of the basic features of the ...

More and more, Wikipedia articles are creeping up the search results when you search for famous names. I tested this theory a bit tonight, and here's what I found when searching for nothing but the first and last name of someone famous: Bill Clinton: 3rd result Condoleezza Rice: 2nd George ...

Kimpire: Is it just me, or has Kimble jumped the shark here? I mean, you're cool and everything, dude, but isn't this a bit much? Interesting Wikipedia page on Kimble. Legends never die...or something. I lose track.

Abandonware - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Here's a term I hadn't heard before. Abandonware is computer software which is no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder. Alternately, the term is also used for software which is still available, but on which further support and development has been ...

History of a Victorian Era Robot: This was an elaborate hoax back in 2002, apparently. Boilerplate was a mechanical man developed by Professor Archibald Campion during the 1880s and unveiled at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. According to the Wikipedia page, teachers use this an example of why not to ...

Interview with George Clooney - On Career, Sex And Politics: Ever wonder what stars think about all the stuff written about them on the Internet? Well, this is one of the most simply inventive things I ve seen in a while: Esquire sat George Clooney down to surf the Web about ...

It's a Wiki, Wiki World: Time Magazine has an article about wikis in its latest issue. They focus on Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia of course, but they cover wikis in general. This line was interesting: A wiki is a deceptively simple piece of software (little more than five lines of ...

Video game crash of 1983: Here's a good Wikipedia article about an event I was only vaguely aware of. The video game crash of 1983 refers to the sudden bankruptcy of a number of companies producing home computers and video game consoles in North America in late 1983. The term ...

Spam (Monty Python) - Wikipedia: You ever wonder how the term "spam" came about? Well, apparently there was a Monty Python sketch that ended with a bunch of people yelling the word "Spam" so you couldn't hear someone else talking, and... "The phenomenon, some years later, of marketers drowning out ...

Bullet time: A really interesting Wikipedia article. Who knew that bullet time started in Speed Racer? Bullet time (often hyphenated as bullet-time) is a concept introduced in recent films and computer games whereby the passage of time is displayed as extremely slow or frozen moments in order to allow a ...

Floppy disk: From Wikipedia we get the reason 5 1/4" floppy disks were that size. After meeting in a bar in Boston, Adkisson asked Wang what size he thought the disks should be, and Wang pointed to a napkin and said "about that size". Adkisson took the napkin back to ...

Slashdot trolling phenomena: Here's an example of awesomeness of Wikipedia combined with some pretty interesting reading. It's several thousand words on the trolling of Slashdot comments. The Slashdot trolling phenomena make up a bizarre and complex subculture found on the popular Slashdot technology website. It is a mixture of juvenilia, ...

The Webby Awards: 2004 Nominees: The 2004 Webby nominees have been announced. Friendster is in there, so is Wikipedia (twice). Red v. Blue and The Onion got Humor nods. Music Plasma the mind-bending Flash app got picked for Music. The only "bloggish" nom was Blog for America ...

Here s a fact: intranets don t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together ...

Comparison of relational database management systems: I found this Wikipedia page at the bottom of the SQL comparison I linked to yesterday. It's a comparison of major database platforms and their support of various features. It doesn't get into the SQL like the other page, but there are more platforms ...

Leet - Wikipedia: Ever wonder what your kid is writing in AIM or on his cell phone? Here's a guide to the world of "Leet," in which everyone happens to ph34r my kewl, m4d l33t skillz, d00d. Leet (often Eleet, l33t, 31337, or 1337; from "Elite") is a cipher, or ...

Pentagon gives go-ahead to Osprey: It's finally going to get built, after 16 years of development. The Pentagon on Wednesday gave the go-ahead to begin full-rate production of the V-22 Osprey, the hybrid helicopter-airplane that the Marine Corps considers vital to the future of its air fleet. Since the program ...

Some good news -- it looks like Amtrak isn't going to die anymore, given that Congress just gave them $626 million. But are we just shoring up an industry that, sadly, hasn't been self-sufficient in this country in maybe 20 years (total speculation there)? I love trains, and I wish ...

There's a fascinating contest afoot since 1996 called "The Obfuscated Perl Contest." The idea is to write the most needlessly complex Perl program your evil little mind can think up. According to the Wikipedia page, there are four categories which tend to limit the size of the programs to just ...

Once, sure. Twice, Maybe. Three? Four!?!: A good roll-up of news and theories about all the Internet cable cutting going on lately, full of good links. On a related note, Iran has recently announced plans to move to trade oil with the Euro rather than the US dollar, which will ...

Google Search: waffles: John Kerry got Google-bombed. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has an excellent page on Google-bombing that reveals some bombs I didn't know had been dropped. I love this one. If you knew you were getting Google-bombed, couldn't you take some counter-measures? Say a bunch of people linked the term ...

Amazon Mechanical Turk: I can't believe I haven't heard of this before, given that's almost a year old. Amazon's MTurk service is an API to match people up with Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for them to complete and get paid. HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that ...

NPR "Xeni Tech": Jigsaw wants your data: This is a tricky little service that makes Plaxo look almost legit. If you upload someone's contact information, you can search for and download someone else's. So anyone who gives you a business card is currency for you to use to get someone ...

I started writing something that needed a password store today, and stopped myself short as I got all prepped up to store the passwords as a one-way MD5 hash. As we've reported earlier, MD5 isn't all it's cracked up to be these days. There's no direct 'crack' of the MD5 ...

This morning as I was waiting for Visual Studio to get its act together (a lot of Gadgetopia posts happen in this time), I thought about C#'s ancestor, C. Why did they call it 'C'? The trend at the time was towards acronyms like 'FORTRAN', 'REBOL', 'ALGOL', and etc. Wikipedia, ...

Audi Makes Racing History as Diesel-Powered R10 TDI Wins Debut at 12 Hours of Sebring!: Diesels: they're not just for your Dad's Oldsmobile anymore. Audi Sport North America made history Saturday as the diesel-powered Audi R10 TDI of Tom Kristensen, Allan McNish and Rinaldo Capello won the Mobil 1 Twelve ...

Blogger Twins: The Amazing Race is one of the greatest televisions shows ever conceived and produced (and I mean that with all sincerity). A set of twins from Brooklyn have created a Web site solely to try and persuade CBS to cast them in season 9. You can help us ...

Caravel Content Management: Caravel is a content management system with the somewhat odd implementation of storing everything in LDAP, rather than a traditional SQL database. I don't know of any other system that does this. This project was open-sourced from a system used to power 2,000 Mennonite churches. See the ...

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (Liger): I found this on Snopes this morning. I bet this Liger has gone off some sweet jumps. According to the Wikipedia article, here's why Ligers are so big: Ligers grow much larger than tigers or lions and it is believed this is because ...

Encouraging people to contribute knowledge: I m a little confused about this, I guess. Is Google trying to take on Wikipedia? The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal. Earlier this week, we ...

I'd never heard of the Maunsell Sea Forts until tonight. When I first saw this picture, I thought it was an image from Myst or Riven: The Thames Estuary Army Forts were constructed in 1942 to a design by Guy Maunsell, following the successful construction and deployment of the Naval ...

I'd never heard of the Maunsell Sea Forts until tonight. When I first saw this picture, I thought it was an image from Myst or Riven: The Thames Estuary Army Forts were constructed in 1942 to a design by Guy Maunsell, following the successful construction and deployment of the Naval ...

White paper: I'm thinking about writing a white paper to help with marketing, and I got to wondering why they were called "white papers." Turns out, the term predates computers by quite a while. The Wikipedia article linked above cites a 1922 example by Winston Churchill. A white paper can ...

Ben Armstrong in Microsoft's Virtual PC Group is using his power for nefarious purposes: Resurrecting Microsoft Bob. I immediately set about trying every operating system I could find under Virtual PC. However – I was not able to get my hands on a copy of Microsoft BOB until the Connectix ...

Windows XP: The featured article over at Wikipedia today was on Windows XP, and it included this bit explaining what limitations are contained in Windows XP Starter Edition the Windows version for developing countries (launched in India two days ago). [...] display resolution can only be up to 800 ...

Encyclopedias gather dust as research moves online: I'm not surpised that paper encyclopedias are dying off. I am surprised that CD-ROM based encyclopedias are. In the age of the Internet, encyclopedias are gathering dust, and most families with young children don't even consider buying the space-hogging printed sets anymore. Even digital ...

Here s an interesting fact I finally broke down and looked up today I wondered what percentage of U.S. oil consumption could fit in one supertanker. The answer was a little scary. As of 2004, the U.S. consumes about 20 million barrels of oil a day, according to the CIA. ...

Movies of Software: On the heels of Jon Udell's Wikipedia screencast, I got to wondering how to make my own. I found this O'Reilly article by...Jon Udell, where he talks about the concept of screencasts, and links to several examples. In the software world, we spend a lot of time ...

Web 2.0 Service Mark Controversy (Tim responding this time): Tim O'Reilly responds to the "Web 2.0" trademark controversy which has apparently been pretty hateful over the last week. O'Reilly also values its trademarks -- as do other companies and individuals aligned with the values of openness and sharing. (I'll note ...

Have 'Star Wars' questions? Ask Lucasfilm: USA Today sat down with some people from Lucasfilm to clear up some Revenge of the Sith plot holes. Q: No female Wookiees? A: Though Chewbacca's warrior chums all appear to be male, the fur makes it difficult to tell at a glance. In ...

Wikibooks portal - Wikibooks: Here's a cousin to the perfection that is Wikipedia. Wikibooks is an attempt to write community-edited textbooks on a variety of subjects in a variety of languages. There are some good ones on XML, General Computer Programming, and Perl . But those are just the geek ...

What happened to TechTV? It merged with G4 a year or so ago, but now seems to have vanished completely. They got assimilated and forgotten. I was looking through the "List of Flops in Entertainment" page at Wikipedia (wickedly addictive), and came upon a blurb for "G4TechTV," which was the ...

Media Bias and Technology Reporting: John Dvorak makes a flameworthy point: most all tech writers are Mac users. There's a conspiracy to promote Macs. This is why when Microsoft actually does have a good idea, people look to trash it out of hand. With 90 percent of the mainstream writers ...

World's tallest structures: Great Wikipedia listing of the world's tallest buildings. It includes these complicated points of debate about what constitues a contender for the title. Tall-structure enthusiasts debate: whether guy-wire-supported structures should be eligible to be counted whether only habitable height counts and if so; whether observation galleries on ...

Google won't dump offensive anti-Semitic site: Google is in a bad spot here. Searching for the word "jew" on Google returns an anti-semitic site in the top spot. "I certainly am very offended by the site, but the objectivity of our rankings is one of our very important principles," ... ...

Blogging systems have always confused "posts" and "pages." We've talked about this before: what is the difference between a time-sensitive "post" and an "eternal" page? At what point does a "post" get re-visited and revised enough that it should become a page? We wrote about this at length almost two ...

Golden age of arcade games: The featured article on Wikipedia today is "The Golden Age of Arcade Games." I was at the perfect age for this. I still remember haunting the arcades as a 13-year-old. During the early 1980s, arcade game technology had become sophisticated enough to offer good-quality graphics ...

April 13, 2029 is the date that asteroid 2004 MN4 a quarter-mile wide chunk of rock may hit the earth. (Of course, it's already got a Wikipedia entry!) If you're wondering if that is a Friday, I checked already; it is. The risk rating for asteroid 2004 MN4 ...

At what point does a usability flaw become unethical? If a usability flaw continues to cause people to do something undesirable to them but very desirable to you and you know this and don t change your interface at what point do you become a massive tool? I m left ...

arXiv.org e-Print archive: Here's a huge archive of scientific papers, including some great ones on computer science and information architecture (scroll just a bit it's towards the bottom). With great titles like "Semantic Linking a Context-Based Approach to Interactivity in Hypermedia," "The Revolution In Database System Architecture," and ...

I N K S C A P E . Draw Freely: This has been a hole in the open-source landscape for a while now. Good to see it filled. Inkscape is an open source SVG editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc. Supported SVG features include basic shapes, ...

Scientist Imagines Elevator Reaching 62,000 Miles Into Space: This seems so wrong on so many levels. President Bush wants to return to the moon and put a man on Mars. But scientist Bradley C. Edwards has an idea that's really out of this world: an elevator that climbs 62,000 miles ...

Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia: An interesting few paragraphs on the history of the IMDb. The database started out in 1990 as a collection of shell scripts created by Col Needham which could be used to search the FAQs posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies. In 1993, a centralized e-mail ...

Dave's post from the other day reminded me of another great game with a weird name; Sokoban. (and wouldn't you know that the Wikipedia entry hits at number 9 on a Google search, further reinforcing Deane's Standard Reference theory!) On the surface it's a fairly simple game... Sokoban (Japanese for ...

There s a science to CBS Big Bang Theory : The CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory (which is quite funny, I must say), employs a consulting physicist to try and keep the geek science accurate. But the science gets some attention, too. David Saltzberg, a professor of physics and astronomy at ...

London Congestion Charge : This is an interesting Wikipedia article about the "congestion charge" levied on vehicles entering the busiest zone in Central London. Apparently traffic was so bad here, that they charge people $9 US for a day pass to drive in it. Those sneaky Brits are too smart ...

Airbus bets on building largest commercial plane: The Airbus A380 is set to be unveiled next month. It will be the largest passenger plane in history. Its wings stretch nearly the length of a football field, about 50 feet longer than any plane in the air today. Nose to tail, ...

Virgin Galactic: Richard Branson, that hot air balloning nut and playboy of the airline business, has created a new company to offer paid spaceflights. He's entered a deal with Scaled Composites to license the technology behind SpaceShipOne. By the end of the decade, Virgin Galactic the most exciting development ...

Has anyone else had good luck with Yahoo! video searches? I was reading Wikipedia tonight about Alexander Karelin, the dominating Russian wrestler. The article mentioned the "Karelin Lift" where the guy just picks up other world-class, heavyweight wrestlers and tosses them backwards. Not believing this was possible, I searched Yahoo ...

From Christian Science Monitor: Deciding what kind of software Massachusetts wants to load on some 50,000 state computers may sound like something of interest only to uber-geeks. But that decision could spark a revolution in how software is developed and sold. The Commonwealth wants to adopt an "open document" standard ...

LEGO: Another great article at Wikipedia. Name one geek who never played with Legos. The company's name was coined by Christiansen in 1934, from the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning "play well." The word "LEGO" is claimed to mean "I put together" or "I assemble" in Latin, although this is ...

Bloop: Since 1997, Navy sonar equipment has occasionally picked up a sound they think is coming from the South Pacific, about 1,000 miles off the coast of South America. They don't know what it is, but they think it's alive. The sound, detected by the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone ...

Yesterday, I wanted to buy a stock image from Corbis to use in a Web site I'm developing. It was a standard hi-res image of a man standing in front of a building reading a newspaper. This should have been simple... For those that don't know, Corbis is the largest ...

Love all...for instant replay at U.S. Open: The animated instant replay system has been a hit at the U.S. Open so far. If the player chooses to consult the replay (each player is allowed two challenges per set), an animated image of the ball hitting the court zooms into focus ...

CEOs shudder at thought of BlackBerry shutdown: A article about how many in the business world are terrified at the thought of having their Blackberries shut off. "It's just nuts. The idea that someone is just going to switch it off in three or four weeks, even if it's only ...

Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend: This is a compelling story about the search for Jim Gray, the Silicon Valley pioneer that went missing on his sailboat a few months ago. Jim has geek friends from a lifetime of work, and everyone pitched in to try ...

Koenigsegg CCX: Found this interesting note on the wikipedia page for the Koenigsegg CCX -- one of the fastest cars in the world. Who said being more environmentally responsible was less fun? The Koenigsegg CCXR is an environmentally-friendly version CCX powered by essentially the same twin-supercharged V8 engine but converted ...

SearchMonkey - YDN: Yahoo is taking a big step with this. They re letting people write apps that other people choose to install that directly change how search results are formatted. The SearchMonkey developer tool enables you to create small, sharable applications that enhance search results. A SearchMonkey application pulls in ...

I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Bill Gates, and I stumbled across this tidbit about his home: According to King County public records, as of 2002, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $113 million, and the annual property tax is just over $1 million. ...

SJ Games vs. The Secret Service: Wikipedia has a good article on the legendary raid by the Secret Service on Steve Jackson Games back in 1990. The reasons for the raid are related to the nascent hacking community in the late 80s, and this was one of the precipitating events ...

China rolls out the big guns, aiming for a dry Olympics: I must be behind the times, because I didn't even know this was possible. [...] u and the other rainmakers face their toughest challenge: making sure it stays dry for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. ...

A while back, we posted about a picture of a big machine I had stumbled across. Sometime after that, it was identified as a mining machine over in Europe, complete with many pictures. Last night, I was watching Modern Marvels on The History Channel (great, great show), and the topic ...

From the really odd department -- I've seen some posts around the blogosphere about people using blog comment threads as chat rooms. It happened to me once as well -- some kids in a high school somewhere were using the comments of the Line Rider post as a discussion board. ...

The space shuttle had to land at Edwards AFB in California last week due to weather, so they had to get it back to Florida via the piggy-back method. I watched it on CNN, and was struck by how cool it was. I ve seen it before, of course, but you ...

I've been setting up a new server lately, and in the process I've been reevaluating a lot of the software I use on my servers. One of the things I've been dreading more than anything else is moving over DNS services. My old server runs BIND, and has 40+ domain ...

Cats Can Has Grammar: This is a great examination of one of the current Net memes -- annotating cat pictures -- and why it has ended up the way it has. If you spend any time at all observing net culture, then you'll have been unable to miss the recent ...

Perpetual motion: We're (I'm?) having a bit of a discussion on this post about perpetual motion. This prompted me to look up the concept on Wikipedia and confirm what I knew to be true: it's impossible. It is generally accepted that perpetual motion machines cannot exist. In particular, perpetual motion ...

This morning, Joe and I were perusing through the Random Facts about Vin Diesel (don't click it if you can't afford to lose 15 minutes of your life). We saw a fact that went something like this: When the grocery store runs out of Vin Diesel's favorite ice cream, the ...