matt haughey has a great discussion on the horribleness of the
hinterland that the unwashed masses must endure. i’ve had almost the same experience of going to perform routine maintenance on a elderly relative’s computer, only to find it crippled and invested with bloat and spyware that nobody seemed to know from whence it came.

a finnish company has released something they
are calling the

Radionet Open Source Environment (“ROSE”)

for building wireless lan access points. there are other options
for doing this type of thing, including the popular
nocat

, but none of the other contenders were really designed to be
deployed on “embedded systems”. “rose” claims this with a fairly
competitive feature set, so things are looking pretty
intriguing:

“ROSE can be used with both embedded devices and
personal computers. Initially, ROSE is available for Intel and
PowerPC architectures and the software can be easily cross compiled
to other HW platforms such as MIPS and ARM.”

hmmm. it hasn’t shown up in any

stateside publications

but the observer is feeling pretty confident that the

iraqi mobile labs had nothing to do with germ warfare

. and to add some spice to the conspiratorial special sauce:

“The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce
hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the
British authorities because the Iraqi army’s original system was
sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command &
Control.”

webber is a configurable python and php system that allows you to easily display jabber presence information on a webpage:

“Webber is a multi-user Jabber presence indicator for the web. It is
split up into two parts. Webberbot is a bot written in python which
connects to a jabber server and stores presence information in a MySQL
database. webber.php is a PHP script which you can include in your
webpage to display your presence on the web.”

i wonder how tough it would be to hack in support for geographic metadata and a map display, similar to the jabber world map.

i don’t know how adweek narrowed it down, but
you can go relive the absurdity known as

The Lowest Moments in Advertising

. [ via
kottke’s
remaindered links

]

zeldman

writes a pretty good
eulogy
for ie5/mac

and points to the potential for trouble:

“We know that, after spending billions of dollars to
defeat all competitors and to absolutely, positively
own

the desktop browsing space, Microsoft as a corporation is no longer
interested in web browsers. We know that, on the Windows side, it
will eventually release something that accesses web content, but
that “something” will be part of an operating system – and that
operating system won’t be available until 2005, and probably won’t
be widely used before 2007. Whether the part that formats web pages
will be more or less compliant with W3C recommendations than what
we have now, we don’t know. Neither do we know whether the unnamed
thing that handles web browsing will support CSS3 and other
specifications that will emerge during the long years ahead in
which Microsoft offers no new browser.”

A social network caught in the Web

:

We present an analysis of Club Nexus, an online
community at Stanford University. Through the Nexus site we were
able to study a reflection of the real world community structure
within the student body. We observed and measured social network
phenomena such as the small world effect, clustering, and the
strength of weak ties. Using the rich profile data provided by the
users we were able to deduce the attributes contributing to the
formation of friendships, and to determine how the similarity of
users decays as the distance between them in the network increases.
In addition, we found correlations between users’ personalities and
their other attributes, as well as interesting correspondences
between how users perceive themselves and how they are perceived by
others.”