Uranium Ore on Amazon

Apparently, you can (legally) buy cans of Uranium Ore on Amazon.

Still looking for a Christmas Present?

Is it just me, or is that really a little strange to buy something like this off the internet? But then again, the same seller also offers Rosswell soil samples, so what can you expect.

One of the customer reviews with two out of five stars is really funny:

I bought a can of this about 4.5 billion years ago, give or take a few million years, but when I went to use it today I noticed only half of it was still in the can. I swear I put the lid on tight. I'd give it more stars if it came in a better package.

Oh, sweet science! :)

December 13, 2007Fred Wenzel

BSD-powered Obama '08

Douglas Karr at the Marketing Technology blog has an interesting post about the web servers the election candidates for the U.S. in 2008 run.

Hillary runs Windows 2003, for example, while Guiliani trusts his website to a CentOS+Apache install. An exception seem to be Barrack Obama and C. Todd, who are the only ones to run FreeBSD on their webservers.

The percentage difference between Linux/Apache (48%) and Windows/IIS (43%), seems to reflect the Internet not too badly (which is about 50% Apache vs. 35% IIS), but when you look at the two parties, there is a much more clear bias:

It’s fascinating to me that the Dems are predominantly Open Source… except for Hillary Clinton and the Republicans are predominantly Microsoft with the exception of Ron Paul, Jim Gilmore, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.

I wonder what makes Republican candidates go so strongly for closed source products, but I'll leave this up to your speculations ;) .

When I look at the hosting companies, I don't recognize many names -- only one came to sight: Republican candidate Jim Gilmore gets his Linux box from 1&1 Internet, Inc., a subsidiary of 1 und 1, one of Germany's largest internet companies who have big facilities in my university town Karlsruhe. /me waves from here.

Will this knowledge influence where the average geek's makes their cross on the ballot? Probably (or rather, hopefully) not. Yet it is interesting to see what technologies the candidates trust into. Now I'd only like to find out which browser they are using. But this will likely remain unresolved forever...

December 03, 2007Fred Wenzel

All but one

Kevin Rudd, who just became Prime Minister of Australia on Monday, immediately got to work and just today ratified the Kyoto Protocol (an amendment to the United Nations convention on climate change).

Now there is only one industry nation in the world left who did not formally commit to a common effort on climate change. You probably know who it is...

November 26, 2007Fred Wenzel

MySpace Email Blocking

Today, I received my first MySpace invitation spam ever, featuring some text along the lines of:

Hi gorgeous i loved your profile you want to have great time... blah, blah...

Sadly for her, I am not a MySpace member and probably never will, but when I almost hit the "Report Spam" button, I realized that myspace has a proactive approach against spam from their members (also described in their privacy policy). The end of the mail reads:

If you want to block any emails from MySpace members in the future, you can click here: http://www1.myspace.com/... Or send a single blank email with the subject line "BLOCK" to: privacy (at) myspace (dot) com You can also block future email or direct any other inquiries by regular postal mail to: MySpace, Inc. 8391 Beverly Blvd. #349 Los Angeles, CA 90048 USA

After making sure the mail was not a phishing attack, I went to the provided link and put my address on MySpace's block list and now I am fairly confident this first invitation spam message will also have been my last.

As they tend to live off the sharing of private data, social networking sites almost never deserve praise for something they do privacy-related. This, I believe, is a notable exception.

(Note: A double opt-in system would be even better, yet that would defeat the purpose of "inviting one's friends" into a social network, who have not opted into the network (yet) by definition.)

November 19, 2007Fred Wenzel

Chuckabee

Republican presidential candidate and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee made an interesting election commercial featuring nobody less than the actor that all other actors are merely imitating, everybody's favorite idol and the guy whose fists are faster than light: Chuck Norris.

I know what you're thinking now: "Where can I vote for Chuck, and who's that other guy in the commercial anyway?" (after all, you American voters have made an actor president before, and the Californians have made one governor, so this seems to be the logical career step for American actors). Maybe next time he'll have a heart and roundhouse kick his way to the Oval Office?

(Thanks for the link, Tara!)

November 16, 2007Fred Wenzel

Aggrandize

When I read dictionary.com's word of the day today:

aggrandize: To make or make appear great or greater.

... I thought, ah! That must be the same as embiggen!

However, I wonder: Is "aggrandize" a perfectly cromulent word? ;)

October 13, 2007Fred Wenzel

Garbled Fred

Yesterday, I registered with LinkedIn and sent out a few invitations to people I know who also have an account.

Sadly enough, LinkedIn didn't like my name, FrÃƒÂ©dÃƒÂ©ric, quite as much as I do, so the invitation emails ended up being signed like this:

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. -Frédéric

I reported the bug and hope they fix it soon. For now, I replaced my "ÃƒÂ©"s by regular "e"s but of course they are only half as nice :)

Sorry for the inconvenience to everyone who though "who the heck is that?" when receiving my email.

(Thanks to Brandon and morgamic who told me about the problem.)

October 08, 2007Fred Wenzel

Hi, del.icio.us

From the HTTP response headers that the del.icio.us API sends:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:10:01 GMT X-Delicious-Debug: Hi there (...)

Uh, hi, Yahoo! ;)

October 01, 2007Fred Wenzel

Ein Allzeithoch nach dem anderen

Das ist bald schon keine Meldung mehr wert, so oft wie der Euro in letzter Zeit "Allzeithochs" gegenüber dem Dollar erklimmt: Heute stand er bei fast 1,43 US-Dollar.

September 29, 2007Fred Wenzel

New York Times on Dining in Portland

This is a golden age of dining and drinking in a city that 15 years ago was about as cutting edge as a tomato in January.

Despite this questionable quote, the New York Times seem to like Portland, Oregon food-wise.

I can see that: Portland is still one of the nicest cities that I have been to in the U.S., if not the best. Turns out, I have chosen the right decade to go there.