AOL and Google, Sitting in a Tree...

I'm a little confused over the news that Google has bought 5% of AOL's stock and will now be giving special treatment to AOL. 

I've always looked at AOL and Google as opposites.  AOL, with it's messy and unnecessary user interface meant to confuse people into thinking this is how the Internet actually is.  Google, on the other hand, having the most stripped down interfaces possible.  What real, long-term gain can Google get from this?  I was hoping AOL would file for bankruptcy in a few years.

Now all this could change.

There was talk of giving priority to AOL sites in Google searches, and even non-text adds in Google.  Both of these things would suck big time.

Don't abandon us Google!  We always knew you as the underdog, fighting against the corruptness and stupidity of Large Corporations.  Don't succumb to their ways!

Will the cool kids of the Internet be forced to switch to Yahoo? Or will Google, in it's infinite wisdom, rise from this stronger and more useful than before?

Only time will tell.

All I know is that AOL leaves a bad taste in a lot of peoples' mouths, and I wouldn't be spending one billion dollars to French-kiss them.

New Features in Gmail

Just off the digg.com presses, Gmail has a couple of new features that should make it more attractive to people used to an Outlook environment.

One, is the ability to create contact groups.  So you can make a group of all of the cool kids you email funny videos to, and make sharing bizarro humor all the more simple.

The other feature is the ability to create a "I'm on vacation" message that will auto-reply to people when they try to send you something.  I hadn't seen this feature anywhere else until I started working with Outlook at my new job.  I don't think this ability is really necessary, but I'm sure some people would scoff at Gmail for not having it.  Well scoff no more!

At my new help-desk position, around 50% of the calls we get are email related, and a majority of those calls are problems with either Outlook, or Outlook Web Access.  If the people with these problems had a bit more knowledge and time, I would be really tempted to set up a Gmail account for them and have them use it. 

Really, the 20 Mb limit on KU's student emails is a joke.  2.6 gigs would allow people the freedom they need in how they save emails.  Plus, I've already heard the "I accidentally deleted my entire inbox, save me" line too many times.  With Gmail, you could say "ok, click on "All Mail" see the messages you lost?  great!"

And Outlook Web Access DOES NOT have a "select all" feature, which makes transferring emails from one place to another very tedious.

Now I just need to figure a way to have Gmail connect to the KU Exchange Server, and everyone would be happy.

Comedians of Comedy

Just a quick note:

There is a new show on Comedy Central called "Comedians of Comedy" which follows 4 stand-up comedians as they travel around in an RV doing shows.

Its probably the funniest "reality" TV show you will ever watch.

The comedians are :
Patton Oswalt
Brian Posehn
Zach Galifianakis
Maria Bamford

Most of the show is just them goofing around.

I guess it comes on at 10 pm, but I've been just getting the torrents and watching them at my leisure.
You should too.

Kansas gets Slashdotted

Crazy crazy times.  The news about the ongoing bizarre and disturbing turn of events surrounding the "battle" between religion and science became slashdot worthy today.

The particular war at the moment is between a Dr. Mirecki, an atheist and professor at KU who was going to teach a class on Creationism, and the fundamental Christians who apparently control much of Kansas.

He referred to them as "fundies" and then he got beat up, cancelled the class and resigned as chairman of the department of religion.

Though CNN messed up the details, and say he sent an email around to different people with these statements in them.  My understanding, and what I read in the Kansan was that he posted to a Yahoo group for atheists. Completely different.

He also had previously made comments on this same Yahoo group about when he was a child he almost threw up when he thought about the wafer taken at communion turning into the flesh of Jesus Christ.

What hits me over the head every time I hear another chapter of this tale is how unchristian the Christians in this story appear to act.

If the original report was true (and I think that it is) then that means some Christian was actively searching through atheist Yahoo groups just trying to dig something up.  To me, that seems a little ridiculous.  Someone went out, found these comments that Dr. Mirecki made on a forum, and distributed it out to the masses in hopes that someone with power would make a ruckus.  And of course someone did. 

When did it become the Christian way to go stirring up trouble?  I agree the professors comments were unprofessional and mean, but on the forum he was basically just puffing himself up a bit in front of his friends.

And then someone else went searching for all the other stupid stuff Dr. Mirecki said on this Yahoo group, just to try to get him in more trouble.  And their plan worked great.

This isn't what Christianity is about!

Where is the calm persuasive discussion about differences in opinion?
Where is the acceptance of all people regardless of transgressions?

I don't want to go into this too much more, because it is too touchy of a subject to really speak your mind in a public place such as this, but just a few more things:

• No one who would have taken this class would have been converted in either way to one side or the other.  This was a fight, not for the students, but for the politics of college.
  
• There were only 11 people signed up to take it before it was cancelled. (Out of 100 possible spots).
• This kind of behaviour just gives opponents of Christianity more fodder to throw at us and makes Christians in general look like bullies.
• Don't post rude things about people that can fire you, or who can and will beat you up on a country road
• "Fundies" is actually a pretty funny word, and should be used more often, with an expanded meaning to someone who is fanatical about any particular subject.
  

My own Network Topology

Instead of studying for finals, I decided to create a little diagram of my network at home. I used the trial version of OmniGraffle Pro, with some free downloadable stencils to make a pretty accurate mapping of what we have here.

OmniGraffle is actually a pretty nice program, and with a little work, you could do a lot with it.
But I don't think I'll ever use it enough to justify the $129 price tag. That's a bit much, in my opinion, I'll just stick to the trial version.

In the diagram, the little black boxes represent WRT54g routers, and the little white box is a little Linksys switch I have. Everything on the top line is in my office upstairs. The hardware on the lower level is downstairs (well the iBook can go anywhere).

If you wanted to, you could create much better maps then this one, but in about 30 min. this is what I came up with.

So what does your Network look like?

(FYI I had to use the capture-screen-image feature of my Mac to get a version of this in an image format, as the export feature dosen't seem to work for the demo. Plus you can only add 20 objects, so I couldn't fit my printer on there.)

Trick for printing graphs in Microsoft Office

My wife recently came up with a very intelligent way to print
multiple Excel graphs on one page, without dealing with formatting
issues in Word, or anything goofy like that. There is probably--
should be-- a built in way to do this, but I haven't used Excel enough
to know it, and this works fine.

She wanted to have four Excel graphs on one page, to save paper and
because it looks nice. So she simply copied each graph and pasted
them into an empty Powerpoint slide. There is a default Powerpoint
template that allows for a graph and a title. If you double click on
the graph place-holder Microsoft opens up its crappy graph maker,
which does you no good. BUT, if you single click on the place-holder
and then paste, your graph will fill up the entire slide. You can
decide if you want to keep the title or not.

When she had all of her graphs on different slides, she went to print,
and then chose the four slides on one page printing option. Genius!
Everything was lined up right and all it takes is a little copying and
pasting.

Again, I played no part in this unique solution. I actually wasted
time trying to figure out a way to print graphs in Excel, but to no
avail.

I don't know how often anyone needs to print multiple graphs to a
page, but you could also apply it to pictures or other similar
objects. Even better, print it to a pdf file, then load it back onto
a slide and you can print 16 graphs on one page! Genius!

This brings up the fact that I'm dying to have a native, Apple built,
Cocoa Office suite for the Mac. Please! Microsoft Word is slow,
jittery, goofy, and lazy. And the other Office products aren't much
better! Pages is nice, but it really is for laying out interesting
documents, and not lab reports or regular everyday stuff. Open
office is coming, but not really here for the Mac yet, and I would be
happy with just Text Edit, except when I need to use tables, graphs,
pictures, etc.

Please Apple Hurry!

Return of the W.R.T.

A few weeks ago, I was saddened to learn that Linksys had changed the best home router available for the worse. In case you don't follow the router scene much (I know I don't), here's just a bit of backstory:

The Linksys WRT54G has been considered one of the best home / small office routers availible for the geek with too much free time. Why? Because people found out that it was running Linux. And even better, due to weird copywrite laws that I won't pretend to understand, they had to release the source code for the software-- aka "firmware" --that ran on it. Meaning anyone could take their software, look at it, improve it, and release it again. All for free.
And many people did that.

Thus, you could take this $50 router, add someone's improved software, and make it almost as powerful as a router you might pay $600 dollars for. That's a pretty good deal.

Then tragedy stuck... To save a few bucks, for the newest versions of this router Linksys has changed the internals of this model and crippled it from allowing this change in software to work. (And they changed the operating system, so anything Linux wouldn't run anyways.)
And I cried at night.

But now, they've released the old (good) WRT54G under a new name: WRT54GL! It's got all the cool features that it did before they crippled it, but it costs $70 now. So, basically they want geeks that want to hack these routers pay a few more dollars to be able to do it. This is still a good thing, because at least you can still buy it somewhere.

I have two of the original one's, and they are great. One is running the original Linksys firmware. The other is connected to the computer we have hooked up to the TV and is running the dd-wrt firmware, so that it can run in client mode and connect to the other router upstairs.

This saves me from drilling a hole trough the ceiling to connect this computer to the network. I thought that was a good idea, my wife did not.

So, if you are in need of a router, and want the option to someday modify it to make it much more powerful, go grab a WRT54GL today!

And if you want more info about the WRT54g and its possibilities, check here or here for a mostly complete list of the firmwares you can get. Its really pretty exciting stuff... If you're in to routers.

And hopefully someday electronic makers will figure out better ways to name their hardware, so we aren't all left memorizing silly strings of random characters. I mean really, how hard would it be to come up with a naming scheme similar to vechiles for digital cameras, routers and the like.

It would be much cooler to say the Linksys "Firebrand" then WRT54g anyday.