I’m an opera fanboy. No, not the music, click on the link. Anyway, one of my favorite features is the mouse gesturing system. I’m addicted to it and get frustrated when I sit in front of a browser besides opera. Now it’savailable for mozilla/Netscape 6 as well. And it works on the mac. Browsing heaven, especially on the mac os x side where opera is not nearly as good.

I got my new machine up and running this weekend. If you’re interested, read on, though be warned that lengthy and arcane techno geekery is to follow….
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newegg.com refunded my money today, leaving me free to shop for replacement parts for the new machine. This leads to the one advantage to this whole struggle, so far at least: the prices of computer parts are constantly dropping, such that for the same money I spent 3 weeks ago I can now get an identical motherboard from the same manufacturer but with ATA 133 support on board for the same price (the dead one only supported ATA100), and I can get the next AMD cpu up the scale or save $20, whichever I prefer.

I have this ongoing fascination with data visualization tools that provide easily navigable visual ‘portals’ into complex data sets, especially as they apply to website navigation. Mostly the interest stems from work, where we face this issue on a macro level (how to organize access to a website that has over 30k pages broken into a huge number of ‘content areas’) and on a micro level as we have one project in particular where we’d really like to have a tool that offers students the ability to navigate complex biology subject matters easily. So, today I ran across Touchgraph, which is completely awesome. You’ll need a java enabled web browser to check it out.

The other reason I’ve been fascinated with these comes from reading Gibson and Sterling and the other cyberpunk authors and recognizing that basically they’re onto something when they describe near future computer interfaces, it’s just a question of what that something ends up looking like, and these tools I’ve been linking to are glimpses….or potential glimpses anyway 😉

Check out these absolutely beautiful cases. My next geek project after I finish the still incomplete gaming rig is to buy one of these cases and turn it into a combination gaming rig/mp3 repository for my home entertainment system. They aren’t cheap at $500 for a half complete box but I can turn the thing into a finished PVR rig for well under a grand. This is where my tax return is going.

My new machine won’t post. I’ve now spent about 8 hours on my own and 2 with a friend who came over to double check my efforts to make sure I’m not overlooking something, and the new machine won’t post. All signs seem to indicate that it’s the motherboard, though there’s a small possibility that its the cpu. This is major suckage, I have been carefully planning the construction of this machine for about 4 months. To have it all fall apart on the finish line is very frustrating. Plus Jesse has to wait for his new machine since I am still using my trusty abit BH6 for now. I’ve had pretty good luck with abit mainboards but based on this one and the trouble my friend Paul had with his new abit this may be my last one.

So I’ve become completely paranoid about posting to this blog using one of the wireless laptops, from home or work, because it’s so pathetically easy to sniff wireless traffic. I know if I was in college and I could sniff the network so easily I would definitely be listening in on the stream to see what fun stuff I could uncover. The solution seems to be to encrypt the connection from the server end but it’s somewhat beyond me and Bandy is no longer around to advise me on this stuff so for now, no wireless posting, alas.

Under $100 for driverless firewire portable storage. Note to relatives and signigicant other; I want one!

I’ve had this ongoing fascination with distributed computing projects and their commercial potential. Long ago I wrote a long piece about it which is now sadly lost. The gist of it was that it should be possible for a company to profitably exploit the vast sea of networked computers to use their computing power when their owners weren’t using it. About a year and a half ago I outfitted all of the machines in our lab at work with the Popular Power client, which was doing research on flu vaccinations, and served as proof of my earlier piece. Unfortunately the .com collapse brought down Popular Power and several other companies that were after the same goal.

But now there’s Ubero. Again promising payment for your unused cpu cycles (through paypal no less) and, at least for the time being, again focused on non-profit ‘for the public good’ research. If you’ve a win32, macosx or unix box, go get it and run it when you’re not using your computer. Help scientists save the universe…or at least cure the common cold. Or something.

Long before there was the world wide web there was Ted Nelson and Xanadu, a vision of a global two way hypertext system into which all the world’s knowledge would be poured. I happened across Ted’s writings while I was in college and actually applied for grant money to do research using Xanadu, which at that time was to be published by Autodesk. I wasn’t that great of a student and so my grant proposal was denied (it didn’t help that I was looking for roughly $50,000, at a time when the average grant was a few hundred dollars in stipend money to fund a visit to a remote museum or library), but I never lost my interest and ultimately it led to the career I now (largely) enjoy, so I was pleasantly suprised to run across this piece in the register today, covering the public launch of the new xanadu website which among other things has the source code for Xanadu. Amazing stuff, I wonder if it’ll actually lead to something tangible this go around or if it will be just another step in the long evolution of Xanadu.