I wrote a script to test whether a web visitor is a human being or not. For background info and technical nitty-gritty, read below.

Programs known as "robots" have been masquerading as real web surfers since the beginning of the Web. Robots can navigate between web pages and servers using hyperlinks just as people do, and can do so very quickly. Most commonly, robots are used to search out data to include in search engines.

Developers of free software operating systems seem obliged to provide screenshots of their releases. Most of the time, these screenshots show nothing more than a themed or thinly customized KDE or Gnome setup. Except for OSes aimed directly at Windows switchers, these efforts are worthless and silly.

Your OS runs a window manager. Congratulations.

An interest in legacy hardware led me to buy a handy USB floppy drive for my Powerbook for creating boot disks for and transferring data to and from machines that for whatever reason don't have a workable CD-ROM or network connection.

In OS 10.3, Apple merged most of the functionality of "Utilities/Disk Copy" into "Utilities/Disk Utility," though I've found that Disk Utility will not write floppy images. The venerable command-line Unix utility "dd" is required.

"An escalator can never break. It can only become stairs. You would never see an 'Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order' sign, just 'Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.'" -Mitch Hedberg

I'm on Christmas break and have been spending part of my time reading through AK Dewdney's "The Tinkertoy Computer," a collection of Dewdney's writings and articles from Scientific American and elsewhere.

Woops.

Today I picked up a wonderful 20GB bus-powered external hard drive, and it rocks. The only problem: its filesystem.

It's possible to correct "myopia," or near-sightedness, with what's known as a "pinhole lens;" by allowing only a small sliver of light enter the eye, the effects of distortion in the lens or cornea are mitigated and once can see clearly if dimly. You can cup your hand into a fist and make a pinhole to look through. Your vision will improve noticeably.

Broadcom makes a wireless chipset called the BCM4301. This chipset is in the Airport Extreme hardware from Apple, which is in turn in my Powerbook G4.

Broadcom has not released any GNU/Linux or otherwise open drivers or a development kit, so no driver for any open OS exists. Basically, this piece of hardware is the only thing preventing me from running a free OS on my laptop.

I've been dabbling in shell scripting the past few weeks. My first project was a DynDNS record updater. My latest creation is what amounts to an alias for killall; it scans ps output and kills processes matched to a pattern with grep.

I discovered today that writing extensions for Firefox is a ridiculously straight-forward process.

The actual coding is done in JavaScript, while the presentation is handled through Mozilla's XUL.

I can see myself getting into programming these hard-core. Awesome extensions to follow!

I got an IM today from a friend of mine with the question "I'd like to put multiple Linux LiveCD ISOs on one disc, and then be able to select at boot which one to start up."

Various micro and utility OSes might be stuffed onto a CD this way - Damn Small Linux, Slax, or Derek's Boot and Nuke are just a few that might be used.

I knew immediately that this was possible, but it took some research to determine exactly how it can be done.

Today in the car I heard an interview with Steven Unwin, a guy who in his new book claims to have come up with a number representing the probability of God's existence. That number? 67%.