Category: Computers

— Federal authorities accused executives at three Northern California software
companies of cooking the books to dupe investors and prop up stock prices during the high-tech boom of the 1990s. The U.S. Attorney’s Office filed criminal securities-fraud charges Monday against two former chief executives, Gholamreza Mikailli of Sacramento-based Unify and Alan K. Anderson of the now-defunct Quintus, and former chief financial officer Gary Pado of Unify. AP’s Michael Liedtke in the San
Jose Mercury Judith Burns in the Wall Street Journal Ben White in the Washington Post Gilbert Chan in the Sacramento Bee

Source: Rough & Tumble.

— Finding the Speed of Light

The activity requires a microwave oven, a microwave-safe casserole dish, a bag of marshmallows, and a ruler. (The oven must be of the type that has no mechanical motion-no turntable or rotating mirror. If there is a turn-table, remove it first.) First, open the marshmallows and place them in the casserole dish, completely covering it with a layer one marshmallow thick. Next, put the dish of marshmallows in the microwave and cook on low heat. Microwaves do not cook evenly and the marshmallows will begin to melt at the hottest spots in the microwave. (I leaned this from our Food Science teacher Anita Cornwall.) Heat the marshmallows until they begin to melt in four or five different spots. Remove the dish from the microwave and observe the melted spots. Take the ruler and measure the distance between the melted spots. You will find that one distance repeats over and over. This distance will correspond to half the wavelength of the microwave, about 6 cm. Now turn the oven around and look for a small sign that gives you the frequency of the microwave. Most commercial microwaves operate at 2450 MHz.

All you do now is multiply the frequency by the wavelength. The product is the speed of light.

I’ve often wanted to measure the speed of light with a ruler, and now I know how.

These are the RoboPundit sources:

Andrea Harris

Bellicose woman

blogdex

daypop

Electrolite

Evhead

News is Free Headlines

Ken Layne

lgf

Matt Welch

Moira Breen

Moreover

More Than Zero

Fredrik Norman

Olmstead

Patio Pundit

Peerkat

PhotoDude

Political Wire

Craig Schamp

O’Reilly Weblogs

Works in Progress

Rand Simburg

Protein Wisdom and Scripting News have errors in their feeds and don’t presently register. Some sites don’t use titles, which causes Peerkat big problems, since it can’t generate a link without a title. It looks like Peekat needs re-writing.

— High-Tech companies in Sonoma County’s Telecom Valley find venture capitalists want a bigger piece of the action now that the economy’s in the dumper. This article explains the moral clarity of investors (Signs of life return)

But the decline in valuations is not necessarily bad, said Winston Fu, general partner at U.S. Venture Partners, a Menlo Park venture capital firm. Investors want to fund companies that are focused on building a real business, not just becoming rich.

What we have here is the beginnings of an explanation for the Dot Com Swindle, in which VC firms and Investment Bankers took the public for a ride. “It’s good that we fleeced you,” they’re saying, “because you should be more concerned about your soul than your bank account.”

Isn’t it good that they’re looking out for us?

— We have a new feature here at the Navel called “RoboPundit.” This is a little bit of technology that features summaries and links to recent articles from a number of different blogs that I enjoy reading. The summaries are assembled automatically, hence the name. This works through Peerkat, which grabs the summaries automatically generated by Movable Type and some other blog tools (but not by Blogger, alhough Mr. Blogger has an RSS feed on his personal blog), and makes an RSS feed out of them. This feed is then grabbed by a server that converts the feed into Javascript. The blogs are scanned every hour, but the service that converts the feed only runs once a day, unless I force it to refresh more often (or unless somebody else does, because anybody can force a re-build of the RoboPundit feed.)

All of this software is flakey, pre-release stuff, so I expect a little randomness, which we can pretend is punditry. I just did this to do it, not because I think it’s Really Cool or anything like that. Of course.

UPDATE: To force an update of the RoboPundit feed, just click here.

— Peerkat is a little Python application that scans websites for new entries and collects them for you to browse and edit. It does some of the scut-work for the blog-fetcher I was speculating about recently. Click here to see an automatically-assembled blog raw material page.

— The Alexa system has revised its rankings, and they appear much more accurate (according to my intuition), with one caveat: they now throw away sub-domain information, so all Blogspot-hosted sites have the same ranking, 2098, all weblogs.com sites rank 8663, and all weblogger.com sites rank 28,054. Redirected sites flash different numbers as they redirect, like Kausfiles, which ends up lower on Slate than at the original domain. Tech blogs generally do better than they should. Here are some of the rankings for blogs with unique domains:

NRO 4,693
Arts and Letters Daily 11,657
Andrew Sullivan 14,875
Daypop 15,249
James Lileks 18,495
Corante 38,001
Den Beste 63,313
LGF 67,691
Josh Marshall 78,461
Kausfiles 84,276
Tony Pierce 84,425
Matt Welch 100,843
Ken Layne 105,125
Va. Postrel 109,420
Omphalos 131,874
Bill Quick 139,748
RageBoy 151,041
VodkaDude 159,358
Nick Denton 178,128
Suman Palit 208,531
Rand Simberg 214,935
Protein Wisdom 226,392
Joanne Jacobs 253,214
Jeff Jarvis 286,929
More Than Zero 320,194

The Number One web site: Yahoo; number one newspaper: N. Y. Times, 82 overall.

— Want to hear people talk about blogs? Go to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference for only $350.xx a day and get your fill. That’s not a typo: three-hundred and fifty bucks for one day of Dave Winer and Steven Johnson.

The O’Reilly conference fees give capitalism a bad name.

— WarLog: World War III by Jeff Jarvis says:

I propose the creation of The Weblog Foundation for the advancement of weblogs and online media.

The foundation would support weblogs with hosting, software, and honorariums for a wide array of selected webloggers. It would raise money from sponsor/underwriters, who would receive advertising on selected weblogs, as well as from technology underwriters, readers’ contributions, and other activities.

It’s an intriguing notion, drawing a lot of buzz from Photodude, Dailypundit, Instapundit, Eric Olsen, and others. Off the top of my bald head, I’d counter-propose a quasi-standards body to work on the long-term issues affecting blogging, such as micropayments, syndication, and microcontent management; these issues have the potential to pay back more than subsidized blogging, but I have a day job so YMMV.

It’s good that people are taking a constructive direction on the Future of Blogging today (instead of making scurrilous conjectures about the motives for wanting a discussion,) I’d suggest that we pay extra-special attention to the needs of actual writers, such as Ken Layne and Matt Welch; these guys aren’t looking for subsidies (which would be hard to administer given the issues raised by Denton), as much as a means to get paid for the honest work they do; that’s where retrieval, syndication, and payment come into the picture.

I used to joke that we made a mistake in the design of the Internet by making the “money” module a sub-class of “porn;” let’s do a redesign where it’s a subclass of “publishing.”

— This will make somebody happy: IT job market to rebound, hiring managers predict

The information-technology workforce shrunk by 5 percent in the past year, but it should rebound soon because companies expect to refill jobs cut in the economic slump, a trade group said Monday.

But a decrease in high-tech unemployment will be bad for blog readership figures.