Friday, April 01, 2005

The JavaScript behind Google Maps



Click here for AmazonIf you're interested in examining the JavaScript used by GoogleMaps, the LibGmail folks -- who broke down the GMail interface have provided an excellent cross-reference. In addition, they've de-obfuscated Google's code to make it easier to read.

Be warned: it some serious Ajaznix: Google Maps Classes and Functions References
 

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Writing a Get Well Letter to the Pope



Click here for AmazonIf you've ever wanted to write a "get well" letter to the Pope, now is probably a good time. The proper greeting in a letter is "Most Holy Father" and the mailing address is:

His Holiness, the Pope
Vatican City
Rome, Italy


The Pope's courageous stand against Communism is especially worthy of mention in light of Ronald Reagan's passing. In fact, his pitched battle against the Soviet leadership earned him a bullet from an assassin.

On October 16, 1978, at age 58, he succeeded Pope John Paul I, fulfilling a prophecy made to him decades earlier by Padre Pio that he would become Pope. The monk also had a darker prediction to make: that Wojtyla's reign would be short and end in blood.

On May 13, 1981, that prediction nearly came true. Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish Muslim, shot and came very close to killing the Pope in St. Peter's Square. Documents released this year indicate that the Soviet hierarchy ordered the assassination in response to the Pope's tireless battles against Communism.

According to the documents, the KGB and the East German State Police -- the dreaded Stasi -- contracted with Bulgarian operatives in Rome to perform the assassination. The Bulgarians, in turn, subcontracted with radical Turkish groups that ended up unleashing Agca.*

On December 27, 1983, John Paul went to Agca's prison and met the man who had attempted to kill him. The men spoke in private and the nature of their conversation has never been revealed.

In more than 100 trips abroad, the Pope has attracted enormous crowds and traveled a greater distance than all other Popes combined. Possessed of great physical courage and stamina, his efforts at peacemaking and bridge-building between religions have been truly remarkable.

BrainBank: Spoken and Written Forms of Address

*In 1987, author AJ Quinnell wrote a fictional account of the Pope's assassination entitled In the Name of the Father. In light of the recently released documents, it is well worth reading.
 

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Our Top Story: Hitler Still Dead



Click here for AmazonThe indispensible Best of the Web points us to this startling headline:

Harvard Study: Hitler Held Grudges, Craved Attention


Now that's what I call a hot news flash.

In any event, the article describes a detailed psychological profile of Hitler commissioned by the OSS in 1943. The article reports:

The rare 1943 document was among the papers discovered in Cornell University Law School's collection from the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

The psychological profile of the Nazi dictator is now available on the law library's Web site.

The report said that if Germany were to lose the war, Hitler might kill himself. Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker in late April 1945.


The interesting thing is that I recall reading this report years ago. It was in book form, probably published in the late 1940's or early 1950's and was titled, I think, "The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report".

There are some interesting tidbits in the report. While there is a prediction that Hitler would commit suicide, the recommendation for postwar treatment of Hitler is fascinating. The primary goal of the treatment was to prevent a living Hitler from becoming a cause celebre or some sort of martyred symbol of persecution:

...1. (a) Bring the Nazi leaders to trial; condemn the chief culprits [to] death, but proclaim Hitler mentally unbalanced.
1. (b) Commit Hitler to an insane asylum (such as St. Elizabeth's, Washington, D.C.) and house him in a comfortable dwelling specially built for his occupancy. Let the world know he is being well treated.
1. (c) ...Unknown to him, have sound-films taken of his behavior. This will show his fits and tirades... of everyone in the world, including the German people.
1. (d) Exhibit regularly to the public... selected segments of these sound-reels, so that it can be seen how unbalanced he is, how mediocre his performance on the customary tests...


Update: the book is still for sale, and I just found it on Amazon. I would have to read the Harvard study in more depth, but at first glance, it would appear these two have markedly similar content.

The study is available on the Cornell Law School web site.
 

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The UN wants to run the Internet



Click here for AmazonHere's something so sick it's almost laughable: the UN wants to run the Internet. Oh, they won't come out and just say exactly that, but a recent interview with the ITU's Houlin Zhao made it crystal clear what the UN is after.

Quick refresher: ITU stands for the International Telecommunication Union and it's an agency of the UN. Here's Mr. Zhao:

Today the management by ICANN (is something that) people consider to be management by the United States, by one government. People definitely want to see some changes. I think everyone would agree that a better arrangement is something that we're looking for.


Bzzzzzt!! Wrong answer! Now I know the UN has had a stellar year, what with:

  • The Oil-for-Food Scandal that ripped off, oh, about $10 billion for Saddam and his buddies (and we all know who they were). Not to mention some untoward payments to UN head Kofi Annan's son Kojo

  • The Sex Scandal in which women and children in the Congo were reportedly raped by UN "Peacekeepers"

  • Oh, wait, I forgot about the other sex scandal in which different UN "Peacekeepers" were linked to separate sex crimes in East Timor as well as prostitution in Cambodia and Kosovo

  • And that's just the recent stuff that's come to light despite the UN's incessant stonewalling.

    From the head down, the UN appears to be rotten with corruption and, as an added bonus, populated with predatory animals possessing no more conscience than John Wayne Gacy.

    News.com's Declan McCullagh, who is usually a steller observer of the technology scene, didn't ask Mr. Zhao the key question:

    What in the name of Kojo Annan would possess anyone with a lick of sense to give the UN the keys to the Internet?


    Brief history lesson: the US invented the frigging Internet. It was funded by US taxpayers through DARPA and matured as an artifact of the US military. Don't like it? Invent your own damn Internet.

    Sure, the UN are just the folks I want running the Internet. Hey Kofi: here's a dollar - go buy yourself a big tall glass of shut-up juice. Or, better yet, resign.

    From News.com: Interview with Houlin Zhao and from ISOC: Brief History of the Internet

    Update 10/2/05: Wizbang Blog
     

    Farmer Burns



    Click here for AmazonFarmer Burns was a legendary wrestler who made his name during the turn of the century. His record was a reported 6000+ victories against only seven losses. He won the world wrestling title on several occasions including a victory over the much-feared "Strangler" Lewis.

    The reason I bring up Burns? Combat conditioning guru Matt Furey has resurrected the Burns' legend in the context of bodyweight conditioning. As a longtime lifter with more injuries than I care to recount, I've become fascinated with using bodyweight exercises as an alternative to resistance training solely with iron.

    Ever heard of Hindu pushups? Hindu squats? Divebomber pushups? Wall-walking? Reverse press-ups? Bearcrawls? Furey covers all of these in his (relatively expensive) courses. But there are also a variety of free resources on the web to learn the basics.

    Among other things, Furey sells Burns' original conditioning and wrestling course. But it's also available free, online, courtesy of the folks at SandowPlus. When it was introduced in the early 20th century, the course cost the equivalent of several hundreds of dollars (at least). And it was quite popular, due to its useful illustrations (groundbreaking for their time) and practical advice.

    SandowPlus: Farmer Burns
     

    Simple AJAX



    Click here for AmazonIf you're wondering how Google pulled off their impressive Gmail user-interface, or why their mapping site is so freaking cool, then look no further than "AJAX".

    AJAX stands for "Asynchronous JAvascript + XML", the latter of which is used to transport messages between client and server without having to refresh the entire web page.

    In February, XML.com's Drew McLellan wrote an excellent overview of Ajax called "Very Dynamic Web Interfaces". His article, probably more than any other, introduced the tenets of Ajax to a wide audience.

    Better still, the folks at ModernMethod have introduced SAJAX, one of the best compact libraries I've seen for simplifying an AJAX implementation. If you write in PHP, Perl, Python, or Ruby, SAJAX is a great jumpstart on your first dynamic web app.

    Check it out: SAJAX.
     

    Google and Urchin



    Click here for AmazonThe folks at Google have decided to buy Urchin, the web analytics firm. Urchin provides both hosted and shrink-wrapped solutions for analyzing web site traffic. Urchin has some monster customers including (according to their site), P&G, NBC, SBC, EDS, and lots of other three-letter acronyms.

    What's it mean?

    If you operate a commercial web site, Google intends to provide you with all of the infrastructure you need to be successful. Google's AdWords campaign managment application drives traffic to your site. Urchin will help you analyze that traffic to improve ROI. Google's AdSense helps you generate revenue from that traffic, aside from any other revenue you may be earning from your core business.

    What's next?

    My guess is that Google will be entering the hosting business in a big way. Google's Blogger is already a free, lightweight hosting solution. Expect more heavyweight (fee-based) hosting solutions using Google's outrageously scalable infrastructure, coming soon to a web site near you.
     

    Monday, March 28, 2005

    You put the balm on?



    Click here for AmazonI think you may have heard about the woman who was eating chili at Wendy's and bit into something hard. She spit it out... and it turned out to be a human finger. The stories imply that vomiting quickly ensued, followed by a projectile apology by Wendy's.

    Of course, a lawsuit is more certain than William Hung getting shut out of a Grammy nomination.

    I can so envision a Seinfeld episode with Jackie Chiles ("you put the balm on?") representing Elaine.

    And a patriotic Kramer attempting to wrangle a business deal out of the debacle by harping on the protein benefits of human digits... and appealing to New Yorkers' patriotism by calling them "freedom fingers".
     

    Defeating Solitaire



    Click here for AmazonThe WaPo's Robert MacMillan noted the following technical solution for the North Carolina State Senator who wants to prohibit state employees from playing Solitaire, Minesweeper, and other time-wasting games.

    That prompted this alternate suggestion from reader Mark Colan: "When I was a developer at Lotus some time ago, we were under the gun for an important project. One team member spent entirely too much time playing Solitaire for our tastes. Someone came up with a Windows resource-editing program, exchanged the images for two cards, and installed it on his machine."

    The result? Every time he pulled a black 7, it would behave like a red 7 and vice-versa. "It did the trick," Colan said.


    Big Music's Last Waltz
     

    How the DMCA Affects Google Search Results



    Click here for AmazonI did a Google search for "excel web" to find which companies were selling products and/or advertising in the spreadsheet collaboration space.

    After the least search result, I noticed the following announcement from Google:

    In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results.


    The link Google directs us to is broken, but contains the term KaZaA Media Desktop. Because KaZaA is a 'prohibited product', in that it can be used for illicit file sharing, the powers-that-be have blacklisted it. The RIAA strikes again.

    Fortunately, there are other powers aligned on the side of good. Powers like Billionaire Mark Cuban, who wrote in a recent blog entry:

    It doesn't matter that the RIAA has been wrong about innovations and the perceived threat to their industry every single time... It just matters that they can spend more (than) everyone else on lawyers.


    The day can't come quick enough when the geniuses at the RIAA are put out to pasture with their intellectual ancestors: the Edsel, Pets.com, and New Coke.
     

    Sunday, March 27, 2005

    North Carolina Solitaire Crackdown



    Click here for AmazonFrom North Carolina comes a report that a State Senator wants to erase all game applications from state workers' computers. His belief: that preventing government employees from playing Solitaire and Minesweeper will recoup millions of dollars worth of productivity for the state.

    ...The solitaire crackdown here, though perhaps rare in its specificity, is part of a behind-the-scenes battle over personal time that's affecting not just unionized state workers in North Carolina, but sales reps in Washington and phone-bank workers in San Francisco. It goes straight to the issue of distractions from long days at the office and, more fundamentally, how much of their employees' time and concentration employers can reasonably expect to own...


    This effort is, itself, a giant waste of time. It makes about as much sense as teaching Mandarin Chinese to Jessica Simpson.

    If you've got bored, unmotivated and/or unsupervised employees, then I can guarantee they'll find ways to waste time.

    Game installation: Are you going to search all employees as they arrive each day to ensure they don't bring in game discs? My guess is you can run solitaire off a floppy or CD if so inclined.

    Convergence devices: Are you going to search all employees as they arrive each day to ensure they're not carrying in a PSP? New, personal entertainment devices like Sony's PSP -- a combo game-player/DVD -- will make it even harder to regulate game-playing activities.

    Invented games: Should the state install security cameras and the personnel necessary to monitor them in order to ensure no one is goofing off? Remember the ESPN commercial where cube workers were using a nerf ball and an empty bookshelf to play "baseball"? And bouncing the ball from the floor to the second shelf was a "double"?

    ...the IRS has shown that over 50% of the time an IRS employee goes on a computer, he or she also hooks up to the Internet to shop, gamble or play games...


    Perhaps this speaks to IRS management: I find it difficult to believe that the average Fortune 1000 organization routinely has 50% of their employees shopping, gambling or game-playing whenever they hook up to the Internet.

    Scott Kirwin, founder of the the IT Professionals Association of America, pins the tail on the donkey:

    "Managers, and in this case politicians, don't know how to effectively utilize the people they're in charge of... You have to ask yourself, if someone is so bored that playing solitaire is stimulating, then the problem is not with the game, it's with the job."


    Exactly. Where is management in this equation? Have they not adequate tasked their employees? Motivated them? Supervised their work or verified their deliverables?

    If I were Senator Allran, I'd worry less about which time-wasting technologies were installed on state computers... and a little more about a management philosophy that seems to encourage the wasting of time.

    Is that a spreadsheet on your screen — or solitaire?
     

    Saturday, March 26, 2005

    Regime Change: Iran



    Click here for AmazonThe invaluable Regime Change Iran blog reports that, if one listens carefully, you can hear the faint drumbeats of war resonating throughout an already tense region (hat tip: Hugh Hewitt). The day when the Mullahs are out of power can't come fast enough. Unless, of course, you prefer that fundamentalist, homicidal maniacs possess nuclear weapons.

    Dr. Jerome Corsi reports that on March 10, units of the U.S. Army's European Command stationed in Germany have been in Israel to conduct joint exercises with the Israeli Defense Forces designed to test their combined ability to down an attack of Shahab-3 missiles launched from Iran against Israel.

    Code-named "Juniper Cobra," these exercises test the linking of U.S. Patriot missile systems with Israel's Arrow-2 missile-defense systems. The Arrow-2 system is designed to intercept incoming missiles at high altitudes to reduce the fallout damage from nuclear warheads. The Patriot systems are a second line of defense, designed to intercept missiles at lower altitudes. Also involved in the exercises is a U.S. missile ship carrying Aegis anti-missile systems.

    U.S. military authorities deny that the exercises have anything to do with the current tensions over Iran's apparently determined drive to develop nuclear weapons secretly. Still, the scenario being tested involves missiles launched against Israel from a "red" whose identity is supposed "unknown," even though the aggressors just happen to speak Farsi. The last Juniper Cobra operation was reportedly conducted in 2001, just before the start of the war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein.

    The point of this combined exercise has not gone unnoticed in Tehran. Iran retaliated by announcing this week that tests of the Shahab-3 missile conducted in September of last year proved they had made breakthroughs in the development of the intermediate-range missile. The mullahs stressed that the September test fulfilled all technical expectations, proving fast and accurate at a range of 1,700 kilometers, more than enough to reach Tel Aviv.

    In other words, the mullahs want to be sure we all know they have an improved version, a weapon maybe more sophisticated than Operation Juniper Cobra is testing against.

    This Operation Juniper Cobra is not expected to end until mid-April. Put this together with what appears to be a convergence of U.S. carrier battle groups in the region, and the preparations for war are hard to miss...

    ...Stalled talks can't last forever. What happens if the mullahs refuse to take active steps to destroy their centrifuge farms and dismantle their heavy-water facilities? Well, there is always the military option. That option is very obviously left on the table, even if the president doesn't talk about it very much.


    Regime Change Iran blog: U.S., Israel preparing for Iran war?
     

    More Research on Nigerian Fraud Was Needed



    Click here for AmazonEver wonder who falls for those idiotic "Nigerian scam" emails? How about a Harvard professor? Really. This is old news, but I'd never seen it before. Perhaps you missed it as well.

    Apparently, Weldon Xu -- a researcher employed by Harvard -- was bright enough to scam $600,000 from coworkers... but stupid enough to lose it all to a classic Nigerian scam. Hmmm... Harvard professor, you say?

    A Harvard researcher accused of conning $600,000 from coworkers lost it all to a Nigerian e-mail scam, the Boston Herald reported.

    Weldong Xu's lawyer described his client as "a gullible guy" at Xu's trial for larceny in Roxbury, Mass., after entering a not guilty plea.

    Xu, 38, until his arrest last week did cancer immunology and AIDS research for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and was a professor at Harvard Medical School... Xu reportedly solicited the money from 35 people, saying it would go to research into SARS.

    Police said Xu confessed there never was any plan to study severe acute respiratory syndrome and he "lied" to investors, including fellow researchers.

    However, his lawyer Arnold Abelow claimed Xu had every intention of doing the research until the fateful e-mail arrived.

    "He got sucked in," Abelow said.

    When police asked where the money went, Xu allegedly told police he lost it to a Nigerian e-mail scam promising him a $50 million return on his investment.

    "He fell for it," Abelow said.

    Xu was ordered held on $600,000 cash bail, the newspaper said.


    More Research on Nigerian Fraud Was Needed
     

    Peace Through Superior Firepower



    Click here for AmazonExcept for ending slavery, fascism, nazism and communism -- war has never solved anything.

    Now comes word the the Sunni insurgents in Iraq are hoping for an "exit strategy". Let's hope the exit strategy is their continued obliteration unless they completely abandon terror attacks on Iraqi civilians, their country's infrastructure, and their liberators.

    Many of Iraq's predominantly Sunni Arab insurgents would lay down their arms and join the political process in exchange for guarantees of their safety and that of their co-religionists, according to a prominent Sunni politician.

    Sharif Ali Bin al-Hussein, who heads Iraq's main monarchist movement and is in contact with guerrilla leaders, said many insurgents including former officials of the ruling Ba'ath party, army officers, and Islamists have been searching for a way to end their campaign against US troops and Iraqi government forces since the January 30 election...

    ...Sharif Ali said the success of Iraq's elections dealt the insurgents a demoralising blow, prompting them to consider the need to enter the political process.


    Financial Times: Iraq's insurgents ‘seek exit strategy' "
     

    Software Development at Google



    Click here for AmazonThere is a policy at Google to require its developers to work 20% of the time on a research project of their own making. Joe Beda explains a bit about the software development process at Google and lists five characteristics that distinguish Google from most other development houses:

    1) One code base: everyone gets free-wheeling access to a large, well-documented software repository.
    2) Switching teams: it's easy to work on multiple projects and switch teams without a bunch of formal (HR-driven) process.
    3) Intranet: there is transparency into literally the entire company on the corporate intranet, without a lot of apparent worry about security and/or compartmentalization. Information can propagate to the correct parties in free-flowing and even unexpected channels.
    4) Pet projects: the 20% 'pet project' is not just paid lip service, it is actively encouraged. In fact, Joe worries aloud that he will get dinged on his review for not working on his 20% project.
    5) Interpersonal: there must be a great emphasis on social skills at Google -- and not strictly technical ability. New ideas are greeted with enthusiasm, brainstorming sessions, and the like. Technical elitists are probably not encouraged in this sort of environment.

    I do take issue with one statement of opinion:

    "One of the reasons that environments like Perl, Python, C#, Java, etc. flourish is that they have large and well through out libraries of useful code. For a variety of reasons, C++ has never had this"

    Uhm, Joe, ever visited CodeProject? On SourceForge, for example, C++ is among the top couple of languages used for open-source development. So... I beg to differ. If you're talking platform-inspecific code, well, yes, other languages will have more generic libraries - but where C/C++ excels is in its raw performance. Running close to the metal usually entails some platform-specific features.

    Joe Beda: How the Software Development Process Works at Google
     

    Friday, March 25, 2005

    FellowshipChurch.com: Why the Switch?


    Picture credit: http://www.infocom.com
    Click here for AmazonTerry Storch and Brian Bailey have operated FellowshipChurch.com, a full-fledged church management portal site, since 2001. In 2002, the site was overhauled using Microsoft's snazzy, new .NET tools: IIS, C#, ASP.NET and, of course, MS SQL Server.

    By 2004, a confluence of factors caused the development team to re-evaluate their approach. Separate campuses; the maintenance burden entailed by management of additional web properties (FellowshipConnection and EdYoung.org among them); and a relatively small development team were all factors.

    As the sites scaled, it became clear to the development team that continuing down the .NET path was probably not wise.

    ...In addition to our three in-house sites, we have a fourth that is developed by a local company in PHP using Linux and PostgreSQL. Time after time, they have been able to deliver simple and quick solutions that would take us twice as long in our current environment...


    Brian blogged about the decision to move to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL [or Postgres] and PHP [or Perl]). He characterizes the top ten factors:

       1) Developers
       2) Complexity and speed of development
       3) Cost
       4) Get it running/keep it running
       5) Security/viruses
       6) Platform independence
       7) Community
       8) Examples
       9) Browsers
       10) The new guy

    Read the whole thing.

    As an aside, I'm an advocate for Visual Studio, ASP.NET, C# and MS SQL Server if you're certain you're tied in to Microsoft's server platforms. But if you look to the big boys to see their strategic direction -- say, Google's clustered Linux farm or Yahoo's adoption of PHP --the appeal and security of platform independence is undeniable.

    Brian Bailey: Why the Switch?
     

    Book Review: All But My Life



    Click here for AmazonI recently had an opportunity to hear Gerda Weissman Klein speak of her experiences as a Holocaust survivor. You may remember Ms. Klein from the HBO Film based upon her startling story, which won an Academy Award. As a pampered, fifteen year-old Jewish girl in 1939, her idyllic family life came to an abrupt halt when the Nazis rolled into their small Polish town.

    For a short period of time, her family was permitted to remain in their house, albeit in the basement. Over time, her family unravelled, shipped off one at a time. Her beloved brother, Arthur. Her father. Her mother. All disappeared, never to be seen again. By 1942, she began her journey through a series of increasingly harsh slave-labor camps, using an ability to speak German and a quickly acquired expertise on garment looms. Only through a series of fortuitous coincidences, sacrifices of friends, and even a few benefactors among her captors, was she able to survive the factories.

    By 1945, the Nazis were on the run and their prisoners were forced to move back into Germany. Stripped of all possessions except for some photographs tucked into her ski boots (which her father had presciently demanded she wear the summer she left home), she survived the 350-mile winter "death march". Only 120 of 2000 girls survived the forced march and Gerda herself was liberated by American soldiers only hours from death: she weighed 68 pounds when Lt. Kurt Klein, who was to become her husband, rolled into town.

    There are few, if any, more compelling first-person stories of survival against all odds. Perhaps John Ransom's Andersonville Diary qualifies. But those who are unfamiliar with the concept of true evil would do well to read Gerda's unbelievable story of human spirit, and courage without measure.

    All But My Life
     

    Thursday, March 24, 2005

    I've been a Bad Boy (I guess)



    Click here for AmazonI recently posted a note on the    J o e l    o n    S o f t w a r e   forum, an online gathering place of various eclectic -- and usually enlightening -- personalities. Think of Slashdot without the incessant flame wars.

    I had answered a question about Digital River, the large software fulfillment house. One of the participants had asked about DR's reputation and commission rates. I responded as follows:

    Digital River consists of many software fulfillment brands. Check out Digibuy for example: it's a DR property, handles fulfillment, and takes about 13% of your list price.

    RegNow is another one - it has a pretty popular affiliate program where download sites are incented to list you through a piece of the action.

    But you shouldn't ever have to pay anything over 15-18%...


    The next day, when I checked the thread from the office, I noticed my message didn't exist. Had it been deleted? Apparently. If so, I wondered why it had earned this relatively rare distinction.

    When I returned home, the mystery deepened. From the original browser -- the one I'd used to post the message -- the message still appeared in the thread, even after a page reload. Now I was more confused than Yogi Berra visiting CERN.

    As an experiment, I posted a response to another thread. Odd. This one 'stuck' - meaning it was visible not only to my own browser, but also to external browsers (how could I tell? I use a series of proxies for... uhm... "testing" purposes). When I commanded other physical machines to retrieve the pages in question, they told me that:

  • the original message I'd posted didn't exist to the outside world... it only existed on my browser and the internal confines of some JOS discussion database

  • the second, test message I'd posted did exist... it was visible from all browsers


  • As a third test, I posted a new topic - a question. Once I checked my proxies, I discovered that this message, like the first, had been relegated to message purgatory. It was only visible from the original browser that I'd used to post the message. Elsewhere, it didn't exist.

    Bugs in the discussion board system? Or have I been a bad boy and had my home IP address "blacklisted"? I have no idea, but it's either an interesting technical anomaly or a pretty cool security feature, depending upon the answer. Although it would be nice to know what earned the black-listing.

    Update: the moderator(s) at JOS completely destroyed this message (which was cross-posted there as a question) and the several answers it had garnered. Methinks I angered someone there, though I have no idea what did it. Here's a list of my posts... if you can find one that's offensive, let me know.
     

    Remember Flooz?



    Click here for AmazonFlooz... the good old days of DotCom mania. I like the slogan. "Just what you wished for." What I wished for was an e-cash company that didn't sound like a term for harlot, wasn't represented by flaky, has-been actress, and actually made electronic payments easy. Oh, that's right - I'm describing PayPal.

    Pando Networks is working on a way to deliver large files easily over the Internet, but the best part about the company is that the CEO, Robert Levitan, started iVillage and Flooz.

    Remember Flooz? It sold dollars that could be exchanged for gifts. Whoopi Goldberg stumped for it. Flooz survived the implosion of 2000. Then in 2001, one of its biggest customers, Cisco Systems, wanted to renegotiate a multimillion-dollar contract. Flooz survived that.

    Then the company noticed that gift buying didn't slow down after the Mother's Day/Father's Day/graduation season. The FBI informed Levitan that the Russian mobsters were buying Flooz credit as a way to launder stolen credit card purchases. Flooz survived that, too. Then the large credit card companies decided to withhold payments, in part, says Levitan, because Flooz was able to garner a higher percentage of each transaction than they were.

    The company was forced to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. It had 325,000 creditors, the largest number of creditors ever. The court allowed it to notify creditors via e-mail, a first. Levitan expected to face a hostile audience of several angry consumers at the first court hearing.

    "No one showed up," he said. The company called it quits on Sept. 10. On his first day of unemployment in years, Levitan decided to go to his Manhattan gym, where he saw the disaster of Sept. 11, 2001, unfold.


    Michael Kanellos, News.com: Remember Flooz?
     

    Wednesday, March 23, 2005

    Japanese WW II sub found off Oahu



    Click here for AmazonThis news is a couple of days old, but interesting nonetheless. A University of Hawaii research team found the remains of a very large, World War II Japanese submarine called the I-401 (its sister sub, the I-400, is pictured at left).

    "We thought it was rocks at first, it was so huge," said Terry Kerby, pilot of the research craft that found the vessel. "It's a leviathan down there, a monster."

    The submarine is from the I-400 Sensuikan Toku class of subs, the largest built before the nuclear-ballistic-missile submarines of the 1960s.

    They were 400 feet long and nearly 40 feet high and could carry a crew of 144. The submarines were designed to carry three "fold-up" bombers that could quickly be assembled.

    Kerby said the main hull is sitting upright and is in good shape. The I-401 numbers are clearly visible on the sides, and the anti-aircraft guns are in almost perfect condition, he said.

    An I-400 and I-401 were captured at sea a week after the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Their mission, which was never completed, reportedly was to use the aircraft to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases on U.S. cities.

    When the bacteriological bombs could not be prepared in time, the mission reportedly was changed to bomb the Panama Canal
    . Both submarines were ordered to sail to Pearl Harbor and were deliberately sunk later, partly because Russian scientists were demanding access to them.

    The submarine found Thursday is the second Japanese vessel discovered off Oahu by the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory. In 2002, researchers found the wreckage of a much smaller Japanese sub that was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941, off Pearl Harbor.


    Seattle Times: Japanese WW II sub found off Oahu (Hat tip: Michelle Malkin, picture courtesy of Steven's Armed Forces Site)