mobrec

So
If you are familiar with the British TV show from the sixties The Avengers, you might be interested to read the Guardian's article titled Revealed: what the Avengers were really avenging.

Might come in handy on a trivia night (you never know).

So
I recently finished reading Blink, The Tipping Point and Freakonomics. I would highly recommend any/all of these books. One curious tension that comes from having read these recently is that the 'Broken Window' policing strategy that is extolled in The Tipping Point is rigorously discounted as having no effect on crime in Freakonomics. Curious. How did Malcolm Gladwell get this so wrong?

The other theme that hit me was how several of the topics covered in Blink and The Tipping Point start to sound like what gets discounted (and in some cases disproven) as 'conventional wisdom' in by Levitt in Freakonomics. Makes me curious that if Levitt were to write a book examining each of the assertions in Gladwell's works, how many of them would stand up to the economists vetting? No matter the outcome, the result would be an interesting read.

One topic that I would love to see Levitt cover is this: does the increased level of violence in movies and video games desensitise people to violence or does it desensitise people to violence in movies and video games?

So
For whatever reason, the long awaited Nokia 6682 is no longer available on Cingular's web site. The 6682 is now 'available' on Amazon for $99 with a shipping date of '4 to 6 weeks' (!?). Nokia thoughtfully has it available on their website for $599.

What is going on with Cingular and the 6682?

Update 2 October 2005: The 6682 is available once again on the Cingular site for $299; Amazon still has it on a 4 to 6 week delay.

So
I just discovered another custom web page creation site called protopage. It seems that it is (for now) really only intended to be a startup page (unlike the more functional netvibes). As such the functionality is limited to creating groups of web page links and small note snippets. Still, it seems great that being able to create web pages has gotten this easy.

So
Jewelcase is another incredible utility for the Mac. Jewelcase is a plugin for iTunes that displays the CD cover art and artist/track title/album title info in a very cool 3D spinning display.

My only grumble with it is that it doesn't automatically retrieve the cover art; if it is not already in your iTunes library, it simply displays a generic CD cover. In the mean time, you can always use something like the FetchArt script to nab cover art for you.

So
Sound advice from 43Folders regarding Writing Sensible Email Messages

So
I stumbled across netvibes this morning. This is very cool. Though Netvibes is currently in early beta, you can create your own web page that aggregates RSS feeds, local weather, gmail, and the ability to add notes to your site (sort of like web stickies. You can drag and drop to arrange things as you like. There is definitely a huge amount of potential here to make this a very compelling tool.

Alas, no Safari support (yet). Firefox for OS X works fine, though.

Looking around a bit more, this seems to be very similar to start.com functionality wise. Start suffers from being a MS sponsored project as well as not having as clean an interface as netvibes.

I also discovered meebo , which is apparently trying to be a web-based IM aggregator (much like I wished that google talk was web-based).

Overall, it looks like commercial grade AJAX apps are starting to take off. And, no, Microsoft, we don't need your bloated, ill-conceived, proprietary 'rich client' software. Thank you very much.

So
LibraryThing is sort of like flickr for books. You can enter in titles and it will search the Library of Congress and Amazon for matching information to allow you to build you library without having to manually enter in all of the fiddly little details.

What would be really impressive is if something which allows you to easily scan bar codes for books (like Delicious Library) would also allow you to export to LibraryThing, the upfront input ramp-up for LibraryThing would be greatly eased.

So
If web security is at all of interest to you then get yourself over to the webgoat project at the Open Web Applications Security Project. Installers are available for Linux, OSX and windows.

WebGoat is a full J2EE web application designed to teach web application security lessons. In each lesson, users must demonstrate their understanding by exploiting a real vulnerability on the local system. The system is even clever enough to provide hints and show the user cookies, parameters and the underlying Java code if they choose. Examples of lessons include SQL injection to a fake credit card database, where the user creates the attack and steals the credit card numbers.

So
In light of all of the other questionable activities post-Katrina, this is absolutely reprehensible (emphasis below added):

Project on Government Oversight – Big federal contractors have scored a major victory with yesterday's news that House Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) and Representative Kenny Marchant (R-TX) introduced legislation that will waive meaningful taxpayer protections and competition in contracting whenever Congress or the President declares a national emergency or there is a disaster. It is rumored that the legislation will be included in a manager's amendment to the next Katrina relief bill. Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has donned the legislation (H.R. 3766) the “Disaster Profiteering Act.”

The Davis legislation would allow agency heads across the federal government to treat all purchases related to national emergencies as “commercial items,” meaning that contracts can be made under a no-bid process and that the government would not have the authority to audit purchases after they have been made. A second, unrelated provision deals with Katrina volunteers.

via Agonist

The only hope is that this 'proposed' legislation won't actually pass.