Nigerian mobile phone users have been anxiously checking who is calling them before answering them in recent days. A rumour has spread rapidly in the commercial capital, Lagos, that if one answers calls from certain ‘killer numbers’ then one will die immediately.

And there was another one where a bunch of us decided to take the second floor of one building and we put like sheetrock over all the doorways and re-plastered them and painted them. We re-did the numbers on the stairwells going up. We rewired the elevator system so that it looked like when you pressed two you went to what used to be No. 3. And we put in fake baseboarding so you couldn’t tell where the friggin’ doors used to be. And for that one I was 18.

I haven’t blogged on this site for a while. I have made some posts to my RUJason site using Blogger. Since blogger’s redesign and the launch of MT 3.0 I’ve been comparing the 2 services and have come to the conclusion that both are now mature, capable platforms specialized for different styles, comments & links, or articles and discussion. Continue Reading »

VeriSign is to rapidly update Domain Name System (DNS) records every few minutes instead of only twice a day. From 8 September changes in the .com and .net zones will take an estimated five minutes to propagate across all 13 .com/.net authoritative name servers. The old systems will remain there for those who don’t want to make the leap forward.

The BSA seems to be confused on where to pin the blame on software piracy, but it may be due to the audience they are trying to influence. Piracy is a global problem and it is hard to pin it down to a single cause. Currently P2P networks are a problem, but according to this year’s study, the addition of consumer program piracy statistics (which would favor P2P as a distribution method) only contributed to 2-3 percent increase in piracy rates compared to 2002. Blaming P2P applications masks what is likely the largest factors in piracy rates and losses: unlicensed installed software and counterfeit software sold on street corners. Unfortunately, the BSA and their representative companies feel that lobbying for restrictive laws are more effective in thwarting piracy in countries with the lowest piracy rates, than mustering up additional forces to crack down on counterfeiting in countries with emerging markets and the highest piracy rates.

You know, you can find the damndest things when you clean out your email, like perhaps an air conditioned jacket from Japanese firm PC2B. It keeps you cool and makes you look like a bloated marshmallow man all at once. Perhaps you could just, you know, take off the jacket.

Pop Goes the GMail is a small Gmail -> POP3 converter that someone wrote for Windows. It seems interesting, but most of the neat GMail features are actually more to do with the web interface, so it seems like you’d be giving up most of the benefits of the service.

In recent months, doctors have traced the problems to what has apparently become a phenomenon among New York City’s Latinas: haphazard cosmetic surgery conducted in the Dominican Republic after being arranged through beauty salons in Washington Heights and other city neighborhoods. The salons act as conduits for the procedure, with recruiters, some from the Dominican Republic, visiting hairdressing parlors, where they casually mention to customers that they know of cheap places to get liposuction, tummy tucks and breast augmentation.

Sun licensed the software from a small company in Alameda, Calif., called Karelia, which worked for years on a version of Watson for Apple computers. Sun has created a new version of the software–code-named Alameda–that runs on any Java-enabled computer, said Peder Ulander, senior director of marketing for Sun’s Desktop Solutions Group.

Interesting. I was wondering who Karelia’s “big company” was. It seems like kind of an odd way to make an attack on the desktop, though I guess this is yet another XAML fighting move. Still, rich client UI’s could be a strong future, and Macromedia isn’t the only game in town. Personally, I prefer Apple’s take with dashboard more myself.

A survey of around 350 undergraduates found nearly 25% had copied text from another source at least once. A new service that can scan 4.5 billion web pages is now online so that lecturers can check the originality of the work submitted by students.

I wonder how much of this plagiarism would be avoided if there were a simple, easy way to automatically cite sources retrieved from the Internet and encyclopedias. I mean, there’s BibTEX for scholars, and Encyclopedia Britannica has started providing MLA style citations for articles, but after 15 something years of the Internet, why isn’t this automatic?

I think what we need is:

• a combination of a bibliographic tool, like the one proposed for inclusion with the OpenOffice.org office suite
• some kind of browser plugin or feature designed to automatically capture site meta-data like URI, author, date created, date updated/accessed, etc.

There’s been some interesting work in the blogging space with bookmarklets that automatically fill in the cite field in blockquotes and stuff like that, but if there was an easily available set of student tools, I think you’d see plagiarism drop. Not in the “I grabbed a paper of the Internet” sense, but in the “I got this somewhere, but don’t know where and I’m to lazy to find it again” context.