Vatican paper set to clear Knights Templar

Vatican paper set to clear Knights Templar
By Malcolm Moore in Rome
Last Updated: 2:08am BST 05/10/2007 (October 5th)

The mysteries of the Order of the Knights Templar could soon be laid bare after the Vatican announced the release of a crucial document which has not been seen for almost 700 years

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/05/wvatican105.xml

Just a tag line, bragging, or an excuse?

Mitch Wagner over at InfoWeek had an interesting editorial about people who include "Sent from my {mobile phone or iPhone or Blackberry}" in their e-mail messages. I know of a few people who do this because they want to offer an appology for short (blunt?) replies. I also know of a couple people who do this because it was the default when they got their phone (nice marketing, Blackberry).

In the editorial, Mitch quotes liberally from a Slate story that suggests the 'Sent from my Blackberry' tag line either acts as "...a subtle signal to my correspondents that I'm getting a lot done" or "...gives the impression that you're on the move but still chained to work". The Slate author (Paul Boutin) seems to have a double standard, suggesting that when these tag lines mention an iPhone instead of a blackberry they "...conjure an image of a doofus who wants you to know he has an iPhone".

Mitch then goes on to raise a more interesting point, suggesting that regardless of the type of phone involved these tag lines are "...symptomatic of a workplace culture that places more emphasis on effort than results."

Ouch. But maybe he is on to something...

Writer's Block...unblocked.

One of the cool features of Live Journal is a little promotion going on called the "Writer's Block". It is sponsored by HP, and appears as a question on each Live Journal user's home page (sort of like the Dashboard on Blogger, but with more options reflecting the variety of social networking tools within Live Journal).

These "Writer's Blocks" are simple questions that encourage a response, for example:
- What's been your biggest influence in making you a better writer?
- What's the best advice you've given or gotten for taking good photos?
- If you could travel back in time to spend a day with someone, who would it be and why?

Each statement is presented individually, with navigation buttons to move through the question. There is also an "Answer" button, clicking it lauches the editor with the question filled in and ready to take your response. The entry is also automatically tagged and, presumably, writing a response enters the author in a contest for HP stuff.

Blog in search of a topic

I've come to the conclusion that all great blogs have a topic, a unifying theme that ties the entries together and establishes an expectation amongst the readers of the blog. This blog is lacking in that category. The unifying theme? Things that I was thinking about when the post was written. Sure, that is technically a theme, but not very good for establishing an expectation amongst readers.

With that shortcoming in this blog in mind, I've launched an eight month initiative to identify a topic. Why eight months? Because I've got another long-term project I'm currently working on that should wrap up in eight months. In the meantime, I'm planning on trying out various blog topics. Today's topic: State Constitutions and their relationship to the US Federal Constitution. Yep, sounds nuts. In other words, 'and now for something completely different'. Speaking of other words, here's a quote:

"An important distinction exists between the federal and state constitutions. The U.S. Constitution contains grants of authority from the states to the federal government. All powers not specified in the federal constitution are retained by the states. This means that the U.S. Constitution identifies what the federal government can do, but the state constitutions tell the state governments what they cannot do."

- Reed, Shedd, Morehead, & Corley, 2005, The legal and regulatory environment of business

Survival Notes

Doing some research on Survival stuff I cam upon SurvivorMan (a Discovery Channel series). In browsing through the related websites I came upon the following notes, but didn't have anyplace to store them, so I put them here for future reference.

www.lesstroudonline.com
The Psychology of Wilderness Survival, Gino F. Ferri
Wilderness Living and Primitive Skills, John and Geri McPherson
Bushcraft, Mors Kochanski
Outdoor Survival Skills, Larry Dean Olsen
The Art of Survival, Cord Christian, Troebst (out of print)
Any of the Peterson Field Guides (wild edibles, etc.)

Les first started by taking every and any survival course he could find, including at Humber College in Ontario and Prairie Wolf in Kansas.

Mobile Blogging

It's been a while since i tried mobile blogging.

----

That was sent from my phone. Apparently it had been too long since I tried mobile blogging, because blogger sent me anther new blog name and claim token. The random blog name (sawfob327) was no where near as good as my previous randomly generated blog name (elfbug266), so I didn't hesitate in merging it with this blog.

Anyway, mobile blogging is alive and well. A bit like twitter, but without the social networking hooks.

You know you are getting too much press when...

…some of the source code for your homepage is leaked and, well, anyone cares.


Facebook Source Code Leak Raises Security Questions
Examining the leaked code reveals vulnerabilities in Facebook's applications that could be exploited, a developer said.

By K.C. Jones
InformationWeek
August 14, 2007 02:25 PM


Facebook source code has been leaked on the Web, and that's raising some serious issues about the site's security and data privacy.
Source code from the social networking site's main index page appeared on a blog called Facebook Secrets recently and remained there Tuesday. The blog does not contain any other postings.

"A small fraction of the code that displays Facebook Web pages was exposed to a small number of users due to a single misconfigured Web server that was fixed immediately," a Facebook spokesperson said Tuesday. "It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way."

Still, developer Nik Cubrilovic wrote in a TechCrunch blog posting that the leaked code could reveal vulnerabilities in Facebook's applications that could be exploited.

"From just this single page of source code, a lot can be said and extrapolated about the rest of the Facebook application and platform," he said. "At a quick glance, I know that I can see some obvious things in the code that both reveal certain hidden aspects of the platform and give a potential attacker a good head start."

{snip}
More at:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201800144&cid=nl_IWK_daily

(FYI, I found a copy of the leaked code and, yawn, it is about as intriguing as the aforementioned article).

From the 'Who Knew' Department...

On Cherubs...

A cherub is a mighty angel. One of the functions of the cherubim was to serve as guardians. These angels guarded the entrances to both the tree of life (Gen 3:24) and the Most Holy Place (Exod. 26:31-33). Two cherubim of hammered gold were part of the ark of the covenant (Exod. 25:18-22). The living creatures carrying God's throne in Ezekiel 1 may have been cherubim.(from Wikipedia).

And I thought they were just cute cubby little angels. I guess you don't want to get on the wrong side of one of those.

About the 35W Bridge...

The big news this week was the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. This has been world news, a fact that is supported by me living in the same metro area as said bridge but able to read about it on the Sydney (Austrailia) Morning Hearld newspaper's website. Why read about it there? Just to confirm to myself that it wasn't myopia-- I'm right here, of course it is news and I can relate and sense the importance. But was it really a big deal to other people? The answer has been given over the last few days, a resounding YES.

This is a Big Deal, but what does that mean? It is big in a physical sense, big in the time to fix sense, and big in the human lives were lost sense. Yet I don't know what to write about it.

The physical scale is hard to describe with words in a worthy way. You can look it up in newspaper archives today and find phrases like 67 feet above the water, a couple thousand feet long, sixty cars, an unknown number of missing people. All just words that fail to convey the sheer Big-ness of this Deal.

The time to fix enormity is hard to write about because no one knows. 2-3 years is a long time in a culture raised on 30 minute sitcoms and 30 second sound bites.

It is hard to write about the human lives that were lost because I didn't know them but I think they deserve a better description than some stranger (me) could string together with a few words.

So maybe I've said enough. Maybe if I'm right, that this is a Big deal that anyone could relate to, then you already have and nothing else needs to be said.

(note: the photo is from the Minneapolis Star Tribune).

Blogging from Live Mail - Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary

I just got done noodling with the Microsoft Mail Live Beta's integration with Spaces.live.com. The new 'outlook express replacement' has an option to write a blog post (or simply blog an email) directly from the mail client. Google docs offers similar functionality so I thought I'd give that a test drive too (this post was made using Google docs).

The Live Mail (beta 12.0.1184) to Live Spaces integration had a couple quirks:

(1) The title of the blog entry is changed on publication from whatever was typed (like 'thoughts on dogs') to be prefixed with the phrase "talking about...". So the post ends up as "talking about thoughts on dogs".

(2) The body of the entry, typed within a Live Mail editor much like the e-mail editor is changed on publication to be a quoted text block.

(3) The publish to blog link simply opens the browser to the web-based Spaces blog editor with the text filled in (with the changes noted above).

Maybe nice for transferring an email to a blog entry, but that can easily be done with copy and paste. Overall first impression: evolutionary, not revolutionary. That seems to be the tag line for tech this year.

Over on the Google Docs / Blogger front, there were some quirks too.

(1) Sending a document to blogger involves clicking the "Publish" tab. The user must preconfigure their blog target. If that is not done, clicking the 'publish to blog' button activates the blog target configuration dialog/webform. But you aren't done! Finishing the dialog simply configures the settings. You have to push the same button again to send off the blog post. This is all written on the screen (sort of) so if you are into reading directions, this double-pump shouldn't be a problem.

(2) Google docs offers to use the title of the document as the blog post title, or at least implies that is what it is going to do. Google docs has a 'feature' of using the first line of text in your document as the title. If you rename your document then publish, the new document name is disregarded and your post is untitled. Wierd, hard to follow, and just plain quirky.

(3) No labels support. Labels can be applied by opening the post in the blogger editor and tagging.

Bottom Line: both of these are preliminary editing tools. Some post-posting clean-up will still be required.

I Can Has CheezBurger - Code Edition

I don't know why I find ICanHasCheezBurger.com so funny, I just do. If you can read the following code, you know what I mean. If you can't, you might want to check out the site.

From another blog...

HAII
   HAS A CHEEZBURGER ITZ 1
   IM IN YR LOOP
      VISIBLE "I has dis many: " N CHEEZBURGER
      IZ CHEEZBURGER BIGGER THAN 11 O RLY?
      YA RLY
         GTFO
      NO WAI
         UP CHEEZBURGER!!1
      KTHX
   KTHX
KTHXBYE

And the book http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/lolcode.jpg

Yenching Palace closes

From an article in the Washington Post in January:
Tucked between Engine Company 28 of the D.C. fire department and a 7-Eleven known for having a mural painted across its brick wall, Yenching Palace has been a Cleveland Park landmark for more than 50 years, a place where -- in its heyday, in the 1960s and 1970s -- diplomats and movie stars dined, secrets were told, international crises were mediated.
Sometime this year, if all goes as expected, the art-deco restaurant with the lopsided "Y" in its famous neon sign on Connecticut Avenue NW is going to get a makeover. It's going to become . . . a Walgreens.

Then NowPublic.com Posted this:
One of the most notable and historic restaurants in Washington, DC, Yenching Palace, will be closing for good on June 10th. Yenching Palace opened in 1955.

Yenching Palace, located on Connecticut Avenue, NW just south of Porter Street in the Cleveland Park neighborhood, is the secret location where President John F. Kennedy's negotiators met with representatives of the Soviet Union in 1962 to prevent a war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also at Yenching Palace, Richard Nixon's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, discussed better relations with the Chinese. After that, Yenching Palace became a popular restaurant among the diplomatic community. Kissinger dined there regularly.
Although Yenching's culinary skills and offerings haven't kept up with newer Chinese restaurants in Washington, DC, it's still very popular among Washington residents, and has a very busy delivery service. It is a much loved family restaurant among neighbors.

Yenching still boasts about their now historic reviews: "In Washington, the China watchers, basking in new found esteem, are acknowledged experts in Chinese restaurants. Their honorable selection; the Yenching Palace," wrote Time Magazine in 1967.

The inside of Yenching Palace is something out of time. There are beautiful Chinese decorations all over, and even a phone booth in the restaurant's lobby. (How many full phone booths are there left?) The booths are classically spacious and comfortable. According to rumor, these booths were bugged by the FBI.

Walgreens, the drugstore chain, has purchased the space from Yenching Palace. The storefront will change; it will be made to look like it did in 1945, or at least as much as possible. Walgreens' design is based on a single photograph from 1945. The diamond windows will remain, as will the art deco glass panels. As for the neon sign that's nearly become a Washington trademark -- that may end up in a museum.

Twitterpaited - Follow vs. Friend

Twitter is new to me and some of my clan, so here's a how-to tip on "Follow" versus "Friend".

To follow someone without making them a friend you can send “follow {username}” from your phone. On twitter it is a bit more complicated.

Here’s an example: You want to follow Fred. Fred is a friend on Janet’s page. If you go to Janet’s page and click the blue “Friends” link, you will see a list of actions (twitter calls this the ‘action menu’). One of those actions is “Follow”.

So what’s the diff between friend and follow?
Friends show up on your twitter me+friends list of tweets. When you make a friend, twitter sends an email to the person you befriended to let them know you’ve declared them a friend.

Follow messages only show up on your phone or IM client, and do not show up on your own “With Others” tweet list. The person does not appear on your friends icon list, and no email is sent to the person you are following.

Sounds creepy, why follow instead of friend?
Mainly because you may not know the person very well and just want to keep up with them for a little while to get to know them. After you’ve had a chance to get to know the person you can always make them into a friend.

Who is following me?
Send the command “followers” from your phone. Twitter will respond with a follower list.

I followed and don’t like what I see, how can I stop?
Send “leave {username}” from your phone. This works for friends too- it doesn’t “unfriend” them, it just stops their tweets from going to your phone or IM. They are still listed on your friend list.

Business Cards as Art?

Business Cards as Art?

Found on the web: A website dedicated to the art of business cards. The site describes business cards as "...little tokens of identity, with their everyday and ephemeral nature but also as a keepsake - a token of remembrance".

Decide for yourself at http://dailypoetics.typepad.com/photos/business_cards_and_other_/index.html

How to fix the blog post editor's title field.

Odd...The blog editor won't let me type in the 'Title' Field. What is up with that?

The fix seems to be to click on preview. That magically heals the unresponsive title field.

A sucky blog post, but good to know.

Follow up: It seems that the title field gets randomly disabled when blogger automatically saves a draft of the post. I've only seen it happen in FireFox, but haven't done thorough testing in other browsers.

Chinese market, hot or not?

This weekend’s research paper is based on the use of statistics in analyzing research data for new product launches. The scenario involves a bank assessing new credit card offerings (what a fresh idea!).

Anyway, in doing some research on banking I stumbled across this snippet regarding banking in China.

When might the Chinese consumer help really drive the global economy? Analysts at Credit Suisse Group have conjured a rosy scenario in which China becomes the world's second-largest consumer nation (after the U.S.) by 2020, up from No. 5 today. UBS is less upbeat, estimating that the middle class includes only about 25 million people--just 2% of China's population--hardly big enough to have much impact globally. And even Credit Suisse acknowledges that personal incomes, while climbing, aren't keeping pace with rising GDP. "If you think the purpose of rapid economic growth is to increase consumption and the general welfare, then China isn't doing a very good job," says Nicholas R. Lardy, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

From CAUTIOUS CONSUMERS; The Chinese are on a spending spree, right? Not really. In fact, they're so tightfisted, Beijing is worried By Dexter Roberts. Business Week. New York: Apr 30, 2007.

Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better

Here are 77 tips related to knowledge and learning to help you on your quest.

A few are specifically for students in traditional learning institutions; the rest for self-starters, or those learning on their own.

77 Tips

How Big is 'The Big Dig'?

There is a huge construction project in Boston that is referred to as "The Big Dig" that you might have heard about in the news. But how big is "The Big Dig"? Read on…

The Central Artery/Tunnel (CAfT) in Boston: The Big Dig.

The Central Artery/Tunnel Program is the largest, most complex and technologically challenging highway program ever attempted in American history. It is the largest federally-funded public work project in history, noted as "bigger than the Panama Canal or the Hoover Dam," consisting of 161 lane-miles (the majority of which is underground at depths up to 120 feet), and requiring excavation of 18 million cubic meters of earth and placement of 4 million cubic yards of concrete (enough to build a foot path three feet wide from Boston to San Francisco and back three times). The casting basis, built on site for construction of the submersed runnel sections at the Fort Point Channel, was large enough to hold three Titanics. The program will dramatically reduce traffic congestion and improve mobility in one of America's oldest and most congested major cities, improve the environment, and lay the groundwork for continued economic growth for millions of New Englanders in the coming new century. While planning commenced in the mid 1980s, actual construction did not start until 1992.

From: A Continuously Changing As-Planned Baseline? John C Livengood, Mark I Anderson. AACE International Transactions. Morgantown: 2005.

Knowledge must be free-- according to MIT

Everybody needs a hobby, and TV sucks anyway…

Play along at http://ocw.mit.edu/

=====

MIT To Put Its Entire Curriculum Online Free Of Charge

The university said it hopes to stimulate global learning by letting students access its entire 1,800-course curriculum by year's end.

By W. David Gardner
InformationWeek

In 2002, when MIT decided to experiment with placing course contents on the Web for open access, the university's officials knew they were breaking new ground and had no idea how the effort would be received.

On Tuesday, school officials revealed plans to make available the university's entire 1,800-course curriculum by year's end. Currently, some 1.5 million online independent learners log on the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site every month and more than 120 universities around the world have inaugurated their own sites for independent learners. MIT has more than 1,500 course curriculums available online to date.

Who are MIT's independent learners? One MIT calculation found that 17% were educators elsewhere, 32% students everywhere, and 49% were self learners.

Periodic Table of Visualization

From a newsletter that showed up in my e-mail...

So many ways to visualize information, so little time.

Fortunately, this site has gone to great trouble to organize and display the many ways we can represent data with illustrations, charts, graphs, flowcharts, and more. A quick mouse-over shows you all your visualization options.

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html