Internetting Tidbits

Like my Linkblog post from Monday, this post incorporates several small items that I’ve been meaning to write about, but that don’t really warrant their own posts.

  • Update on my e-mail diet: I’m definitely suffering from fewer interruptions due to my abandonment of automatic email checking and notifications. However, I still check my manually too often. Need to work on it.
  • Everything2: is pretty cool. It’s like a free-form Wikipedia, and includes all manner of fiction and non-fiction. In addition, rather than one coherent article on a given topic, there may be any number of entries from different perspectives. I believe it has also been around for much longer than Wikipedia. (I have contributed to E2 in the past, but not recently). There’s also a search plugin for Firefox et al. It’s handy for Search Brainstorming.
  • Tab Mix Plus: is another great Firefox add-on. Key features that I use from it (though many more are available) are double-clicking to close tabs and opening bookmarks, searches, and typed-in addresses in new tabs.
  • Using Firefox bookmark keywords: You can set keywords for your Firefox bookmarks. For example, my keyword for this blog is “vs”. If I type “vs” in the address bar, it takes me here. “Shortcuts” would be a better name, or “aliases”. Anyway, it’s great to set a bunch of aliases, but not always easy to remember. I took a hint from various operating system menu systems and started putting the keywords in the bookmark titles so that they show up in the bookmark bar menu for the internet. For instance, my bookmark for this blog is listed as “Virtually Shocking (vs)”. Thus, I am reminded when looking at the menu that the keyword is “vs”, and hopefully this will help me remember to use it next time.
  • VirtualBox: is a neat and (mostly) free virtualization package to let you run various guest operating systems on top of others. Similar to Parallels, QEMU, and VMWare. It should be sufficient for most people’s virtualization needs.
  • Rules for adopting a scientific arch-nemesis: Rules include things like “Your archnemesis cannot be your junior, You cannot have more than one archnemesis,” etc, with explanations. I have yet to pick one.

That’s it for now.

K-Day x 2

I popped into Google Analytics, and noticed that my old K-day post from last year was getting some traffic.

I have kept a Katrina category on the blog. You can look at all of my Katrina-related posts here.

I may be on TV tonight

Our lab was interviewed for the 2nd anniversary of Katrina’s landfall. It will be on Baltimore’s Fox45 at 22:00 EDT. My TV card is not currently set up, so if you manage to catch it on your DVR, please let me know.

Comcast is in the doghouse

This is being posted via the data uplink on my Treo, because we’ve had no cable internet service (nor TV service, my roommates tell me) all day. Several calls to Comcast, in which they said it would be fixed at progressively later times, have not yielded a working connection.

I’ll just have to do my internetting at work tomorrow.

PRISM Bullshit and Hypocrisy

I’m not the only one harping on about open access to scientific journals. I’ve linked to at least two other blogs discussing the issue, and I’m sure there are hundreds more.

I wrote in January about an article in Nature that highlighted the PR offensive being launched by the major science publishers.

That effort has apparently borne fruit. The issue is well-covered by John Dupuis. A sad but interesting twist, which made the front page of Slashdot, is that these organizations bent on protecting their copyright lock-in stole images from Getty Images for their web site. As the post in that last link notes, the onslaught of complaints subsequent to hitting the Slashdot front page convinced them to go buy the images properly from Getty.

Just as Microsoft started the FUD machine as Linux gained prominence, watch for a truckload of FUD from PRISM in the days to come.

ADDENDUM: There’s a good summary post that quotes my statement just above (and those of many other science bloggers) here.