May, 16, 2002 archives

the grounding of all the jets in american airspace last september gave weather scientists a chance to study the effects of contrails on the weather. turns out they form the basis for large cloud banks, and moderate the daily temperature swing. (there's probably some joke about clouds and silver linings to be made here, but it probably wouldn't be in very good taste.)

wow, the sale of farmland may be coming to russia. for the first time since 1917. in just a few more years, they'll probably be paying people not to grow anything. god bless capitalism!

if weblogs are a manifestation of amateur journalism, perhaps something to be gleaned from this salon article about online personals sites is that these sites are the playground of amateur advertising. (that's also why it is a fertile area for sites to make money: you get users to create the content for you.)

(one quibble from the article: am i really supposed to believe that dot.com companies in san francisco had vending machines stocked with banana moon pies? i think someone is letting some non-west-coast roots show. i'll let slide the bit about going to the company vending machine somehow involving a trip outside into the wan san francisco sun, if only because it lets me use the word “wan.”)

clearing out some old messages i've kept hanging around in my inbox:

• this article from webmonkey about the cross-site scripting problem is a good overview of why to be very careful in displaying what users send you on the web.
• here's a good resource about character encodings.
• not only is plan 9 a cool operating system from the original unix guys, but there's a wealth of interesting things in the various papers about the system.
• once upon a time, dean gaudet wrote an email to the apache development listtitled: “HTTP + XML + SCP = HTTP/ng”. interesting ideas. apache 2 is way more boring than this.