Experiments in Cyberspace

A precious item for anyone who cares. Carlo M. Cipolla 's "The Basic Laws of Stupidity" is a short essay I can heartily recommend. You can read the full on-line version at Fravia's. I am inserting just the headlines here, only to remind myself of the foolish mistakes I have done in the past and will undoubtedly do in the future. "What about present?" you may ask. Everything seems sooo right now that one should later look back in time to judge. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places ...

Back in the days when USENET was USENET, I collected a lot of fractal pictures; from alt.math if my memory serves me right. The year should be 1998. The term fractal was coined by Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975, with the Latin root "fractus" meaning broken or fractured and many did not hesitate to slip into the fractal dimension in the newsgroups. Then occurred a frenzy of posting fractals, geometric shapes based on iterative equations where each part was a reduced copy of the whole. Here is a small selection from my favorites:   Jungle   Bluebird   Demon   Fetus   Napkins   A poem   Snail Hope you enjoy them.

Burhan was a phenomenon, to say the least. He was the most successful "on board" marketer doing business on the ferries crossing the Bosphorus. He was so popular that people deliberately delayed their purchases to see what he would be selling  on that day's voyage. His secret? quality merchandise money back guarantee and above all, an interesting combination of goods. Last item on the list was particularly important. He never sold a single item alone. There was first the prime product of the day, the flagship so to speak, and a secondary one, which was definitely intriguing. It was hard to resist the temptation. The bargain was there, together with the trust which was earned over the course of years Burhan conducted his business, a track record hard to beat. He refused all offers to build a company, saying he was making more than enough. He really was. Microsoft is planning a campaign or so I have heard, a free update to Windows 7 for buyers of Vista, which reminded...

Woke up, got out of the bed. A bitwise shift to the right, there am I, ready and charming than ever. Checked the mirror. No, one bit is slightly off. A shift to the left and another to the right; click, clang, it is O.K. now. Good! First impression is important. After the dusting sectors of the ever-spinning hard drive, I am loaded back on memory. Threw myself on Information Highway, my journey begins. Got the time from an NTP server. How come did I sleep this long? Something is wrong, terribly wrong. The handles, they are NOT right. Where is everybody? Phatal Error, Acidic Nature, Corruptor, Social Distortion, MalHavoc, Manifest Destiny, Mind Shadow... Where are they? A few routers more. Here is a crowded place. With a funny name: Facebook. Who would name his site like that? Lame... But they can be here. Worth a look. Oh no! Real names, real information? Don't they know? Didn't anybody tell? I'd better forget the masses and concentrate. Can they be here? No, don'...

According F-Secure's latest report, this lovely worm going with the names Downadup, Kido and Conficker has so far affected close to 9 million computers (figure does not include corporations who forgot to patch their systems and hiding the fact they are infected). Since this place is not a technical site, we will not go into details like how to remove it, anti-virus software, on-line scanners and such. Instead, we will try to tackle the urge for writing such a magnificent (in spite of the damage caused, its code deserves recognition) program. In his article "Ethics and the Urge" [1], Guido Sanchez of VIPER (Viral Inclined Programming Experts Ring) discusses about lame boards [2], several ways to dispose of them, and also the ethics involved in making someone's life miserable just because they are evolutionarily ranked just below slime mold: There's a certain board in Colorado, called the Sound Doctrine BBS {303-680-7209}, and I call up... After downloading some...

Have you ever spent the last day of the year on-line? Instead of partying, hitting the streets or freezing your privates out in the snow (this obviously rules out the people of the southern hemisphere), have you tried celebrating the New Year in front of your computer in peace and tranquility? Well, before you call the men in white coats let me explain. It happened to me once, about 5 years ago if my memory serves me right. Surprisingly, I was not alone. There were quite a number of souls who were in need of psychiatric help apparently. I will go on and say - at the risk of being called anti-social, cynical, narcissist or a similarly appropriate term for the occasion - I enjoyed it very much. For reasons I will not go into, I had to stay home and rather than watching TV and testing the alcohol barrier, I punched the keys until the early hours of the day while the fan was humming gently in the background, trying to cool the system. This is for those who will spend the evening of Dec...

Anyway, Pamela is in the market for a new computer and she might let me build it! I think in her mind though I could potentially be not b/p AT ALL at a higher dose and so she might raise me until that point? I am not good with criticism, even though I try to be. Sometimes you feel as though you can not forgive, or you won't let yourself because it hurt so much. I just read in Health that cilantro can kill salmonella, so you might want to wash that down with some fresh salsa. Your a strong person and with time, I believe you can get over him, all right? And you believe you will pretty much know as soon as you might that person. I guess that's because everyone loves the light-and-natural look these days, so the industry had to make a scent to go with it. So on Thursday, I was all nervous and everyone go to try out -but me and like two other people. Do you smugly sneak your Way into conversations that don't really have anything to do with religion? So I found some mp3 software...