Source: Microsoft

Randy: Sobig, wasn't soo big after all.

Today is the biggest day of the year. Six years ago today, my wife blessed me with my first child, Adelaine Alyssa Nacar Morin. Two years later, 724 Solutions IPOed on my daughter's birthday. To celebrate my daughter's birthday, we ate at Jack Astor's in Mississauga and played at Chuck E Cheeses, Mississauga. Great night.

Quote: The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX), the owner of the UNIX(R) operating system and a leading provider of UNIX-based solutions, today confirmed that it is experiencing a distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attack. SCO announced that it is offering a reward of up to a total of $250,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual or individuals responsible for creating the Mydoom virus.

OK, here's the definitive "garbage on Mars" meme pic. Yep, it's a Mars bar on Mars pic. What's more compelling than that?

Source: Pirotcar

I configured a Linksys wired network at my brother's place last week. Setting up his Windows PC was difficult. But after a couple of hours fooling around w/ his Windows settings and router settings, we were up and surfind. The next step was to setup my sister's Mac. It didn't like the CD-ROM that was distributed w/ the hardware. Of course, the CD is for Windows, not for Mac. I went to Linksys.com and was unable to find anything, not that I tried that hard.

Configuring Windows and Linksys was harder than a mundane users could handle. Configuring Mac was implausible. What happened to Mac is easy? Pointers to configuring a Mac w/ Linksys are mucho appreciated.

I tried a few Wikis today; AspWiki, OpenWiki, SushiWiki and FlexWiki.

• I started w/ AspWiki. It was very easy to install, but feature less. No revision or RSS.
• I then tried OpenWiki. The install didn't do anything beyond frustrate me. When I went to the installation pages, they were full of comments about how the installation pages were missing and/or sucked. Never did get it running.
• I then tried SushiWiki. The install put folder in the root of my C: drive. This was a bug in the installer as they were clearly require in the Web folder. Even when I copied the folder to the Web folder, they didn't work. Never got it running.
• Last I tried FlexWiki. Whammo. Pretty good. Not as good as many of the PHP-Python-Perl based Wikis like MoinMoin, but it'll do. I think there's a real need for an ASP.NET based Wiki that actually works. There's something between the simplicity of AspWiki and the feature full-ness of FlexWiki that might approach MoinMoin.

In the last month, I've received three contact requests thru linked-in. All three connections were painlessly established w/in the Linked-in network, but that is where the process ended. I've since emailed the contacts to find out what is up, only to have my emails ignored. Linked-in seems to be no different than Friendster, in that, everybody is simply using the tool to brag about the size of their network. Is their no software that escapes beyond this practice?

Randy: Now that I have introduced code into the GPL, it will die w/in a couple years. Just history repeating itself.

March 3-24 (booked)

Quote: NASA is canceling all space shuttle servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope, a decision that, in effect, will cause the powerful observatory to slowly degrade and eventually become useless, officials said Friday. John Grunsfeld, NASA's chief scientist, said NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe made the decision to cancel the fifth space shuttle service mission to the Hubble when it became clear there was not enough time to conduct it before the shuttle is retired. The servicing mission was considered essential to enable the orbiting telescope to continue to operate.

Randy: I find it interesting that only one major news publisher in the U.S. has covered this story; the Washington Post. This is an important story, that Americans would want to know about. It would of course reflect negatively on the President and CNN, NBC, ABC, FOX, etc wouldn't want that. If your national media is biased as they have shown once again, then are you truly in the land of liberty? Glasnost!

Penguins outside your Windows? Must view/listen funny!

source Oleg.

Quote: Adult film producer. Male porn star. Fat, hairy guy with a big schlong. Porn celebrity Ron Jeremy has held many positions in the adult film industry. Now the pornographer known as "The Hedgehog" adds a new title to his illustrious rsum: infomercial host.

Ron trots out several of his colleagues from the world of adult video to help sell ExtenZe, a pill intended to help men increase the size of "that certain part of the male anatomy." They never actually outright name the part "down there." The creators of this infomercial are apparently perfectly willing to use x-rated video performers, a stripper, and even an admitted prostitute to sell their productbut are too modest to use proper terminology for human anatomy.

Around four years ago, I called a co-worker a roadblock w/ a bad attitude. He continued to cause problems @ work and contributed much to the demise of that company. I always kept some contact w/ this person, I'm quite open to contact w/ just about anyone. By email (see right), MSN MSGer (same as my email) and my cell phone number is on the front page. A few months ago, I bumped into this person on the streets of TO. He told me that he agreed he was a problem and wished he'd acted a little bit nicer.

We all grow up eventually. I remember myself in my young 20s. I drove like an idiot. I also had a bit of a temper. Three kids and 10 years later, I also can look back and say that I grew up. Moving forward, I hope to grow some more.

Did you know that you can put the url of your comments page in your RSS 2.0? For example, if you look at my RSS  you'll note I put the element in each entry. The <comments> element for this entry will look like this.

 <comments>http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/comments.aspx?guid=20040115090638</comments>

What exactly can you put in this element. Well, it really should be an HTML page fetch via HTTP. This would qualify as a comments page. Can you put an email address where to send your items? I would say "not." I don't think any interpretation of "url of the comments page for the item" could lead you to an email address.

Quote: We upgraded our RSS feeds at InfoWorld to 2.0 overnight (thanks to the consistently incredible Chris Lin on InfoWorld's development team), for a couple of reasons:

1. It's better. 
2. An overall better experience for the users.

source RSS.

I came upon this through whatis. It looks like a pretty extensive collection of free (beer + speech) video courtesy of the Internet Archive. It looks like theres some good stuff here. I think I'm going to try to have a "Free" viewing weekend -- try to entertain myself for 48 hours on copyright free material alone. Here's a lazyweb request -- someone should organize and advertise a Copyright Free Weekend. Who would want to do that? Doctorow, Lessig?

Source: Smartpatrol

Sometimes, you have to stop and just about:blank.

Sam has been doing some experimenting w/ non well-formed XML. The result is that most parsers actually accept his invalid XML document. Are these parsers broken? The answer to the question is obviously yes!

These products were found to be broken:

• FeedDemon
• Mozilla
• Firebird
• Bloglines
• NetNewsWire
• BottomFeeder
• NewsGator
• Radio
• NewsCrawler
• NewsMonster
• RSS Validator
• IdeaGraph
• Xalan
• Xerces

These products passed the test:

• IE
• Wildgrape NewsDesk
• SharpReader
• AmphetaDesk
• Shrook
• Feedreader
• RSS Bandit
• Feedvalidator
• Awasu

The big note is that IE passed and Moz failed.

Imagine if building architects designed houses w/out washrooms. Is it not a great thing they don't make mistakes like this? Yet, we software developers make these mistakes all the time. The reason is that we, more often than not, ignore architecture. Imagine if they built homes w/out blue prints?

While contracting for a new company some months ago, I asked the software architects "What is your architecture? Do you have an architecture document?" Their answer was, "COM." COM is not an architecture, it's a means for creating and using components and objects. Further, if your architecture is ASP, ASP.NET, J2EE or .NET, then you don't have an architecture either. Show me the blue prints (your system architecture document).

Cory: My old OpenCola partners have started a new company, Dude Research, to work on the kind of predictive recommendation service we were hot for a couple years back. The product is called Dude, Check This Out!. Sadly, it doesnâ¬"t work on the Mac yet, but these are good guys and they promise to get it working on the Mac as soon as they get through the primary development phase. From the looks of it, the Dude is a very simple blogging app (WYSIWYG, drag and drop, no HTML) that forms an associative relevance network that suggests new items to Dude users.

Dude 2.0 supports the RSS and Atom XML formats for content syndication and the FOAF XML format for social networking.

They have some cool features, including some social networking stuff, send-to-a-friend, and the ability to post to an external Movable Type or Blogger blog. It works with Bookmarklets or a Toolbar in Explorer only. However, the Dudes at Dude Research want me to warn you that this is still a Beta app, so please donâ¬"t beat them up too badly if it doesnâ¬"t work perfectly. Fortunately, itâ¬"s a Web app, so as they catch bugs the app can be quickly improved without users having to download a new version. If youâ¬"re Dude enough, give it a try and send your thoughts to support@duderesearch.com.

source Pirotcar.

A very senior developer, who reported to me, gave me a DDL SQL script he was working on as per my request. On the way home, which was usually a 10 minute drive, a blizzard turned the roads into a parking lot. Whenever the traffic came to a hault, which was most of the time, I would read and markup his DDL script. I noticed a lot of typos and blatant errors, which would normally be caught by any SQL query tool. With a simple visual inspection, I was able to find around 200 errors during the 2 hour drive home. When I returned to the office, I ran his script w/ iSQL, which reported 2000 errors in a script that wasn't even 2000 lines long. Nobody is perfect, but when the amount of errors in your code approximates the number of lines of code, then you really have to reflect on your production.

Quote: Preservative chemicals found in samples of breast tumours probably came from underarm deodorants, UK scientists have claimed. Their analysis of 20 breast tumours found high concentrations of para-hydroxybenzoic acids (parabens) in 18 samples. Parabens can mimic the hormone estrogen, which is known to play a role in the development of breast cancers. The preservatives are used in many cosmetics and some foods to increase their shelf-life.

In retired life, I sit at home w/ my 3 kids (0-5 yrs old) everyday and enjoy every moment. This March, I plan on bringing them to Disneyworld, for their second visit w/ Mickey. Actually the youngest one wasn't born last we went. We should all retire when our kids are young. Life is backwards. Of course, I don't really have enough money to make it another 50 years and I do work on several projects (Dude Research, Averick, Rapid Spiral) during the workday to try and reduce the expense burden.

At 724 Solutions, we had a socket framework for sending message back and forth. This was before SOAP and even XML-RPC and we passed SGML messages, because XML was still in its infancy.

The developer in charge of this SGML over sockets framework would quite often change the interface to his component without telling anybody. Of course, the next build would fail because his component was no longer source compatible w/ every dependent framework. In fact, he onced switched the meaning of the init() return from BOOL (zero equal SUCCESS) to bool (zero equal false). This compiled as the BOOL was implicitly converted to a bool. But none of the servers would start in the test environment.

This developer paid no attention to the affect his code changes had on others, that is, he couldn't see the bigger picture. It wasn't so much that this developer didn't know that he was breaking other people's code, it was more that he didn't care. He was the god developer and if he wanted to better his code at the expense of others, then that was ok. After a dozen or so disasters, 724 finally ended their relationship w/ this overly pompous developer.

The problem with this developer was that he was solely interested in writing good code. He didn't actually care about how his code affected the company on a bigger scale. Sometimes, it doesn't matter if your code is good or bad, but whether it allows your company to succeed. If you are ready to break other developer's code, just to make your code better, then you are a selfish non-team player.

Given enough attempts, I could perform a successful brain surgery. Killing of course many in the practice. Fortunately, we programmers get to test our code before we look like an idiot. Even after a successful surgery, an expert surgeon would likely find my work sloppy, just good enough to fool death out of taking my patient.

Source: PonyUp

More than 10 years ago, Scott Meyers did us a great disservice by writing a great book on how to write clean C++. The book has taken on religious stature and is often quoted by people who have never actually read the book. Also, many good ideas have come about since that book that invalidate some of the book. Some five years ago, a friend wrote the following code.

class X
{
   private:
      Y y;
   public:
      const Y& GetY() const;
};

He was applying all the Meyers techniques he could without actually considering the problem domain. Of course, I didn't have access to the non-const member of Y. The friend suggestion that the problem was the Y's member should have been const. Eventually, I was able to negotiate a new method in addition to the existing accessor.

   Y& GetNonConstY() const;

Don't get me wrong. Scott Meyers' book is perfect. Too perfect!

It's what you DO with the bandwidth.

The Ameraucana chicken lays green eggs (I've heard they lay varying colored eggs). The green eggs go well w/ Ham. Or so Dr. Seuss has told us. My friend John Henson, famous from his TV show on Spike TV, has a couple and gave me a half dozen green eggs this last week. Awesome!

Good old fan voting have sent a bunch of struggling players to the all-star game. Here's my picks for the starting lineups.

Quote: Meet Valerie (for $59,000, including a two-year warranty). "We are now accepting orders for up to 6 complete and operational Valerie androids for delivery at Christmas of 2004. Valerie is the most advanced android in the world having more degrees of freedom than any android shown up to now. She uses the AT&T speech synthesizer giving the most human-sounding voice available today. She is also easily the most anthropomorphic android available. She will have a high degree of artificial intelligence due to our proprietary AI software - and a generalized interface to the internet (the only existing super-intelligence). Order now - before you get backlogged in a 3 year waiting list!"

source Pirotcar.

What should you write in your blog? What shouldn't you write in your blog? This is likely the most important rule about blogging. I often hear people voice the opinions...

• that the author is writing off topic,
• that the author is writing to much about his personal life, his family, his hobbies, etc 
• that the author is writing about boring stuff,
• that the author is too candid,
• that the author is not candid enough.

The truth is, that you can write whatever you want in your blog. It's your blog. You want to write about how your co-worker is a lazy ass, then do it. It's your blog. You want to write about how your daughter loves pink and purple, then do it. It's your blog. Write whatever you want. In order to accentual this rule, I have decided to start blogging more about meaningless trivialities.

Type "Randy Morin" w/ the quotes at Google. I monopolize the top ten results, but I share one of the next ten w/ this guy. Ya, he's got a cool name, but I bet you he can't program. I doubt he can spell C#. Look at him, smug w/ satisfaction that I'm not #17 on a query of my own name. I bet you he did it intentionally. The vanity :)

Quote: Internet users spent an average of three hours and 37 minutes per month using Internet applications. The top five applications are Windows Media Player, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger Service and Real Player.

source Grey Orbit.

Some sad news. A close friend of mine has had himself bumped from the top of Google searches on his full name; John Henson. Some moron has decided to use his name on a new TV popular show title. In order to move my friend back up the Google ranks, I ask that everybody link his name on their blogs and wikis. Put the words John Henson in a link to the URL http://smartpatrol.dudecheckthisout.com.

Thanks and we're all pulling for you John.

Carl and Mark have a chat with the one and only Don Box about SOAP, WSE, Longhorn, Indigo, COM, the PDC, Band on the Runtime, and the meaning of life. Don reveals a few gems about Indigo, and talks about the ways in which Indigo makes web services better.  Don Box is an architect on the Indigo project at Microsoft, working on next generation Web Service protocols and plumbing. His interests include type systems for XML and Web Services, metadata, discovery, and service-oriented software integration. Don's work with Web Services began in 1998 as one of the original authors of the SOAP specification.

source Scobleizer.

///
/// Function: AddTwoNumbers
///
/// Parameters
///   int x = this is the first number that will be added
///      this number is an integer 32-bit
///   int y = this is the second number that will be added
///      this number is an integer 32-bit
///
/// This function adds two numbers together
///
int AddTwoNumbers(
   int x, // this is the first number that will be added
   int y) // this is the second number that will be added
{
   int sum = 0; // lets start w/ zero
   sum += x; // add the first number, it's an interger
   sum += y; // add the second number, it's an integer
   return sum; // return the sum of the two numbers
};
// end of AddTwoNumbers function

So, what's easier to read? The above or the below?

int sum(int x, int y) { return x+y; };

There are three types of comment styles.

1. Useful
2. None
3. Useless

No comment is better than a useless comment. Useless comments make your code less readable.

Quote: This is the first color image of Mars taken by the panoramic camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It is the highest resolution image ever taken on the surface of another planet.

Leaving February 28th. Returning March 28th.

• Day -1 (Feb 27th) - Get ready for a great trip.
• Day 1 (Feb 28th) - Leave 6AM. Drive thru Buffalo, Erie, Pittsburgh to Wytheville. About 10 1/4 hours according to Mapquest and Yahoo! I think it'll be closer to 12 hours w/ kids and stops. It'll still be cold in Wytheville in late February, likely below zero celcius overnight. There's a year-round KOA outside of Wytheville. I need a contingency in case I can't make it to Wytheville. Also I should check the weather in the Wytheville area a day or two before we get there.
• Day 2 (Feb 29th) - Drive thru Charlotte, Columbia, Savannah to Jacksonville. About 8 hours. There's a year-round KOA north of Jax. Contingent plan is stopping around Savannah.
• Day 3 (Mar 1st) - Onto Disneyworld.

A new article of mine on Developer Fusion. Cool!

Absolutes are absolutely incorrect :) I know, that's a contradiction in itself. Yet, it's true. About ten years ago encapsulation took on the meaning of making all data members private. This practice has grown beyond useful. Making every data member private is an absolute. It's incorrect.

I remember we use to have structures like this.
   struct MyStruct
   {
      int x;
      int y;
   };

Now that same structure looks like this.
   struct MyStruct
   {
   private:
      int m_x;
      int m_y;
   public:
      int GetX()
      {
         return m_x;
      }

      void SetX(const int x)
      {
         m_x = x;
      }

      int GetY()
      {
         return m_y;
      }

      void SetY(const int y)
      {
         m_y = y;
      }
   };

Seems like a lot of extra code for nothing. Well, you do insolate changes in the base type of x and y from the client code. And think of the job security gained from making the code hard to read :(

A friend some months ago justified a bug in an interface using this law. "It's going to leak and that's acceptable," was his reason. The law explains leakage and tells us that leaks will occur and you can't prevent it. It is not justication for having leaks. You should still attempt to fix them when possible. That is, leaks will occur. A trickle is acceptable. A torrent is not.

Ken: Tackling the concrete before the abstract ("how to extend the API"), here's a proposal for a blogroll "API": In an Atom <feed > element or a web site's home page is a <link> element with a rel="atom.blogroll".

      <link rel="atom.blogroll" href="http://example.org/blogroll"; />

Randy: Ken's a smart Dude. This works equally well for RSS and is already in some use. Cool!

      <link rel="blogroll" type="text/x-opml" title="Blogroll" href="http://example.org/blogroll"; />

Quote: Bryan McCabe scored twice in the third period to rally the Toronto Maple Leafs to a 2-1 victory over the Nashville Predators on Tuesday night. Mats Sundin assisted on both goals for the Maple Leafs, who have won two straight following a four-game winless skid. Toronto goalie Trevor Kidd made 23 saves, including several impressive stops in the final five minutes when the Predators had a power play.

source Leafs@Dude.

Quote: This time, the idea doesn't carry a simple, catchy name like push. Instead, we get an acronym -- RSS, or really simple syndication. With RSS, any Internet user can automatically receive the latest updates from thousands of websites.

source Rss@Dude.

Quote: FRIENDSTER is the top tech thing to come out of 2003. These days, you can't go in to a fast food chain without overhearing the crew trade e-mail addresses so they can 'friendster' each other. Friendster is a big surprise in many ways. How a simple website can achieve worldwide success where many far more complex, high-tech designs have dismally failed is a lesson in the limits of technology as well. As Friendster shows, success is not spelled by new-fangled technologies but rather by simple, well executed, easy-to-understand concepts based on people's desire for community.

source Social@Dude.

Quote: 724 Solutions (NASDAQ: SVNX; TSX: SVN), a leading provider of next-generation IP-based network, applications and data services, today announced it has teamed with Anabatic Technologies, one of the foremost telecommunications and IT companies in Asia, to resell its X-treme Service Activity Manager (XSAM) to mobile network operators in the Asia Pacific Region.

source 724@Dude.

Check out the Dude User Guide. Or perish in ignorance.

How to manage priorities in a large software development organization?

Step #1 - Buy the book or tape titled "First Things First".
Step #2 - Read to the book or listen to the tape.
Step #3 - Realize that it applies to equally to organizations as people.
Step #4 - Create your organization as below.

Put one person or a very small team in charge of feature requests. This person or team serves as a gate. If you go around the gate, then you're guided back to the gate. If the CEO goes around the gate, then he's guided back to the gate. The gate is in charge of throttling down the massive set of feature requests that are present in any development effort, to a trickle of extremely important issues.

What the gate does?
This is the principle of "First Things First" applied to an organization. Write down all your issues. Rank them according to effort, urgency and importance. Make the rankings available to all stakeholders, so they can provide feed, that is, complain that their features are not ranked high enough. Discard all issues that are less important, no matter how urgent or trivial the effort. Manage from important to unimportant. Account for urgency and effort only when things have similar importance.

Quote: Nieuwendyk, Tie Domi and Alexei Ponikarovsky had multiple-point games to support Trevor Kidd's first shutout in more than two years, helping the Maple Leafs halt a four-game winless streak. Kidd turned aside 25 shots in only his fourth game this season and second victory. Ed Belfour sat out with a leg injury sustained Sunday in practice that isn't believed to be serious.

source Leafs @ Dude.

Quote: 724 Solutions (NASDAQ: SVNX; TSX: SVN), a leading provider of next-generation IP-based network, applications and data services, today announced it has teamed with Anabatic Technologies, one of the foremost telecommunications and IT companies in Asia, to resell its X-treme Service Activity Manager (XSAM) to mobile network operators in the Asia Pacific Region.

Randy: Another reseller deal. No real sale.

Quote: Add Craigslist to your list of San Francisco landmarks, even if it is a virtual one. The site has become so synonymous with the City by the Bay, it stands to reason someone would make a movie about it. Tonight on "Tech Live," we'll introduce you to Michael Ferris Gibson, who set out to make a documentary about the popular website on which people search for everything from jobs, apartments, parking spots, used cars, and event tickets to tennis buddies and romantic partners. We'll show you clips from his film, "24 Hours on Craigslist," a film as quirky as the people who've helped Craigslist evolve into the be-all, end-all of online bulletin boards.

source social.

Quote: Late last month the judge, Deborah A. Batts of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued a preliminary injunction that bars the advertising software company WhenU.com from displaying pop-ups and other types of online advertisements for VisionDirect.com when visitors go to 1-800 Contacts.com, a competing Web site.

Quote: This is a cropped view of the first Navcam stereo mosaic from Spirit at Gusev crater. To see the image in 3-D, you will need to obtain a pair of 3-D glasses, with red and blue filters over the eyes. The glasses are often available at comic book stores. To see the full image, click on the "High-Resolution Image" link below.

Scoble: I've identified several things that RSS does better than HTML. Here they are:

• RSS is faster to display
• With RSS I only need to read one out of 10 sites
• RSS is faster to read
• RSS is more efficient to read
• RSS lets you escape the browser

This site has added myself to the list of people they are tracking in the blogosphere. Awesome and thanks.

Here it is - Miss Digital World, the first ever virtual beauty contest, strictly for the most beautiful and intriguing virtual models made using the most advanced 3D graphics tools.

Every age has its ideal of beauty, and every age produces its visual incarnation of that ideal: the Venus de Milo, an icon of ideal beauty in the Greek world, the Mona Lisa in the Renaissance, mysterious and eternal, the "divine" Greta Garbo, symbol of an ethereal and enigmatic beauty in the 1920s, Marilyn Monroe, the spontaneous and seductive beauty of the 60s. Miss Digital World is the search for a contemporary ideal of beauty, represented through virtual reality.

source BoingBoing, Smartpatrol.

source Cyblog.

Never deploy a debug release. If you can't take the time to make your stuff work in release, then you might as well pack your bags and go home now.

This was a major problem w/ 724 Solutions. In the first few years of being there, we always deployed a debug build. Most of the developers were too lazy to get their stuff compiling in release mode. A step further, some developers insisted that we deploy the LIB files in production. I was not able to convince them that LIB files were not required at run-time.

With CAN SPAM taking affect on January 1st, I've noticed a steep (40%) drop off in SPAM in this new year. Hurray!

Oleg: Anna and I got engaged while on our trip to Montreal on New Year's Eve! More stories and pictures from the trip to come later, possibly even this weekend.

Randy: Congrats Dude!

Quote: Just three years after Sun Microsystems paid $2-billion (U.S.) in stock for server appliance maker Cobalt Networks, Sun has killed off the Cobalt product line. The move marks the end of the Cobalt brand of Linux servers at Sun, although Sun will continue to resell Linux operating systems from Red Hat and SuSE Linux on x86 servers. Sun also sells Linux for the desktop in the shape of the Sun Java Desktop, but its own server line now runs Solaris exclusively.

Randy: I was born in Cobalt, Ontario.

From: Vilmis
Subject: Re: Toronto Job Oppotunities

"nanchanger" wrote
> Hey,are you hiring or waiting for some free resume samples?
:)))
Believe me, he don't need resume samples.

Quote: The most popular application in December was Windows Media Player, reaching 34 per cent of internet users; AOL Instant Messenger (20.27 per cent); RealNetworks' players (19.76 per cent); MSN Messenger (19.31 per cent) and Yahoo! Messenger (12.26 per cent).

Randy: Is email not an Internet application?

Quote: Comet Wild 2 is shown in this image taken by the Stardust navigation camera during the spacecraft's closest approach to the comet on January 2. The image was taken within a distance of 500 kilometers (about 311 miles) of the comet's nucleus with a 10-millisecond exposure. A total of 72 images were taken of the comet during the flyby. More images, which may be of higher resolution and greater detail, will be transmitted to Earth on Saturday. Photo Credits: NASA/JPL

I just added FOAF support to the Dude. You can see my profile here.

You'll also note a little FOAF icon on the DudeCards that links to the RDF. DudeCards are found on most Dude blog homepages.

The digital certificate for Internet Explorer's Java 2 Runtime Environment has expired, while several more are set to lapse January 7. [cut] Depending on who you ask, the discovery is an oversight that will cause only a minor inconvenience to IE users, or a signal that Microsoft has all but ceased browser development efforts and pays little attention to security details. Microsoft's expired certificate for Java 2 Runtime Environment won't be renewed. According to a spokesperson at Microsoft's PR firm, as part of Microsoft's settlement with Sun Microsystems in Jan 2001, it is no longer allowed to distribute certain versions of the Microsoft Virtual Machine as of Jan. 2, 2004.

source Microsoft @ Dude.