http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic Where ever you go, there you are. Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:28:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been annoyed with the domain registration system ever since it became de rigueur to register any name under (at least) .com, .net, and .org. My coworkers are probably tired of my occasional rants about it. Note that it is the creation and registration process, as handled by ICANN that ... http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic/2008/07/04/the-tld-mint/ I just realized that June 19 was the tenth anniversary of my lohnet.org domain registration (why I registered it). It is still my primary email domain, but the web site just sends traffic here. I've not decided what to do with it once I get time to revamp ... http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic/2008/07/04/ten-years-of-lohnetorg/ My About page currently states "I plan on actually producing content in 2008, lol". You may wonder why I bother. Steve Yegge's You Should Write Blogs (even if nobody reads them) probably contributed to pushing me over the edge, so for convenience, you can blame him. I'm calling this ... http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic/2008/06/28/state-of-the-blog-05/ The Supreme Court of the United States, in 554 U. S. ____ (2008) DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA v. HELLER [PDF], has said (quoting from the syllabus (headnote) of the Opinion): The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that ... http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic/2008/06/27/second-amendment/ Totally tubular, man! Robots for teh Intertubes. In the main, today’s robots are not that clever [to inspect pipes and shafts]. They cannot climb or navigate in vertical pipes – and very few have active joints. Cybernetics and optical measurement scientists at SINTEF are working on a solution. SINTEF ... http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic/2008/06/27/pipe-robots/ I sometimes have to deal with laptop hard disks, either transferring contents to a new disk, diagnosing problems, or repairing file structures. For several years I've used an IDE adapter a friend gave me. I don't remember the circumstances, just that he happened to have it with him and ... http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic/2008/06/14/disk-adapter/ A few days ago iGoogle linked to an old photo of the lengthly (full letter-size page) instructions someone had taped to an office vending machine. I wanted to reference it here because it was quite funny, but unfortunately I've wiped out my browsing history since then and can't ... http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic/2008/06/14/must-be-running-windows/ According to Hannah Hickey, in Underwater communication: Robofish are the ultimate in ocean robots, keeping in touch without scientists’ help (University of Washington), "The Robofish pack's first assignment, beginning this summer, will be to trail a remote-controlled toy shark.". Robofish are unique in that that they can coordinate their activities ... http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic/2008/06/09/robofish-hunter-seekers/ You know you're having a bad day when... Good: Let's go SCUBA diving! Bad: Yikes, we've been swept into shark-infested waters! Good: Hey, an island ... Bad: ... infested with Komodo Dragons! The full story is here. h/t: Greg Ladenimage: Markofjohnson, KomodoDragonRinca1.jpg, Wikimedia Commons http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic/2008/06/08/here-be-dragons/ The significance and formatting of whitespace in source code is a religious issue. Essentially, that means that opinions and intense personal preferences far outweigh any rational thoughts on the matter. That said, here's my contribution to all the noise and furor. Some of you may remember column-sensitive programming languages ... http://www.hornlo.org/isotropic/2008/06/08/significant-white-space/