Archive for December 2005
DualDisc and You ;^)
A week ago I was at the sto’ and was flipping through CDs and came across Cyndi Lauper’s The Body Acoustic (The Body Acoustic) and was really close to buying it on the spot.
However…
The problem was that it was a DualDisc and the label on the back warned that it “might not work in some CD or DVD players” so I put the purchase off.
I came home and got online and found several stories of people not being able to use their DualDiscs with their slot-loading Macs. There wasn’t really much on tray-loading macs, but I asked adb about it and he said that one had worked on his tray-load Mac. I filed it away and forgot about it.
But…
Today, however, I was back in the store and again saw the “CD” and decided to throw caution to the wind. I picked it up and was most pleased to discover that I was able to read the disc with no problem at all.
The only thing that I noticed was that it took a bit longer, maybe 30 seconds, than usual to read the disc and discover that it was a “CD”. That was it. No other oddities or problems.
I keep calling it a “CD” because it’s not really a compact disc. It doesn’t conform to the Red Book specification for CDs. It’s a little thicker thicker than a regular CD and feels a bit heavier, though not very much.
The thickness seems to cause problems for some PowerBook and iMac (and I assume Mac mini) users where the disc simply doesn’t fit well in the slot. There are other reports of the drive accepting the disc but immediately ejecting it.
Chris Breen wrote a blog entry on the Playlist Magazine site about his experiences with DualDiscs and there is a fair amount of feedback, though no new posts since September.
I guess that’s enough rambling for now…
New rules for space tourism?
C|Net News.com’s Future Tech Blog reports that the US Government has established rules to govern the not-quite-existant space tourism industry.
Um…okay. I guess now that they captured Bin Laden and secured a peaceful Iraq, eliminated poverty and homelessness and provided affordable healthcare to all citizens and stopped all crime they must have a lot of time on their hands…
Progress for Botswana in AIDS fight
AP and Yahoo! News have run an article detailing Botswana’s efforts to stem the tide of deaths and increase the quality of life of people suffering from AIDS.
Botswana pledged in 2002 to provide free treatment for every citizen who needed it.
52,000 of the nations 1.7 million people are provided free treatment for their affliction. The Government shoulders 90+ percent of the cost of the treatments but recieves support from pharmaceutical companies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Another 7,300 afflicted citizens get their medicine on their own.
Justice Department investigates but it’s the wrong target
The BBC has reported (link) and CNN elaborates (link) on an investigation by the Justice Department into the latest Washington leak: The New York Times’ disclosure that President Bush sidestepped normal procedure and authorized warrant-less spying on American citizens by the NSA.
It’s just my humble opinion, but shouldn’t there be another target of an investigation? The President maybe?
Children murdered for ‘honor’
A Pakistani man has been (surprisingly) arrested for the murders of his 25 year old step-daughter and his three younger daughters (ages 8, 7, and 4).
He claims that he murdered his step-daughter in order to protect his family’s honor because she was committing adultery–a claim that is unsupported by the local people.
He murdered his three young daughters because “[he] thought the younger girls would do what their eldest sister had done, so they should be eliminated.”
He claims to have honor. Well, it’s been my experience that people with honor don’t murder small children for what others might have done.
May he swing from the gibbet.
Drug helps reduce cancer recurrence
An international study involving 8,000 women has shown that taking the drug Femara (letrozole) helps to reduce the risk of recurrence of breast cancer
Among women whose cancer had spread to their lymph nodes, the drug reduced the risk of recurrence by up to 29%.
Femara is an aromatase inhibitor. It works by stopping the natural production of a hormone that is believed responsible for the formation and recurrence of breast cancers.
The Shroud of the Dark Side?
To paraphrase Yoda, the shroud of the Dark Side seems to be falling, but it might not be too late to stop it.
The New York Times has posted an editorial calling for a more open government and a return to a freer flow of documents from the administration.
200 million documents were declassified in 1998 compared to this year’s paltry 44 million.
Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) are leading the fight in Congress for a return to a more open government.
Star Trek tops most-missed series
I’m not sure if this means that people want to see the old episodes or that they want to see new ones. Either way, Star Trek tops the list in a survey done in the UK. Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes in second and Babylon 5 is seventh.
If I got to choose any show from that list to be aired again, it would definitely be Babylon 5. I love that show.
Stardust Fireball to Cross US.
On 15 January 2005, you might get a rather spectacular light show courtesy of NASA.
At approximately 5:12 AM EST NASA’s Stardust space probe’s sample return capsule will enter the atmosphere and begin its trek to a Utah landing.
If you live in North Carolina, California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho or Utah you may get to see the show.
The capsule’s velocity is expected to be over 28,000 miles per hour.
The Stardust probe was launched to collect cometary debris and space dust for examination upon the capsule’s return to Earth.
Everybody mark your calendar.
Validate via RSS
I was looking for an RSS feed validator and found something really nifty in the Google search results.
What returned was a way to verify your (X)HTML markup via RSS feed.
The author has written a Perl script that runs the verification.
When you add the URL to your feeds, it runs the verification every time that you refresh them. If there are no errors, it doesn’t output any data. If there are errors, it lists them just as the actual validator site would
JeffSay... 
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