Month: July 2004

Slashdot reports that Wikipedia, the free online collaborative encyclopedia, has just reached the 300,000 article mark. As the article points out, “for size comparisons, the English Wikipedia has 90.1 million words across 300,000 articles, compared to Britannica’s 55 million words across 85,000 articles. (All the languages combined together reach 790,000 articles.)” I consult Wikipedia fairly regularly, and Shaft posted about it last year; I’m glad to see that it continues to flourish. However, some posts in the Slashdot thread point out that the project has been having funding issues for some time now, so if you visit the site regularly you might consider a donation. For fun, visit/bookmark the link to a random Wikipedia entry…

Update: After browsing around Wikipedia for a bit, I noticed two other sites by Wikimedia that are worth visiting: Wikiquotes is an “online compendium of quotations in every language, including sources (where known), translations of non-English quotes, and links to Wikipedia for further information,” and Wiktionary is a “multilingual dictionary in every language, with definitions, etymologies and pronunciations.” Check them out…

Tiger Hand beats paper!

Check out this cool barcode clock.

Google has introduced a whole lot of advanced search operators that can be used to refine search results. A lot of this is handled in the forms on Google’s Advanced Search page, but it may be easier for some to use the “command line” operators.

Check out the sweet paint scheme on this Mi-24 “Hind” helicopter in Afghanistan (originally Hungarian?).

via Gizmodo

As most of you know by now, I needed little incentive to switch from Micro$oft Internet Explorer (IE) to Mozilla Firefox and its brethren. If you haven’t yet made the switch, last week’s latest and perhaps scariest security flaw in IE should be a wake-up call. But don’t just take it from me.

Last week the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) recommended using another web browser to avoid the inherent security flaws of IE (other options all but cripple the usability and convenience of the web browser). For those of you who haven’t hear of US-CERT (I hadn’t), it’s “a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the public and private sectors… established to protect the nation’s Internet infrastructure [and coordinate] defense[s] against and responses to cyber attacks across the nation.” After US-CERT’s assessment, Mozilla downloads almost doubled.

Additionally, a recent Microsoft-owned Slate article titled “Are the Browser Wars Back? How Mozilla’s Firefox trumps Internet Explorer” details the many features and security benefits that Firefox offers over IE. Now’s the time to switch…

Update: It seems that Micro$oft’s fix for the recent security flaw is not complete. ZDNet reports that “This marks the third time in a month that Microsoft has had to play catch-up to researchers’ public disclosures about insecurities in Internet Explorer” and that “They chose to address only one part of the problem.” Although I’m glad that (for the most part) I don’t have to deal with these security flaws, my biggest fear is that people who don’t know any better will continue to put themselves and others at risk…

I am so appalled at W’s latest brazen trampling of the principle of separation of church and state that I am speechless. Maybe I’ll have a tirade later…