Okay, so that was odd. Turns out Mom’s problem with email was that it wasn’t actually sending it, and thunderbird wasn’t telling her that it was not sending. At some unknown point in the past when our ip address changed, and my server stopped forwarding mail for the house, thunderbird didn’t start popping up error messages as it normally does. Very odd. So I upgraded her thunderbird version from something to 1.0, and then resent all her email from the 24th on, since the last she remembers getting replies was the 22nd (and apparently she didn’t send anything on the 23rd).

Read “Wild oats, now and later” by John R. Diggs, Jr., MD before disagreeing too strongly with my previous remarks on the problems of advocating condom use to stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Biometrics are starting to be deployed commercially according to “Supermarket: Let your fingers do the paying” from News.com. A Seattle Washington grocery store allows you to register a credit or debit card to a fingerprint, and then pay by fingerprint. While this sounds incredibly convenient, there are a myriad of concerns that should be considered. Even assuming the system used is hard to fool, do you really want to be uniquely identified with what you purchase? Stores want to have data about you, consider some of the stuff going on with radio id tags, Walmart®; for instance was curious about what parts of the store people buying various things will visit, and how long they spend where. Consider if someone did find a way to fake out the system, how would you go about trying to prove it? Can you imagine trying to say “yes, I know that my finger print was used, but I didn’t really buy that” with a straight face? Do you think anyone would believe you? Consider something somewhat more mundane. Now instead of just using your credit card once, they get to store your credit card number. How secure is the server storing it? Can it be hacked? Can someone walk off with it? Pranas says that the company he worked for had a server stolen recently. Not only that, they aren’t even sure it was an inside job. If a government contractor cannot keep employees personal information secure, how well do you think a grocery store or convenience store would do?

The New York Times has a story on a new (very expensive) gadget that creates a 3D video display. Entitled “Virtual Home Theater Promises Immersion and Fits on Your Head,” the article talks about its use for people who want to watch a presentation or movie, but this isn’t so much what strikes me about it. Gnome has and is working on what they call “spacial” metaphors for file management, and there is lots of talk about 3D interfaces, especially in science fiction. Short of a true Star Trek® style hologram, this offers really what seems to me to be the first viable way to really go 3D; imagine what that could mean for computer desktops, organizing your work flow. We’d need some other pointer type device naturally, a mouse wouldn’t make much sense in 3D, perhaps a way to tell what a person is focusing on, or something similar. It would probably confuse many users at first, but for those of us who are used to multiple monitors and/or multiple work spaces, this would be an interesting advancement.

With some help from Vincas in designing a regular expression, I dressed up this log some today. Dates are now pretty printed, and times have a colon in them. I lift them in 24 hour format, I like that better, all my clocks except the alarm clock that cannot, are set to 24 hour time. I’m happy with the result, but I’m not so happy with the code generating it. Being unable to figure out the output for preg_split(), I was forced to use 5 lines of code instead of 3. This is especially disheartening since a series of substr() calls would have only taken 4 lines of code.

Got to see Ederlyn and Joe at Pub Quiz last night. That was nice. None of our teams (we had 3) won, I managed to get two wrong myself, but that still would not have put my team in the tie breaker. Apparently Philadelphia had the first stock market in the United States, and I forget what other one I was responsible for having missed. In other news, we are holding a degree this Saturday, I meant to see if Nicholas was working Saturday or Sunday last night, but forgot. Going will mean we miss some of WCACs for Michael, but I most likely ought to go to the degree even if Nicholas cannot. Thus if Nicholas can, I figure ’tis best to do so now than wait yet another month or three. Sunday is Chris and John’s Super bowl party, I almost did not accept that invitation, just as I almost did not go to Pub Quiz last night. Don’t know why on either one.

Mom is having trouble sending and receiving from Mrs. Moffatt. Finally got around to looking at my mail logs today, and interestingly enough, cox is not showing up in them at all. One or two incoming messages, and no outgoing ones. I think my next stop will be Mom’s address book.