General

Look at the label on the last package you received from UPS, or at the back of your driver’s license. Chances are there’s a rectangular area on there containing tiny rectangles, circles, hexagons, or similar patterns. You’re looking at a two-dimensional barcode, which can store several kilobytes of data as compared to the roughly twelve bytes in the UPC barcode on that bottle of lotion you keep by the bed. Daniel sent me a story at the New York Times about a club in Boston that is pulling and storing the name, age, height, home address, and other specifics of its patrons. So I want to know just what is on the back of my own license. Here is a document that gives a brief introduction to the roughly twenty different types of 2D barcodes in common use today. Read more for further stuff as I find it.

Special thanks to Daniel for finding the bug in my Java code. Apparently the local javascript calls in my comment tags override my global javascript call in the page headers. All fixed now. Yay!

I read John Grisham‘s “The Summons” this week. He takes the reader back to Ford County, Mississippi — recall his first novel, “A Time to Kill.” Grisham writes characters in the South so well, without making them all ingrown fools… which may not seem so profound, particularly if you live here, but this is the first fictional book I’ve read in a while, so I’m accustomed to the tired Southern (and other) stereotypes of television.

2443 words that you can’t say on TV, by George Carlin.

Time for hot digital camera luv! Here are some of the newest photos of a few of the 404 geeks.

So, why would the Air Force want to mess with the weather?

If this is your car, please note: your car is not a Lotus. Nor is it a Ferrari, or even a mid-range Lexus. You drive a Saturn station wagon. Your car isn’t nearly important enough to park across two parking places.

To replace my aging Kodak DC-something digital camera [that only had a serial connector, ick], I got a tiny new Minolta DiMage X today. So far, it’s pretty nice. Considering the batteries are still charging and I haven’t taken any pictures with it yet. Here is a very concise review of the DiMage X.

Is it me, or should Minolta have fired the person who came up with the name “Dimage” for a camera?

Megan and I really like the Coca-Cola from McDonald’s. Until last night, we didn’t exactly know why, but it always seems to taste better coming out of McDonald’s soft drink fountain.

So last night the cashier gave us the wrong change or something and he called the manager over to fix it. It was later in the evening, so the store was really slow — it wasn’t like we were holding up any line of people or anything. She was friendly about the correction, so Megan asked the question that unlocked our “pop” mystery: “Hey, we really like the Coke at McDonald’s. Is there something you guys to do make it so good?” The manager teased us about not being able to disclose it, trade secret and whatnot, but she eventually told us…

Hey kids! On most Cisco routers, “dsu remote accept” is enabled by default! This means that if you’re paying for a fractional DS3 from your upstream service provider, and you have the right type of router on your side, you can issue the command “dsu remote fullrate” to crank that fractional DS3 up to a full 45MB! Even better, your upstream provider will likely not notice, giving you hundreds of thousands of dollars of bandwidth for free! What’s more, if your provider notices, Cisco will consistently tell them that “that command is probably not enabled by default,” but Cisco isn’t sure, because they’ve “never tested it in a lab!”