Up until very recently, we’ve been forced to endure history from the perspective of a very small minority know as “the Victors”. These lucky son’ bitches have, thankfully, been given notice. Thanks to Wikipedia, victory is no longer a requirement for posterity’s pen.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is written by… well… you and me. Anyone with a connection to the internets and the inclination can make contributions. But, keep this in mind… democracy is a bitch and Wikipedia has been the center of some controversies lately. For every person that volunteers to help police the articles there’s another person who will happily deface them. This is the price we pay for a history of the people, by the people.

Personally, I can’t stop myself from using the Random Article feature… but I’m a geek that way.

Google is testing out a new service they’re calling Click-to-Call which offers the following:

“…gives you a free and fast way to speak directly to the advertiser you found on a Google search results page – over the phone.

Here’s how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click ‘Connect For Free,’ Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party.”

Folks on Slashdot seemed really excited about this but… uh… I didn’t get it. This seemed like a really stupid idea to me… but I like to be thorough so I followed a few links, hoping to discover a side to this that made it… well… less stupid. Nope, this is just stupid… but the creepy thing was, everyone else seemed really excited about this too.

Now don’t get me wrong–lots and lots of great things began life as a stupid idea. I applaud smart people pushing technologies without obvious usefulness. Technology needs these trailblazers. But I do intend to mock those who seem to think this has the stench of genius–most of which are either in marketing or overeager bloggers desperate to break a story.

Excellent work y’all! No, really… top notch.

The Sydney Morning Herald is running a story on the lack of style exuding from the World’s IT departments.

“Short sleeved shirts, man-made fibers and the wrong coloured socks were some of the most common fashion faux-pas cited by corporate stylist, Melanie Moss”

Did you notice she uses the “u” in color when she speaks? Classy! I am completely shocked by this clearly important issue, which is completely worthy of my time*.

*I am totally fucking lying.

Apple released it’s new video iPod today. An interesting step forward in the video download business. It got me thinking about the pundits for the original iPod… so I dug up and read the Slashdot article about the original introduction of the iPod. Very interesting indeed…

My Woman sent me a link to this page that answers the question: “If programming languages could speak; what would they say?”. Geek humor at it’s finest.

I recently made the switch back to Apple’s Mail after about a year of running Microsoft Entourage (Outlook for the Mac). At the time, Mail was pretty buggy and I was looking for a change. Recently though, I became so frustrated by Entourage, that I decided to give Mail another chance.

After upgrading to 10.2 (Jaguar), I imported all my existing email into Mail and gave it a spin. Immediately, I noticed that in addition to being a much improved version, Mail consumes much less battery on my iBook than entourage did. I had forgotten that I used to get well over 3 hours out of my battery but of late, I have been only getting maybe an hour and a half. I asked around and it seems that Entourage is very busy behind the scenes and therefore is tough on your battery. This was a huge bonus on top of the pleasure I take in removing Microsoft applications from my machine. Now if only Chimera will hurry up and finish their browser so I can ditch IE…

I’m always forgetting which options get me the output I like from tcpdump so I’m posting it here for all to see. This line gets close to the output of EetherPeek that I always liked but costs about $500 less. Here it is:

tcpdump -vvv -i en0 -X -s 0

Here’s a breakdown for what it does:

• “-vvv” Turns on uber-verbose mode giving the most information
• “-i en0″ sets the device to listen on (in this case the first ethernet card)
• “-X” prints hex and any ascii text (human readable)
• “-s 0″ grabs the entire packet (or n bytes if not 0)

PHP is installed on Jaguar as it was in previous OS X builds and only needs to be activated in order to work. Here’s how…

Launch Terminal.app and enter each of the following steps in order:

1. sudo apxs -e -a -n php4 /usr/libexec/httpd/libphp4.so

2. echo 'echo "AddType application/x-httpd-php .php" >> /etc/httpd/httpd.conf' | sudo sh -s

3. sudo apachectl restart

That should do it. To test if it’s running, create a files called info.php (or whatever) that consists of the text:
<?php phpinfo() ?>, drop it in your web site documents folder and open it in a browser. It should look something like this. If all is well, you now have an active PHP module with support for MySQL.

For a more detailed instructions and a PHP lib file with more features configured take a peek here.