If you downloaded the newest Mozilla Firefox or got automatically updated to 1.5 RC3, you may have noticed some problems with websites that use Macromedia Flash. It seems to be a problem in conjunction with Adblock. If you disable Adblock, the flash pages work. Turns out they already have a fix for this, but it won’t get automatically updated. In fact, it’s not even on the main page, probably because the one on the main page is for 1.0.7, and not for the beta releases of Firefox.

You can download the Adblock fix here. The one you should be using with Firefox 1.5 RC3 is Adblock 0.5.2.054.

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Random Crap:

MK vs. SF 2 (from stanman) – An awesome flash pitting Mortal Kombat vs Street Fighter 2. The animation was actually done really well and you get to see Ryu fight with Scorpion. Sakura and Lui Kang are in it too, but they played smaller parts. You get to meet a special character at the end, but I don’t want to ruin the ending.

[adult swim] Friday Night Fix (from deadlock) – a bit belated, but these Adult Swim cartoons apparently are posted online for viewing every Friday night starting @ 11pm to Saturday morning 6am. The selection is decent, the quality good, and the speed is great! Great if you have nothing to do on a Friday night and want to watch some toons.

Rocket Boots (from deadlock) – a video showing some guy attaching rocket boosters to his feet which lets him float in the air for half a minute during a sky dive. I wonder when tools like those on Rocketeer will be available to consumers.

Chrono Resurrection (from bittorrent) – I first saw the trailer from a bittorrent download. It was so awesome!!! You can download the trailer here. You may also want to check out the screenshots on that page. Chrono Resurrection is a… well, was a project to resurrect Chrono Trigger (as the title suggests). It was created by fans for fans. The work is just amazing, but not all good things get to suceed, and this time was because they received a cease and desist letter from Square Enix. You can check ou the old site here. Sigh… I really wanted to see this come through. I’m curious if the fair use law is applicable to this. I mean, people do tons of fan work and parodies and they all seem to be legal. What makes this fanwork illegal. Only the storyline was reused, the characters are all redrawn, although they do hold resemblance to the older characters. They’re not planning to making money off it (or I think they’re not).

Square-Inch Plot of Land for Sale on eBay – A square-inch parcel of land will be auctioned this week on eBay for a starting bid of $1,224, although Owen County officials say they’ve had offers for more. What can you do with 1 in² of land?

Student Allegedly Urinates in Ice Machine – A Nicholas County High School student was suspended after he was accused of urinating in an ice machine that at least 31 people got ice from before the incident was reported. Not as bad as the sperm incident from The Squid and the Whale, but pretty similar.

Tears save sick mother from cremation alive – – A Chinese peasant woman who suffered a brain haemorrhage was left at the undertakers alive for cremation because her family could no longer afford hospital treatment, state media said Friday. Morally I know it’s wrong, but in this situation, what can one do?

“Deferred Success” is new term for failure – report – In 2005, some people wanted the word “brainstorming” replaced by “thought shower” so as not to offend people with brain disorders, and they also wanted “deferred success” to replace “failure” so as not to embarrass those who don’t succeed. People these days… why can’t they just accept the truth? Or is it not politically correct if we hurt other people’s feelings?

Superintendent Arrested After Camera Found – A school superintendent was arrested for allegedly placing a hidden video camera resembling an air freshener dispenser in a women’s bathroom at the school administration office. … According to records, a school business office clerk alerted investigators this week after finding a school credit card statement for a $299 purchase with no vendor name, then discovering it was from a surveillance company. Two days later, Doyen submitted an invoice for the purchase, which included a description of the camera and a Web site address, according to records. Story wasn’t that interesting, but charing it to the school credit card and submitting an invoice for reimbursment? Can anyone get any more stupid?

Friday work meetings may mask love trysts – Employers be warned: workers who schedule Wednesday meetings are potentially going to a job interview and regular Friday afternoon meetings could be an excuse for a rendezvous with their lover. I need to schedule more Fridays off!

Radish in intensive care after murder attempt – A giant white radish that won the hearts of a Japanese town by valiantly growing through the urban asphalt was in intensive care at a town hall in western Japan on Thursday after being slashed by an unknown assailant.

Pit bull ad insults lawyers: court – Responding to a complaint by the Florida Bar, the state’s highest court sanctioned a pair of Fort Lauderdale attorneys whose advertisement showed a spike-collared pit bull in the company logo. The bar also objected to the company’s telephone number: 1-800-748-2855 or 1-800-PIT BULL. The advertisements “demean all lawyers and thereby harm both the legal profession and the public’s trust and confidence in our system of justice,” Chief Justice Barbara Pariente scolded a unanimous decision. I find it funny that most lawyers don’t see themselves as bullies. I guess ignorance is bliss.

Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless (from /.) – If I remember correctly, wasn’t there something in humans we could remove that’ll make us fearless or never nervous or never feel pain?

Not sure if you’ve read any of the news recently regarding Sony’s Root Kit, but Sony’s gotten into major problems with it. In short, a root kit is a software that allows others to hack into your computer. The Sony Root Kit is installed when you insert any of Sony’s recent music cds into a Windows machine. At first, Sony denied it was a root kit. I mean this was a nasty nasty bug. It would install itself automatically, hide itself from the user, and actually modify the kernel making it extremely hard to get rid of it. When Sony finally admitted it was root kit, they gave a half-ass apology but didn’t do anything about it. Several lawsuits have already been filed against them. A bit later, they finally decide to release a patch to fix this problem, but by installing that patch, they opened a whole new can of worms for users of Internet Explorer. Now anyone on the web can launch any program just by using the script that Sony used. Later, it was found that their root kit actually contained open source software, the LAME MP3 encoder/decoder to be exact. There’s also an article saying how Sony hired a Symantec ex-employee just so that they knew how to bypass the anti-virus softwares installed on your computer. Now they’re offering if you mail the cd back, you can get a new one without the root kit or download a copy from online and finally recalled all the “faulty” audio cds that were already out in the market.

The reason for this post wasn’t to bash Sony, they’ve already gotten quite a bashing already. I’m not saying they don’t deserve it, but I haven’t purchased audio CDs in so long, I don’t even care about all the tactics they try to pull anymore. What this post is about is that many believe Windows is to blame for this problem. I agree Windows should be part of the blame, but I want to talk about the auto-play feature. I personally hate the autoplay feature and many here would agree. Windows should have that disabled by default. However, I actually like the feature when you stick a CD or DVD in, it prompts you for action. How often do you stick a CD in and not planning to take an action on it? Autoplay should be an option in there and not automatically run by default. Just my 2 cents.

The Rules of Distraction (from /.) In sum, a relatively well-behaved class. In my other lectures, nearly half of the students spend time pecking away at laptops, and most of us aren’t just fact-checking the professor. This is the classroom of the future: Students use class time to read the Drudge Report, send e-mail, play Legend of Zelda, or update our profiles on Facebook.com. Last year, during a guest lecture by the estimable K. Anthony Appiah on W.E.B. DuBois and cosmopolitanism, I edited three articles for a campus magazine. But the distraction epidemic is really nothing new. Replace laptops with crumpled notes, and the classroom of the future looks a lot like the classroom of the past.

The article was quite interesting cause they actually linked the student’s surfing behavior with the grade the got in the course. This observation may be total hooey. But when Cornell University researchers outfitted classrooms with wireless Internet and monitored students’ browsing habits, they concluded, “Longer browsing sessions during class tend to lead to lower grades, but there’s a hint that a greater number of browsing sessions during class may actually lead to higher grades.” It seems a bit of a stretch to impute a causal relationship, but it’s certainly possible that the kind of brain that can handle multiple channels of information is also the kind of brain that earns A’s.

I’ve always thought of the laptop as a distraction tool for most people. But there are several key questions one must think about. 1. Would the student even have gone to class if he didn’t have a notebook? 2. Aren’t there any other “objects” that can be used for distraction too?

I’d like to split the 1st question into 2 groups. The 1st group consists of people that already ditch class *whistles*. Lectures were boring and there was no enticement to go to class, UNTIL they brought high speed WIFI. Now people from that group can have a reason to attend class, even though it’s not the best reason to attend, but it actually gets you to go to class in the 1st place. Although leaning by osmosis is nothing more than a myth, there are times when you would pay attention to the professor, either because you ran outta places to surf to or you’re waiting for something to finish downloading or maybe the professor just said a keyword that your brain reacted to. Either way, I’d still think it’s better than just sleeping through class. Though before I had a laptop, I would often fall asleep in class because lecture was boring. So I figured it was better to sleep at home in bed, then to go to class to sleep in the uncomfortable chairs.

The 2nd group are people who already attend class daily. Having a notebook would be most devastatious to those people. Although a few could do it, it is quite hard to multi-task trying to surf the web, chat with friends, and understand your professor at the same time. Listening to your professor is easy, it’s understanding the concepts he’s trying to push through that is hard. And that’s what’s lectures are all about, professors trying to get you to “understand” the concept, and not just “know of it”.

Some people noted that people who tend to surf the web, were those who already didn’t really bother going to class or if they did, didn’t pay much attention by doodling or falling asleep. I tend to think laptops make it easier to get distracted than falling asleep or doodling. Falling asleep requries a lot of courage, because you never really want to get caught and if you do, it’s quite embarassing. Sometimes it’s fun to look behind you and see al the bobbing heads. Doodling on the other hand isn’t as easy as it sounds. Creating your own content is a good excercise for your mind and requires. Using a laptop doesn’t require you to create your own content cause all the web content has already been created for you. It’s not embarassing either cause the professor can never see what your looking at, though the guys next to you and behind you can clearly see you’re playing Street Fighter 2.

I was discussing this issue with fuzzywuzzy and we moved on to classes the required mandatory attendance and the different methods professors use to get you to class. The easiest one woudl be to pass around a attendance sheet and have people sign it. I’ve actually had a professor that did that, but as fuzzywuzzy noted: I’d just rotate with my friends, and come in, sit in the back, wait for the sheet to get to me, sign in for everone and leave. Then there other professors who’s lecture complimented the readings, basically talked about stuff that was not in your readings and will be on the tests. Then there’s a reason to actually go to class, unless Black Lightning was auditing your class. Then you can just buy the notes from them. Finally, there’s the pop quiz idea. My EE20 professor stated in the beginning of the semester that there will be 4 pop quizes, so people actually came or tried to guess when the pop quiz days were. The 4th pop quiz never showed up and before we knew it, it was already finals. So the last pop quiz was purely not given so that people would still come to class. Fuzzywuzzy said people can easily escape that by having friends call them on their cell phones. I asked wouldn’t it be obvious then and the professor would probably catch them and give them a 0. He goes, then there’s the sneaky text message technique. hehe.

There were actually classes I attended every single class. This would be my Japanese classes and my Sandinavian Literature class. I’m not sure if it was because the class was small or if it was just really fun, bu I had actually read all my papers and books assigned. Did all my homework. I had a great time in 3 classes. CDMCC believes because the class size is small, it’s highly likely that the professor would pick on you to answer some questions and it’d be quite embarassing to not know the answer for a question about the previous night’s reading. Maybe it just coincidentally ended up that way, but I think if the class and the readings were boring, I’d probably end up not doing the work anyway and if I got picked on, I’d pull a move like Walt from The Squid and The Whale.

Got this peom from rayalome which I thought was hilarious. Any CS major would appreciate it. Well at least those who took data structures.

Algorhyme

I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity.
A tree which must be sure to span
So packets can reach every LAN.
First the Root must be selected
By ID it is elected.
Least cost paths from Root are traced
In the tree these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me.
Then bridges find a spanning tree.

— Radia Perlman