Richard Bejtlich highlights many interesting points from the recent ;login: article "Standard Deviations of the Average System Administrator".

System administrators have a surprising amount in common with electricians. Both professions require intensive training. Both professions are plagued by amateurs who believe (erroneously) that they can do a good job as a professional. Both professions are based upon a shared body of knowledge.

But electricians can call upon several resources that system administrators lack. Electricians have a legally mandated mentorship/apprenticeship program for training novices. They have a well-defined and generally-accepted profession of job grades, from apprentice to journeyman to master. They advance in grade partly through legally mandated apprenticeship and partly through legally mandated certifications. These certifications test for knowledge of a set of standards for practice—again, mandated by law. The regulations are almost universally accepted as essential to assuring quality workmanship, function, and safety.

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from www.webware.com:

Mozilla CEO John Lilly on Tuesday waxed philosophical about the release of Google's new Web browser, Chrome, despite it signaling an attempt by the search giant--and Mozilla's major financier--to become its biggest competitor.
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Mozilla and Google have had a long and very fruitful relationship. Google is the default search engine on the Mozilla Firefox browser, and the company pays Mozilla large sums for the privilege: $56 million of the $66 million that Mozilla Corp. made in 2006.

But Lilly, writing in his blog, said he welcomed the competition posed by Google. Lilly said Mozilla would continue its financial relationship with Google until 2011 and would continue to work with the search giant on technical collaborations such as crash reports system Breakpad.

Paul Kim, vice president of marketing for Mozilla, said that Google staff would be allowed to continue to contribute to the Mozilla Foundation's projects. "As a 100 percent open-source project, we welcome contributions to Firefox from everyone," he said.

I think it's quite possible what we are looking at here, from a business standpoint, is google covering its bases in the way that only a giant corporation with money to burn can. Recently we heard that google and mozilla agreed to continue for the time being their business arrangement where google massively funds firefox and firefox makes google the default search engine in the firefox browser.

It seems plausible that what google is doing with Chrome is basically saying to firefox: we have an alternative browser we can market and spend the money on.  i.e. they are covering their bases -- their goal is to dominate the search space so they make their advertising money -- if that means buying their way into the top browser then they will do that, but what if firefox demands too much money or changes their mind and decides to use a different search engine as their default (they can't really change search engines even if they wanted to now because they need the google money).

Chrome may be the shot across the bow from google warning firefox not to think about trying to mess with having google as the default search engine.  So basically my guess is google won't push/market the new browser too hard as long as firefox stays in line..

But the threat will be that if firefox ever tries to stop partnering with google then google will go all out against firefox.

If true it's not exactly happy news. Or maybe i am just being paranoid and conspiratorial.

Basically a simple alarm clock with a different tab/alarm for each day.  Looks like a simple solution that could be just the thing some people might need.

College Alarm Clock 1.06 is a personal Alarm Clock for your PC. Features a 7-Day Format so that you can wake up earlier/later on different days of the week. Save/Load your weekly schedule to your hard drive. It will play any media file stored on your PC or LAN. You must have a player installed for each media file you wish to play (e.g., Winamp for mp3's or CD's, media player for avi's, Real Player for .rm's) Created by a college student for college students... in other words, freeware.

http://www.geocities...cac/screenshots.html

Here a simple command line utility.

BatteryRun - Run commands when the power plug is connected or disconnected.

Command line:
  BatteryRun.exe "<connect command>" "<disconnect command>"
Example:
  BatteryRun.exe "ding.wav" "calc.exe"

You'll find the downloads and more info at 1 Hour Software by Skrommel.

For multiple actions, I suggest making an AutoHotkey script.

Skrommel

Right now, what you're probably thinking is something along the lines of "What the heck is Toribash?"

Well, it's actually pretty hard to explain, but i shall try. Toribash is a turn-based fighting game, where you control a ragdolls joints and set them to do whatever when you press space, or in case of on-line play, when the time runs out.

One thing that really makes Toribash stand out among others isn't only that it's an indie game, but that it's also entirely physics based, with no pre-rendered moves or anything. Everything is rendered real-time. One should think that this would be enormously taxing for ones CPU, right? But this isn't true. While the early versions of Toribash was very unoptimized, the new versions run incredibly smooth, considering the amount of calculations done.

And you know how people say that the best things in the world are free, right? Well, guess what? Toribash is free! Ever since version 3.0, Nabi Studios, the creators of the game, has removed the 20$ price tag from the game, and now they earn their money by charging for many kinds of optional services.

Toribash even features its own little economy system, using a virtual currency called ToriCredits. These ToriCredits (Or TC as they're usually called) can be used to buy many different things in the ToriShop, like colors for your ragdoll (Or Tori), custom textures, colored trails and so on.

I stumbled on the NewLine article on wikipedia today during some random browsing, and I never expected it to be so fascinating.

It shows some interesting history, and how many different Operating Systems have different control characters to represent a new line, and for different reasons.

There is also some confusion as to whether newlines terminate or separate lines. If a newline is considered a separator, there will be no newline after the last line of a file. The general convention on most systems is to add a newline even after the last line, i.e., to treat newline as a line terminator. Some programs have problems processing the last line of a file if it isn't newline terminated. Conversely, programs that expect newline to be used as a separator will interpret a final newline as starting a new (empty) line. This can result in a different line count being reported for the file, but is otherwise generally harmless.

wow... I never even thought about it that way. I guess it can be interpreted both as a separator and as a terminator. I can see how some interoperability problems could occur. This is one of those things that, when I really think about it, makes me realize that it's a small miracle that software as we have it today works at all! - When programs can't even agree on what a new line is, or even how to treat it.

It doesn't stop there, the problem persists on our internets:

Most textual Internet protocols (including HTTP, SMTP, FTP, IRC and many others) mandate the use of ASCII CR+LF (0x0D 0x0A) on the protocol level, but recommend that tolerant applications recognize lone LF as well. In practice, there are many applications that erroneously use the C newline character '\n' instead (see section Newline in programming languages below). This leads to problems when trying to communicate with systems adhering to a stricter interpretation of the standards; one such system is the qmail MTA that actively refuses to accept messages from systems that send bare LF instead of the required CR+LF.