Woot has the InFocus ScreenPlay 4805 DLP Projector up for $700 again today. Pretty decent price for a very nice home theater projector that can be hooked to your computer to play WoW at 120 inches. :-) Only up for today, after that the link will point to, well, whatever woot is selling that day.

For some time now, we’ve been using the services of a company called Gomez to monitor our public websites. They do an excellent job for the corporate customer, monitoring from multiple locations around the world, and notifying by email, pager, and text message of any slow performance or outages. Lots of things are configurable (severity, maintenance blackouts, etc). They offer great historical reports we can use to track patterns, the IT managers can use to say “no, we aren’t ‘down all the time’, we had a single outage of 3 minutes on thursday, and a 30 second network glitch three weeks ago tomorrow”; and the execs can use to say “yes, we have 99.995% uptime on our servers, we’re working on that last .004% now” or whatever it is execs say. Gomez is great, and we love it. Only one problem. It’s outside. It can’t work for any of our internal servers.

Now, we can use the built in probing mechanism of Coldfusion MX 7 (love it, btw, great upgrade!), but it’s not as sophisticated. It also has some issues… it can only email one group of people if there’s a problem with *any* of the probes, it can’t text message or page (unless the phone/pager supports an email format), and its logging is very, very rudimentary. It also cannot handle more complicated scripts, such as Log in to this application, submit this form data, if the results do not contain X OR the results are Y, fail and report”.

So… what can? I’m hoping one or more of you loyal FG readers will have some ideas. If it’s something that can run from Windows 2003 server, all the better… we have a few linux hobbyists in shop, but no real experts.

You’re mad at the boss you’d like to bite his head off… or that hot little number down the street looks so good in that short, short skirt you could just eat her up. But hey, that’s messy, and you might get caught. Not to worry… now there’s Hufu! Yes, that’s Hufu, the brand new creation of Hufu Inc., a tofu product with the taste and feel of authentic human flesh! Designed originally for anthropology students who wanted to really ‘get into it,’ this wild new product has found a much larger audience. Soylent Green may be people, but Hufu is 100% pure non-flesh vegan safe soy product. Feed your inner cannibal… without breaking the law.

Now, I’m not sure if this is a hoax site or legit, and I won’t be ordering any Hufu to find out, but man… some funny-slash-sickening reading. For example…

If you’ve never had human flesh before, think of the taste and texture of beef, except a little sweeter in taste and a little softer in texture. Contrary to popular belief, people do not taste like pork or chicken.

Although… I’m seriously tempted to order some for all those PETA jackasses who annoy me, especially the one who always leaves the flyers showing cartoon animals at a butcher shop ordering human parts…. Anyway, uh, well, I’d tell you to ‘enjoy’ but you probably won’t. :-)

CNN is running an interesting article/review about Helen Greiner, one of the founders of iRobot, the robotics company that makes the Roomba, as well as an assortment of robots used by the military and rescue workers; and that oddball pyramid rover they built to explore a shaft in Cheops which made news a couple of years ago. It’s a company worth watching, full of very bright minds. And hey, robots, cool.

Also, a nice interview with Colin Angle, the company CEO can be found here.

Geeks.com (formerly known as ComputerGeeks.com) is running a special on a head mounted virtual reality display guaranteed to give you an immersive gaming/movie watching experience and remove all possibility of your DNA entering the gene pool through any conventional means. Only $117 if you use code GEEKVRLCD (offer expires 3 June 2005 or when they run out of people who wish to develop exceptionally strong necks)

This very funny (but obviously at least partially staged) video (including the guild’s ventrillo chat overlay) has been going around some World of Warcraft forums. In it, a guild party is preparing to attempt a high level area called the Rookery, where dragon eggs are everywhere and getting too close will make them hatch, unhappy and hungry. At the back of the rookery, one can spawn an event that leads to a boss attack; that boss drops a set of armor which is helpful for healers. Unfortunately, one of their members forgot to take his ritalin. We know him by his battle cry… LEEEEROOOOOOOOOOOOYYY JENKINSSSSSS.

There’s also a techno remix mp3, which allows you to bring that astounding collection of colorful metaphors and resounding battle cry to your sound device of choice. Both are highly recommended downloads, especially for WoW players.

Back in December, I posted on the very cool QX5 Microscope, by Digital Blue. It’s built for kids, but alot of fun for adults, too. Yesterday a friend who’d bought one of those after I showed it to her mentioned to me that she was getting her son another very cool science toy, and I did a little research. This thing is nice.

It’s made by Discovery Channel. They call it the Discovery DNA Explorer Kit. Yes, that’s right. DNA. You can have your very own DNA lab for less than $100. And this isn’t just a toy… you can extract and map real DNA. Pretty cool, huh? Includes all the tools you need to grow that extra arm you’ve always wanted… well… maybe not, but all the tools you need to perform a variety of interesting experiments that help you (or, yeah, wait, your kid, this is for kids, too) learn more about genetics.

You can read more about it in this Wired Magazine writeup from a couple of years ago. I think the kit has been updated a bit since then, but it gives a good general overview.

The Discovery DNA Explorer Kit is available at Amazon for $79.95. Instructions for cloning Fluffy not included.

“So the other day, I was surfing this website, and all of a sudden, every time I start my computer, it launches all these windows with ads and stuff”

Time to get out Spybot S&D, Ad-aware, PC-Cillin, and the rest? Don’t you hate how Windows machines get all those… what? oh. um. Sorry, that was a mac.

My iBook weeps at the thought, but it looks like Tiger’s Dashboard may be playing understudy for ActiveX. You can read more in this article from Wired.

Happy Birthday, Pac Man!

Hard to believe it, but Pac Man is 25 years old. CNN Money has a nice retrospective article, looking at the legacy of Pac Man… from the national shortage of Yen coins in japan upon its release, to the upcoming Pac Man World 3. By the way, did you know that when you hit level 22, power pellets don’t change the ghosts anymore?

A coworker sent me a link to this great video of a choir doing a medley of old Nintendo music, a capella. Gotta love the jumping Mario guy. I don’t know the story behind this… anyone have any more information?

Fairly large video download, by the way. And obviously, it has sound. So maybe you’ll want to save it for home, not the office.

B:Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?
P:I think so, Brain, but isn’t that why they invented tube socks.

Always loved Pinky and the Brain. Here’s a great site with a large collection of great lines. Read it, and TAKE OVER THE WORLD!

Sure, you guys don’t use AOL… but your parents probably do. Or a friend or neighbor. And maybe you’ve noticed a few less “please fix my computer” calls from them, lately? I know I have… til I got a call from a friend of mine. She’d used the recent AOL Autofix software to resolve some connection issue she was having. It fixed them. And it fixed her bank account, as she discovered a few weeks later, when she received a phone bill with $1,500 in long distance charges… and for a local number, to boot. AOL’s “Fix” was to add a 1 and the area code to her *local* access number. But according to this and this and undoubtedly more, Autofix doesn’t just stop there… it’s delighted to add long distance numbers right into your connection settings. AOL insists it can’t. I watched it happen. My friend got the charges reversed. Yours may not. Be aware. :-)

The world is a beautiful place. At least, for Everquest II gamers. Sony has announced that they’ve added a new command to the game: /pizza — this command will let you order pizza from pizza hut, through the game itself. There are future plans to allow you to bill the food directly to your EQ account. Sadly, you must pay with real money, not fifty million pp per slice.

If World of Warcraft added this (maybe with Papa John’s so no conflict of interest for the Hut) I would definitely use it… at least once every week I have to tab out to a browser to order.

Now if they’d just deliver to your desk instead of the door….

I knew my day was going too well. This balances it out. Maybe it’s common sense, but I’d never thought of it. CNN has an article about the “Evil Twin” attack. The basic gist is Joe Random takes a wifi point, dumps it on the same channel, and with the same SSID as a public one, but with a boosted signal and more sensitive antenna. No one notices any difference… but all that unencrypted data’s getting logged for Joe Random to dig through later… and the next day, he can move his box somewhere else (or not).

Sure, you can stop this by only connecting to encrypted boxes.. but that’s not going to help most people. Not good, and I can’t really see any fix for it. This sucks, particularly if you’ve put alot of effort into setting up free wifi for your apartment complex like a certain FG editor.

sweet! I wouldn’t trade my (free) ipod for it, but I might get one anyway!

Oh, and if you don’t get the title, you don’t remember the ‘85 bears and the superbowl shuffle. My name is iPod, and I like to dance… heh

The new Mac mini webpage is up… I’m gonna get me one of them…

So what is it? It’s a $499 headless mac, a little bigger around than a CD, and about 3 inches tall (as you see above). No mouse or keyboard or monitor. If they can just come up with some decent home theater stuff for it, it’s going right in my living room, and maybe my dad’s home theater, too.