2004 Presidential Prediction Poll

Bernie at One-Trick CyberPony has a 2004 Presidential Prediction Poll going. You can enter the contest here and results so far are here. The contest is open until January 31, even though a winner can't (obviously) be announced for 11 months.

I (heart) my Targus mini-mouse

I've spent the last few days in Tom's office rather than my own, as we've been frantically trying to finish a project together. Because of this, instead of using my usual big honking infinite number of buttons trackball, I've been using the Targus Ultra Mini Optical Mouse that Amazon threw in when I bought my laptop. And I have to say, I really like this little thing. It's got a great feel to it and it works like a champ. The way the cord automatically winds up means that it doesn't get tangled with all the other USB devices in my bag, and of course, especially with Mac OS X, all I had to do was plug it in for it to work.

If you're looking for a mini-mouse to take on the road, or just plain don't have a lot of space on your desk, I give this one a big thumbs up.

Google ads, again

If you look all the way down on the right on this page, you'll see the Google ads. And sometimes, they're the funniest part of this site, so they're worth checking out. Right now, we're getting served a bunch of "Turkey fryer" ads, just because Tom pointed to the Underwriters Laboratories fryer mishaps page last week.

Let's see if this post can bring back the alpacas again!

Toysight Games

This is cool: Toysight Games.

Toysight is a set of fun games and toys to play using your iSight or similar firewire camera created by Strange Flavour, the authors of the award winning 'Airburst'

Using a system of object and motion detection to track your position, Toysight allows you to control buttons, sliders and perform gestures on the screen, putting you right in the gameplay, and also giving you a bit of a workout.

Author Wil Gets Called Up to the Majors

Big congratulations to our new colleague and fellow O'Reilly author Wil Wheaton, who announced today that his book Dancing Barefoot was picked up by O'Reilly for broader publication and distribution, and that he'll have two other books coming from ORA next year. He should remember that if he comes up to Sebastopol, we're just a few miles away. Did we mention that there's an award-winning microbrewery here?

Opus online

I hate the idea of subscribing to the massive Sunday paper just so I can read Opus, so I'm thrilled that this site is putting them online. I don't expect it to last long, so I gotta say that I really wish that Breathed would put up a for-pay site so that I could read it legally.

2003 Meme map

2003: An eventful year is a flow chart of this year's memes.

Mac OS X Unwired on its way?

If you go to this page on Amazon, it says that Mac OS X Unwired will ship in one to two months. If you go to this page, though, it supposedly ships within one to two days.

Given that we got one author copy last week (and successfully managed to keep it out of my mother's grasp—whew!), I'm betting the latter is more likely.

And if you want a sneak peek at the companion Web site, all you have to do is click...

Browser-Based Cryptography Tools

JavaScrypt: Browser-Based Cryptography Tools.

Catching Script Kiddies

This will only make sense to the truly geeky among you, but I got a good laugh out of it: how to catch script kiddies.