A day by the SEAside Part 2

Mr S: Hey Mr I, your gardener told me yesterday that you can't sell me those nice round pebbles to decorate my garden. I thought only the soil was not for sale.

Mr I: What?! He told you that? That is ridiculous, soil and round pebbles are two unrelated matters. Looks like I have to reshuffle my gardening committee. This is nothing to worry about. You can still buy my nice pebbles.

*Seven minutes later*

Mrs S: Did you see that? It looks like over at Mr I's they have replaced their "No Pebbles for sale" poster!

Mr S: That's great now we will have enough round pebbles to decorate the sides of our pond.

Mrs S: But they have placed a new sign with the words "Pebbles for sale! Except for Ss. By order, the Gardening Committee".

Mr S: *Groans* How perplexing!

Emails for all to see

Can you imagine your own private emails being posted for everyone to see? That is what is happening at this site that covers an update of NASA's astronaut love triangle saga. I always thought it was normal to quote some relevant parts of the email being used as evidence, however they just placed the entire email online as a photo. What is worse is that you can even order the "photo" for a fee!

Customized Homepages

For those that are not already making use of a customized homepage, now is a good time to start. A customized homepage puts together a host of web widgets from the vendor (e.g. Google) in any way you like. These widgets can be functional tools (i.e. calendar, translator) or news aggregators. The latter being the most useful. The format of the homepage will be saved by the vendor and logging in anywhere in the world will present you with your unique homepage catered to suit your needs. Below is an example customized homepage using a Google account. Just visit this link to begin a customized homepage.

This is precisely what the new buttons "+ Add to Google" and "+ MY Yahoo" on the right are for. These will add this blog's RSS feed into a aggregator widget on your customized homepage (Google or Yahoo respectively). Alternatively, the "RSS" button will allow you to add a live bookmark on your browser or RSS reader. However, browsers are as mobile as the device they reside on...

Fish Nets

There are fish nets with big holes and fish nets with small holes. Fish nets with big holes catch only big fish, allowing the smaller fish of no interest to pass through. However they are weak, and may tear easily, leaving the fisherman with nothing. Fish nets with small holes are strong. However, they catch everything, including things that are not fish.

Decent writing to NTFS partitions in Linux

Been waiting for this for a long time. Basically writing to New Technology File System (NTFS) in Linux was considered unsafe. This is due to the fact that the open source developers had to reverse engineer Microsoft's NTFS file system. Finally there is a driver that can write to NTFS safely. It is released here. Not all features of NTFS are ready yet but there is one interesting thing -- you can now install Linux into an NTFS partition. In other words, you can access the Linux partitions from Windows in a dual boot system instead of installing some 3rd party ext2 and ext3 (file systems that Linux commonly uses) drivers for Windows.