textiplication.com

Here’s Wordle, if you haven’t seen it before.

Not sure whether they tell you anything, but here they are:

Barack:

Biden:

McCain:

Palin:

Actually, I really like it. It’s way, way faster than Firefox 3 or IE7 or 8, for initial launches and individual page loads.
Though I made fun of the comic book, it does cover a lot more info than I remember Mozila or the IE team ever releasing on the architectures of their browsers – and Opera? Forget it. They cover a lot of interesting points for the user, the developer, and the security guy. I’m impressed by all of it.

Google Chrome is, though, a web browser, which means that it is inevitably a huge and complex piece of software riddled with security defects. Since it’s new, we don’t know what any of them are, though! They are there, though, and they’ll jump out at us pretty rapidly.
Here’s one, via Zero Day and Evil Fingers.

“An issue exists in how chrome behaves with undefined-handlers in chrome.dll version 0.2.149.27. A crash can result without user interaction. When a user is made to visit a malicious link, which has an undefined handler followed by a ’special’ character, the chrome crashes with a Google Chrome message window “Whoa! Google Chrome has crashed. Restart now?”

This is bad enough we’ll see it patched really soon. The problem isn’t just that a malicious URL can crash the browser, it’s the risk that the crash could lead to a stack overflow. They’re using ASLR – address space layout randomization – which makes that kind of attack harder to mount.

The second issue Zero Day cites was a big flaming red flag when it showed up in Safari – the ability of a malicious site to drop files onto the desktop. The Google proof-of-concept exploit may not seem as bad as the Safari carpet-bombin issue, since the user currently has to OK the desktop file save. Aviv Raff’s exploit is an interesting combination of old attacks on aging components incorporated into Chrome and a brand-new vulnerability fresh from Black Hat 2008.

SOOO…
I’d continue to use Firefox for your everyday casual browsing needs. Chrome won’t be safe for a while yet – no new browser could be. IE7 isn’t bad, and IE8 will be pretty good.

It may sound more like the name of an early Elephant 6 band – cf. Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control – but it’s a wonderful little museum in Orleans, MA. We went there a few weeks ago during our one week vacation on Cape Cod, and for me, at least, it was the height of the trip.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable connected the US with London, although it took several tries for it to be successful. The French wanted to have their own nearly-instantaneous link with the US that didn’t run through London – diplomatic concerns, don’t you know – and laid their own cable from France to St. Pierre et Miquelon – French-owned islands off the coast of Newfoundland – and from there down the Atlantic coast to Orleans. The French built a telegraph station in a not-so-big house by the water and operated it for over seventy years, apparently upgrading, repairing, patching, and reinventing it on the fly. Much of that equipment has remained in the house since the station shut down in 1959, and it’s now lovingly maintained by a number of elderly gentlemen who run the museum.

The equipment is beautiful. Apologies for the quality of some of these pictures – the only camera I had with me was my iPhone.

They let you use some of the equipment! My favorite thing in the museum is the Kleinschmidt Perforator:

Mr Kleinschmidt – quite an important guy, really- took a standard typewriter and added a tape-puncher on top. Anyone who could type could be a telegrapher; in Thomas Edison’s youth, a skilled telegrapher was a highly-paid professional. Edison himself was one of the best in the world, in fact. By the 20th century, though, innovation had stolen the luster from the telegraphy profession, replacing it with wonderful objects like this.

And this:

This is a telegraph transcriber. They didn’t have felt-tip pens, of course, so they had to invent low-friction pens. Dead center in this picture you can see a tiny white whisker. It’s actually a glass tube about a millimeter wide. In this transcriber, the tip of the glass tube sat a mil or so distant from the paper, and the ink would be drawn to the paper by static electricity generated by this:

Lovely, isn’t it? Unfortunately, the static-charged contactless pen only worked in low humidity. On Cape Cod, you really don’t ever get low humidity, so this experimental transcriber only worked in winter.

Here’s a working transcriber:

By working, I mean they actually let you work it! The low green box to the right is a punched-tape reader; you feed in the tape you punch on the Kleinschmidt Perforator, and the signal travels six inches to the transcriber, which as you see here is currently using a ballpoint pen instead of the incredibly fragile glass pipettes. The transcriber produces an EEG-like trace of the Morse signal, which you can easily read if you have a) learned your Morse cold and b) further, learned to read Morse as an EEG-like high-low voltage trace instead of dots and dashes. Probably only the ancient gentlemen who operate the museum possess these skills today.

The cable carried direct current over two thousand miles! At the end of its transit the signal was extremely weak, so much of the energy of the inventor team was engaged in reading or amplifying the faint voltage fluctuations. Here’s a real gem:

There are only two of these babies left in the whole world. The Heurtley Magnifier used two pairs of platinum wire to form a Wheatstone bridge, with one of the four wires heated ever-so-slightly by the signal current. The slight temperature variations produced enough resistance in the detector wire to control a larger current through the bridge. Vibration was a problem – they couldn’t receive a signal on that one afternoon every couple of weeks when the hardware store across town had its coal shipment dumped into the basement.

If you’re on the Cape, I highly recommend this tiny little museum. Tended with love by men who rescued the building and equipment from destruction, it’s a rare opportunity to understand the technology constraints of an earlier era, and appreciate the astounding feats of engineering on which the modern world is built.

Everybody’s pretty excited about it. 

I could say a lot about how people are overreacting [not everybody though], how it’s the first browser that leverages the principle of least privilege, how optimistic I am that Gears would be worth using if it was built in, and so on.

But what strikes me is that…

To promote it, they’ve written what is clearly the most boring graphic novel OF ALL TIME!

My six year old son is very scared from the movie all the neighborhood kids watched tonight. He’s lying in bed with the covers over his head, and I’ve been lying on the floor next to his bed for forty-five minutes.
Bored out of my mind, I decided to blog! I think that I’ve discovered the sluggishly-beating heart of the user-generated content phenomenon.
What’s the old saying? Art is what happens when you’re waiting to do something else?
Something like that.

You know when you have something you don’t use very often, but you feel better knowing that it’s there, and miss it when it’s gone?

I’ve been looking for a replacement for the tragically missing Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society blog ever since I discovered it was missing.  PAKS used to post pictures of weird Victoriana – collections of bones, weird medical instruments, things like that.  I mentioned it to Mary Robinette Kowal at Readercon, but discovered on returning to it that it was gone, deleted, kaput.  So today I discovered oobject.com, which is, in its own words, “kind of like a Billboard for gadgets.” 

Here’s a list of “DIY Frankenstein lab items.”

Vintage fans.

Beautiful airports.

Extraordinary armor.  Not to be missed.

Discussion of Farah Mendelsohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy

Gregory Frost, Ellen Asher, Greer Gilman, Sarah Micklem, John Clute

Portal Quest – Lion, Witch, Wardrobe (fantastic reached through a transition, fantastic does not leak back into the real world)

Entry, quest, discovery.  Can seem immersive, but the important part is the transition.  LOTR is a a portal quest, because of the hobbits leaving the Shire.

Immersive – Most epic fantasy.  Fantastic element is explicit from the start

Frost quotes M John Harrison – “The counter-trajectory of the counter-liminal…” for instance, in Howl’s Moving Castle, when the fantastical characters travel to the real world, allowing satire or other commentary on the real world

Intrusion – the fantastic bursts into the everyday world, e.g. horror, but in general without a celebration of the fantastic, and driven by the desire to return to the real world.

Ellen Asher: Can there be positive fantasy? Strange and Norrell? Mortal Love?

Liminal – Little, Big.  Joe Nathan’s story “But this is Tuesday?” Opposite of the quest fantasy.  Turn of the Screw.  Crucial element is that what is fantastic to the protagonist is not fantastic to the reader.  Purpose is to disconcert the reader. 

Greer Gilman – Pattern/Ground fantasy.  We don’t always know what framework we’re in.

Immersive = Like a Pre-Raphaelite painting in which every element is equally brilliant and important

Liminal = like impressionist painting? Or like a Vermeer in which the only numinous element is the light?

Clute – the most modern of these categories, rare in classical literature?

What does she mean by equipoise and irony?  Todorov has fantasy defined as hesitation between the fantastical and the mundane?

The last category: Subverting the Taxonomy.

Hal Duncan’s Vellum – a liminal fantasy in the immersive mode?

Hope Mirlees, Lud-in-the-mist one generation on – magic entered the world some time ago, some still resist it.

What about most urban fantasy – LKH, etc, where the everyday world is full of fantastic elements ab initio?

Clute – applicability of structural analysis to fantasy – no point in looking for exceptions to analyses like this, the value is in the utility of the distinctions drawn.  The difficulty of criticism is in finding positive value in any of the ideas of others.

E.g., the idea that portal quest fantasy is imperialist.  [What does imperialist mean in this context?]

Clute: Taproot text – a text belonging to the fuzzy set of fantasy

Finis.

The End.

Finished my novel again.  This time it’s 94K words long, up from 72 thousand the last time.

via Maureen’s Blog.

You know how sometimes you take one line somebody says out of context, and it’s really funny?