Don Reisinger at CNET posted an angry blog entry yesterday titled “A tech lover’s call to arms”. It’s the usual hand-wringing over various and sundry attempts to regulate/control/limit technology, ranging from the RIAA’s and MPAA’s feckless crusade against the scourge of piracy to the seemingly endless procession of politicians banning violent video games “for the children”.

There’s been a dearth of tech posts around here lately, but that’s about to change.

I’ve previously mentioned the Alfa AWUS036S USB WLAN adapter that I got a while back for OpenBSD wardriving. It’s been reliable for that purpose, but lately I’ve been interested in using it with aircrack-ng to crack WPA pre-shared keys.

I just read a TechCrunch post on companies that should exist but dont, which reminded me of an idea I had years ago during the dawn of the internet age, to use Internet technologies to farm out translation and transcription work to low-wage areas, not just India and China but the rural United States, etc.

One of the companies mentioned in the post is a podcast transcription service. It occurs to me that the new Amazon web service, Amazon Mechanical Turk, could be the key to implementing just such a service.

When AOL first added the ‘AIM bots’ to my account, I received the intro IMs via Gaim and dismissed them as another purile attempt by AOL to monetize their IM service.

I commented recently about how I don’t get Google Base. I read a post by Russel Beattie wherein he describes his epiphany about how this will all work.

Today I learned of a new Google endeavor, Google Analytics. It’s basically traffic analysis software, mostly targeted to advertisers (in fact, it’s free to AdWords customers), but also useful to bloggers and other amateur content authors. Since I’m not an AdWords customer, I’m limited to 5M page views (per month, presumably); that leaves me with a margin of barely 4.999 million.

My co-worker and boss, Bill, posted a concise, insightful article on the skill continuum of IT developers. I worked on the same project with him for a couple years, and feel like we’ve both explored pretty much the entire range of the spectrum.

A further wrinkle in the IT development experience (as in all multi-human activities) is along an orthogonal axis in humanspace: personality. Sometimes the ‘detrimenal’ and ‘useless’ devs are sociable, pleasant, likable as people, perhaps even ingratiating. Similarly, the ‘good’ and ‘heoric’ devs are occassionally insufferable assholes, or more likely emotionally stunted borderline-autistic introverts (like, uh, me). I personally have fired a borderline plugger/good developer due to a toxic personality, and I’ve knowm a couple pluggers who really needed firing, but were such decent people that the economically obvious termination decision was not so clearcut.

For roughly a year now, I've been tweaking the specs on a 1TB file server I keep meaning to build. When I started the project, I was confined to artemis' meager ~30GB RAID storage. I added a 120GB RAID 1 volume running off a Highpoint RocketRaid PATA RAID controller connected to aragorn, which helped a little. Unfortunately, aragorn ate shit and died, and one of the 120GB drives in the RAID array seems damaged, as I can't duplicate the primary drive onto the secondary now that I've moved the controller and drives over to boromir.

I just got an email from VMWare announcing the new "VMWare Player":http://www.vmware.com/download/player. As the name implies, it allows anyone who downloads the free player to run virtual machines created w/ VMWare Workstation.