HIS not truly a bug, but rather an interesting occurrence, which has come up purely by coincidence. KasBar (part of KDE) gets snapshots of applications every 30 seconds by default. By doing so, it can display previews in a pseudo-taskbar that is visually rich. It gives a rough sketch of applications instead of text.

Earlier on today, I happened to hover over KasBar; subsequently I went away for a few minutes to prepare lunch. Here is what I saw when I came back. The preview had that ‘infinite mirror’ or picture-within-picture effect. Amusing or interesting at the least, no?

A screenshot was automatically grabbed in
my absence to produce some arbitrary ‘art’

EARING in mind that humour should not be taken as reflectant of true views, here are a couple of sexist jokes that crossed my mind recently. [smile] I feel as though I need to unburden myself, getting them off memory and onto (non-volatile) text:

• Last week I was approached by a girl with a SuSE laptop. Attractive one even (true story actually). I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her… machine.
• If she had run a set of servers, I’d say she has a nice rack.

It would have be easier to use somebody else’s jokes, but that would be pointless. Surely, such humour becomes a deterrent to women in the IT industry. I believe it to be quite derogatory, so I was honestly on the verge of retracting the post. To borrow somebody else’s joke (Linønut from nntp://comp.os.linux.advocacy):

 
Windows is like an asshole. You need to wipe it quite often.
 

An example output image from the simple text-to-sign generator

Check out this on-line church sign generator. You need only enter some text to get an image generated ‘on the spot’. Notice the nice embedment of the letters in the sign. This page was brought to my attention by Dr. Scott Tobkes.

Image/text generation tools:

• ASCII Banner Generator
• Cyborg Name Generator
• Polaroid Images

What would you be told if you stuck one of
those babies in a public cluster machine?

can assure you that technology might arouse your appetite. Have a look at the selection of USB drives that go on sale these days. Some time ago, data loss disasters were mentioned. Pets chewing media were among the main culprits. I imagine that making USB drives look like food warrents their arrival to a dog’s stomach. I’m off to an 8 AM lunch! Where has that USB pen gone?

A computer-generated face, which the BBC uses in a promotional trailer, has been dropped despite initial arguments in defence of it.

A promotional trailer for digital TV – which some viewers complained was “horrific” and “disturbingly psychotic” – has been dropped by the BBC.

The Faces campaign, which featured a giant animated head made up of smaller heads, generated 1,300 complaints.

Follow the links at the top and judge for yourself. I think the imagery might only be unnerving to children, unless one considers scenes from Silence of the Lambs.

A single slide from my talk on data recovery (XHTML)

Below is a snippet from an amusing BBC article.

One incident involved a dog that used a USB flash drive as a chew toy and almost ate all its owner’s data.

[...]

But top of the list is an old laptop containing key company data that was found filled with cockroach corpses.

It seems as though computer disasters and Darwin awards are becoming a golden source of joy to the computer literate. This could leverage tentions. People should never be humiliated for being unfamiliar with technology, but then again, this is a blog…

Similar items:

• Data Loss Humor
• iPod nano Crash Testing

ARNING: this item is unhealthy to self-proclaimed and avid Windows users. To me, it sometimes seems as though Windows is much like smoking. It takes a lot of your money and as the addiction grows (dependency on software), it requires you to assign a decent proportion of your wage to it. Eventually, in return, it punishes you despite its high cost.

The fact that a majority people stick to Windows does not bother me. They insist on using it and I respect that decision. Being told what is good for you is probably the toughest challenge. I continue to see my colleagues spending a great deal of their time doing things which are by all means unnecessary, e.g. filesystem maintenance and virus checks. There is also a perpetual penalty due to, e.g. trial version of software with disabled features, O/S collapses and so forth.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, some people are able to get their work done without worrying at all about these man-made problems, which inherently are inexistent in computing. Finally, returning to my point above, Windows users often punish themselves, but no deliberately so. The least we can do is offer redemption from the habit and prove that better ways exist.