Honestly, DynDNS if this is how you’re going to word your emails from now on I’m not surprised your communication skills are poor. I also noticed that every link that was posted (including the youtube and twitter plugs) routed through a 3rd party marketing firm, SendLabs, which just told me that DynDNS probably had little involvement with this email anyway. So no, Dyn, Inc., I will not be helping you and if you’d like to communicate with me as part of our vendor-customer relationship; please write me an email yourself and not through a marketing firm. They’re not cool and did an atrocious job.

You're not that funny

[Source email

In a nutshell, the Pale Moon Project is a custom build of Firefox from source that is optimized for 32-bit Windows environments.  The biggest changes between the two projects are Pale Moon does not support ActiveX or ActiveX scripting, any accessibility features and parental controls  nor does it support Intel Processors pre Pentium IV or the AMD Athlon Thunderbird. There are builds for Athlon XP/MP processors, but they aren’t updated on the same schedule as the main Pale Moon project. Furthermore, Pale Moon is only built for stable release builds of Firefox and may skip some incremental releases if they aren’t deemed significant enough. If you want a full rundown of the technical specs (including some performance tests purporting to a 1.25x increase in javascript speed) be sure to read the project’s technical page.

I’ve been running Pale Moon for the last few weeks and I haven’t noticed any problems with it. It  loaded all of my plugins and also correctly located my existing Firefox profile. The browser starts faster than Firefox did and websites seem to load a bit faster, but your mileage may vary. If you’re a on a Windows machine and are unable to use Firefox, I’d suggest giving Pale Moon a try. If you have an alternative you think is better, let me know about it in the comments.

via flickr

Imagine for a moment, it’s mid morning and you’re standing in a McDonalds wracked with guilt. Do you appease your intestinal lusting with a piece of midday sustenance or do you pounce upon a breakfast bite to better remind yourself of what could have been had you slept in? Desperate you look at the clock, time is running out. If you wait too long your decision will be made and breakfast will have died by the wayside.  But dammit, you still yearn for the comfort a breakfast sandwich brings even as you acquiesce to the sustainability of the ubiquitous burger. And then it hits you: the Mc10:35!

This magnificent piece of culinary composition is at its core a McDouble and an Egg McMuffin. It’s creation is even simpler. Once both items are procured, you carefully extricate the egg and canadian bacon from the McMuffin and add it to the top of the McDouble. It’s bliss in a bun giving you that last little bit of morning sunshine coupled with a nice meaty kick to get you through the day rest of your day. Now, seeing as it’s 10:20, I for one am off to the Golden Arches.

[via Consumerist]

*Picture courtesy of Consumerist since I work for the Man and have no access to a camera.

We can add another item to the long list of amazing things that I wish I thought of and yet have no time to ever accomplish. Patrick Acton of Iowa has completed an incredibly detailed match stick model of Minas Tirith. His labor of love began in April of 2007 and culminated last week on the 15th of February. He used 420,000 matchsticks to create the city and another 24,000 wooden blocks for Mount Mindolluin (the mountain the city is built into). You can catch more pictures of the model over at Matchstick Marvels and I must say, they’re pretty awesome.

[via Nerdesque]

After reading mostly good reviews of Microsoft’s app I was interested to see what all the hullabaloo was about, but I haven’t been able to and there’s a good reason for that. I can’t install the damn thing. Why you ask? It’s because my iPod touch is so ancient it doesn’t have a microphone. Yes that’s right, it won’t install because I failed a mic check. But wait, take a look at Microsoft’s own screenshot below:

Bing Mobile

Yup, you saw that correctly. That’s a search box. Whoever is using this app to find thai restaurants in Boston isn’t speaking into their phone or newer iPod. They’re doing it the old fashioned way. The web 1.0 way. The same antiquated way I would on my iPod touch. They typed it.

What makes matters worse is that Google’s mobile app, which Microsoft is attempting to thrust out of the limelight with Bing, doesn’t have this problem. In the settings section of Google’s app, the option for voice search is grayed out with a message stating that it is not available and the app is still 100% effective. It’s just missing a few bells and whistles.

The question now is why did Microsoft couple the voice technology so closely into their app that it can’t work on the mic-less iPods? It seems once again that Microsoft is striving too hard to battle Google without fully thinking out the solution to the problem. As a direct result, they’ve failed a basic tenet of software engineering: KISS, or “keep it simple, stupid!” and that’s what really grinds my gears.

In a normal environment, a carcass gets cold in 8 to 36 hours losing an average rate of 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit per hour. However, the ice world of Hoth is not an average environment. The Star Wars database lists that Hoth reaches nightly temperatures of -60 F. In a frigid, sub-zero environment, body heat can be lost almost 32 times faster. This means a Tauntaun’s body heat could drop almost 51.2 F every hour. Considering that Han Solo’s Tauntaun died of severe hypothermia even before it was cut open with Luke’s light saber, one could assume it’s core body temperature was already well below normal. The problem for Luke is if the Tauntaun’s body temperature reaches freezing point those once toasty guts, blood, and assorted alien goo, will in fact become a frozen coffin. If the Tauntaun died of cardiac arrest due to hypothermia with an average body temperature of 75 F (23 C), and if Tauntaun blood freezes at 28.4 F (-2 C), then Han has roughly 56 minutes to set up a shelter before Luke once again is in danger of losing his life in the barren wasteland of Hoth.

If you’d like to read the whole article, you can find it here.

Yes, that’s right. Go hasn’t even been out to the public for more than a day and there’s already someone taking credit for it. Unlike the absurd claim that was just made against Steve Jobs and Sarah Jessica Parker, this one may actually have some credence. A user calling himself fmmcabe created issue #9 on the Go google code page in which he says:

I have been working on a programming language, also called Go, for the last 10 years. There have
been papers published on this and I have a book.

I would appreciate it if google changed the name of this language; as I do not want to have to
change my language!

A quick google search brought up his book, “Lets Go!” on the self publishing site, Lulu and a perusal of the ACM digital library brings up several hits as well including “Go! for multi-threaded deliberative agents”.

The biggest issue at hand seems to be the semantics between the two names. Google’s new language is named Go whereas McCabe’s is a more emphatic Go!. Go is already a fairly common word and I can attest to the difficulties of using it as a parameter within a Google search. Even a day after the announcement, a quick search for ‘go programming language’ returns hits entirely about Google’s Go including a rudimentary wikipedia article. With the immense popularity of Google, I can easily see McCabe’s language (which is already obscure) being pushed even further into the depths of the internet.

I’m not surprised that Google didn’t know about the previous usage of the name, but I hope Google follows their corporate motto of “Don’t be evil” and let McCabe be the sole user of Go. I’ll even suggest that they fall back on GoLang. Not only is it the official url, but it allows them to retain all the quirky uses of go within their language (ex goroutines ) and puts them in league with another concurrent language, ErLang. Problem solved.

1 ) Log into your Google Apps mail account (mail.your-domain.com)
2 ) Navigate to settings and in the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” section enable POP3
3 ) Log out of your Google Apps mail account
4 ) Log into your main email address
5 ) Head to the “Accounts and Import” section of GMail’s settings
6 ) Scroll down to the “Check Mail Using POP3″ section and click “Add POP3 email account”.
7 ) In the subsequent dialog box, enter your google apps email account (you@your-domain.com) and click next
8 ) In the next window, fill out the following fields accordingly:
Username: you@your-domain.com
Password: password for you@your-domain.com
Pop server: pop.gmail.com (NOT mail.your-domain.com This is where I kept having problems)
Port: 995
I’d also recommend checking “Always use secure connection” and “Label incoming messages” along with using your-domain as a label. After that, hit next and everything should be all set to go.
Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when I set up pop3 for my Sector930 account:

I decided to search through YouTube and saw that while awesome, the Tetris skaters didn’t seem as dedicated to bringing to life source as the pixelated post-it note Donkey Kong team:

Nor were they as patient as the crew of  this stop motion Space Invaders performance created using an empty auditorium: