UNI is now advertising to fill an Information Technology Specialist position at the Iowa Waste Reduction Center:
NECESSARY QUALIFICATIONS: Bachelor's degree in management information systems, computer science, business, or related field plus at least one year of web-based database and networking experience required; virtual reality and programming experience preferred
This article from George Ou is an alarming way to start the morning. It details the new attacks on the WEP protocol, which is known to be broken, but was generally assumed to be “good enough” when rotated often. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, so we need to look at moving to the next generation of encryption on our Wireless LAN ASAP. In an educational setting such as ours, however, this is a little trickier, I’ve got about 750 clients spread around campus, and I can’t get that many users to turn on a dime. To make them even grumpier, this is going to “break” a lot of older wireless hardware which is sure to bring the college students out with their pitchforks and torches. In other words, I’m already having a bad day…
There are a lot of stories of bad scientific research and downright fraud in this story from The Guardian, but this was my favorite:
But the winner was a hair-straightening treatment by Bioionic, called Ionic Hair Retexturizing: "Water molecules are broken down to a fraction of their previous size ... diminutive enough to penetrate through the cuticle, and eventually into the core of each hair". Shrinking molecules caused some concern among the physicists at the ceremony, since IHR was available just 200 yards away, and the only other groups who have managed to create superdense quark-gluon plasma used a relativistic heavy ion collider. The prospect of such equipment being used by hairdressers was deemed worthy of further investigation.
Yeah, I'd really love to know how they can take two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom, and then shrink them into a smaller version of themselves...
[via Slashdot]
I’ve finished up my parents’ Christmas newsletter. You know, the one my mom has roped me into doing for the last 16 years? If you want it in a 2MB PDF, here it is.
I wondered if Microsoft's new MSN Spaces blogging system supported the MetaWeblog API, or any of the popular blogging tools. I looked it up, and the disappointing answer is a decided no. I understand them wanting to have an API that supports all the features of the MSN Spaces service, but in the mean time, howabout implementing the MetaWeblog API over SSL (that's how I post to my blog now) to let people at least use the service? Think of it like this. Sure, Thunderbird doesn't support all of the features of Exchange that Outlook does, but does that mean that shutting out IMAP and POP3 clients from Exchange is the right answer? No, sometimes limited functionality is "good enough" for most uses, and this is one of them.
