Okay, so perhaps this isn't exactly Lighter Side material, but it is pretty weird! It seems that the tragic end of William Shakespeare's famed tale of two star-crossed lovers was nearly recreated last week by an Italian couple. According to an article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer an "Italian man killed himself out of grief for his ailing wife, hours before she came out of a coma." Now, if you'll remember back to your High School years, in Shakespear's play Juliet drinks a potion that put her into a coma-like state in a plan to elope with...

Google has quietly announced that they have started to index (allowing you to search) previously aired content from some of the major TV networks. They aren't actually indexing the video, but rather the closed captioning text of the videos. So you can just type in your search terms (like apprentice) or you can get more specific (like title:family guy). The results won't provide any direct links to the actual video, but will give the transcript, still images of the show, and a link to get more info (including future air times). Right now the content is...

I'm sure anyone who has their own Blog, or has even come across someone else's Blog, would agree that comment spam can be quit a nuisance. Google has recently announced their idea for how to prevent such abuse. Google's idea is to add a new attribute to "any [hyper]link that a user can create on your site automatically." Google claims that when their spiders see hyperlinks with the attribute (which takes the form rel="nofollow"), they won't give any credit to the links when they rank their search results. The thinking is this will eliminate the benefit the spammer would gain...

It appears that some students at IT-University in Copenhagen have given an entirely new meaning to the phrase "FREE BEER!"  From their website: Vores Øl (Our Beer) is a great tasting energetic beer and it's the world's first open source beer! It is based on classic ale brewing traditions but with added guarana for a natural energy-boost. Version 1.0 is a medium strong beer (6% vol) with a deep golden red color and an original but familiar taste.Sounds interesting... it's like RedBull meets Budweiser! Now, you can't buy this in any stores (yet), but you can make your own! ...

While the Blog phenomena is several years old, it was only about a month ago (around Christmas) that I began my venture into world of Weblogs. I came across .Text pretty early on because it was one of the few Blog engines that supported some of my basic requirements:A FREE (as in beer and speech), open source project preferably based on ASP.NET, and more specifically on C#. Most of my past experience was with JAVA, C/C++, php, and VB (standard asp)... I wanted to learn more about .NET and I figured what better way that to use it!I...

It seems that recently discovered GMail vulnerability has been fixed. From the article: "GMail messages are vulnerable to interception. An attacker has only to transmit malformed test messages to himself, and information left over in memory, from previous messages destined for other people, will appear with the test messages, in the attacker's inbox. Sometimes, this information may include usernames and passwords... Do you use GMail? Are you communications private? Should they be? Well, here's what we figured out about the issue, that may or may not help you - or perhaps GMail, if...

As I mentioned earlier, there is currently (.Text 0.95) a known issue with the way .Text implements the MetaWeblog API editpost() method. I discovered this bug while trying to use the w.bloggar desktop publishing tool to edit some posts to my blog (which is obviously run on the .Text engine). After some searching, I quickly found that ScottW had already released a patch for the issued (095_TempFix), but it was only available in assembly form. This meant just copying the new patched dll's over the old ones. This is a problem for anyone who modifies the...

It looks like Marcelo has finally made a public release of w.bloggar v4.00 (download it here).  I plan on upgrading (from v3.03.0165) as soon as I get home!  Some of the new updates (as listed in the change log) I'm most looking forward to are: ADDED....: Support to Multiple Categories to blogs that uses metaWeblog API; ADDED....: New supported tools: Nucleus 3.0, Wordpress, SquareSpace, b2evolution, Blog:CMS, UBlog, .Text, BlogWare and Xaraya; ADDED....: Option to toggle the XHTML compliance to the tags; ADDED....: Now is possible to ping not only Weblogs.com but Technorati, blo.gs...

Wired is running at article about The Shadow Internet, the culture behind the Peer-to-Peer (p2p) file swapping networks which are changing how the entertainment industry does business. "They start with a single stolen file and pump out bootleg games and movies by the millions. Inside the pirate networks that are terrorizing the entertainment business." From the industry insiders, to the distributors, and on to the public... a complete look at how music, movies, games, and more are pushed out to the next major distribution channels, the p2p networks. These upper levels of these "dark nets" are hidden...

Well, it looks like we've made it through yet another year! I rang in the New Year in The Nasty Natti (Cincinnati) with a few friends at The Pavilion (I'll be posting the pictures soon). It was one of those all-you-can-eat-and-DRINK deals! So for about $50 a person we got all the beverages we could handle, and we tried our best to get our moneys worth! A good time was had by all. How did you celebrate NYE 2004? Leave me some feedback and let me know! I was doing a little Googling this morning and I came across...