+ An interesting website that provides Your Online Manufacturers Color Database (Powered by CBN Systems Technology). You can cross colour match between paint manufactures, wood stains, caulking, concrete, stucco, tile grout, brick pavers and so forth. I downloaded the CBN Selector which utilizes thies database, and ties it to photos. The idea is that you can photograph something and it will match it. Problem is of course cameras interpret and monitors interpret..still, the paint manufacturer database is a great for colour matching.

+ Have you used the GIMP yet? It’s a freeware alternatative to using a pirated version of Photoshop. I have. I like it’s speed and versatitity, but I’m lazy. I already spent a fair amount of time figuring out the basics of Photoshop. And so I kept putting off the switch to the GIMP because of the time involved in learning a completely different menuing and windowing system. I’m not saying the GIMP’s system is bad. In fact it could be easy as breathing. Just no time. Problem solved. The GIMP has been hacked to feel more like Photoshop, and renamed GIMPshop. Grab it, try it. It manipulates colour, composition, and adds design elements to your photos and other images. It’s an easy switch. — they aught to change the name of the GIMP to something else. It sounds derogatory and amateur.

** also available for Linux, and OS X.

+ Kim sent the link Channel 4 Film - Abe’s Manhood. A film about Abe who devises a ‘personal rite of passage, a complex ritual culminating in his public circumcision.’

+ since Black Viper is (hopefully) temporarily off-line, the elder geek has a good XP sevices guide that will help you decide what services you don’t need running in the background. Unneccessary services use up memory and processing power. Shut them down and gain power.

+ Prince Rupert, Canada (the city) once had dreams of becomming a shipping port to rival any other on the west coast. Unfortunately on his return trip from gathering financial backing for that dream, Charles Hays, the city founder and President of The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway died when the Titanic sank. That dream is about to be realised. With Asian to North American trade growing at a huge rate, ports along the coast have been getting more and more congested. Both the federal and provincial governments are throwing $60 million dollars into building a container facility that will be operational by 2006. The trip will be one day shorter from Asia, making it a highly desireable shipping destination.

+ This was Slashdotted. A completely sane and rational refutation of the Canadian music industry’s claim that p2p file-sharing has caused incredible loss of sales:
Written by Michael Geist who is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he hold the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. He publishes a wide range of articles, newsletters, and reports and is involved in a several interesting Internet policy projects. His weekly column on law and technology appears in several media outlets including the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, and Canada.com .

Canada is in the midst of a contentious copyright reform with advocates for stronger copyright protection maintaining that the Internet has led to widespread infringement that has harmed the economic interests of Canadian artists. The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) has emerged as the leading proponent of copyright reform, claiming that peer-to-peer file sharing has led to billions in lost sales in Canada.

This article examines CRIA’s claims by conducting an analysis of industry figures. It concludes that loss claims have been greatly exaggerated and challenges the contention that recent sales declines are primarily attributable to file-sharing activities. Moreover, the article assesses the financial impact of declining sales on Canadian artists, concluding that revenue collected through a private copying levy system already adequately compensates Canadian artists for the private copying that occurs on peer-to-peer networks.

+ Searching with Google recently became much more interesting: elgooG. Even more interesting is Google News

**please do not email to inform me that i’m so out of the loop because this was around the net in 2002. i know. thanks anyway.

+ U B U would be a great resource for making digital music. Scads of avant guard sound files. It’s notactually limited to that. The group was formed ‘as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry. Over the years, UbuWeb has embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions. ‘ –so really, much could be made from UBU.

+ Cookies are a minor threat to personal privacy. Most everyone deletes them nowadays, at least anyone who cares about their privacy has that option. But that option is about to be taken away for a while.

A New York company called United Virtualities is now marketing the ability to restore deleted cookies to a back up file, without the user knowing. The user who thinks blocking and deleting cookies is effectively protecting them from businesses spying on them is in for a surprise.

United Virtualities calls this PIE -mmm pie, such a nice name for such a devious manipulation of technology!

According to JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corp., 58 percent of Internet users have deleted the tiny files, essentially making many consumers anonymous during site visits. In addition, 39 percent of consumers are deleting cookies from their primary computer monthly.

United Virtualities’s PIE helps combat this consumer behavior by leveraging a feature in Flash MX called local shared objects. Flash MX is a Macromedia Inc. application for developing multimedia Web content, user interfaces and Web applications. The technology runs on a Flash Player that the company says is deployed on 98 percent of Internet-capable computers.

When a consumer goes to a PIE-enabled website, the visitor’s browser is tagged with a Flash object that contains a unique identification similar to the text found in a traditional cookie. In this way, PIE acts as a cookie backup, and can also restore the original cookie when the consumer revisits the site.

While consumers have learned to delete cookies, most are unaware of shared objects, and don’t know how to disable them.

Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United Virtualities, says the company is trying to help consumers by preventing them from deleting cookies that help website operators deliver better services.

“The user is not proficient enough in technology to know if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works,” Tanembaum said.