I just finished reading The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. I really liked her previous book, The Secret History when I read it a decade ago, so I figured I’d give it a go. It’s a good read, with some really gripping moments and highly believable characters. The only complaint I have with the book is that the ending doesn’t really tie up all the threads that are laid out during the telling; I suppose that’s the whole idea, that the book is primarily a character study, but it’s a shame that a fine, nicely written story has such a lackluster conclusion. It almost feels like the first four-fifths of a book rather than a complete work.

Check out this technical overview of Mac OS X. It’s written primarily for Linux geeks, and gives a nice wide picture of how the system is laid out, what happens during the boot procedure, etc. The author sums up with a little opinion piece explaining the pros and cons of Mac OS X vis-a-vis Windows and Linux.

Finally!

After nearly two months offline, nuthole.com is now once again available to the teeming masses. The story of our absence is the all-too-common, sad tale of broadband companies failing to live up to their commitments, which won’t be retold here.

Anyway, we’re now back in business. Let’s celebrate with a link to a slightly aged article by Molly Ivins entitled “Is America Texas?” about the impending Texafication of the nation.

Some of you may have seen (in some obscure media outlet) mention of Neil Bush admitting, in his divorce papers, that he played around with some undisclosed number of prostitutes in Southeast Asia while he was there “on business”. Of course, this son-of-a-Bush can’t just come clean, no; he is compelled to wrap this misadventure in a lie: see, the women simply knocked on his hotel door and then had sex with him; He didn’t pay them, and therefore didn’t know they were callgirls! Perhaps Neil thought his animal magnetism was so strong that women could smell him right through the door and out in the street, and simply had to have him. That he was there as a guest/“business partner” of the son of the former president of China doesn’t seem to come into play there at all.

So, the obvious questions:

• How would the media handle this if it were Bill Clinton’s brother?
• How does that compare with the actual media treatment?

Oh, that liberal bias, eh?

Check out this excellent letter by a Vietnam veteran concerning our the current US occupation of Iraq.

Well, I don’ t have much to say at the moment, except that I’ve been tied up for a couple of weeks since the birth of my new baby daughter! Hopefully I’ll get back on track soon.

I found an interesting article about the problems with the touch-screen voting terminals that are starting to be used all over America.

Most of the problems boil down to the fact that these are closed systems whose workings are impossible for any outsider to examine or verify. There’s literally no way to know if the machines are recording votes accurately, or whether through error or mischief they are recording and reporting incorrect results. It seems to me that the easiest, best solution (as proposed in the article) is that after entering everything, the machine should print out a paper ballot for the voter to verify, and those ballots should then be saved in case a recount is required. Presumably the paper copy and the electronic copy would be tagged identically so that given a paper ballot, you could find the electronic ballot and see if it matches what was printed.

My friend James clued me in on the existence of a fine TV and radio program from the BBC called Dead Ringers. It’s a prank call show, but what separates this from the Jerky Boys or Crank Yankers is that the pranskters are talented impressionists.

One of the most heavily-used characters for these prank calls is “The Doctor”, an actor who does a mighty fine Dr Who (as portrayed by Tom Baker) impression, confusing his hapless victims with bewildering talk of Daleks, alternate timestreams, time travel, and past and future selves.

(For those of you whose Dr Who knowledge stops at the “you mean the guy with the long scarf and the puffy hair?” level, it is that very same Doctor [who was played by actor Tom Baker] who is being sent up in these sketches).

Anyway, there are a few RealAudio clips from Dead Ringers linked from the offical Dr Who site, and a few mp3 files of the same available on the p2p networks (a fine use for Poisoned). What I haven’t yet found anywhere are clips from the TV series. Apparently the aforementioned prankster actually walks about in full TomBakerDrWho regalia, leading to further hilarity. Hoo!

For the past half-year or so, I’ve been using Acquisition, a Macintosh client for the gnutella network. It’s got some really nice features, integrates well with iTunes, and feels like a proper Mac OS X application.

But Acquisition has its problems: For one thing it’s crippleware, and the accursed warning panel that pops up now and then is bothersome. Acquisition also makes use of the Limewire engine for connecting to the gnutella network; While this makes life easier for Acquisition’s developer, it’s obnoxious for those of us who want decent performance on our machines; Limewire is notoriously resource-hungry, and will happily consume all the RAM and CPU you can throw its way.

So imagine my happiness when I stumbled across Poisoned, an open-source p2p client that addresses all of the problems I’ve had with Acquisition, and is nearly as full-featured. It connects to the gnutella, FastTrack, and OpenFT networks, and it seems like support for the OpenNap network is coming as well. Instead of the hungry Limewire core, it uses the open source “giftd”, which connects to the aforementioned networks through a plugin system. It is missing some of Acquisition’s neatest new features like the nice organization of search results, but is roughly equivalent with where Acquisition was 6 months ago in terms of nifty GUI features. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

As of today, this blog is now being brought to you through the power of nuthole.com. Now instead of that crazy-long address you used to have to type in order to reach this fine place, you can just type “www.nuthole.com”, or heck, in most modern browsers you can probably just type “nuthole” and you’ll be on your way.

If you’re reading this, you’re certainly already aware of this. I just thought it might be worth noting for posterity’s sake.

The origins of the nuthole.com domain are far too boring to recount here. At any rate, the actual meaning of the very word “nuthole” is currently open to debate and discussion. While the Urban Dictionary defines nuthole as “Persons of uncoolness, one who is one can short of a six pack, involoved in rather ridiculous acts” (which may or may not apply here), another witness noted that nuthole.com sounds like the name of a gay dating service (which this site is not). Other theories are welcome at nuthole@rebisoft.com.