Month: February 2007

NYT Sunday Book Review of The Physics of the Buffyverse

In this past weekend’s NYT Sunday Book Review, J.D. Biersdorfer reviewed Jennifer Ouellette’s The Physics of the Buffyverse.

Biersdorfer’s review is generally positive,

The book does not delve too deeply, but biology, electricity, cryogenics, string theory, temporal anomalies, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Schrödinger’s cat and thermodynamics are all touched on in the context of “Buffy” and “Angel” plot points. Examples are often reinforced with descriptions of recent scientific experiments and developments.

Hmm…I wonder if Ouellette covers the likelihood of everyone suddenly bursting out in song together.

60th Anniversary of 228 Incident

Today is the 60th anniversary of The 228 Incident in which protests by native Taiwanese on this date in 1947 led to the wholesale execution of Taiwanese leaders by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces who occupied Taiwan after Japan’s defeat in World War II.

According to TaiwanDC.Org, in addition to those outright killed,

Thousands of others were arrested and imprisoned in the “White Terror” campaign which took place in the following decades. Many of these remained imprisoned until the early 1980s. Until the beginning of the 1990s, the events of 1947 were a taboo subject on the island. The Kuomintang did not want to be reminded of their dark past, and the Taiwanese did not dare to speak out for fear of retribution by the KMT’s secret police

Wikipedia also has a long entry about the incident and its aftermath.

DLO Shipping HomeDock Deluxe for the iPod

DigitalTrends.Com reports that DLO is finally shipping its HomeDock Deluxe dock for the iPod. The HomeDock Deluxe features nice-looking menus and screens on your television that make it easy to navigate and play movies and music stored on your iPod.

I’ve got the first HomeDock that DLO came out with a couple years ago and absolutely love it, but it lacks the onscreen menu features. Take an 80gb video iPod and add the HomeDock Deluxe and you’ve got a very nice multimedia center.

Western Digital’s 1TB NAS

Western Digital’s My Book World Edition II is a 1 TB Network Attached Storage Drive that includes 10/100/1000 connectivity. These things are very common these days, but the $499 suggested retail price for this device is very nice. You’ll pay a lot more than that for a Buffalo’s 750gb Linkstation II Pro. Initial reviews seem to be fairly good. I could use 4 or 5 of these.

Google Webmaster Feature Improvements

Google implemented some nice features this month for those of us who run websites to help get a better handle on who and how many people are following along with our sites.

In early February, in greatly expanded the ability to track external links to a web site you control. It is possible in Google already to get a list of pages that link to a particular page, but for some reason Google is actually only presenting a small subset of that information to the public.

Once you have verified your site with Google (which involves adding a meta tag), Google will now let you view and download a more comprehensive list of external links to any site you control. From my cursory look at the external links reported by Google to this site, there are still a lot of external links that Google either doesn’t know about or aren’t being included in this more comprehensive report, but it is still much better than what you get from using the link operator in the search engine.

The other thing Google did was add a notation when Google Reader hits an RSS feed that indicates how many people are subscribed to that feed. Open up a server log and search for the Google Reader bot and you can quickly see how many people are subscribed to the feed via Google Reader. Bloglines and other web-based RSS readers have had this feature for a long time, so it’s nice to see Google Reader finally implement this as well.