What I can't fit on Twitter is on Random.AndrewWarner.com

From Tim Ferriss in 37 Signal’s blog:

“One of the recommendations that I make to many of the startup founders I advise is to have at least three or four areas of interest outside the business,” he explains. “Don’t become a Dow Joneser, someone whose mood and self-worth goes up or down dependent on the Dow Jones, which you have no control over.

“If your entire ego and identity is vested in your startup, where there are certainly factors outside of your control, you can get into a depressive funk that affects your ability to function. So, you should also, let’s say, join a rock climbing gym. Try to improve your time in the mile. Something like that. I recommend at least one physical activity. Then even if everything goes south — you have some horrible divorce agreement with your co-founder — if you had a good week and set a personal record in the gym or on the track or wherever, that can still be a good week.”

The stinkin’ WordPress iPhone app won’t let me link properly, but I found the quote here:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2734-tim-ferriss-on-tolerable-mediocrity-false-idols-diversifying-your-identity-and-the-advice-he-gives-startups

I saw this photo on Yahoo News today:

Did Obama dye his gray hair away? – Yahoo! News.

The Stuxnet computer worm seems to have done more to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program than threats of war or written sanctions.

According to the NY Times, the retiring chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Meir Dagan, “told the Israeli Knesset in recent days that Iran had run into technological difficulties that could delay a bomb until 2015. That represented a sharp reversal from Israel’s long-held argument that Iran was on the cusp of success.”

Check out how the worm worked:

The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.

via Stuxnet Worm Used Against Iran Was Tested in Israel – NYTimes.com.

I can’t stand when a web site asks me to create a password, and then to ensure extra “security,” asks for the name of my high school or my mother’s maiden name. Read this excerpt and you’ll see why that’s dangerous.

[George Samuel] Bronk targeted his victims by searching Facebook for women who posted both their e-mail addresses and also personal information such as their favorite foods, their father’s middle names, their high-school mascots and their favorite colors.

Such details are routinely used in “identity challenges” when changes are made to online personal accounts. “Social engineering” scams, such as phishing scams, are designed to trick the victim into revealing this sort of information — but Bronk found it all right there on Facebook.

With it, Bronk could pose as a legitimate e-mail user, hit the “Forgot your password?” button, pass the identity challenge, change the password to one of his own and take over the e-mail account, locking out the victim.

And then the problems would begin.

Bronk, 23, searched hundreds of “sent mail” folders for any nude photographs or videos.  If he found any, he’d often sending the most scandalous or pornographic pictures to the women’s contacts lists, or would contact the victims directly and threaten to make the pictures public unless they sent him even more revealing ones.

You could read the rest of the story on MSN, but the MSN story works the Facebook angle a little too hard because any article mentioning Facebook gets eyeballs today. The real problem, I think, are sites that use publicly available information as part of their security process.

via Facebook used to get to nude e-mail photos – Technology & science – Security – msnbc.com.

Apparently the practice of using two spaces after a period goes back to old typewriters which made the end of sentences hard to spot. The extra space was needed to make the period stand out. From Slate:

The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.

We don’t use typewriters any more so we don’t need the extra space any more either.

I just read on Dvice how North Carolina State University has been testing a ’Superstreet’ intersection design to speed up traffic by removing left turns:

Superstreet intersections are designed for situations where you’ve got a major road intersected by a bunch of smaller roads. What generally happens in these situations is that the people on the smaller roads trying to get across the major road have to wait forever, or if theres a traffic light, all of the traffic on the main road has to stop and wait for just a couple cars to get across. This is horribly inefficient, not to mention frustrating.

The Superstreet intersection attempts to solve this problem by entirely doing away with left turns and preventing streams of traffic from directly crossing each other. To cross a Superstreet, traffic from side roads must first turn right, joining the main flow of cars. A dedicated u-turn lane allows you reverse your direction, at which point you can continue straight effectively making a roundabout left turn, or turn right, which gets you across the intersection.

At first glance, this probably seems pretty inconvenient. But the idea is that even if you want to turn left, you’re actually saving a bunch of time by not having to sit and wait for a light. Superstreet intersections can operate without any traffic lights whatsoever.

via Superstreets make traffic 20% faster by eliminating left turns | DVICE.

Seems Chatroulette is earning $100,000 per month by profiting from guys who insist on getting naked on the site. I just read this in FastCompany:

Of the roughly 500,000 visitors Chatroulette receives daily, about 10% are males itching to show their business. So Ternovskiy parlays that business into profit….

When users flag someone enough times for indecent behavior (by clicking a button), the offender is automatically transferred to a partner site. Thanks to deals with adult dating services like FriendFinder.com, Chatroulette is earning cash hand over fist from the referral traffic.

“Basically, once we detect a person is naked, he’ll be kicked from our service to another website,” Ternovskiy says. ”So, we’re actually getting revenue from naked men right now.”

These exhibitionists were a major headache for Ternovskiy before becoming a major source of income.

via Chatroulette Founder Andrey Ternovskiy Raises New Funding: “50,000 Naked Men” | Fast Company.

Details here: Who owns Facebook?.

Benjamin Meyer got a MacBook in 2006. The camera on the lid sparked in idea. He decided to program his Mac to take a photo every time he opened the lid.

In pictures that he took from 2006 to 2009, you can see his hair cut change, sporting a cast after breaking his arm, and beating Super Mario World.

Benjamin Meyer’s Personal Blog: 1-10 photos every day starting in 2006.

CHOW.com found a chef who works for a company that develops private-label products for supermarkets to reveal some of the secrets of her business. Like this one:

Most cartons of orange juice aren’t simply filled with juice.

“I could get killed for this one,” says Chef Wendy happily. “Orange juice is orange juice right? Not so much. They juice the orange and distill all the oils out of the peel.” The end result is the equivalent of a bunch of little bottles, which product developers can use, mad scientist style.

“I was in an OJ plant where they had over 300 formulas for not-from-concentrate orange juice,” says Chef Wendy. If the client, the company that actually puts out the orange juice, wanted a juice that was sweeter, or more yellow, or a deeper shade of orange, the plant Wendy worked for could mix things together until they got just the right formulation. It’s a lot different than just squeezing oranges. And the label will still just say “orange juice.”

via You’re Not Allergic to MSG and 6 More Culinary Secrets – Food Media – Top Stories – CHOW.