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Danger!

[...] websites are targeting your children with so-called digital drugs. These are audio files designed to induce drug-like effects.

All your child needs is a music player and headphones.

There are different slang terms for digital drugs. They’re often called "idozers" or "idosers." All rely on the concept of binaural beats.

[...]

Some sites provide binaural beats that have innocuous effects. For example, some claim to help you develop extrasensory powers like telepathy and psychokinesis.

[...]

However, most sites are more sinister. They sell audio files ("doses") that supposedly mimic the effects of alcohol and marijuana.

But it doesn’t end there. You’ll find doses that purportedly mimic the effects of LSD, crack, heroin and other hard drugs. There are also doses of a sexual nature. I even found ones that supposedly simulate heaven and hell.

A transcript of a Chris Morris Brass Eye special? No, it’s a loopy news story from CNN.

E-mail:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated "The Andromeda Strain" have also purchased "Philippine Fighting Arts by Julius Melegrito Vol. 1: Single-Stick Tactics and Applications" on DVD. For this reason, you might like to know that "Philippine Fighting Arts by Julius Melegrito Vol. 1: Single-Stick Tactics and Applications" will be released on June 17, 2008.

OK. Thanks for that.

J2SE 6 has some interesting new XML functionality called JAXB. Using JAXB, you can take an XSD file and compile it into Java classes. You can then add those classes to your project, create an Unmarshaler object, feed it some XML which meets the XSD, and it will pass you back a tree of appropriate POJOs you can mess with.The only problem is that the XML file my source application generates refers to a DTD which JAXB tries to load via xerxes, causing epic fail.

Clearly I could rewrite the XML on the fly, perhaps even using XSLT to make the code even more enterprisey. However, I can’t help thinking that there should be a simpler way to either make xerxes/JAXB ignore the DTD (which, after all, it doesn’t need), or tell it how to find it.

Anyone happen to know?

[And yes, this is horribly enterprisey, but the benefit of being able to unmarshal a large population of XML-represented objects in only 20 lines of code is too good to pass up. Plus, I already know that the bottleneck in the intended application will be database speed.]

Chicago Sun-Times:

Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee.

Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of “self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width,” after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.

Last time I went to Chicago, I took several such bags. One had spare batteries in. Another had the change from my pockets while I was going through airport security.

Is it just me, or are these CAPTCHAs getting a bit ridiculous?

That’s a screenshot of what I see when I try to use gizmosms.com via Firefox. Or via my BlackBerry, which is where I really wanted to use it from.

From the NorthWest airlines in-flight magazine:

Darn terrorists, I can’t even drink out of the toilet any more!

In Chicago, the police are asking loyal citizens to report anyone seen using a map or binoculars, or taking photographs.

Meanwhile in California, police are stopping drivers who have done nothing wrong in order to compliment their driving and give them $5 gift vouchers.

Both of these seem to me to be misguided. The former is obviously nutty; do they really want the 911 dispatchers bothered by some paranoid who just saw someone take a picture of Chicago’s art deco architecture?

The latter I can understand the motivation behind, but I can’t help wondering how many recipients will feel that the gift voucher is worth  the stress and/or anger of being pulled over. And for a US cop, any time you stop a vehicle, you’re risking your life; I can imagine them stopping a good driver who happens to have a car full of drugs, and having him freak out and start shooting.

Since I got my new glasses, DVD cases on shelves look suspiciously small. At first I wondered if it was some new smaller design of DVD case. However, DVDs themselves are obviously still the same size, and inspecting a case reveals that it’s only just wide enough to encompass the diameter of the disc.

OK, you may think, no mystery here. New glasses. However, my new glasses are exactly the same prescription as the old ones. What’s more, DVDs still look the same size when I’m holding them close to me; they only look smaller on the shelves, at medium distance. It’s almost like my eyes have switched to wide angle lenses. I can only think that it’s an odd perceptual effect caused by the fact that my new glasses have a much wider field of view. At medium distance, there’s now a lot more stuff clearly in focus within my field of view, so things look smaller.

Quote of the week:

“Draw envious looks when you carry your Cyber-shot^® W and T Series digital camera in the understated and elegant LCS-TWA/T carrying case.” –SonyStyle.com

Just be careful someone doesn’t snatch it.

From CQ Politics:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

OK, I confess: I have purchased and eaten falafels on several occasions. I’ll come quietly.