Restaurants miss moms

Attention working moms: The restaurant industry needs you. According to an article in today’s Journal, restaurants “are waking up to a worrisome long-term trend: The number of harried working moms isn’t growing like it used to.”

The article says that the steady increase of working women over the last several decades has been a boon to restaurants, as “the combination of women having less time to cook and households having a second income caused families to eat at restaurants more frequently.” However, since 1999 that five-decade increase has leveled off, “with the percentage of women in the work force down slightly at 59.2% as of January,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Why the number of working women is flattening out isn’t entirely clear. NPD Group analyst Harry Balzer suggests it has to do with more young moms opting to watch their children instead of work.

WSJ

Bush to endorse John McCain

A bold move on Bush's part, I tell ya. Those pundits who thought he'd take the safe road and endorse Clinton or Obama were wrong, wrong, wrong.

OpenDNS content filtering

I've used OpenDNS for a while to speed up my web surfing at home. DNS is what's used to look up domain names. When you type in "google.com", your DNS server (usually supplied by your internet provider) translates that into an IP address that is used to load the page. If your DNS server is slow, your web experience will be slow. OpenDNS promises to speed things up with faster servers.

What I just discovered the other day is that they also provide free content filtering. By default it will filter out phishing sites as they are discovered. The also have a mess of other categories that you can filter.


And it's free.

Note that filters are not 100% accurate. Web sites can only be blocked as they are discovered by whatever service is tracking them. But filters are a good first line of defense in keeping unwanted material out of your home.

Chocolate during Lent

It's fun to sometimes check out the search terms that bring people to my blog. A couple days ago, someone entered into Google "did the lord say it's ok to eat chocolate for lent on weekends" and somehow ended up here.

To answer the question: no. :)

And that reminds me. Since I have a couple days until Lent begins for us Eastern Orthodox, I've got some chocolate eating to do.

Mazda 2

If VW never brings the Polo to the US, I could be consoled with a Mazda 2.

And with diesel? Sweet!

De-DRM'd audiobooks

The NY Times says

Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books.

The trend will allow consumers who download audio books to freely transfer these digital files between devices like their computers, iPods and cellphones — and conceivably share them with others. Dropping copying restrictions could also allow a variety of online retailers to start to sell audio book downloads.

And perhaps libraries will start offering audiobooks that can be played on iPods as well. It boggles me that they think they're providing a service when the Microsoft-DRM'd files can't be played on a vast majority of mp3 players.

Cracking disk encryption

I guess in addition to strong passwords you should also consider shutting down your computer instead of simply putting it to sleep.

A new paper (PDF) by a group of Princeton computer scientists suggests that disk encryption is vulnerable to a hack that will be hard to correct for: data about the encryption can be extracted from the machine's RAM.

[...]

With the memory contents in hand, the next step was to crack the encryption and compensate for the sporadic memory errors. Here, the researchers relied on the fact that most decryption systems store information derived from the encryption keys in memory to speed calculations.

[...]

The paper describes algorithms for recognizing and extracting AES, DES, RSA, and tweak key information from memory. The authors have also turned these on most of the common encryption methods, including TrueCrypt and dm-crypt, as well as Mac OS-X's FileVault and Vista's BitLocker. Using an external USB drive, the authors were able to identify and extract the key and mount a BitLocker-encrypted volume in about 25 minutes. While wandering around the memory of an Intel Mac, they not only cracked the FileVault encryption but also stumbled onto multiple copies of the login password.

Why the Microsoft Office file formats are so complicated

An interesting piece by Joel Spolsky, a guy who worked for Microsoft back in the day.

If you started reading these documents with the hope of spending a weekend writing some spiffy code that imports Word documents into your blog system, or creates Excel-formatted spreadsheets with your personal finance data, the complexity and length of the spec probably cured you of that desire pretty darn quickly. A normal programmer would conclude that Office’s binary file formats:

* are deliberately obfuscated
* are the product of a demented Borg mind
* were created by insanely bad programmers
* and are impossible to read or create correctly.

You’d be wrong on all four counts.

Being the charitable guy I am, I only thought the first, second and fourth bullet points were true.

The advice on how to work around the difficult specs is good.

Misinformed craze for hybrids

Hybrids like the Toyota Prius are selling like mad, but they are a stop-gap measure at best and the "misinformed craze" for them may delay sustainable technologies like hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, French researchers say.

Gas-electric vehicles are not environmentally sustainable, yet automakers like Toyota and General Motors are pouring tens of millions of dollars into them in no small part because consumers are convinced they are, Jean-Jacques Chanaron and Julius Teske write in "Hybrid Vehicles: A Temporary Step."

Wired

Happy day-after-Evolution-Sunday

Yesterday was another Evolution Sunday, a day where some churches celebrate being religious and evolutionists. At the same time! (Cue dramatic gasp.)

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. [...] We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

Er, okay. Except that it sounds kinda post-modern to me. If science says "black" and religion says "white", do they have a problem with that? Or would those be complementary forms of truth?

Here's some previous comments of mine.

And the final word (IMHO):

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy creatures. Yonder is the sea, great and wide, which teems with things innumerable, living things, both small and great....These all look to thee, to give them their food in due season. When thou givest to the, they gather it up; when thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good things. When thou hidest thy face, they are dismayed; when thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created; and thou renewest the face of the ground. (Psalms 104:27-30 via Mere Comments)