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Archive for August, 2006

Pork, The Other Alternative Fuel

A biodiesel refinery here in good old Australia is living high on the hog — and the sheep, and the cow.

Australian Farmers’ Fuels is turning the tallow from animal carcasses into biofuel. According to the Australian, it takes about six sheep to fill a tank, while a cow gives the most MPC (Miles Per Carcass) Surprise, surprise.

This gives new meaning to the road-bound lifestyle as being “on the lamb.”

Found via Autoblog

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8 Invaluable Wordpress Plugins

Wordpress is one of the most popular, free solutions for managing your website’s content and I am just your average user. However, whilst Wordpress in its default, out-of-the-box form can provide a good platform for your website, with a little tinkering you can increase the functionality of your site massively. With these plugins you can increase your productivity and site useability with just a small amount of input from you.

8 Invaluable Wordpress Plugins - [PingMag]

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AOL Releases Search Logs from 500,000 Users

In a daring move, AOL has just released the logs of all searches done by 500,000 of their users over the course of three months earlier this year. That means that if you happened to be randomly chosen as one of these users, everything you searched for from March to May (2006) is now public information on the internet.

This was not a leak - it was intentional. In their desperation to gain recognition from the research community, AOL decided they would compromise their integrity to provide a data set that might become often-cited in research papers: “Please reference the following publication when using this collection…” is the message before the download.

This is a blatant violation of users’ privacy. The data is “anonymized”, which to AOL means that each screenname was replaced with a unique number. “It is still a research question how much information needs to be anonymized to protect users,” says Abdur from AOL. Here are some examples of what you can find in the data:

User 491577 searches for “florida cna pca lakeland tampa”, “emt school training florida”, “low calorie meals”, “infant seat”, and “fisher price roller blades”. Among user 39509’s hundreds of searches are: “ford 352″, “oklahoma disciplined pastors”, “oklahoma disciplined doctors”, “home loans”, and some other personally identifying and illegal stuff I’m going to leave out of here. Among user 545605’s searches are “shore hills park mays landing nj”, “frank william sindoni md”, “ceramic ashtrays”, “transfer money to china”, and “capital gains on sale of house”. Compared to some of the data, these examples are on the safe side. I’m leaving out the worst of it - searches for names of specific people, addresses, telephone numbers, illegal drugs, and more. There is no question that law enforcement, employers, or friends could figure out who some of these people are.

In my opinion, this is a step towards user privacy violation. I’m sure that many of the thousands of people whose search data was logged and distributed for all to read, wouldn’t be happy if any Average Joe could see what they searched for.

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Status of New Layout

Okay, So there has been a placeholder on the root of This Site for quite some time now, and I was supposed to be working on some form of a Concept/Beta Layout to house my creations and tutorials, but as it seems this has been placed on the backburner due to the fact that I have undertaken other projects and many other factors of my personal life have pushed the opening of xenosDesign backwards.

However, There is another concept layout in progress after I scrapped my first Photoshop layout for a CSS/HTML approach. I have done most of the backend PHP coding that will allow the site to run smoothly and effectively with minimal fuss (hopefully.) the amount of fuss yet to be determined once the layout goes into beta stages and I test everything and then I should be able to publicly release it. I have the intention of also putting up tutorials that I have written and then maybe even expand it so people will be able to add their own tutorials, etc.

Wishful thinking, I know but can you blame me?

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