• The morning session covered a wide range of topics: If you are abducted by aliens, should you pray to Jesus as some have suggested, or does that constitute a Christian-centric bias? Has the mutual suspicion among UFO researchers and those who believe in ghosts, spirits, faeries, and/or demons impeded progress in both fields?

    —MUFON

  • The rat-bots currently just skitter around the floor, just like a rat would, with the neurons helping them to avoid walls. The team claims that the obstacle avoidance shows improvement over time, but one creepy facet of the research is that different rat brains behave differently. As each set of brain cells only lasts three months, several brains have been used – and each exhibits different behaviour patterns to the others. (Brain cells of rats used within experimental robots via Marginal Revolution)

  • Easy URL shortener for Apache

    In httpd.conf:

    RewriteEngine On RewriteMap urlshort txt:/path/to/file/map.txt RewriteRule ^/s/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ ${urlshort:$1} [R]

    in map.txt:

    abcdef [http://www.foo.com/blah/](http://www.foo.com/blah/)bcdefg...

  • Killing Joke, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns

  • Nothing more goth than an iTunes playlist.

  • mod_concat

    I was recently asked about enabling mod_concat on the work servers to make it easier to combine things like .js and .css files into a single request. It works nicely:

    <script src="foo.js"...