Rants & Raves

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August 08, 2001 Megan Morrone is Good Spider Food

A caller to tonight's show said that Megan was his favorite on the show, and it's no surprise to me. According to The Screen Savers' latest Supergeek Challenge,
Do You Speak Geek?, spider food is slang for keywords embedded in a web page. I've recently discovered how to use a spreadsheet program to sort the entries from this website's access logs. Included in that information is what search terms were entered into a search engine, such as Google, that led to someone clicking on my site. Megan was the top entry, followed closely by that scourge of browser plug-ins, Bonzi Buddy. It seems that people are still trying to find out how to get rid of that awful thing. I mentioned how to remove it in my 5.15.2001 R&R entry, but I think I'll have to add that to the FAQs page as well.

In the opening news segment, Patrick mentioned a group in Berkeley that wants you to send them your AOL CDs so that they can deliver them to AOL headquarters in protest. In case you would like to contribute, and that address flew by a little too fast, here it is again: http://www.nomoreaolcds.com/. This reminded of a site from several years ago, "AOL Disks: A Modest Proposal", that displayed one guy's art made from AOL floppy disks, before AOL switched to CDs. He basically got fed up with how many AOL disks he kept getting in the mail, and the fact that the disks were so cheap that he couldn't even reuse them for saving his own data. So he got out that favorite geek item, a Dremel tool, and some paint and went to town. My favorite was the one where he slit the outer case open, and painted the inner disk to look like an egg being broken. I believe it was called "Your brain on AOL", and was the inspiration for the animated gif that can be found at the bottom of this site's humor page. Unfortunately, it appears that the site no longer exists.

In Leo's Bootcamp segment, a caller asked about the difference between an 800MHz Celeron and an 800MHz PIII processor. For those of you who want the technical low-down, the first difference is that the Celeron only goes up to a 100MHz front side bus speed, which limits how fast the processor can communicate with the rest of the computer. Most PIII processors sold today use a 133 MHz FSB. The second difference is that the Celeron has 128K of L2 cache as compared with 256K for the PIII(E). The L2 cache is the area of the processor where recently accessed, or soon to be accessed, information is stored. A larger L2 cache increases the amount of memory that is more quickly available than that from RAM. Interestingly enough, since the Celeron uses the same manufacturing die as the PIII, the extra cache is still present on the chip, but it's been disabled. Anandtech has a good article describing the recent Celerons: Intel Celeron 800: The first 100MHz FSB Celeron.

Posted by Christy on August 08, 2001 10:44 PM

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