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Pop over to Flickr to see my photos of Ballunar Fest 2006, in particular Sunday morning’s Key Grab competition.

Hey, not too shabby! Cuckoo is featured today over at Apple’s Mac OS X downloads site. (If you scroll down the page you’ll see that Pyrothèque is a Hot Pick, too. Oh, and, what up, FuzzMeasure!)

[Permanent links to toastycode products on Apple’s download site: Cuckoo, Pyrothèque.]

Amar writes: “Settlers is OURS now. MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.” (IGN: EA Acquires SpellForce Creator, also owner of the Settlers of Catan franchise)

Well, the website for Rice’s undergraduate orientation week has finally undergone a total redesign (probably a result of a new upper echelon at the university, including a new Dean of Undergraduates). Verdict: blah.

The front page is slick and impersonal, and the undergraduate information is buried under a haystack of JavaScript menus. Not particularly engaging. The copy is new, too:

The mission of O-Week is to assist new students in the transition to academic and social life at Rice University, with the two primary functions being: to provide academic advising and to introduce and incorporate new students into their residential colleges. Informative presentations, small-group discussions, academic advising, and class registration are designed to help you enter the university informed and confident about your upcoming years at Rice.

YAWN. Sorry for the snoozer, Class of 2010.

Of course, I’m partial to the version I designed for O*Week 1998, whose design (roughly) and text (exactly) survived two redesigns and seven years.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

These people are all dressed the same, and they know who I am, and they’re telling me I’m going to be LIVING in their building!

These people are crazy! Get me out of here!

WHOA, THERE

Now calm down. These people have been planning for months, and they’ve been working without sleep for days, doing nothing but preparing for your arrival.

Okay, maybe that doesn’t really vouch for their sanity.

But these are your advisors — a team of several older Rice students who have sworn to spare you from the dull sort of orientation you would have been subjected to at another school. You simply can’t adjust to an intense new atmosphere by sitting in 2,000-seat lecture halls with people you may never see again, listening to boring lectures by faculty you’ll never meet.

To put it another way (taken from the Will Rice College 1998 O-Week book): “You may be nervous, sweaty, and even scared, but we guarantee that you will remember your O-Week.”

OK, are you with me now? Good.

Welcome to O-Week.

I was always pretty proud of that legacy, and it’s sad to see it go. Oh, well; times change, and websites move on.

[On the other hand, the photos that they’re using on the new O-Week website do appear to be from the late 90s…]

Update: What, no information for transfer students on the new site?

Update 2: Yeah, yeah, the new site has all kinds of handy information that the 1998 version lacked. (This is partially because in eight years a lot has been done to put handy university information online.) So I guess I give the new site points for being somewhat more useful than previous versions. But it’s definitely not as much fun.

Some interesting stuff in the Houston Chronicle yesterday and today. First off, today’s frontpager, College parents find it hard to let go, featuring a number of cute Rice stories:

“I don’t want to find any of you hiding in the hedges tonight,” Leebron told a concert hall filled with parents Sunday.

But not everyone is ready to leave. Rekha Malhotra, of Fort Collins, Colo., cried as her youngest son, Parteek, unpacked his belongings.

“I have to call her every day,” Parteek said. “I thought she was joking at first.”

Move It!: Points to Ponder about Metro.

Culberson is fond of calling Metro’s post-election attraction to Richmond a bait and switch. Translation: Previous Metro leaders left Richmond off the ballot for tactical reasons, intending to resurrect it if the measure passed. Thus “Metro created this dilemma,” as he said recently.

The same kind of thinking — cynical or just reasonably suspicious? — might lead others to conclude that Culberson baited the trap by insisting that the routes be spelled out as a condition of his support, then kept quiet as Metro walked into it.

Let’s assume instead that both Culberson and Metro are acting in good faith.

Finally, on Sunday, an editorial calling for VVPATs (voter-verifiable paper audit trails; the ed refers to them simply as VVPBs—”… ballots”) in Texas voting machines, and an op-ed rebuttal by County Clerk Beverly Kaufman.

Last week at the Usenix Security Symposium, I gave an invited talk, with the same title as this post. The gist of the talk was that the debate about DRM (copy protection) technologies, which has been stalemated for years now, will soon enter a new phase. I’ll spend this post, and one or two more, explaining this.

Though his post isn’t exactly a recap of the talk Professor Felten delivered, it’s an excellent survey of the points and ideas he presented in that talk, which I was fortunate enough to hear in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. At the end of the talk, I got up and asked what now seems like an embarrassingly dumb question:

Of course, the correct (read: witty) riposte here would have been, simply, “I’m new here.” Failing that, I mumbled something or other into the microphone, and Felten continued by explaining that, yes, you might think that a great meeting of the minds will take place in the halls of government, debating the issue on the merits, whereas what will actually happen is all the people who like {patents, DRM, flag-burning, kitten-killing, whatever} will stand on one side of the room, all their opponents will stand on the other side, and each side will be counted to determine who wins.

Hey, this little improvement snuck past me during the glut of WWDC semi-hype: RSS reception coming to Mail.app in Leopard/10.5.