Dorothy and I decided to make Christopher’s next birthday a big one, since he’s more likely to remember it. This year the theme was to do all his favorite things: breakfast at IHOP in the morning, followed by looking at the animals at the pet store, then a nap, then a birthday party in the afternoon and Busch Gardens in the evening.
He now says “hap-day” for “happy birthday” when he sees a cake or someone wearing a party hat.
I finally got fed up with Firefox’s lack of threading support. This means that the entire application hangs when rendering a webpage. I switched to Safari, which is much more responsive. Unfortunately, I immediately found out how ad-infested the web is… I’ve been running Firefox with the Adblock Plus plugin for so long, I didn’t realize how annoying the web had gotten.
After a bit of hunting around, I found SafariBlock by FSB Software. It’s an Adblock-like plugin for Safari.
One downside is that it doesn’t ship with a list of filters. There are filters out there for Adblock, but SafariBlock doesn’t yet support regular expressions like Adblock does. Here’s the solution:
I also discovered another downside: The basic “*” pattern matching that is does support is very basic, only working at the beginning and end of a pattern. This means that a pattern like “*.example.com*.swf?*” won’t work.
I’m spending the week in Syracuse, NY attending the Air Force Office of Scientific Research annual PI meeting. The meeting is a week long because they’ve combined the software and security presentations. Next year they plan to split them up, which is a shame since I have found the security presentations the most interesting.
I found out some other interesting tidbits of information: the NSF funds the majority (90% IIRC) of all university research in computer science, and AFOSR’s software research budget is increasing. Given the highly competitive nature of NSF funding, with 10% or less of proposals normally being funded, I’d bet that AFOSR will be getting more and more applications in the future as researchers look elsewhere.