Twing might help you find the information you are seeking when you recall it was posted in a forum, but you can't recall much else.

Twing is a new search engine that indexes almost 5,000 online forums, on subjects ranging from the very general (arts and entertainment) to the extremely specific (Scottish Snooker). On top of its search features, it also has a 1990's-Yahoo!-style directory organized by topic, and a collection of trends and toplists called the Community Buzz Directory...Twing has some interesting tools for tracking the hottest links and conversations. Most popular links, threads, and forums are all ranked, and RSS feeds are available for each. Twing says that the most popular thread on the Internet right now is called "longest ever thread." While we don't doubt this is accurate, we'll leave it up to you to decide how practical you find it...

http://www.downloads...ine-for-forum-posts/

A mysterious book has recently come into my possession (Mr. R. Maximus is the other custodian of the book). It is our belief that the book contains something profound - we simply need time to translate the illegible scribble that accompanies the bizarre illustrations.

You are invited to join us and be part of the throng that will learn the mysterious of the Codex Transportica.

...

As further introduction, Mr. R. Maximus has deciphered the first extract from the beginning of the book.

First diary entry - undated.

The Seizures, as I have come to call them, struck quite suddenly. The first time, I was dining alone in a favourite house, and awoke face down on the linen. The wait staff seemed frightened of me; I had knocked over a water glass and broken a vase of flowers. Before me was the first drawing, sketched carefully in my own hand inside of a notebook I had purchased that morning.

The next time it happened, I was at work. The incident cost me my position, for after I was revived it was shown to me that I’d carefully inked a drawing on the back of an irreplaceable 16th century manuscript. (Trading in the bonds I possessed to pay for my vandalism did not appease my employer. Though I do now own the defaced manuscript.)

Shortly thereafter I barricaded myself at home. The Seizures come upon me a few times a week, then leave me alone for a month or more. Just when I begin to wonder if they have departed me for good, I am stricken once more. Often there are words and descriptions for the bizarre devices I have drawn, left behind as the waking memory of some nightmare. I must hurry to transcribe them before they fade entirely; and transcribe them I must, for I feel they hold a clue to my worsening condition.

It is as if a spider were niggling between my frontal lobes. An odd, foreign presence that sometimes taps at the mental skylight, and finding it unlocked, sneaks in for a visit. My greatest fear is not that the Seizures continue, driving me into complete madness, but that they stop before I learn their secrets.

I have a fair amount of antipathy and distrust for Thomson ISI, the makers of EndNote, the dominant bibliography management tool on the marketplace.  They basically bought out every competitor product to endnote and then let them all whither and die, including the superior ones (Procite).

I've been very tempted over the years to embark on writing a free alternative to EndNote -- I think it's a crime (and ridiculous) that academic institutions haven't funded an alternative program that would be free for researchers.

So anyway it gives me a lot of pleasure to see a project like JabRef, which by all appearances looks quite substantial and promising:

JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager. The native file format used by JabRef is BibTeX, the standard LaTeX bibliography format. JabRef runs on the Java VM (version 1.5 or newer), and should work equally well on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

http://jabref.sourceforge.net/

If you ever get a virus alert, you should know that it is very common to get false positives from over-aggressive antivirus tools which aren't very concerned about falsely identifying something as a virus.  I've complained a lot in the past about the failure of antivirus tools to usefully inform users when some new detection is more of a guess than a sure thing.  In cases where a brand new update detects something, it should be a no-brainer that the user should be told a little more about the possibility that it's a false alarm, and given more help and information for how to figure out if the threat is real.

If you get a virus alert one thing you can do is visit a few of the very cool free websites which will scan the file using a wide variety of different antivirus engines.  If your antivirus is the only one that detects something then chances are it's probably a false alarm.

• virustotal.com
• http://virusscan.jotti.org/

What are your favorite science blogs (can be general science or on a particular area)?

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Machines Like Us - http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/ - nice general site on brain/ai general audience stuff
• Machine Learning Theory - http://hunch.net/ - this is for the hardcore machine learning people only
• The Frontal Cortex - http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/ - nice blog on brain research - mostly for researchers but general audience suitable too

DC Member Chris Hanscom (Veign) has a blog that is reliably good at discovering interesting articles day in and day out.  Today is no exception.

Read on, to learn the basics of how sites and web content management systems are most often hacked, and what you can do to reduce the risk of it happening to you.

Methods Discussed:

• SQL Injection
• Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
• Authorization Bypass
• Google Hacking
• Password Cracking

http://www.cmswire.c...echniques-002339.php