Done yesterday (20100325 Th)

( raw notes )

Not all that good a day. What started out as a simple attempt to see whether I could adjust my hotel room for Norwescon, and maybe move to the con hotel, ended up stretching into a two-hour nightmare that left me drained of mental spoons for the rest of the day. Turns out it was mostly due to cookies. The fact that Doubletree and Hilton share the same damned cookies didn't help.

Alongside of that, here's "Weaning the Web off of Session Cookies: Making Digest Authentication Viable (pdf)". Good luck with that, but one can hope. (There are simple ways of not using cookies for form sessions, too, including passing the session key in a hidden field. General principle: if I start a new login session in another tab, I ought to get a new session and not get hooked back up to the old oe.

Something that somebody has put in their LJ (or a feed) is mucking up the navigation on my friends page. The arrow keys and middle mouse button don't work. Weird, annoying, and took a couple of hours to diagnose. Perhaps I'm losing my edge?

Speaking of losing, here's What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? - NYTimes.com (from @rowanf)

These researchers point out that there are plenty of reasons to suggest that the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis has now effectively failed the test of time. In particular, that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980's, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma. (Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, also rose significantly through this period.) They say that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected. ''That is very disconcerting,'' Willett says. ''It suggests that something else bad is happening.''

...

The crucial example of how the low-fat recommendations were oversimplified is shown by the impact -- potentially lethal, in fact -- of low-fat diets on triglycerides, which are the component molecules of fat. By the late 60's, researchers had shown that high triglyceride levels were at least as common in heart-disease patients as high L.D.L. cholesterol, and that eating a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet would, for many people, raise their triglyceride levels, lower their H.D.L. levels and accentuate what Gerry Reaven, an endocrinologist at Stanford University, called Syndrome X. This is a cluster of conditions that can lead to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

Back to watching my carbs.

More, mostly depressing, links under the cut, as usual.