...more recent posts
The NSA had a backdoor into Crypto AG machines for decades? That's pretty shocking if it turns out to be true. Why would any country trust an encryption mechanism without understanding the algorithm?
Great story of inventive IT problem solving during a spending freeze: ITAPPMONROBOT
We could build an admin robot...
LM turned me on to a browser webshot service a while ago (you submit a URL and they give you back screen shots of the page taken in a bunch of different browsers on a bunch of different platforms.) Pretty much essential if you're doing serious web design. Lately I've been using browsershots.org which, amazingly, is a free service. Not quite as fast as it's payed brethren, but I can wait a couple minutes.
If these numbers are to be believed (and it's a little hard, I admit, although I'm doing it,) the iPhone already leads Windows Mobile in US marketshare. The iPhone, a single very new device, locked to one wireless carrier's network, already has a larger marketshare (in the US) than *all* Windows Mobile devices, made by multiple vendors, available on all wireless carriers.
Tons of charts and other info at the link.
Great munin tutorial I'm sure I'll need to refer to again.
In Microsoft Word (from Office 2004 Mac edition, at least) if you try to sum a column of numbers with either =SUM(above) or =SUM(below) it will just stop counting at 85 rows no matter how many rows you have! And it gives no error! Holy shit. What a pile of crap. Why can't they be sued for something like this? I wonder how many people have billed incorrectly because of this bug?
Very clever javascript date library: datejs.
Full Apache, PHP, and MySQL stack coming to the S60 mobile environment (Nokia is calling it PAMP.)
In addition, there will be PHP extension modules that provide access to the core functionality of the phone. And on top of PAMP you can basically install any LAMP based content management system. For instance, Drupal can be installed off the shelf.This is exactly what I thought the iPhone was going to allow, and the reason for my initial jaw droppery over that device. Now if only the N95 wasn't like $1000!
Crap. Spent all morning trying to (re) install MySQL server on my somewhat new OS X 10.5 system (the 10.4 mysql package does work.) What a pain. Still not sure what the issue was, but it kept ending on startup. The useful clue I found was to look in the file ending with .err in the mysql data directory. This is where error messages get written, and indeed it informed me that I already had something (another instance of mysqld) running on port 3306. So I just killed that and then restarted the new server. Would have been more helpful if that error was directed to stdout as well as the file but I guess you can't have everything.
Been buried since early morning, so didn't get a chance to even look at my RSS until now. Amazon released Kindle, an eBook reader. It's really strange. Described as "the iPod of reading." Has an EVDO cellular modem in it to connect with Amazon. It costs $399, but has no monthly charge. $9.99 to download a book. All first chapters free.
And it will surf the web ("basic" web surfing, so might not that great yet) and do email. And $.99/ month for blog subscriptions (RSS?)
This is not going to work, but really interesting / strange / frightening business model to give away the computer and the wireless connection, but then sit as gatekeeper and charge for everything.