...more recent posts
Interesting, very technical paper on the Bitfrost security platform for Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project.
I've always been skeptical about the OLPC, although, sure, it's a great idea (I just didn't/don't think they can deliver what they promised.) But this paper has value in terms of security thinking far beyond that project.
Wired magazine editor and "The Long Tail" author Chris Anderson says this is "[t]he most inspiring thing I saw all day. This is why I do what I do...." He's talking about this 4.5 minute YouTube video that attempts to explain whatever it is we are trying to do in building online interconnected databases that is variously described as "the web," "the semantic web," "web 2.0," "XML," etc....
Pretty nicely done. A good, if a little slick, high level overview of the situation. Worth a look.
Short interview (advertisement?) in Salon with Scott Rosenberg about his new book "Dreaming in Code". It is an effort to explain coding to non programmers, or as he puts it:
My goal was really more to write something that, if you were a developer, then yes, you might find it interesting. But even more, if you had a relative who was always wondering, "What is it that you do all day?" you could hand my book to that relative and say, This is what my work is really like.Most of what he has to say really resonates with me as being correct. Especially the parts about the advantages of having only one person writing a particular piece of software.
Jonathan Rentzsch, an actual programmer (Rosenberg is just an observer,) has some push back that strikes me as correct as well.
Interesting discussion.
Internal Microsoft emails discussing Apple's release of OS X 10.4 (Tiger,) made public recently during an anti-trust trial in Iowa. I am surprised how impressed they are by it - especially spotlight.
This is from a Microsoft engineer who had an early release he had just gotten at the WWDC (Apple developer's conference)
You will have to take Vic's disk ... I am not giving mine up ;)I like that he won't give up the Mac install disks!
Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and ... my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was fucking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Lonqhorn land today.
It reads like a spoof.
Don't you love when you have a problem in your head for weeks (or months) and then one day you're reading through RSS links and discover someone has built a tool that solves your problem? And released it for free with a BSD license? Nice.
SoundManager 2:
is a Javascript Sound API which talks to Flash, effectively mapping most of Flash 8's native sound capabilities to Javascript. It enables web developers and front-end engineers to programmatically control sound in a cross-browser/platform way, using a language they already know.
Vint Cerf says 1 in 4 computers are secretly controlled by hackers:
Of the 600 million computers currently on the internet, between 100 and 150 million were already part of these botnets, Mr Cerf said.
Botnets are made up of large numbers of computers that malicious hackers have brought under their control after infecting them with so-called Trojan virus programs.
While most owners are oblivious to the infection, the networks of tens of thousands of computers are used to launch spam e-mail campaigns, denial-of-service attacks or online fraud schemes.
ZOMG!!11!!!1!! Apple just announced the breakthrough mobile device I have been waiting for. A few details I still need to find out (including price) but this is IT. Finally. The future is here.
I know I'm prone to hyperbole around this subject, but I predict (this is 1 minute after hearing the specs and only seeing a couple pictures) that this will be the best selling consumer electronics device of all time.
Had a little drama today. I needed to reboot the server so that a few changes I made would take effect. But it never came back up. D'oh. So I ran down to the datacenter to see what was up. Yuck. Bad Superbock on /dev/VolGroup01/LogVol00. WFTBBQ?
In a little over my head here. Not the best feeling. Nobody there could help me either, but they were nice and at least set me up at a work station so I could begin googling.
It's really important to keep your head in this situation. It's easy to feel like it is hopeless when you have no idea what is going on, but the key is just to keep looking. In this case (and really in every case with computer problems like this,) looking just means plugging the exact error messages you get into google.
Of course most of what you get back is not helpful. But you keep looking. Inevitably you learn things along the way. I kept running out to my machine, trying something, then running back into the office and googling something else.
This went on for a few hours. During this time I cursed myself pretty thoroughly. My recent decision to keep all my clients on this box instead of moving them to ServerBeach was not seeming too wise. And my other plan to have that old PIII 1U server setup as a backup so I could just swap the ethernet cord and at least get a recent backup of everything on line was seeming very wise, except I hadn't gotten around to setting that up yet.
But no giving up. There is no one to give up too. No one to call. So just keep going. Eventually google helped me determine that it was just my /tmp partition that was giving me trouble on boot. So I erased that line from fstab and rebooted again, although truthfully not expecting this to help. But it booted. A little more hassle getting MySQL to start up (more googling... aha!)
And now everything is okay. I think I was down for a little under 3 hours. Not so smart, but even in failure I am somewhat proud to have found my way back to a working system. I really had to fight with my brain so that it wouldn't just turn off (like "Forget it - I'll never figure it out!") Read, look, try, repeat. Read, look, try, repeat. Eventually you get there.
Need to get started on the more robust contingency plan for sure.
Apple t-shirt from 1983 holiday gift catalogue. :-)
I've posted before about ZFS, Sun's seemingly amazing open source file system. I have some fairly large (couple TB) ext3 partitions running on hardware RAID5 under linux, and while I've never had any issues <knocking on wood> I've always felt like there must be a better way. And if the ZFS hype is true then it sounds like that better way. Although I guess these things are always open to reevaluation upon inspection.
Still, I'm pretty skeptical these days, and ZFS really does sound great. And now the rumors are that Mac OS X 10.5 (probably announced in January, shipping in March/April) will have ZFS support. Interesting. It almost seems too advanced for the home user, except the whole zpools stuff really makes sense. And it's very Apple. Want more space? Just plug in another hard drive. No fussing with it, or choosing parameters; and it doesn't show up as a separate drive or anything complicated like that; you just get that much more storage added to your pool of storage. Kind of like how you might think it would work if you didn't know too much about how it actually works.
