“Santa putting children’s information at risk, warn experts”
After all the major privacy blunders in the past few years, by both private corporations and government agencies, this tongue-in-cheek warning isn’t likely to raise any eyebrows at all.
Archive of entries posted on December 2007
“F*cking programming” [NSFW!]
As a software developer, I have occasionally been tempted to put… um, “colorful” language… in my source code and comments, especially about whatever vagaries of the OS API that I’ve just spent several days locating and working around. I generally manage to suppress the urge, because it’s rather embarrassing when you go to share or …
“An uncanny 1960s view of the future World Wide Web”
Spotted on Chris Linfoot’s site. Very interesting.
“Transactions specialist – flexi-time contract hire”
I’ve pretty much given up posting the spam and scam messages I receive here, because there’s very little new in them, just the same tired rehashes of the same tired fake offers. But this one is notable because it’s one of the few actual “money mule” e-mails I’ve ever gotten. I know I shouldn’t have …
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This Morning’s Interesting Conversation
I answer a soft knock on the front door a few minutes ago, still in my houserobe because the recent blizzard has driven me into semi-hibernation, to find two soft-spoken and well-dressed men at the door. One is in his late twenties, the other maybe forty, and each carries a handful of literature and a …
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Cross-Platform GUI Programming
Over the last week or so, I’ve been working on a test program for Project X. The requirements pretty much dictated a GUI solution, but while I work primarily under Linux, the other developer on it works primarily in Windows, and we use both C++ and Lisp for this project. Any programmer who’s tried to …
VMware Workstation 6.5 will have Unity!
Unity — the VMware Fusion feature for Macs — allows Macs to run Windows and Linux programs on the Macintosh desktop, instead of in a virtual machine window. And as of 5:40am today (US Eastern time), I hear that that feature is coming to the next VMware Workstation version too!
I love ZFS!
As mentioned earlier, I’ve been using the ZFS file system on my network backup drive for the last couple weeks. Last night, I decided to run a “scrub” operation on it (a file-check, similar to fsck or chkdsk): $ sudo zpool status pool: zfs state: ONLINE status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable …
“Apple keeps critical security fixes to itself”
He-LLO, Steve! Security through obscurity doesn’t work! How many times do we have to be burned by your software before you learn that?
“AMAZINGLY SIMPLE HOME REMEDIES”
Courtesy of my sister, whose sick sense of humor matches the rest of our family: 1. If you’re choking on an ice cube simply pour a cup of boiling water down your throat. Presto! The blockage will instantly remove itself. 2. Avoid cutting yourself when slicing vegetables by getting someone else to hold while you …