RIP: Jef Raskin

It’s well known that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (the Steves) founded Apple but it’s not so well known the Macintosh, introduced to great fanfare in 1984 and the foundation upon which all Apple desktop and laptop computers have since been built, was created by a guy named Jef Raskin.
Yesterday Mr Raskin died. He too […]

What does your iPod sound like?

No, not the music on your iPod but rather the software that runs the iPod, resident in the flash ROM.
Nils Schneider wanted to know how to get his own software to inter-op with his iPod hardware. In order to do this he needed to know how the firmware worked. In order to know how […]

Microsoft to patent ‘IsNot’

WTF?

According to the patent application—filed in mid-November by Paul Vick, lead architect for Visual Basic .Net at Microsoft; Amanda Silver, a program manager on the Visual Basic team; and an individual in Bellevue, Wash., named Costica Barsan—the IsNot operator is described as a single operator that allows a comparison of two variables to determine if […]

Hunter S. Thompson: “Security”

Security - Hunter S Thompson, 1955
Security … what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word […]

RIP: Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, the U.S. writer who pioneered the super-subjective form of journalism known as “gonzo”, has killed himself, his son said.
In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News, Juan Thompson said his father shot himself to death in his home in Aspen, Colo. on Sunday night. He was 67.
- Hunter S. Thompson dies

He […]

calc.pl install: now with added bash

I’ve updated my Installing calc.pl under Mac OS X tutorial to include instructions on doing so with bash as well as tcsh, since bash is the default shell now.

Microsoft’s GhostBuster

This sounds pretty damned clever: a simple way to detect root kits and stealthware called GhostBuster:

File hiding is an advanced stealth technique that is becoming popular among system monitoring software such as RootKits, Trojans, and keyloggers. It presents a major challenge to system administrators and the anti-malware industry because detection and removal are virtually impossible […]

Werner Vogels and the Ultimate Job

No, not the latest installment in the Harry Potter series, it’s what sounds like possibly the coolest comp-sci job currently available. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, is hiring and looking for some seriously smart people to tackle some sort of distributed systems problems (details per se are lacking). But if this sort of thing floats […]

Ironic?

“Two of the great ironies of history,” said President George
W. Bush, “is there will be a Palestinian state and a
democratic Iraq.” - Harper’s

Ironies? I do not think that word means what you think it means.