smaug: The firebreather
Nov 30, 2010 GMT
I recently bought my first new laptop computer in over six years. My previous computer was a Thinkpad X31, and I purposely bought the best I could afford knowing that I would have it for a long time. I outfitted the X31 with two GB of main memory, an 80 GB disk, a docking station and a five year extended warranty.
That laptop has been around the world many times, subjected to freezing cold, hot temperatures and even been dropped a couple of times (fortunately onto carpeted floors and with the power turned off). I have upgraded its disk twice (it now... more »
One Ring of Trust To Bind Them All
Nov 30, 2010 GMT
There is much discussion these days around security, most of which comes from the release of Firesheep and the “discovery” that the three “W”s of “World Wide Web” may really stand for the “Wild, Wild West”.
Basically I hate the idea of needing to lock things up, hide things, and search people. There have been cultures where two poles crossed over the door of a tent meant it was “locked”, and people could leave the doors to their remote cabins unlocked to allow stranded people to find shelter in a storm, but in many places... more »
No perfect resistors
Nov 30, 2010 GMT
Recently I was watching a video that Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, the founder of the Xiph.org project had produced on audio and video formats. They did a good job on the video, putting it out in both WebM format and Ogg format, with subtitles in English, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian. They even include the SRT files so other subtitle translations could be done.
About position 7:36 on... more »
CeBIT - Free Exhibit Space Offered to FOSS projects
Nov 28, 2010 GMT
CeBIT, held in Hanover, Germany each year, is the largest IT trade show in the world. Companies come from all over the world to show their goods and services to each other, and to make deals. For several years now Linux New Media, the publishers of various Linux magazines around the world has sponsored a “Linux Park” at CeBIT.
For the past three years, in the spirit of “Free and Open”,... more »
Latinoware 2010
Nov 10, 2010 GMT
I am at Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, attending a conference called Latinoware. Of course I am seeing a few old friends and many new ones, but I am also happy to report that the facilities for Latinoware, which is held on the grounds of the Itaipu hydro-electric plant, have been... more »
Bell Systems Technical Journals Published
Oct 31, 2010 GMT
My friend Benjamin Scott send some email around today stating that Alcatel/Lucent had published all the old Bell System Technical Journals from 1922 to 1983 online and freely accessible. As Ben said:
Bell Labs practically invented much of our recent civilization (communications theory, transistor, laser, microchip, Unix, the list goes on). The public switched telephone network, before the Internet came along, was probably the most complicated system in human... more »
Eating Your Own Dogfood
Oct 31, 2010 GMT
One of my favorite sayings has always been “You should eat your own dog food”. When applied to programming it quite simply means that you should use the code that you generate.
I started saying this many years ago when I noticed that the Unix product managers at Digital Equipment Corporation were not using Unix in their day to day work. They had Microsoft Windows systems on their desktop, and would often go over to VMS to use “EDT” (the VMS text editor) for doing “real editing”. One product manager at a very high level even admitted to... more »
