brad rhine's personal weblog
Via Worse Than Failure:
With all the “oh no, mind the world’s gonna end” date problems out there – Y2K, DST, The End of the Epoch, and Y2070 – it’s surprising that most haven’t heard of the day that the world actually ended. On that day – January 1st, 1984 – a single bug was responsible for shutting down – and keeping down – a whole lot of computer systems.
Reference
Via Coding Horror:
Software developers think their job is writing code. But it’s not.* Their job is to solve the customer’s problem. Sure, our preferred medium for solving problems is software, and that does involve writing code. But let’s keep this squarely in context: writing code is something you have to do to deliver a solution. It is not an end in and of itself.
Amen to that.
Google Launches ‘The Google’ For Older Adults:
“All you have to do to turn the website on is put the little blinking line thing in the cyberspace window at the top of the screen, type ‘thegoogle.com,’ and press ‘return’—although it will also recognize http.wwwthegoogle.com, google.aol, and ‘THEGOOGLE’ typed into a Word document.”
I love it.
From Ananova: A Bosnian couple are getting divorced after finding out they had been secretly chatting each other up online under fake names.
Beautiful.
Very positive article about REALbasic 2007 Release 4 (which I’m using and loving) from Redmond Developer:
The product interface is very clean in its appearance and function, compared with the more cluttered VB6 development environment that I had previously used. I especially liked how the most important buttons, “Run” and “Build” are very large, visible and easily accessible on the toolbar, unlike the MSVB6 equivalents that managed to hide in a series of drop-down menus and cluttered toolbars. Equally impressive was how the IDE categorized my test program into several tabs: Project, Window 1’s UI, and Window 1’s code. This helps to keep a project organized in a more logical way. I remember having to toggle between the code and UI of my projects in a drop-down menu in MSVB6, so this was a welcome change.
Nice. Will Kraft, the author of the article, even admits to being an Ubuntu user. I don’t normally follow Redmond Developer, so maybe my comment is out of context, but I found it very refreshing that they’re open to so much non-Microsoft technology.
Those of you who know me well know that my home office is currently a corner of my laundry room. It’s not an ideal situation, but it’s workable for now. It’s quiet at night, since I’m on the other end of the house from the bedrooms, and it’s nice and warm in the winter, between my space heater and the dryer.
But as I mentioned, it is not ideal. Last night was a reminder for me of why it’s not ideal. I was planning some music for a show I’m doing with some friends on Saturday, and it was getting late, so I decided to turn in. As I turn around to put my guitar away, I gasped and jumped.
Why?
Because there was a five inch slug sitting on the doormat in front of the back door, not six feet from where I was sitting. It was oozing its nasty slugslime all over the doormat. I don’t know how exactly it got in, except to say that my house is fifty years old and perhaps not as airtight as I might like to believe.
(As I write this, I keep looking behind me to make sure another slug hasn’t snuck up on me.)
I know they’re not harmful to humans (unless ingested, apparently, and disgustingly), but still. It was gross. I don’t like bugs and creepy crawly things. I never went through that stage as a boy where I thought spiders were neat and interesting. All bugs (except ladybugs, grasshoppers, lightning bugs, and butterflies) have always creeped me out and given me the heebie-jeebies.
Plus, in reading the Wikipedia article I referenced above, I just learned that slugs are hermaphrodites, and I don’t go for that kind of of nonsense in my house. I mean…. yuck.
Very interesting discussion of Rainbow Tables over at Coding Horror: But it is possible to attack the hashed value of your password using rainbow tables: enormous, pre-computed hash values for every possible combination of characters. An attacking PC could certainly calculate all these hashes on the fly, but taking advantage of a massive table of pre-computed hash values enables the attack to proceed several orders of magnitude faster– assuming the attacking machine has enough RAM to store the entire table (or at least most of it) in memory. It’s a classic time-memory tradeoff, exactly the sort of cheating shortcut you’d expect a black hat attacker to take.
And that blog post led me to the 10 Immutable Laws of Security. Example:
Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security
The purpose of having a logon process is to establish who you are. Once the operating system knows who you are, it can grant or deny requests for system resources appropriately. If a bad guy learns your password, he can log on as you. In fact, as far as the operating system is concerned, he is you. Whatever you can do on the system, he can do as well, because he’s you. Maybe he wants to read sensitive information you’ve stored on your computer, like your e-mail. Maybe you have more privileges on the network than he does, and being you will let him do things he normally couldn’t. Or maybe he just wants to do something malicious and blame it on you. In any case, it’s worth protecting your credentials.
Lord help me, I’ve created a Facebook account.
The fact that I did that surprised me. But you know what surprised me even more? Facebook is kind of cool. I feel dirty even thinking it, but I’ve hooked up with a couple friends from high school and learned some new things about some current friends.
Who’da thunk?
New York Times: Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.
May she rest in peace. Oh, how I loved A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind In The Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet when I was child. Those were some of my favorite books, and my sister’s, too, I believe.
The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians.
I love it. Children’s literature is too difficult for adults to understand. Brilliant.
