In episode 141 of Security Now!– the latest episode– Steve Gibson highly recommends watching some of the keynotes from RSA Conference 2008. This is a reminder to myself to watch some of them when I have time. Here’s a link: RSA Conference 2008.
Archive for the 'Geek Stuff' Category
I have an external hard drive which is formatted NTFS. Just one of the many hazards of using a Mac is that they do not support NTFS, which is a far superior filesystem to FAT32. Fortunately, there is a program called MacFuse which allows you to use many different things as filesystems, including SSH. Someone at Google wrote a read/write NTFS driver, known as NTFS-3G, which works with MacFuse to allow read/write mounting of NTFS volumes. Exactly what I wanted, so I downloaded and installed MacFuse and NTFS-3G, taking care to get the latest stable versions.
WordPress 2.5 is not compatible with older versions of K2. You’ll know if you have this problem because this error message appears:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_register_sidebar_widget() in /blog/wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php on line 31
I had this problem, and found a solution in the WordPress Forums. I wonder why it happens and how the K2 people fixed it. Continue reading ‘Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_register_sidebar_widget() in /blog/wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php on line 31′
I used to highly respect Apple. I bought an iBook, a few iPods, an iMac, and an iPhone. I’ve purchased several songs on iTunes, and I’ve used the Safari beta. They’re trying to remove DRM from iTunes music. They were a good company.
But as of today, I’ve lost all respect for them. Let me explain.
Today, Apple realized Microsoft’s success, and decided to follow them as a role model. They forced their Safari web browser on Windows users of iTunes, QuickTime, or Bonjour.
Sneakily, the Apple Software Updater will run and pop-up automatically on the screens of Windows users who have iTunes installed. This is fine. The problem is that it now has Safari, and it’s checked to install by default.
Even if you have never installed Safari before. Continue reading ‘Today, I Lose All Respect For Apple: Software “Updater” Installs Safari’
I’m very proud of myself tonight. You see, I’m a programmer at heart. Yet it has been a long time since I just programmed something for fun. Not a contest, not a class. Just out of pure usefulness and interest. Here’s the story.
I setup a webcam to watch my room for the day, and some software that uploads the webcam’s image to my server via FTP, 6 times per minute. The software is Active Webcam, and I just used the free evaluation version. Over the course of the day, it generated 6,522 images - way too many to view at once. So I decided to script something to make looking at the images more interesting.
The first obvious problem is that most of the images look exactly the same. Nothing happened during the day, so the images have no easily visible distinction. Yet they are not the same in terms of bits: the brightness has slight variations, the JPEG compression differed, etc. So doing an md5 comparison (which will be the same for files which are the same) doesn’t cut it. I need to actually look at the image data.
Fortunately, PHP has a great built-in image library known as gd. You have to have PHP compiled with it, but my host does, so I suspect most others do, too. After much trial and error, I managed to do the following: Continue reading ‘Comparing Images and Measuring their Similarity in PHP’
Chinese company Lenovo, which acquired IBM’s computing division in 2005, today is throwing around the word “perfection.” And I think this could very well be the closest a laptop has ever come. They have released the ThinkPad X300, a 2.9 lb. wonder. Far less than an inch thick, it’s the lightest and thinnest ThinkPad ever made. Amazingly, it has not only a TrackPoint, but a TouchPad as well - which is the signature ThinkPad “UltraNav.”
Naturally, when thinking of extremely thin laptops, the recently-released MacBook Air comes to mind. Here’s a head-to-head comparison, which shows clear ways in which the X300 wins out:
Continue reading ‘Lenovo ThinkPad X300 vs Apple MacBook Air’
On my birthday, Apple released a new software update for iPhone. Thankfully, it’s free. Apple really does treat their iPhone users well 
Apple announced today (my birthday the release of the MacBook Air, which they claim is the world’s thinnest notebook. What I’d like to know is: what was the thinnest notebook before today?
The MacBook Air is 0.76″ at its thickest point. There is a hard drive option (80 GB 1.8″ hard drive) and flash memory drive option (64 GB), which would make it the first mainstream OS X computer running on flash memory. I suppose you can count the iPhone, but it’s not really a full-blown computer.
Since the new laptop doesn’t have an optical drive, you can use a new product called “Time Capsule” with it to backup files wirelessly. Time Capsule is a wireless router with a 500 GB or 1 TB hard drive, which looks like the Apple TV and will probably be a popular accessory for the MacBook Air.
Overall, the MacBook Air reminds me of the canceled Palm Foleo. I’d like to get an Air when the price comes down. Or would someone like to give me a review unit? Update: The X300 seems more suited to me. Continue reading ‘MacBook Air: World’s Thinnest Notebook’
To US consumers, that is. The “Give 1 Get 1″ program ended on December 31, 2007. So now that it’s over, and at least hundreds of thousands of Americans have tried it out, what do people think?
My OLPC on an extremely messy desk
The Economist says it’s “One clunky laptop per child.” At least they’ve managed to attract attention with the article: they got me to read it! It’s a negative review, so let’s take a look at exactly what they say, along with my response. [I originally wrote this as a wall post to Sam Park, who linked me to the article. It's long enough that I'd like to repost it here.]
Economist: “Great idea. Shame about the mediocre computer … This is not because the keys are too small for his adult hands (though they are), or because the processor’s slow speed makes the machine frustrating to use (though it does). Nor is it because the track pad sometimes goes screwy and the keys lack the normal pressed-key response that allows smooth typing. It isn’t even because moving the column from the word-processing application to the web-mail system is prohibitively difficult.
Instead, it is because the XO, which your columnist has explored since it arrived a few days before Christmas, has bugs that cause occasional crashes. A discreet message sometimes flashes when the system boots up, warning of some sort of data-check error.”
Me: The OLPC isn’t done yet. As the article conceded, the hardware issues were NOT the main problem. His trouble was the software, which can be fixed in future revisions. The hardware isn’t easily changeable, so that’s what must be done right. And they’ve done it right: it’s a laptop designed for children, but can work for adults. Continue reading ‘One Laptop Per Child No Longer Available’
I finally received my OLPC XO-1 today… here’s part 5 of my video unboxing series.
More below the fold… Continue reading ‘OLPC Tablet? One Laptop Per Child Impressions’
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