General

Data is zeroes and ones — software is zeroes and ones and hard work. As seen on The Third Bit.

I have just finished listening to the back-episodes of Security Now! # 38, where Steve Gibson describes his approach to securely browsing Web without antivirus and with Internet Explorer. The idea in a nutshell is - use properly locked down IE zones. Steve has modified the security settings of the default (Internet zone) to maximum: not allowing any scripting, cookies etc. Which makes many sites unusable, of course because increasing number of browsers does require Javascript enabled - or else game is over.

It has been half a year in March since we have started to use Wiki as main project management, collaboration and content creation tool. I think this is period long enough to look back and summarize what we have discovered, what worked and what not. This was not the first attempt to use Wiki in this context - however, it was first case when the result can be considered full success. I have tried (both in at-home and project environments) several Wiki implementations, notably JSPWiki,MoinMoin, FlexWiki, Wiki module for DotNetNuke and MediaWiki over period of about 5 years. During this process I have discovered by trial and error, which features are important in software development project environment and what are the conditions/consequences of using Wiki as main information hub.

Thanks to exploring the Google calendar (when playing with public calendars related to Ottawa) I found the Ottawa Mac User group's calendar and discovered that a) they exist b) they hold monthly meetings in nice Irish pub at the Market The group is actually named Bytown Mac User's group, for the reasons explained on the Web site or here. So I decided to go there. I thought - what the heck, worst thing that can happen that I will have a glass of Guinness at the pub I never visited before, which is not a bad thing at all. And besides, the Rideau Chapters store is very close (the plan B). It turned out pretty well, though - meeting was interesting. The group is fairly small (I believe somewhere about 10-15 people) but nice, friendly, dedicated and interesting. It sort of reflects the Mac representation in the market. Unlike when attending Microsoft users events, where almost everybody is by profession tied to the software development of IT business, here larger percentage of people did something non-primarily computer related for living - like creative writing, art, video processing. Again - it represents well the real world situation. Not too many people that actually do software development (other than Web design) but there was one guy who is exploring the same path as I am looking for: Objective C and Cocoa development.

Gabo sent me this link - it is some half-joke half serious knock-off of the Myers-Briggs personality classification. Same as in case of MB, it gives you four letters. Unlike in MB, the letters are different: Instead of E/I - Extroversion or Introversion, N/S (iNtuitive / Sensing), T/F (Thinking/Feeling) and J/P (Judging/Perceiving), it classifies you either as D/P - Doer or Planner, L/H - Low or High level programmer, S/T - Solo or Team programmer and C/B Conservative/liBeral.

It is not Friday today and I am obviously late with next link collection. Somehow I have completely missed the weekend - so much was happening at work that I had barely had time to notice what is going on on the Web. My Google Reader is overflowing with new links and there are lots of new links in delicious. Let's start. Merlin Mann of 43folders started to do videopodcasts - have a look (in the second edition he interviews Jonathan Coulton, famous creator of the Code Monkey song). This little utility allows to synchronize contacts and tasts between Thunderbird and PocketPC. Interesting article on how to make Gmail you personal information centre.

I have picked it two days ago in Chapters - Code Craft by Pete Goodliffe. Somehow similar in topics covered as the Rapid Development or From Coder to Developer - but newer. Divided into 6 parts: Part I - At the codeface - defensive programming techniques, naming, formatting, commenting, error handling Part II - The secret life of code - code contruction tools, testing and debugging methods, building Part III - The Shape of the code - code design, architecture, source code growth and decay over time

It is Friday again, time to clean up the link cache. I'll try to make this a Friday affair and stick with weekly schedule. The DRM is having hard time: after Steve Jobs article about how DRM is bad, EMI announcement of considering dropping the DRM, another of Net celebrities - cryptography legend Bruce Schneier (of Applied Crypography and Blowfish fame) wrote an article for Forbes Why Vista DRM Is Bad for you. He makes several good points, it is good read.

I found out by accident that the famous Get a Mac ads exists in many versions: Some nations have their own actors http://www.apple.com/uk/getamac/ads/ http://www.apple.com/jp/getamac/ads/ Other have only just language version of Long && Hodgman act http://www.apple.com/de/getamac/ads/ http://www.apple.com/fr/getamac/ads/ http://www.apple.com/it/getamac/ads/ http://www.apple.com/es/getamac/ The Austria and German speaking part of Switzerland are using German version of the ads (no surprise there) - http://www.apple.com/chde/getamac/ - and the francophone part of Switzerland uses the French version. As it looks like, Italian and Romansch speaking Swiss do not count :-(

After lots of attempts (see here, here and here), I have finally resolved my disk space problems and the RAID-5 NAS server is up and running since about two weeks now. I have stayed with Fedora 6, successfully installed Samba, configured the shares and copied all family JPEG's, videos, MP3's etc onto the huge 907 GB large RAID5 share. The old NSLU2 is still dead - I did not have any time to try to re-flash it, but all content of it's disk was without any issues readable by the new server (the NSLU2 was using ext3 filesystem) so I did not even have to try to use backups.