I have read somewhere that quotation is safe way how to say something potentially dangerous or controversial without being legally exposed :-). So today I am going to quote an authority in computer security - Steve Gibson on some very interesting Vista related security information.
Steve is doing (together with Leo Laporte) excellent weekly podcast "Security Now!". It is so great that I have decided to download as many back episodes as I could find on their site and started to listen to them in the chronological order, back from June 2006. It was worth of every minute. I am now somewhere in August 2006 and Steve Gibson (== SG) covered interesting tricks what to do with you hosts file, very nicely explained the usefulness of netstat program and started multi-episode sequence on virtualization and virtaul machines. Thanks to many years of experience, Steve always gives a historical perspective on every topic he covers.
I cannot help it, but it is awkward feeling when something that was part of your life, was so omnipresent is announced to be dead and disappear shortly. Exactly this is happening to video tapes and format VHS specifically. The news has been all around the net day or two ago: studio's stopped after 30 years production and distribution of the VHS media.
It does not seem to so many years ago when VHS was and new and struggling to survive against more technically advanced BetaMax (I still remember how great the BetaMax movies looked). Now the VHS is slowly disappearing and everything moves to digital format and DVD. One one side, it is better - higher quality, less compatibility issues (no more struggling with expensive VHS players that can play both NTSC and PAL tapes on NTSC TV (strangely enough, the other way is much easier and many players sold in Europe do play NTSC tapes OK, but require 220 Volt/ 50 Hz and PAL TV). Compared to this, the DVD "zones" create much smaller problem, especially since Linux folks gave us some very good tools :-). Even the DVD and medium seems to be approaching the beginning of the end of life - albeit it is very unclear who will win the BlueRay / HD-DVD war. Maybe nobody will prevail, consumers will wait until the live with live streaming and video on demand with PVR's will be practical alternative to physical distribution.
Got a new gadget. Actually, not quite "got" - just borrowed from Mike. It the digital pen - amazing piece of machinery, that remembers all you write (up to 40 pages) and allows you to transfer written text to computer. The catch is that you *must* write on special paper, with microscopic marks that help to note the position of the pen.
I was surprise how successful was the CRC software of making some sense from my cat scratches :-).
It's official. The Browser version 2 final is out. I mean Firefox, of course - it should be quite obvious what is "the browser" these days. Yes, I know - IE still holds majority of the browser share and yes, Safari is really really nice, fast and good looking application - but let's face it: browser is not just another application - it is a *platform* these days. Platform means extensibility and extensibility means being a good foundation for add-ons, extensions and plugins. And from the platform perspective, the Firefox is the king.
Bruce Byfield has interesting article in Linux.com featuring hands-on comparison of four on-line wordprocessors: specifically ajaxWrite, ThinkFree Online, Writely, and Zoho Writer. I do not 100% agree with all his conclusions, but it's interesting and worth reading if you are exploring these tools. I am certainly staying with Writely, right now I am using it on daily basis. Combination of WriteRoom for off-line concepts and "thinking phase" of writing and Writely for on-line editing, adding links, etc fits ideally my needs.
It is hard to imagine - on September 13th it will be 50 years since IBM introduced the very first hard drive.
Since that time technology made quite a progress. Compare for yourself:
1956 - RAMAC drive
capacity: 5 Megabytes, built from fifty 24" spinning disks weight: about one ton price: $250'000 / year (lease) price per gigabyte: about fifty million dollars 2006 - typical harddrive
capacity: 500 GB weight: < 1kg price: ~ $300 price per gigabyte: about 60 cents Amazing, isn't it ?
See also Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V
This Mac thing seems to be quite contagious. Gabo started to seriously considering buying the MacBook, after listening to my happy stories about Great Mac Discoveries. Even Vlad, right now living trough his latest love-affair with Ubuntu Linux was deeply impressed with OS-X after we seeing Expose, Spotlight, PhotoBooth and iPhoto in action.
Next day, after I arrived to the office in the morning, Gabo was already there. Which is not unusual. Since his little son and wife are back, they get up quite early in the morning and Gabo usually beats me to arrive first to work. He lives only 5 minutes away anyway ...
See also part I, part II and part III and Part IV
August 13th # I have discovered wonderful thing today. I was experimenting with my PocketPC (Toshiba e830) and switched on Bluetooth. Mac discovered the device OK - all I had to do was to follow the wizard Setup Bluetooth device, under Bluetooth menulet (the strange B icon upper right). I have entered the code Mac suggested on PPC and they new about each other. What was really cool was that I found out how to access files on that device ... but let's step back a moment.
See also part I, part II and part III
August 10th # That Spotlight thing is just freaking fantastic :-). After few days of work, accumulating some files, emails etc, just for fun I typed Gabo’s last name to Command-Space search box. I did not even finish typing and first results were coming in the result list: all emails exchanged with Gabo, saved chats, text documents and as “best hit” Gabo’s contact card. Which was exactly right.
See also part I and part II
August 3rd # This is my second day with Mac, writing in TextEdit as I have not installed any other editor (yet). Still learning, do not want to install lot of junk before I find out proper ways how to do things. Time to learn how things are in the Brave New World ….