Here’s a list of 25 reasons to convert to Linux. Of course I’ve been using Linux exclusively since ’99 — do I get a prize of some sort?
06 February 2018: update URL
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For years now I’ve known that I need backups; I’ve worried that sooner or later the hour would come when they would be necessary. I RAID my drives, but that just provides redundancy and protects against disk failure; it does nothing to protect against human or software error. At one point I even bought a SCSI tape drive off of eBay, but it never quite worked properly.
Well, last night disaster struck.
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Google Talk now supports federation; that is, rather than only being able to talk to other gmail.com users, you’re now able to talk to any XMPP (Jabber protocol) users out there. At last instant messaging is starting to grow up — in time there will be no more AIM, MSN Messenger and instead a single common protocol open to all, just like email.
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ZDNet have an excellent article taking CERT to task for misrepresenting the number of Unix & Windows vulnerabilities for the past year. It makes some very cogent points, and should be read.
31 January 2018: updated URL
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One of the techniques used in some sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence is training: one feeds one’s apparatus a set of known good associations (e.g. this word sounds like this and that like that, or this is the number 3 in forty different styles of handwriting), and for each sees what answer it returns, then correct it based on its answer. This obviously requires a large corpus, and building such a corpus is time-consuming and error-prone.
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A scientist has engineered tobacco to produce an anthrax vaccine. The current vaccine has severe side effects; the tobacco-derived vaccine does not.
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Spotted an article about Jorf, a programming language which came out at about the same time as Perl and Python, and had some neat ideas — unfortunately, nothing came of it.
4 February: updated URL. It’s awesome to see that the author is still blogging!
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On Friday I started playing around with MoinMoin Desktop Edition; it’s a personal wiki. The idea is that it can act like a free-form personal information manager. Playing around, it looks pretty neat; I’ll be using it over the next month or two and will see how it actually works out in practise.
04 February 2018: updated URL. Nowadays, I’d suggest Org for this kinda of thing.
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Allin Cottrell believes that word processors are stupid & inefficient. While those might not be the exact words I’d choose, they are quite true. For the vast majority of computerised document preparation, word processors are not the correct tool to use.
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Someone actually produces Menger Sponges for sale. I desperately want one.
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Just came across Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?, a presentation by Charles Petzold on the process of programming. Very good points about the rhythm of coding and how we can come to over-rely on tools — as well as how that over-reliance can translate into much more complex (and hence brittle) systems. Anyone with an interest in human-computer interactions should take a look.
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I’ve recently been using Froogle; it’s a Google service which enables one to search through a huge number of online stores and find the best price on items. Very, very cool — and it’s saved me quite a bit of cash.
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