Fed up with worms, viruses, spam and spyware, people are giving up their computers, or at least giving up the Internet. Well, that’s what they get using Windows. If you stick a petri dish out in an influenza ward, you’re gonna grow junk; if you stick a vat of Lysol out there you won’t.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t get worms; I don’t get viruses; I don’t get infested with spyware.
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Thinkgeek have a plasma mug: a glass mug which acts as a plasma ball. Extremely cool.
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Michael Wiedmann has a great reference for screen presentation (e.g. PowerPoint) tools which focuses on those which run on open platforms (and maybe Windows/Mac OS X as well).
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I want a Neuros. Completely open; has a mike; transmits FM; plays Ogg Vorbis. A bit pricey, though: $280 for the full bundle of player, flash backpack, earphones, belt clips and a charger.
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Recently found How to Write Unmaintainable Code; it’s an amusing compendium of how not to write code. I’ve a nasty feeling I’ve done some of it, too …
07 February 2018: updated URL
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The Register has sponsored a comprehensive comparison of Windows and Linux security, and has posted a brief summary as well. The upshot is that Linux — while imperfect — is much more secure than Windows.
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The Periodic Table of Perl Operators. Egad — I used to write a lot of Perl, but it has increasingly grown insane; now I’m a Python guy.
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Caml appears to be an interesting programming language. Programs written therein are supposed to be strictly verified for a whole slew of potential bugs — and thus they are apparently much more reliable than those written in other languages. That’s the theory, anyway.
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I recently discovered the Great Computer Language Shootout, a very cool collection of benchmarks for various programming languages. My one quibble is that it normalises the results to a ten-point scale, when a twelve-point would obviously be superior. Other than that, quite slick.
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Robin is a desktop-like interface coded in XUL which runs on Firefox. It is, quite frankly, incredible. Imagine where this could lead in half-a-dozen years …
06 February 2018: and it no longer works, now that XUL is unsupported🙁
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The Ansari X Prize has been won by the SpaceShip One team. Civilian space flight is coming, slowly but surely. I expect that it will be several decades before it really comes into its own, but this is wonderful news. I wonder how many centuries it’ll be before we figure out some form of faster-than-light travel.
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Grace is a cool little graphing tool. It can’t do 3D plots like gnuplot can, but its 2D plots appear a bit nicer.
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