Bob Bemer, one of the creators of ASCII, the man who invented the escape sequence, recently passed away.
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Russian organised crime is exploiting flaws in IIS and IE to infect Windows hosts. They infect a Windows web servers running Internet Information Server, and then use it to infect visitors who are running Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, users of real OSes, web servers and web browsers are invulnerable. When will the world learn: Microsoft cannot be trusted to run one’s business, home or anything else.
4 February 2018: Microsoft actually learned a lot about security in the 2000s, and have really cleaned up their act.
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Windows is so insecure that it’s impossible to secure it; in the time between installation on the net and downloading vital patches, it will already have been infected. Friends don’t let friends do Windows.
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Inkscape is a nice little vector graphics editor derived from Sodipodi, which was itself derived from gill. Looks very featureful and pleasant to use.
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Maxima is a cool symbolic algebra system based on software which has been around since the 1960s and which has been continuously updated since. Available under the GPL, it has survived even the death of the maintainer. Very cool, if math is one’s thing. And neat no matter what.
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MIT have put online the entire text of How to Design Programs, an excellent guide to software design.
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dillo is a small but capable web browser written against gtk+ (and hence running on Linux/Solaris/AIX/HP-UX/&c.). It’s pretty basic, but I kinda like it. Among its advantages is the fact that it can run on a handheld such as an iPaq (the binary is but 350K). One has to give the fellow behind it a lot of credit. He’s looking for funding, so if you’ve a few extra bucks, forward them his way.
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freebooks.by.ru has a plethora of technical books available online, free of charge. Very nice indeed.
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Mark Pilgrim realises that free software is useful software. He had been blogging with Movable Type, which is proprietary but was free enough: a new version came out, the pricing got restrictive and he was stuck. But then he discovered WordPress, which is and always will be free.
2 February 2018: update link
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Ever been concerned about what life without the Internet might be like? Never fear — an Internet-less existence survival guide is here.
4 February 2018: updated URL
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RFCs (Requests for Comments) are the working standards of the Internet; while a very few are eventually promoted to official Internet Standards, most never do, and yet are no less important for that. Some are superseded; some obsoleted; but most are still in effect.
RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines (dating back to 1995) is one such RFC. It’s an important document, and should be read by all newbies.
Its guidelines are not mandatory in letter but rather in spirit (e.
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I just bought myself a Happy Hacking Keyboard (actually, the Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite2, to be completely exact); it’s a small keyboard which cuts the unwieldy 101-or-so-key standard layout down to a much more manageable 64. It has an incredibly small footprint (4.7" × 11.6") and does things the Right Way: there is no accurséd Caps Lock key (the Control key goes there, as God intended); the SEC is next to the 1 and the tilde/backtick is above the Backspace.
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