05 Apr 2003
Reading Stop Acting Like the Entertainment Industry! a rant about how TiVo and ReplayTV are a service not a product, and why it’s risky to buy either.
Why the heck hasn’t someone started building MicoATX DVR linux boxes is beyond me. It wouldn’t take much. Any PC builder could get in on it.
27 Mar 2003
The Pro-peace movement isn’t doing themselves any favors making signs like the one talked about here at USS Clueless.
Pro-War, Pro-Peace, I think I want to join the Pro-“Shut the hell up and act like civilized people” faction.
27 Mar 2003
There may be a good reason to go to war (to get rid of an abusive leader), but the pro war faction of this country does not win over the hearts and minds of the antiwar by censoring them. As I heard on Democracy Now! this morning Ani DeFranko was told by a concert venue owned by Clear Channel that she had to agree not to say anything about politics, or the she could not use the venue.
Not that I’m saying Clear Channel does not have a legal right to do this.
27 Mar 2003
From /.: Too Cool For Secure Code
In no small part, it’s because programmers aren’t using appropriate tools. In an age where processing power is cheap, there’s no excuse for a mail client written in C or C++. For users accessing mail via IMAP or POP, network speed and congestion have a greater influence over performance than anything done on the client side; even for users with local mailboxes, I doubt that we’re looking at a huge performance hit.
I had to do some C coding for a job lately. Ever time I wander into C I’m absolutely terrified I’m going to make a stupid error and end up with a buffer overflow bug. I was a lot more confident this time ‘round, but still… make mine python.
#python
23 Mar 2003
A Papuan free for all:
An independence movement in the Indonesian province of Papua threatens to turn into a humanitarian disaster and bring new tensions to the fragile ties between Canberra and Jakarta.
The PNG Government recently expressed fears that Islamic extremist militia in Papua could use the province as a base to strike Australian targets on the PNG side of the border.
So do we get to liberate them too?