Posts

Making Light: Ghosts of the Great War, 2003

The JBoss Group has found some code in Apache’s Geronimo project (which is designed to be a JBoss competitor) that they say is copied from JBoss. Naturally, they had their lawyers send a letter (PDF) to Apache telling them to knock it off. Unlike SCO, they entertain the possibility that this might have been an honest mistake, and more importantly, they included examples of actual code from JBoss and Geronimo for comparison. The main differences here are in motivation, of course. JBoss wants to keep their code from being released under a less restrictive license, and more importantly, don’t want the Geronimo people to use JBoss code to give them a head start toward releasing a JBoss competitor. SCO just wants someone to give them bucketloads of money so that they don’t die the corporate death that they so richly deserve. ...

I love Google, but I don’t mind seeing them deflated a bit. The problem here isn’t Google, really, it’s the Google fanboi tribe (of which I sometimes am a part).

As a veteran Microsoft basher, I would be remiss if I didn’t point to Joe Gregorio’s critique of what we’ve seen of Longhorn: Longhorn versus the light of day.

Doc Searls wrote up some analysis of Novell’s acquisition of SuSE.

Iraqi guerillas shot down another US helicopter today, killing all 6 of the soldiers who were aboard. The downing of the helicopter last week and now this one reminded me of the Fred Kaplan article from April that discussed why the Army has so many helicopters in the first place. The most disturbing bit of trivia from the article is that the Army lost more than 5,000 helicopters in the Vietnam War. ...

Is there anything more political than the teaching of history? Here’s a brief description of Iraq’s new history books: The first indicator of what a Saddam-free education will look like is arriving this month, as millions of newly revised textbooks roll off the printing presses to be distributed to Iraq's 5.5 million schoolchildren in 16,000 schools. All 563 texts were heavily edited and revised over the summer by a team of US-appointed Iraqi educators. Every image of Saddam and the Baath Party has been removed. But so has much more - including most of modern history. Pressured for time, and hoping to avoid political controversy, the Ministry of Education under the US-led coalition government removed any content considered “controversial,” including the 1991 Gulf War; the Iran-Iraq war; and all references to Israelis, Americans, or Kurds. ...

A malfeasant hacked into a server where the source code repository for the Linux kernel resides and injected a clever exploit into the source. They wrote the code such that any program calling a particular system function with a certain set of flags would gain root access to the machine. Fortunately, the hack was sniffed out through a regular a file integrity check and some subsequent digging. The most ingenious part is that the hack only comprised two lines of code, and was camouflaged as the common = != == mistake that programmers make all the time. ...

I know people with hundreds, nay, thousands of bookmarks. I’m not one of them. Generally, I only use bookmarks for whole sites that I want to keep track of. For particular articles, FAQs, or other reference documents, I just post a link here, thinking that maybe there are other people who care about them as well. I just use this site’s search facility to dig the articles up later if I need them. So my bookmark file is already fairly small. The ones that I do have tend to go ignored, because I don’t really like to take my hands off the keyboard. So it’s easier to use autocomplete to go to frequently visited sites than it is to use a bookmark anyway. That said, Firebird and Google have rendered my bookmarks almost completely obsolete. Firebird, like Opera before it, has a Google search field built right into the user interface. You can hit Control-K and your cursor appears there, then you just type in your search terms and go. A lesser known feature Googles what you type in the address field. If you type something into the address field (easily reachable with Control-L), and it doesn’t resolve to an actual host, Firebird submits it to Google using the programmatic equivalent of the “I feel lucky” button. So if you type “rafe” in the address field, you are automatically whisked to this site (unless you have a machine named rafe on your network). Google’s first result is generally very reliable, especially in cases where the term is well known. And plus, once you’ve used it once to find something you know you can rely on it in the future. So when I want to read Phil Carter’s weblog, Intel Dump, I just type “intel dump” in the address field. Very simple, very easy (as Chef Tell would say). So long, bookmarks. Maybe I should advertise this site as “http://rc3.org or Google keyword: rafe”. ...

Early this year, when we had an incredibly powerful invasion force sitting at Iraq’s border, one of the things that didn’t make sense to anybody was the fact that Saddam Hussein wouldn’t try to make a deal, any deal, with the United States. Everybody knew that regardless of what else happened, as soon as US forces crossed the border Saddam Hussein was on his way out as dictator of Iraq. Surely the fact that he wouldn’t negotiate proved that he was utterly and completely insane, or so the thinking went. Well, as is often the case, there appears to be more to the story. Update: there’s also a story behind the story. Slate’s Jack Shafer also looks into this. ...