Posts

Dave Hyatt has a lot of things to say about designing a tabbed browsing system.

You know, sometimes I like it when other people take care of my light work for me. For example, Lyn over at Medley smacks down the arrogance, no, presumptuousness of certain other webloggers with style. That “10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers” post was just crying out to be flamed, but it was an obvious troll, so I didn’t go there. I mean, writing such a post is voluntary self-identification as a highly annoying person, so not much more needs to be said. I rarely criticize other webloggers, but I certainly appreciate it when other people do it well. And, in truth, the reason I avoid it is that I try to avoid inter-weblog squabbles because I think they’re boring to be involved in. On the other hand, I often enjoy watching them from the sidelines. In any case, I wish I met up with likeminded folks from the weblog community more often because I have a huge chest of vicious things to say stored up, and I never have an occasion to spill them out. I’ve often considered starting a weblog just for saying mean things about other webloggers, but that would be childish and petty. When I was younger, I used to be obsessed with pointing out the annoying aspects of other people’s personalities, and basically making sure that everyone knew which people I thought were jerks. With age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized that the things that annoy me about a particular person annoy most other people as well. So I don’t feel the need to rush back to my cube from meetings and kvetch with everyone about how so and so talks too damn much or how that other person always tries to suck up to their superiors. Everybody knows, except for the other annoying people. Having come to that conclusion, I find myself more at peace. ...

Somebody tell me how this works. Update: I have lots of smart readers, or at least readers who are more clever than I am. The trick to the puzzle is that when you add the digits of a two digit number together and subtract them from the original number, you always wind up with a multiple of 9. The person who created the puzzle just assigns the same symbol to all multiples of 9, so it always shows the symbol for the number you’re “concentrating on.” The creator of the puzzle wisely shuffles the symbols every time you try again, so it’s not obvious what’s going on. Thanks to the many people who sent me the solution. ...

This is the ultimate geek gift.

Everyone has probably already seen How To Write Unmaintainable Code, but if you haven’t (and you’re a software developer), it’s worth reading.

The Register is reporting that Microsoft is going to offer a cheap ($399) version of Windows Server 2003 to be used as a Web server. It’s limited in various ways, of course, to provide people with an incentive to buy the more expensive versions. Cheap is, of course, a relative term here when compared with Linux, and I think the goal here is strictly to avoid losing customers to Linux and to provide an affordable upgrade path for people who wouldn’t otherwise upgrade from whatever they’re running now (NT 4.0 or Windows 2000). If you’re just serving up Web content, there’s not much reason to upgrade your OS, especially if it’s going to be expensive. ...

Awhile back I mentioned OLED (organic LED) displays, which could very well provide a cheaper and all around better alternative to LCDs. It looks like OLED is moving beyond the hype phase: Kodak is shipping a digital camera featuring an OLED display in April. The display is 2.2" (pretty large for a digital camera), and should feature battery life due to the lower power requirements of OLED. For more info on OLED, check out Kodak’s OLED site. ...

Shaun Waterman has written a piece for UPI covering the Laurie Garrett affair at length. One interesting bit about this whole thing is that Garrett’s tone in the email, which seems so flip to her, is very much in a weblogesque style. Her piece reads like a huge entry on her weblog, and it’s no surprise that it was such a big hit in the weblog world for that reason. Publishing observations and impressions is an anathema to the news reporter, but it’s the weblogger’s stock and trade. So she seemed like one of us, except with more writing skills and better access. ...

Yet another buffer overflow in Sendmail has been found, and can be used to obtain root. Interestingly, the worm Robert Morris unleashed in 1988 took advantage of a security flaw in Sendmail. Good to know that 15 years down the road, we’re still running into problems with the same buggy piece of software. There’ll be no patching for me, I run postfix.

The North Koreans keep pushing us. I assume we’re supposed to ignore it.