Posts

If the people whose job it is to uphold the law systematically break it, one wonders how normal citizens can be expected to have any respect for the rule of law? I’m sure everybody has already heard about this, but it gives me a chance to link to Lou “Moneyline” Dobbs’ new Web site. The Mars orbiter crashed into the planetary surface because Lockheed-Martin sent navigational data to the orbiter in English rather than metric units. That’s even dumber than the Y2K problem. ...

It’s amazing to me how brittle the Internet still is. There’s just not enough cable in the ground carrying Internet traffic to provide acceptable levels of redundancy for a “carrier class” network. Yesterday, four OC-192 cables in Ohio got sliced, delaying traffic between the East and West coast. There’s a buffer overflow in Microsoft’s pathetic telnet client that will allow a third party to execute arbitrary commands on your computer. This bug affects users of Windows 95 and Windows 98. Malicious people can create a web page that executes your telnet client and runs the commands of their choosing … there’s a CIAC security bulletin about it. The Unix community has spent years trying to excise buffer overflows from common programs, and is still working on it. It seems that people are just getting started finding the buffer overflows in Windows, and we have to rely on Microsoft to fix them. ...

Chip Salzenberg (a member of the Perl core team) is rewriting Perl in C++. The project is called Topaz, and seems to be progressing fairly slowly. The result of the project will be Perl 6. The article begins with a comparison of the programming languages they could have used, which is interesting if the comparative benefits of various programming languages fascinates you. The CIA is trying to put its finger on the pulse of the computer industry by starting its own venture capital fund, called In-Q-It. They’re even going to have an office on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto with all of the other venture capitalists. ...

For those of you keeping score at home, here’s the tally in the 1999 Presidential race for dollars. From the, “isn’t this old news” department comes Andrew Leonard’s article that discusses the replacement of Apple with free software at the vanguard of the computer revolution. It also discusses Apple’s open source future, and where the paths of free software and Apple converge. Those clever bigots in Missouri are trying to drum up publicity through public service. The KKK is trying to adopt a highway for cleanup, and sponsor All Things Considered on the local public radio station. I can certainly sympathize with those who don’t want to allow the KKK to publicize itself in this way, but it is an interesting free speech issue. Would the KKK members wear their costumes to clean the freeway? ...

TheStreet.com’s James Cramer has finally come clean and admitted that investing in Internet companies is a joke. Cramer’s article lists the top 10 myths surrounding Internet business, and make some important points. The MIG-21 that’s being auctioned on eBay is kind of an old model, but the price is right. Simson Garfinkel has written an article for Salon breaking down the differences between DSL and cable modems. For what it’s worth, I’d take either of them over the 56k modem I have right now. ...

The New York Times has the best summary of the closing arguments in the Microsoft trial that I’ve read. Believe it or not, sometimes IPOs go badly. Innogear has created an MP3 player for the expansion slot on the Visor (the Palm clone from Handspring). I hate JavaScript. It’s the bane of my existence. Mainly, I hate it because it’s implemented differently in every browser, and debugging the scripts is absolute torture. What makes it worse is that many people don’t follow the most basic best practices that have been established over time. To help eliminate this problem, I will link to the article Object detection, not browser detection. If you program in JavaScript, read it. ...

Apple’s earnings are going to be down because they can’t get enough G4 processors for their smelly computers. By the way, does anyone actually have an iBook yet? I thought they were supposed to ship this month. Jef Poskanzer’s license plate maker is a pretty neat toy. Do the right thing for God, country, and Microsoft’s shareholders … sign up for the Freedom to Innovate Network. The little American flag with the computer as the blue section really got my patriotic juices flowing. This makes me want to puke. ...

Unsurprising news of the day: Microsoft secretly paid for “independent” full page newspaper ads that contained an open letter from academics supporting them in their antitrust case. Disgruntled readers are chattering about the fact that this month’s Wired is one of the fattest ever, mainly because it’s chock full of advertising, presumably raked in by their new owners, Conde Nast. As a service to Wired subscribers who read this page (an illustrious group of which I am no longer a member), I’ll provide you with a link to the seminal October 1995 Suck essay, How to Read Wired Magazine. ...

The Economist has a rundown of the hopes and fears surrounding Windows 2000 this week. In the same breath, they talk about the “withering of the Unix skills base” and the growth of Linux. For all intents and purposes, Linux and Unix are the same thing. There are more Unix users now than there have ever been. The idea that Unix is dying is a meme that should have died long ago. ...

Updates may be sparse over the next few days as I’m forced to deal with hurricane Floyd.