Technology
Technology
Isn't it an amazing time we're living in? A just a few hundred years ago explorers were still discovering new parts of the planet. They travelled around in big ships and brought home spices and treasures from the new lands.
Now, I can go to google maps, and look at a satellite picture of my building here in Cape Town. I can literally look at any part of the planet! And it's all online, free and fast. Amazing if you ask me.
Enough! I can't get to my work because I'm contstantly deleting comment spam. As a result I've turned off comments for now. Donny is busy setting up CSBlogs. So hopefully comments will be back on by next week.
Spammers should be shot!
So what's happening with GMail? I've been using it for months now. It looks great and works perfectly. Why is it still in Beta?
Just a thought.
I love technology! One of the things I've seen a lot lately is Abstract Computing (I can't think of a better way to describe it?)
You can run one or more simulated computers inside your current computer. That's called VirtualPC.
You can connect to a computer in another room and work on it like it's your current machine. That's called Remote Desktops (or Terminal Services).
You can use the same mouse, keyboard and clipboard on more than one machine(even if it's running a different operating system!). That's called Synergy.
Not to mention that you can administer IIS servers and SQL databases for any server from any workstation. I think Active Directory gives us that ability.
Throw a dual monitor into the mix, then it becomes quite a task to remember what computer you're working on! Fun stuff.
SPIT - Spam over Internet telephony.
Bruce Schneier has written an interesting article on VoIP spamming and spamming in general. Check it out.
Isn't it terrible how another technology is being exploited by spammers? Yes, there's more important things to worry about (war, famine and all that), but that doesn't make this spam “war” any less annoying.
Remember when you just started coding? Back when you were only doing it for fun? Those were great days!
My dad introduced me to GW BASIC. I was bored and wanted to play Leisure Suit Larry. I was only 11 at the time, so he refused and showed me BASIC. I was hooked!
What I enjoyed most was writing games. They were relatively simple games because I got bored quickly and only completed a handful of them. The most noteworthy ones that I created -
- Computer Knowledge Gameshow - Using QBasic. A text-based, 2 player “Gameshow“ with a lot of computer questions. “How many bits in a byte?“
- Othello - Written in Turbo Pascal with nice graphics.
- Dude - Written in Turbo Pascal. A Commander Keen style game. You had to collect diamonds and avoid obstacles like water and spikes.
- Tetris - My favorite! The normal version wasn't challenging enough, so I wrote my own in Pascal, then later in Delphi.
I'd like to hear from the community. What kind of games/applications did you guys start with?
Kerberos is the name of the hard-core security protocol that's been used since Windows 2000. I'm in the process of learning exactly how it works.
So where does the Kerberos name come from?
Kerberos(aka Cerberus) is the name of the three headed dog that guards Hades (remember “Fluffy” that guarded the Socerer's Stone?).
When an IIS web application has "Integrated Windows authentication" enabled and “Enable anonymous access” is disabled, the LOGON_USER server variable will contain the name of the user accessing the website.
I wasn't sure if this method is really secure. Can't the LOGON_USER server variable be modified? These are my findings -
- IE will try to authenticate the user by hashing the username and password and sending it to the server.
- The server will then compare the hashes to the user on the domain.
- If the hashes match, the user has been authenticated successfully.
Note that no passwords are passed directly. Also, because both the username and password are hashed, it's not possible to simply spoof the username. You need the password as well.
Sounds pretty secure to me.
The new Nokia Nseries phones will use Symbian as their operating system. According to Symbian (see article), these phones will support multi-gigabyte memory.
Ya right! Now that's what I call marketing.
Update: I was being sarcastic before, but now that I think about it, cellphone memory is usually the amount of space that's available to store images, text messages, calendar items and so forth. So for a cellphone, memory can be thought of as hard disk space. Now having a cellphone with multi-gigabyte hard disk space is not so unbelievable.
That could be very cool indeed.
Sahil Malik writes Why MSN Messenger sucks.
I agree with his comments! The new MSN (version 7) clearly suffers from TooMuchShit syndrome. Go on... open it up and think about how many of those “features” you actually use. In the new version, MSN Messenger has a “Search” textbox and a “Search“ button, a “handwriting” tab so you can draw your message. It's got “winks”. What's that all about?
Which brings me back to my question - when is enough, enough? MSN Messenger isn't the only program that suffers from this problem. Companies feel they have an obligation to bring out a new version of their software every year or so. If the application was already working perfectly, they have to add more sh!t to it to justify a new release.
I still believe that managers and developers should learn to keep things simple. Think GMail.
Then again, maybe Messenger's target market isn't 20-something year old developers. Maybe it was meant for teens? I think I'm going to try Trillian.
I've downloaded RoboHelp X5 from Macromedia. Apparently this is THE help editor.
I have to say that I'm a little disappointed. The user interface is clunky. Some forms need to be able to re-size, but can't. That's just plain lazy, sloppy coding. The error messages aren't helpful at all. Overall it was just a pain to work with.
In true movie-critic style - I give RoboHelp 2/5 stars.
Surely there must be something better out there?
My requirements are straight-forward. I've got an NDoc-generated help file. I want to write additional help documents that can link to the NDoc help file (yes, I know there are ways RoboHelp can do this, but going through RoboHelp's leeengthy process to achieve this is not worth the effort).
This is annoying. WBloggar is a popular desktop blog publishing tool (free). BlogJet is another popular one (not free).
However, I can't connect to dotnetjunies with any one of these. WBloggar times out when trying to connect. There's nowhere to increase the timeout setting. BlogJet crashes with an EAccessViolation at address 0053CFC2. That helps a lot.
So much for fancy blogging software.
Update: After browsing the BlogJet forums, I came accross this post. Apparently this error occurs when trying to connect to .Text using a MS ISA 2000 proxy. I've got version 1.5.0.37 of BlogJet. Maybe this problem will be fixed in a later version. Maybe not?
When I try and send an email with Outlook, I get the following error - “Unknown Error 0x80040201”. Not very helpful. We used to use Exchange, now we're using a POP3 server (don't laugh).
Luckily this post pointed out the solution...
1. Open your outbox
2. Double click the first email that is unsent
3. Change the email address from the alias such as 'Joe
Error' to the actual address that looks something like
joe_error@here.com.
4. Repeat for all the emails in this folder.
5. Relax! It is fixed.
Thanks, Ben!
Wow, this is exciting. Adobe is planning to buy Macromedia (from Paul Mooney's blog).
I'm a big fan of Macromedia and Adobe products (Freehand and Photoshop respectively). Now imagine what we'll end up with when we mix the two companies together. Unfortunately as software development goes, I think we won't see any new exciting software for at least a year or two.
Here's something I'd like to know...
Current intel processors are all x86 based(I think?). Fair enough, but where does this “x86” term actually come from?
What does it mean? Does it have something to do with the number of registers, or number of instructions, maybe the number of bits or bytes in something. I have absolutely no idea.
Here's a nice Windows XP tip - when in Explorer(or Internet Explorer), hit F11.
Ba-da-bing... fullscreen!
I'm a PC guy. I probably haven't spent more than 3 hours in my life working on a Mac, so I find the one mouse button thing very strange. No context menus? Shame! I mentioned this in a post yesterday and got a nice reply from Jake (no url). Thought I'd post his reply.
So, the question - Why does a Mac only have one mouse button?
“First, I have to say that the right-click-to-get-a-context-menu convention that has materialized since Windows 98-ish is useful.
That said, the way to get different click behaviors on the Mac has always (geez, since 1985 or so...) been to "chord" with the left hand. On a Mac keyboard, the shift, control, option, and command keys are in a cluster in the lower corner of the keyboard. You shift-click or shift-command-click or option-command-click, etc. Very easy to get used to making combinations of keys with your left while clicking with your right.
And yes, you can chord in Windows, but from keyboard to keyboard the layout of which keys go where (including that new "Windows" key) varies so much that it can be tricky. And also, during the thirteen years between chording the right-click-convention, I was making a bunch of money with Photoshop, MacDraw, and Pagemaker, rarely having to use the menus to do anything...
So, these days, in Win-land, you CAN drink coffee with one hand and do TWO different useful things with your right, but for the times you're not drinking, the Mac-ists can play chords with the left hand and melody with the right. Pretty cool stuff.”
Here in South Africa the MAC market is very small (except under the graphic designers). My girlfriend is a graphic designer. I am still stumped by the single mouse button thing. Why oh why?
So I had to smile when I read about Scott Hanselman updating an old Mac's firmware.
For the past two years I haven't had a computer at home. Partly because I want to keep my work and private life separate. But mostly because I didn't have space in my small flat for a computer :) Yes, I could make space by getting rid of the fishtank, but I feel sorry for the fish.
So I finally took the plunge and bought something that wouldn't require too much space - A Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pro V 2020. Here in South Africa it's a mid-range laptop. It's got a 1.6 GHz Centrino processor. 512Mb Ram, a 60Gb hard disk and a DVD writer (nice).
Now all I need is an internet connection at home. Maybe 3G or ADSL. I'm going to compare some prices.
This is great!
From Bruce Schneier's blog -
“Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner's finger to get round the vehicle's hi-tech security system.
The car, a Mercedes S-class, was protected by a fingerprint recognition system.”
Makes you wonder what will happen when all cars start getting hi-tech security systems. The criminals will always figure out ways around the system.