I’ve started to integrate my facebook account with my blog. So if you look at my facebook profile, you can see new blog posts from this blog. And I’ve now added the facebook photo plugin to this blog so I can display images here that I’ve stored on my facebook account. That photo then links back to the facebook album which can be viewed even from people that don’t have a facebook account. Nifty!
I have just recently discovered ‘the show‘ a series of tiny video episodes from and with zefrank. I think he’s funny, Tina doesn’t, but that’s ok. He has great humour and it helps that he thinks, so I don’t have to. I also now that he likes me, he says so on his website!
This video is special. A great song to sing whenever you are scared: “At least I don’t suck at life, I keep on trying despite.”
This is a great talk by Stanford professor Larry Lessig about how the current system of enforced copyright is turning us and our children into criminals for only creative expression.
You, yes you, dinosaur of the industrial age, get this into your head: this age is about information and information is really totally different from material matter. One curious property of information is that if you try to take it away …. it multiplies! Not by magic, but by the nature of the human mind which just loves to delve into a big sea of information and reacts strongly to forces that try to dry up this well.
So, read up on the Streisand Effect and learn a lesson. All you RIAA, DCMA, Cease and Desist lawyers and Patent Pushers out there. You are of the past, just lie down and die.
Darauf haben wir LANGE gewartet! Endlich ist dem notorischen Spielverderber Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth das Handwerk gelegt worden, jedenfalls fuer kurze 6 Monate und nur wenn die Berufung nichts bringt. Dieser Mensch hat so lange die Softwareentwickler und Domaininhaber in Angst und Schrecken versetzt mit seinen fadenscheinigen Abmahnungen, dass diese Nachricht so richtig gut tut.
If you are using openId, think again and read the above article. There are so many things wrong with openId, you could just as well put all your usernames, passwords, social security number and credit card numbers open on your website.
It’s all text! - edit text from textareas in your desktop editor of choice
abcTaipu - provides an easy way to insert accented characters into entry fields or textareas, great for writing German or Esperanto on an English keyboard
In his article “We Worship MD5, the GOD of HASH“, Rich Skrenta shows some of the good uses for the old and trusted MD5 hash algorithm. So what if it’s cryptographically broken? As long as you know about the weaknesses, you can still use it for stuff that doesn’t need to be 110% secure.
In a way this article ties into the same line of thought as “The Architecture of Mailinator“, in that it emphasises that the perfectness or security of systems and algorithms must be seen in the context of it’s use. MD5 is great and fast and creates a collision only after hashing 2^64 items, in the same way to provide throw away emails that noone cares about after 1 or 2 hours, storing them all in memory in a LIFO is a great way of solving the problem.
Goodness or fitness or perfectness of a thing is always relative to the domain or context of it’s use.
In this article Paul Tyma talks how he designed and implemented his great Mailinator system, a service which provides free short-lived throw-away email addresses. This article is a great read in systems design. The Mailinator receives around 2-5 Million emails a day and runs on a very modest machine with an AMD 2Ghz Athlon processor, 1G of ram, and a boring IDE, 80G hard drive. It also shows that Java is good and solves real world problems reliably and fast.
Welcome to my motley collection of rags and bones from the vast internet. Most of it may be completely useless to you, but please be my guest and browse ...