Archive for September, 2006
Why The Wisdom Of Crowds Fails On Digg
A great article about a herd of people making the same decision, reminds me of the stock market!
read more | digg story
What’s in a Name
The 5th anniversary of 9/11 is a reminder that my first name is not welcome in many places (mostly by americans)… do you really think having the same first name as somebody makes me bad? How about all those who carry the first names of sinister characters in human history.
I’m proud of my name, my name identifies me, it’s one of the arabic names of the lion, and I refuse to change it even if only online… in late 2001 I was kicked out of so many IRC chat immediately after entering channels just because I use my name.
Get a life! This is my name, and you’ll have to tolerate it.
sudo make me a sandwich!
Here’s a nice comic from xkcd, you can order a t-shirt here.
Randall Munroe says:
This is probably the most popular comic I’ve ever done. It was spotted on the walls at Amazon headquarters and on some of the bigger blags. And now, as per your many email requests, here it is on a shirt!
USB flash drive that steals passwords in seconds!
The latest episode of Hak5 has a segment where they show a USB key that steals password hashes, LSA secrets, and creates back doors within seconds on insertion. The show notes are pretty detailed.
For individuals, this is mostly not a very important issue, but I Guess IT Departments everywhere should take note, and make sure non-essential USB ports are disabled, as well as taking any precautionary measures.
XP’s Places on Save/Open Dialog Boxes
I have always hated the way Windows XP manages open and save dialog boxes, it gives me choices on the left of the dialog, but those are not the places that I need, I frequently save, and load files from/to:
- My Desktop
- e:\
- A mapped network drive (Linux through Samba)
- A webdav access to a subversion repository
I found a great resource on the internet to change these, this involves registry editing, but puppy pc even provide a “wizard” that creates a .reg file, here’s the link:
Boot Linux faster with an open BIOS
Linux does not need much of the BIOS in our PC motherboards, most of it was made in the DOS days, and Windows probably still uses many BIOS functions, but Linux runs on many different platforms, and could get rid of the BIOS.
Daily Color Scheme
This is a nice site with color schemes… they claim to be adding a scheme daily, but I don’t mind if they don’t (who has time to check this site every day)…. but the archives are good!
Ruby on Rails
I just installed Ruby/Rails on my ubuntu, and followed this tutorial, with my own tables and fields.
This looks promising, what I like:
- A clear way to do things.
- A unique database naming method (table and field names).
- Simple coding “scaffolding” that could be replaced by real code.
- Real MVC.
What I don’t like so far:
- I’m not sure, but a rigid framework like this could mean that even though most things can be done easily, some complex stuff could need a lot of work.
- Ruby, I didn’t go through a ruby tutorial, but seems simple enough.
Here’s a nice vid: