New Scientist | "Cyclone" blows computer bugs out of code

A new computer language designed to avoid unforeseen programming errors could prevent many computer security breaches, according to the US researchers behind the project.

The above link was posted to our local Low Level Programming newsgroup by one of my students (thanks Chris). In a followup to that post I recommended that the students check out the Cyclone home page...

Cyclone is a programming language that is as C-like as possible while preventing unsafe behavior (buffer overflows, dangling pointers, format string attacks, and so on).

....especially the on-line manual. Some great insights into the pitfalls that C programmers get into. Even if they never use Cyclone they should all be aware of the traps that C lays for the unwary programmer and take steps to avoid these by following safe programming practices wherever possible.

Q: Would a C environment that results in safer programming not have been called Condom? ;-)

I hate to say it but Office v. X looks impressive. Since the Mac divison of Microsoft is pretty much a maverick outfit it helps to sweeten the pill ;-)

Read Joel on Software - A Hard Drill Makes an Easy Battle to find out...

...what it takes to get software that works on hundreds of millions of computers. Those of you who develop apps that only have to run on one computer or in a controlled environment have it easy, but you're getting flabby. One of these days you'll need to get it to run on a second computer and you'll need to pull an all nighter, installing a complete development environment on that computer and debugging for two hours, before you discover that you didn't account for the possibility of spaces in the installation file path because the first computer didn't have them.?

O'Reilly Network: Road Testing the PowerBook Ti 667 is a very positive review of the new TiBook. I wouldn't mind one as my 2nd laptop ;-)

O'Reilly Network: SSH on Mac OS X for Worry-Free Wireless

via HtP - Ace's Hardware | SPEC CPU Dataminer. I bet my students would have found this useful when attempting my [52.225] CAD Tutorial #03 questions!

Jim has a wicked, and hilarious, sense of humour. For instance. Big Tobacco Settles. ROFL.

If any of my LLP students are reading this then I'd highly recommend reading Dave McCusker | New November 2001: Foyle's Island. Lots of good stuff from a very talented software developer. In particular, scroll down to the allocation games:

This is another piece about runtimes and address arithmetic.

(indirectly) via HtP - The Hoard Multiprocessor Memory Allocator (malloc replacement)

Hoard is a fast, scalable and memory-efficient allocator for multiprocessors. Hoard solves the heap contention problem caused when multiple threads call dynamic memory allocation functions like malloc() and free() (or new and delete). Hoard can dramatically improve the performance of multithreaded programs running on multiprocessors.

Isn't it a delicious irony that the Office of the e-Envoy | | Guidelines for UK Government websites version 2 is not available in HTML!?:

The Digital Communications Team works with the rest of the Office of the e-Envoy to help improve government communications in digital media.

Guidelines for UK Government websites version 2

The following documents are available:

Framework for senior managers - a summary of main points of the Guidelines and changes from the first version

Word version: (207 KB) | plain text version (54.9KB) | PDF for Acrobat 3 Readers: (341KB) | PDF for Acrobat 5 Readers (404KB)

Update: Curiously, version 1 of the guidelines is available in HTML, but not version 2. Duh!

Office of the e-Envoy | Government Metadata Framework

The e-Government Metadata Framework (e-GMF), which is available at www.govtalk.gov.uk/egif/meta.html, sets out the policy and standards for applying metadata to support the flow of information into, across and out of government and the wider sector.

Another delicious irony is that the URL cited above currently results in Error 404

HTTP Error 404

404 Not Found

The Web server cannot find the file or script you asked for. Please check the URL to ensure that the path is correct.

Please contact the server's administrator if this problem persists.

Fortunately, there is an alternative here.

There's an interesting table of Framework Policies documents at Office of the e-Envoy - Policies.

The third and final irony for now is how the Office of the e-Envoy pages look with my current settings for Mac IE5 [79K image]. As a result, I have to hike up the font size two notches before I can even read the text!! So much for accessibility!

via http://mac.scripting.com - Network Computing ... Apple OS X Upgrade Delivers Fast, User-Friendly Unix OS ...

In addition, by installing the developer tools (available on CD or by free download), I had access to a project builder and C/C++ compiler. I've searched for free C compilers for the classic Mac OS before and couldn't find any. Now anyone can be a Mac developer, which may mean a revival of the Mac shareware community.

Computer News: The Apple PNG Misinformation Scandal

via HtP - Microsoft, Intel hammer and tongs over SMT

Microsoft - the rumour goes - wants Intel to scotch talk of SMT altogether, an unlikely event given that the chip giant has talked up the benefits of the technology and sometimes says it can offer a 60 per cent boost for systems.

Yet another example of Microsoft's attempt to control not just software development but hardware too!

The Yahoo! News - Reuters Photo | President George W. Bush reacts to a Turkey named "Liberty" photo was on the front page of The Scotsman Newspaper today. It's perfect for a caption competition and blackholebrain's is just one of many I am sure. Feel free to contribute you own caption here too.

To tunr your PC into a Mac check out http://www.yaromat.com/macos8/ ;-)

Thanks for the link Gordon

It's a red letter day over at Andrea's Weblog: Tuesday, November 20 2001. Andrea has passed her last exam and has now got her degree. Hearty congratulations! BTW, it would seem that German higher education is very demanding. Now, if only my students worked as hard as Andrea has...

I feel peely wally all of a sudden. Nothing to be alarmed about - just a general feeling of lethargy and a mild sweat. It's not a hang-over. Probably lack of sleep and generally being run-down.

I doubt that my tutorials and lecture today will be the best if the peely walliness persists.

Recent developments in technology in learning have often been claimed to facilitate distant learning. I have to say that I am not enamoured by that phrase, or the connotations that it has. One alternative I considered was disembodied learning. I hadn't heard the term used before but trusty old Google threw up Disembodied Learning: How Flexible Delivery Shoots Higher Education in the Foot, Well Sort of as its first hit:

One of the great ironies in education at the moment is that increasing attention is being given to the body - how meaning is `written' on it by gender, ethnicity and class - at the same time as the new information technology provides for the body's very disappearance from learning. `Flexible delivery' writes the body out of the learning equation - or tends to. This short paper, shaped by philosophy and styled as polemic, discusses this irony. It ends up with a few worries about flexible delivery, especially the so- called `delivery' of learning, and suggests that higher education may not be as well-served by flexible delivery as is currently thought.

I have some sympathy with the tenet of that article. I am not a sociologist (IANAS ;-)) but my own experience of teaching - and commonsense - suggest that an embodied mentoring aspect to teaching and learning is A Good Thing. I like to think that real face to face mentoring situations - i.e. lectures, practicals, and tutorials, are a necessary condition for really effective teaching and learning. As a Computer Scientist that has used newsgroups and e-mail for more years than I care to remember to support teaching I know that these sorts of technologies have their place but that they cannot replace face to face situations entirely.

But, I am also critical of the constraints that such technologies impose on interactions between participants in a class. On such constraint is the poor integration of e-mail (pop/smtp) and newsgroup (nntp) with the web (http). It seems to me that e-mail or newsgroup mediated discussions are themselves disembodied from the web which, IMHO, is a superior delivery platform. Of course, you can incorporate URLs and/or HTML in e-mail and newsgroup messages but integration this ain't. It won't come as any surprise to regular readers to know that I think weblogs are an exciting (new?) development and, potentially, a great asset to disembodied learning. I like the term disembodied rather than distant in this case since it implies (to me at least) that I although I may not be in a classroom or laboratory in person, I can be there 'virtually'. I sometimes feel that 'distant' implies 'disconnect'.

Although it's unlikely that I can contribute a great deal to the underpinning (sociological) theory - remember IANAS - I am a dedicated teacher. The students that I interact with on a daily basis are (mostly ;-)) computer-literate and some are undoubtedly more active in e-mail, IRC, and newsgroup forums than I. I have always counted myself fortunate to have the opportunity to interact with generation(s) of students that are so comfortable with these sorts of technologies. They are ideal guinea-pigs!!

Time's up. Off to a tutorial. I'll get back to this thread later.

via SiT - Adam Curry's Weblog : Mobile Data Mind Bomb

I'm not crazy about the name, but the Mine is the nerds answer to Apple's iPod. Check it out though, this baby is designed to be portable storage! It helps you collect, organize and tansport up to 10 Gigabytes of data. It has special functions for your most used data, like being able to play mp3's to any audio system, showing picture slideshows on any tv set and, get this, it can email files and act as a standalone fileserver via dialup or ethernet.

As David says, Adam thinks differently. I've also long held the belief that it is your data and set-up that's important and I am critical of developments like Strathclyde's Millennium Student Project which concentrates putting a standardised laptop in (selected) students' hands. As an iBook user I am suspicious of attempts to standardise on platforms and applications - which invariably means PCs and MS Office. I would readily embrace a device that would allow me to conveniently carry around my data/setup into lecture theatres, labs, etc., without the need to lug around the iBook - although it is a nice compact and reasonably light device. But, I would require it to interwork with Macs, PC, and Un*x systems. A tall order for what is in effect a portable filestore.

Eureka! It think doesn't matter what the native filesystem is for such a device. if it has a built in web server and/or WebDAV then surely it could be used for any platform and not just Windows as [the] mine is. Ooh! I bet you Apple will come out with a product like this in the future. Let's speculate on possible names - iFile, iServe, iGather, iStore, iFetch, iNote - its a shame that most/all of these names are in use already! But not this. I hereby lay claim to be the first user of the term iJotter!! Wonder how long it will be before it registers on Google's radar.

via HtP - Java(TM) Technology & XML Downloads - Java XML Pack

The Java(TM) XML Pack is an all-in-one download of Java technologies for XML. Bundling the Java XML technologies together into a Java XML Pack ensures developers of a quick and easy development cycle for integration of XML into the Java platform.

T.H.E. Journal Online: Technological Horizons in Education | e-cheating: Combating a 21st Century Challenge

When I began teaching college English four years ago, I was enthusiastic about new opportunities for using technology in the classroom. I had visions of students learning to write essays with a computer rather than a pencil, realizing the ease of editing their work; enjoying the speed with which they could write and rewrite; discovering how to research using online databases and search engines; and submitting their work and receiving comments and grades electronically. I was not naive, though; I anticipated challenges with reluctant or skeptical students and inevitable technical problems with hardware and software. I did not, however, envision the difficulties I would encounter with electronic cheating.