ThinkGeek :: No, I will not fix your computer

There is nothing more frustrating on this earth than constantly being asked to help other people with their petty computer problems. Of course if your job description dictates that you have to fix other peoples computers, then there is nothing so frustrating as being forced to do so ;)

Gotta get me one of these T-shirts ;-)

Scientists build tiny computer from DNA

Israeli scientists have built a DNA computer so tiny that a trillion of them could fit in a test tube and perform a billion operations per second with 99.8 percent accuracy.

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...