Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, November 14, 2003

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Mom Finds Out About Blog: 'In a turn of events the 30-year-old characterized as "horrifying," Kevin Widmar announced Tuesday that his mother Lillian has discovered his weblog. [...] Upon receipt of the e-mail, Widmar mentally raced through the contents of his blog. He immediately thought of several dozen posts in which he mentioned drinking, drug use, casual sex, and other behavior likely to alarm his mother.'

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Torvalds served, seeks legal advice: "Darl McBride, the man under whose leadership SCO has been transformed from a software firm into the high-tech equivalent of an ambulance-chasing law firm, has made a number of outrageous claims about Linux, open source development, and the GPL after filing suit against IBM in a contract dispute. But he has not been able (or willing) to substantiate any of them. If anything, he has gone out of his way to obfuscate rather than inform. But he has proven to be top-notch at one thing since SCO began its assault: annoying the free/open source software communities. And he's done it again."

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The Reality Of Bugs: "People are constantly shocked and amazed that their pet bug hasn't been fixed in subsequent releases (e.g., in Mozilla or Safari), but those people simply don't understand how many hundreds of thousands of bugs their particular problem is competing with." (Dave Hyatt via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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Windows Vs Apple: "After a week with a Windows machine I get the feeling that this system is designed by people who know a lot about computers. Macs, on the other hand, seem to be designed by people who know a lot about people." (The Times via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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Microsoft Defies EU Commission: "Microsoft claims that by removing Windows Media Player from Windows, it would be forced to ship a substandard version to European consumers. This is on the heels of a three-day hearing by a European commission to determine the validity of charges that Microsoft illegally abused its power over the home computer market." [Slashdot]

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PowerPoint of No Return: "Bill Jensen boldly proclaims that PowerPoint is "among mankind's worst inventions, ever" and the "largest single source of useless crap within companies." To balance his virulence, Bill goes on to offer several tips and tactics that -- if you must use PowerPoint -- will help you create a presentation worth sharing.

Turn the one point you want people to know into a question.
Never "present." Always provoke conversations.
Create a one-page summary.

Personally, I've never used PowerPoint. Not once. But it turns out that Abraham Lincoln did." [via Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

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More Elsevier cancellations: "The Cornell University Library is cancelling "several hundred" Elsevier journals and has explained the reasons why in a public letter." [Open Access News]

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Encrypting directories: "[C]reate an encrypted read/write .dmg (disk image) using Disk Utility/New Image against some passphrase, and then [...] mount that image against the passphrase. It will mount under /Volumes in the usual way, but if you want it elsewhere (eg in your home directory, perhaps so that it can easily be SMB exported across the network) then UNIX link (rather than Mac alias) it into the required location. [...] When you're done with it, simply unmount the image and the contents will be secure. The UNIX link can be left in place -- it won't work while the image is unmounted, of course, but will come back to life when the image is mounted again. [...] The .dmg can be backed up and will remain fully secure off-line until restored and remounted against the original passphase." [macosxhints]