Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, July 2, 2004

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Redmond's Butterfly Effect: "Criminals are benefiting from an Internet Explorer that's so complex even Microsoft can't predict its behavior. [...] Here we had multiple vulnerabilities in IE, at least one spanning back months, which have remained un-patched by Microsoft. The culmination of the vulnerabilities allows for silent code execution on the client box: zones crossed, files downloaded, code executed, boxes owned. Microsoft's own little butterfly effect."

About Moomin and Finland -- Comment()

Here is a short introduction to Tove Jansson, the creator of Moomin: "Some writers have the gift of being able to construct an entire coherent and detailed world and to people with more or less human creatures out of their ow imagination. [...] Somewher at the top of any list would be Tove Jansson (1914-2001) of Finland, creator of the world of the moomintrolls and their friends, a world which is both strange and a little dangerous, while being pleasant and familiar at the same time. [...] Moomintroll, that chubby, cheerful being, came into existence as a family joke when Tove Jansson was young girl. He was a little thinner at the time. Later he became a kind of signature when she did illustrations for various magazines." Perhaps you allow the Moomin to teach you about Finland as well.

What kind of atmosphere does Titan have? -- Comment()
The Huygens Atmospheric Structure Instrument (HASI) is perhaps the most interesting instrument on-board the Huygens probe. This probe will be released by the Cassini spacecraft to descend onto Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

HASI has been partly developed researchers at the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI). So, to celebrate the arrival of the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn, I'm showing the flag of Finland here. (By the way, the Finnish flag at Wikipedia uses a too dark blue color. The flag shown here is nearer the correct version, at least on my screen.)

Dan Gillmor celebrates In Saturn's Orbit: "Congratulations to the teams from several nations who successfully put the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft into Saturn's orbit for an exploratory mission. Wonderful pictures, brilliant engineering, a boon to science -- as good as this gets."

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Lawsuit: Google Stole Orkut Code: "A small software company says Google got a big start in the social-networking business by stealing its source code for orkut.com. The company claims a former engineer took the code with him when he got a job at Google." [Wired News]

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Origins and essence of Apple's Dashboard: "A sliding puzzle. A calculator. A clock. A little notepad. Tiny little applets — little pieces of software that are something less than full applications themselves, but which run alongside real apps and are easily accessed at any time. Obviously, Apple ripped off the idea for Dashboard. Stolen wholesale, without even the decency to mention where they took the original idea. Which, of course, would be the desk accessories from the original 1984 Macintosh ..." [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

Surfin' Safari provides additional details: "As for many of the animations, fades, slides, etc in the widgets themselves., they simply look so damn cool because of Safari's rich support for CSS3 used in conjunction with DHTML. Do you know what I talked about at WWDC? Image replacement. Sliding doors. Using opacity to create fade effects. CSS3 text truncation. Web standards. All of which are being used to full effect in Dashboard widgets. Our standards support has grown so rich and our engine has become so smooth at effects that people are constantly mistaking pure JS/DHTML/CSS stuff that people are doing for something fancier. I've heard "That's HTML?!" several times in the past week."