This is a great little utility (I've used it for quite a while now - this is an update) that let's a Unix weenie like me put some nice GUI touches on shell scripts or any command line executable. It's quite a nifty little toolset to automate (and GUI-fy - is that a word?) the power in the OS X Unix system.

iHook 1.0. A frontend for Mac OS X command-line executables. [freshmeat.net - Mac OS X]
11:38:08 PM     comment []

I ran into this wonderful little essay on software development embedded in a tag line of a Slashdot comment: Are You A Sharecropper?
3:50:54 PM     comment []

These scumbags never give up ... Usenet is useless now, email is getting there: is this to be the fate of the Weblog?

Spammers Clog Up the Blogs. Ever searching for paying customers, spammers have turned their attention to blogs, where they mass-post target URLs in the comments section. By Chris Ulbrich. [Wired News]
3:48:16 PM     comment []

Opps! I'll still stand by the conclusions I came to here on file swapping and iTunes, but an astute reader from outside North America pointed out a rather silly discrepency in the numbers.

Re-reading the original linked news items, it's obvious that some of the numbers represented global network utilization, while a survey cited in the same paragraph represented American numbers for client downloads.

I'll take the rap, even though the linked item wasn't exactly explicit about the source of the data cited. It's obvious, going back over it, that there was some serious apple-and-orange mixing going on here.

I didn't do any actual calculation in the piece, which is a good thing, as I was working with half-baked numbers. Still, I think the point of the piece, which was inflation of actual file sharing data by the folks with a vested interest in making "piracy" appear to be more prevelant, still stands, even when the entire globe is calculated in...

I do try to avoid "American provincialism" ... but I sure screwed up on this one! So - opps! Sorry!
1:28:56 PM     comment []

I gotta think about this ... as a developer, NAT has caused me no end of grief. And as a user, workarounds to get certain P2P services running behind NAT can be a royal pain. But ...

NAT also provides some measure of protection as a sort of "firewall" (and I know I'm using the term loosely here). NAT provides, via the options usually attached to a NAT router, for example, the ability to run a completely promiscious mail server inside a LAN - which can be most useful in the case of mixed networks (such as my home LAN).

NAT is also cheaper - I don't care how many IPv6 numbers are available, it's still finate, and they will still cost cash - if not immediately, at some point in the future where everybody's refrigerator is online all the time.

So, like I said, it's something to think about - I just can't see it being as cut and dried an issue as the headline might suggest.

NAT: Just Say No. Fueled by the lack of public IP addresses, 70% of Fortune 1000 companies have been forced to deploy NATs (Source: Center for Next Generation Internet). NATs are also found in hundreds of thousands of small business and home networks where several hosts must share a single IP address. It has been so successful in slowing the depletion of IPv4 addresses that many have questioned the need for IPv6 in the near future. However, such conclusions ignore the fact that a strategy based on avoiding... [CircleID]
12:13:44 PM     comment []