David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Barnes & Noble just cut its tablet prices to make them more competitive. Now, $199 gets you the 16 GB version, and $179 gets you the 8 GB version. Twice the memory of a Kindle or Nexus, plus the ability to expand with cheap $25 SHDC cards? Why am I sitting at home writing this instead of standing in line?
Simple. Read more
And if you needed another reminder of why you should secure your wi-fi:
“There’s a very common belief that if someone pirates your Wi-Fi connection or uses your computer without your permission, you are responsible for illegal downloads of copyrighted material. That’s not true, says Stoltz; the law is quite clear. However, the lawyers who bring those cases use that misperception to convince innocent people that they had better pay up. Since $3,500 is just a fraction of the money it would take to fight a case in court, most people simply settle.” —Infoworld
The plugin I was using, FT Facepress II, decided to quit working, so now I’m trying to get the official Facebook WordPress plugin working.
If it does all it says it does, Facebook comments about blog posts will also show up here (and not just on Facebook), which would be nice.
Update: It appears to have worked, but it also appears to have replaced the comments engine. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. That option is easy enough to disable; I’ll give it a trial period and see. The new engine can authenticate against Facebook, AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail, so it does give some options for those who don’t have Facebook accounts.
The upside is that this may significantly reduce the spam comments. I have a good anti-spam engine, but the comments still clutter up my database.
Software developer, author, and blogger Jeff Atwood wrote his confessions of the 1980s this week. As a teenager and not-quite-adult, he was a phone phreaker.
More of this went on than anyone wants to admit. Rob O’Hara has podcasted about it. Read more
I didn’t have time to write everything I wanted to write yesterday, so I’m going to revisit Bill Gates and Gary Kildall today. Bill Gates’ side of the DOS story is relatively well documented in his biographies: Gates referred IBM to Gary Kildall, who for whatever reason was less comfortable working with IBM than Gates was. And there was an airplane involved, though what Kildall was doing in the airplane and why varies. By some accounts he was meeting another client, and by other accounts it was a joyride. IBM in turn came back to Gates, who had a friend of a friend who was cloning CP/M for the 8086, so Microsoft bought the clone for $50,000, cleaned it up a little, and delivered it to IBM while turning a huge profit. Bill Gates became Bill Gates, and Kildall and his company, Digital Research, slowly faded away.
The victors usually get to write the history. I’ve tried several times over the years to find Kildall’s side of the story. I first went looking sometime in 1996 or so, for a feature story about Internet misinformation I wrote for the Columbia Missourian‘s Sunday magazine. For some reason, every five years or so I end up chasing the story down again.
Read more
I saw the headline on Slashdot: Forensic evidence trying to prove whether MS-DOS contained code lifted from CP/M. That got my attention, as the connection between MS-DOS and its predecessor, CP/M, is one of the great unsolved mysteries of computing.
Unfortunately, the forensic evidence doesn’t prove a lot.
Friday night, my wife and I attended a baseball game with several of my new coworkers and their families. We rode Metrolink–St. Louis’ light-rail train–to the stadium to avoid traffic. The ride to the stadium was peaceful and relaxing. The ride from the stadium was peaceful and relaxing too, except for a brief interruption between the second and third stops.
It started with an obscene gesture and a lewd request, stated loudly. I assume he was hitting on a female rider sitting in front of him, though I don’t know who it would have been, since all of the female riders on the train appeared to be riding with their husbands or boyfriends. This action predictably failed to win him any affection, or even much attention, from any of the female riders, though several of the male riders took notice. Read more
I’ve been grabbing Project Gutenberg texts as I think of them, and prettying them up with an epub editor, but I learned today that I’ve been largely wasting my time. Manybooks.net is a site that has most of the Gutenberg collection available and has already cleaned up the formatting and added covers to make these old public domain books look better and more recognizable on an e-reader’s virtual “shelf.”
That’s not the only thing the site has going for it.