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Thursday, August 29, 2002 |
Hand in the Cookie Jar
posted by David Bau
Well, we got a response note, and they didn't just agree to comply. Instead, actually, the author decided to deny any copying of code. But his hand is in the cookie jar. We know he is fully aware that he copied the code. We know he knows it was wrong to do so. Read all about it.
Infringing on a GPL License
posted by David Bau
I've read about it before, but now it's happening to me: somebody is infringing on the code for my GPL'ed DQSD project. Glenn Carr says that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I'd really rather that the infringers stop. Here's what's happened so far.
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Friday, September 21, 2001 |
Moore's Triple Crisis
posted by David Bau
Why all the hype around Microsoft.NET?
It's not just hype: it is Microsoft's response
to a major shift in the software industry caused
by a three-way Moore's Law crisis.
I've written
an article about the way I see things.
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Wednesday, September 19, 2001 |
New Worm
posted by David Bau
This time I was the last to notice: at about 9:14 yesterday, my webservers started getting hit by a new worm. This one is again more virulent than the previous Code Red worms. Instead of hunting for one vulnerability, the new worm appears to exploit several vulnerabilities, including the ones opened up by Code Red II. It's hitting my web server at a rate of about 9000 hits per day, which is about 15 times more volume than Code Red II. The Symantec's advisory indicates that the worm is also spread via an email attachment virus. Very tricky.
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Wednesday, September 12, 2001 |
Hitting Close to Home
posted by David Bau
I learned this morning that Ed Felt, one of my colleagues at BEA, died in the hijacked plane that crashed over Pennsylvania.
I have to admit that when I first saw the disaster on TV yesterday morning, it was just another remote and strange media curiosity to me. But when I heard the news of Ed Felt's death, it hit very close to home. I lunched with Ed last Tuesday when he hosted my recent visit to BEA's New Jersey office, and he made an immediate connection with me. He was a smart and energetic engineer, and it was also clear that he was a real family man. I was looking forward to working with him.
Ed was killed on his way to a small meeting in San Francisco that I was also going to attend. If I had booked a slightly different flight for my trip, I would have been on the same plane as Ed. Instead, the airports were closed down before my departure. Life is so precious.
My deepest condolences go out to Ed and his family and all the other victims.
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Monday, September 10, 2001 |
Uptime is Dead
posted by David Bau
The free Uptime service from ArsDigita is dead. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Uptime is (was) a great little free service by Phillip Greenspun that would periodically hit your website, and send you mail if it was down. It was nice to be notified, for example, when the power went out on my home webserver, or when I screwed up my router configuration. But recently I've taken down my websites several times without the familiar notification from Uptime. And today I just noticed after looking through my access logs that uptime hasn't been hitting my websites since August 6! Time to switch to the Uptime service from OpenACS.
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Thursday, September 6, 2001 |
Popup Killer
posted by David Bau
Fed up with those popup ads? I am. The most popular popup squasher on Cnet's downloads.com is a free program called Popup Killer, by Xavier Flix Sanchez.
It works. You can tell it to make a little noise when it kills a popup; then you can check the logs to see what windows it has closed. It has a configurable blacklist, whitelist, and and an optional "smart" mode which I turned off. And the most useful feature is that you can download a standard blacklist that is kept up-to-date by volunteer administrator Bruce Hearne. Free support from Xavier and other users is available on active newsgroups.
With its active community of outside contributors, Popup Killer is a good example of Open Pragmatism that is not Open Source.
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Sunday, September 2, 2001 |
Chinese Hackers?
posted by David Bau
I visited Gary Burd last week, and we sifted through our access_logs and error_logs looking for anomalies. Our conclusion: there are several programs that are scanning the internet - both our servers, anyway - from China. The scans seem harmless, but they could be used to collect information to launch future attacks. Could this be Chinese government funded activity? Then a couple days later Gary saw this article.
Structured Graphics
posted by David Bau
I've been trying to improve the Realtime Javascript Editor by adding basic computer programming examples: "Hello world", "Prime number sieve", "Temperature converter", "Digits of pi", "Guess a number", and "Line drawing". For that last thing I had to look for a way of doing line art inside Internet Explorer. It turns out that it's possible, but not widely used. Have you ever heard of the Microsoft Structured Graphics control?
An Old Game About Programming
posted by David Maymudes
Inspired by Dave's reminisces, David talks about one of his favorite old computer games, which is also about programming. Even though it's from 1985, it's a great game, and even better, you can still play it through the magic of emulation.
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