Saturday, April 30th, 2005
Designline
This is insanely cool - a designline to show design progress from start to finish. I’ll keep this in mind for my next redesign (not that i plan to do one anytime soon).
Friday, April 29th, 2005
New Nokias
I don’t do much gadget-talk lately, mostly because the new stuff doesn’t look quite as exciting lately as it used to, but nokia’s new n-series looks mighty intriguing. They introduced their n70, n90 and n91 a few days back, all 3g series60 phones with 2megapixel cams. The n70 looks like a solid base model, but the n90 and n91 are something to get pumped up about: the n90 is a clamshell which can be swiveled and contorted in a few interesting ways with a v-v-high-rez 352×416 display - four times the resolution of current series60 phones - and autofocus. Even more exciting is the n91 with its internal 4gb harddrive to double as a portable music player - infosync fittingly calls it “Steve Jobs’ wet dream”. Most interestingly it also features wifi-support in 802.11b and 802.11g flavors, a blatant attempt at bypassing carriers if i’ve ever seen one. I expect nokia to make some moves in the online-music-store business pretty soon.
Please just slap a samba server on there and make that harddrive easily mountable over a wireless connection.
Thursday, April 28th, 2005
What is it?
I don’t have a clue what 37signals’ backpack actually is, but this sounds intriguing:
This isn’t just about posting flat content to the web via email, it’s about turning flat emails into functional web pages.
Also, could you please just finish writeboard? Not that i know what this one actually is, but i’m fantasizing about it and how it might be exactly what i need. I’d like to see these dreams confirmed or at least discarded.
Update: Now there’s another preview of backpack which hopefully clarifies things further but i don’t have the time to read it right now so i’ll just put a pointy-pointer in here for later reference.
Tuesday, April 26th, 2005
Don’t click or… whatever
When Warren Ellis writes
DO NOT LOOK AT IT IF THE SIGHT OF MAGGOTS AND EXPOSED NECROTIC BRAIN TISSUE UPSETS YOU
how could one possibly not click that link?
Monday, April 25th, 2005
What i’ve been doing for the last two weeks
Of course not exclusively, but mostly. Nothing like this game to make you crave for a faster machine or at least more ram. I believe this correlates directly to this:
At least i’m keeping up with my e-mail.
Sunday, April 17th, 2005
DRM as an end in itself
Just in case you needed any more proof that the media cartels are drawing a very distorted image of copyright protection and drm, read what Cory writes:
The OMA licensing cost was $1 per handset, which means that buying OMA for all of last year’s phones would have cost $684 million — more than the total market for digital music.
This also makes it quite clear why the tech-companies are willing to get behind the media-companies ludicrous demands: apparently there’s more money in drm than the whole media business. Considering this, it’s quite obvious why microsoft, apple &co wanna become the gatekeepers of digital media and why you shouldn’t trust any claims that they have the artists or consumers in mind when they defend their stance on drm. Someone needs a reality check and it’s not the copyfighters.
Friday, April 15th, 2005
World of Warcrack
Sorry for the inactivity, but i picked up world of warcraft two days ago and i really can’t play less than 10 hours a day right now. Addictive as crack, this game. Also, mobile data is not suitable for gaming: i’m forced to spend the next two days on a 3g connection and get a latency between 600 and 1000ms. Not so nice.
Surprisingly nice however is how well the game performs on my one year old ibook g4 1ghz. Even though it barely matches the system requirements i typically get 15-20 frames outdoors and 10-15 frames in busy towns. Quite playable. I’m on the german alextrasza-realm, my first and so far only character is “Korlorn”, a tauren shaman. Just ping me in-game if you wanna party.
Wednesday, April 13th, 2005
Security labs & paranoia
There’s nothing better than security classes, at least at our university. I’ve already taken a really nice general-purpose security lab, introducing many of the basic tools like nmap, nessus, firewalk, tcpdump, netcat, &c. During that lab we got to scan network topology and vulnerabilities, take over a machine utilizing a vulnerability in a php script and analyzing an infected machine. This semester i’m taking an internet security lab and last night i finished the first challenge. Scanning a remote network with nmap, combing through a nice tcpdump log with ethereal - it doesn’t get much funnier than that.
The amazing thing about these courses is that you’ll see how insecure most systems, networks and protocols out in the wild are. The skills necessary for a challenge like the one i took yesterday can be obtained within a few hours by any person with some basic knowledge of how computers and networks work, given the right starting points. Running a network sniffer in promiscuous mode isn’t rocket science and could possibly get you a lot of private data and account information. Sure, you shouldn’t be using an open access point without some decent security measures like vpn tunneling in place, but let’s face it, most people don’t bother with this kind of thing and these problems will only grow with more and more open wifi access points in public places and undereducated users being eager to put that shiny new centrino laptop to good use outside their home. Just sniffing the network traffic won’t immediately give you access to encrypted data, but http-, pop3- or telnet-traffic will leave some juicy clear-text usernames and passwords in your log-files, let alone any site someone browses to or the contents of their e-mails. Just thinking about this makes me wanna change all my passwords and pile some extra layers of security onto my daily computing routine.
Tuesday, April 12th, 2005
Marshall’s Web Tool Blog
A while back i wrote about my needs for a collaborative writing tool and Marshall Kirkpatrick left a comment with a pointer to his site asking for feedback on his comparative wiki review. If there’s one thing we could use more of on the web, it’s comparative reviews because most people just stick with what they know and don’t bother much with alternatives. Unfortunately, regarding wikis i’m in this camp and therefore couldn’t provide any meaningful feedback. My own experience with wikis is mostly limited to single-use, local setups for personal notetaking, not so much collaboration, but perhaps you’re a little more proficient in this area and would like to head over Marshall’s site and contribute.
As for the project discussed in my previous post: it didn’t go very well. When you receive change requests via e-mail for the wiki, things aren’t going in the right direction. In the end i’ve been the only one ever working on the wiki and the team soon returned to e-mailing word documents back and forth, which in and of itself is bad enough, but the fact that i don’t have word installed made it even worse. If you’re struggling with a similar problem and are more dedicated to getting your wiki going, you might want to read Marshall’s wiki training talking points, an interesting primer written in an approachable style found throughout the site.
Sunday, April 10th, 2005
What’s on my desk
Following what’s in my bag - what’s on my desk, as per gibarian’s suggestion. Luckily i just cleaned up my desk yesterday, so everything’s rather tidy. Now to which groups should i add this photo…