June 28, 2008
A Shared Fantasy World - Santharia
Santharia is a shared fantasy world with a constantly evolving collection of birds, beasts, gods, history, geography, music, and legends. Very odd and quite interesting.
Welcome to the future, kind of like the Uncyclopedia but not so pointlessly silly.
I might do some work on this...
Posted by rakhier at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2006
Re-made Blog Roll
I re-worked my Blog Roll a bit. Some blogs have been demoted, a few new ones added.
- Pajamas Media - the great collection of bloggers. Some of the best active bloggers.
- Melanie Phillips Diary good general commentary from England.
- Ruth Gledhill - Articles of Faith - the London Times special columnist on relgion. Very rare indeed.
I've been busy with other online writting. The Wikipedia has been the subject of much of my free time for the last three months.
Posted by rakhier at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2006
What is going on?
Seem to have a problem with the Bloggin software here...
Posted by rakhier at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)
January 03, 2006
A virus that works simply by viewing an image... sigh
At one time in my younger days I would have said this was impossible but it turns out its real. You can get infected by a virus simply by viewing a file. Here is a link to the entry on the F-Secure web site which talks about the problem.
For the technically minded the vulnerability has to do with a feature Microsoft put into their WMF format. The feature was a piece of code that could be embeded into a WMF file. The function was designed to be called by Windows if a print job needed to be canceled during spooling. Sadly, the feature can be (and now IS being) exploited to hack into other people's systems.
This is an incredibly easy and nearly unstopable virus. Sigh.
The initial work-around can be found at www.hexblog.com.
Posted by rakhier at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2005
Why Use Internet Explorer? Use Firefox...
Microsoft announces yet another problem with Internet Explorer. Sigh. Why would any sane person use that program?
- Microsoft issued a patch to fix the problem as part of its monthly security bulletin. The problem mainly affects the Windows operating system and Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.
Computer security experts and Microsoft urged users to download and install the patch available at www.microsoft.com/security.
Microsoft said the vulnerability exists in its Internet Explorer Web browser, which an attacker could exploit to take over a PC by running software code after luring users to malicious Web pages.
Use Firefox. Its fast. Its simple. It doesn't have security holes so dangerous that evil programs can take over your computer.
Posted by rakhier at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)
Wikipedia as Accurate as EB in Science articles
What I consider to be one of the great achievements of this decade - The Wikipedia - has been rated just as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica, at least in science articles.
- Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that relies on volunteers to pen nearly 4 million articles, is about as accurate in covering scientific topics as Encyclopedia Britannica, the journal Nature wrote in an online article published Wednesday.
The finding, based on a side-by-side comparison of articles covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum, comes as Wikipedia faces criticism over the accuracy of some of its entries.
Two weeks ago prominent journalist John Seigenthaler, the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today, revealed that a Wikipedia entry that ran for four months had incorrectly named him as a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.
Such errors appear to be the exception rather than the rule, Nature said in Wednesday's article, which the scientific journal said was the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia to Britannica. Based on 42 articles reviewed by experts, the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three.
Of eight "serious errors" the reviewers found -- including misinterpretations of important concepts -- four came from each source, the journal reported.
Given the nature of the Wikipedia, it will have corrected the errors within a day or two of this magazine's publication, while the Britannica might be fixed 5 years from now.
Posted by rakhier at 08:37 AM | Comments (0)
December 01, 2005
Google's Future as Seen by Cringely...
Robert Cringely has a post in which he explains how Google is poised to take over the Internet. I don't fully understand how what he is talking about is any sort of "take over" but it does make for intersting reading...
- Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria's Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn't matter. To Google's local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.
As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit locally, too. Two or three hops away from every user, they'll also be completely backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your data never goes away unless you erase it. Your latency and system response are as low as they can possibly be made for a network app.
And remember the Google Web Accelerator that came and disappeared? It's back! Only this time the Web Accelerator will have the proper hardware and network infrastructure to make it worth using.
This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware.
Interesting...
Posted by rakhier at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2005
You won't believe how nasty computer security wars have become...
This essay by Mark Russinovich details how Sony installs a super secret piece of software onto your computer when you try to play a "protected" CD or DVD and then hides the software and does not allow you to de-install it. In a nutshell this code is identical to a virus.
To do this, the code makes use of a new technology called Rootkits (which you can read about here).
As Mark writes "persistent rootkits work by changing API results so that a system view using APIs differs from the actual view in storage... It is theoretically possible for a rootkit to hide from RootkitRevealer. Doing so would require intercepting RootkitRevealer's reads of Registry hive data or file system data and changing the contents of the data such that the rootkit's Registry data or files are not present."
As one comment put it: "It's like discovering that your cough medicine actually changes your DNA in irreversible ways... and nothing on the label says so. Then you find out that the reason for the DNA change was just to make you allergic to knock-off cough medicines, not to make you any healthier."
First, this is illegal under California State law and the laws of several other nations, so Sony is in serious legal trouble over this.
Second, this reveals the danger inherent in being allowing software to re-write basic operating system calls. I know all about this as we used this basic trick to get After Dark screen saver to work.
Posted by rakhier at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
August 31, 2005
New blogger: Michael Barone
Barone is a writer for U.S. News. Now he has a blog (for who knows how long...). So far, its worth the read. Now in my daily blog section.
Posted by rakhier at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)
July 09, 2005
Two new web sites...
Here is a site, WorldChanging, which looks at changes in technology and effects on the world.
This web site History in Film, could be better but its got a lot of materials highly useful to teachers of history.
Posted by rakhier at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)
A Conference run by Women Bloggers...
A conference run by women bloggers will be held at the end of this month in the Santa Clara TechMart Meeting Center. Its called BlogHer.
Good for them. Sounds pretty cool. More bloggers is good.
Posted by rakhier at 02:09 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2005
A Reasoned Theory for Apple's Switch to Intel...
Mr. Gruber of Daring Fireball has a critique of Robert X. Cringley's analysis of the Apple-Intel news. His analysis is worth the read. Intel buys Apple? Nope. Oh well. It was just a theory (ed - So is this!)
Posted by rakhier at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2005
Why Did Apple Announce the Switch to Intel CPUs?
The news that Apple was going to leave its current CPU line (an IBM/Motorola RISC chip) and switch to some unnamed Intel CPU came out of the blue and makes just about no sense. Here is a speculative article by Robert X. Cringely which suggests a plausible reason:
Intel has determined that Microsoft is now its enemy and so Intel is going to buy Apple as a way of fighting back.
Clearly Microsoft is no longer doing much of anything in its software development which forces people to buy state-of-the-art Intel CPUs. So people aren't buying the expensive (profitable) Intel CPUs. This is a problem for Intel.
BTW: The history of the 1990s was a history writen by two key facts: during the 1990s, Microsoft repeatedly built and released new versions of its operating system (Windows 3.1, Win95, Win98, Win2000) while Apple repeatedly tried and failed to release a new version of its operating system.
Now things have changed. The decade of the 2000s has been the reverse of the 1990s. While Apple has successfully released operating systems (based on the NeXT OS which Apple bought from Steve Jobs), Microsoft has been stuck in a holding pattern. Its been 5 years since Microsoft released XP and the new operating system has been repeatedly delayed.
New operating systems matter. New operating systems (should) create a new baseline of basic services to the computer users that makes their lives easier and allows for better applications. Microsoft won the 1990s because they did this while Apple tried and failed. Things are different. It may be time to sell Microsoft stock.
Posted by rakhier at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2005
Two New Blogs...
I've added Chester's Blog on War and Foreign Affairs to my blog roll and I've added Neo-NeoCon. I've also removed some non-performing blogs.
Posted by rakhier at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
April 28, 2005
How to Blog Anonymously
Here is a good essay on how you can blog and avoid getting into trouble or getting fired.
How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)
I may need to do this sometime. The cult of polical correctness has even reached into some areas of public education. Sigh.
Posted by rakhier at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)