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Add some pages here, or start a new chapter.Linkdump
» Good Books - Killing Rommel by Stephen Pressfield
Another quick summer read - Killing Rommel is a return to form for Stephen Pressfield - his 'Gates of Fire' was a masterpiece but after that I found 'Tides of War' and 'Last of the Amazons' to be a little dry.
His latest novel tells the tale of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and their various exploits in the North African campaign, culminating in a mission to track down and kill Rommel. | ¶
His latest novel tells the tale of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and their various exploits in the North African campaign, culminating in a mission to track down and kill Rommel. | ¶
» Good Books - Old Mans War by John Scalzi
My linkdump sidebar has been a little stale so I thought I'd fill it with a few short reviews.
Over Christmas I was looking for some lightweight reading material and Old Mans War certainly did the trick. Easy to read, great pacing, nice ideas and a milieu that you can't wait to immerse yourself in again (which I did by reading Ghost Brigades soon afterwards).
Both books focus on humanities move to colonise space, the competing species struggling for the same limited resources, the inevitable conflicts that arise and the rather unique solution humanity has come up with to ensure its survival.
Only complaint would have to be the 'el cheapo' Tor publishing values - cramped text and tiny margins made both books tough on the eyes. | ¶
Over Christmas I was looking for some lightweight reading material and Old Mans War certainly did the trick. Easy to read, great pacing, nice ideas and a milieu that you can't wait to immerse yourself in again (which I did by reading Ghost Brigades soon afterwards).
Both books focus on humanities move to colonise space, the competing species struggling for the same limited resources, the inevitable conflicts that arise and the rather unique solution humanity has come up with to ensure its survival.
Only complaint would have to be the 'el cheapo' Tor publishing values - cramped text and tiny margins made both books tough on the eyes. | ¶
» IBM Model M
You know you want one - IBM Model M keyboards.
Now I know I'm not the only keyboard nut on the interweb. | ¶
Now I know I'm not the only keyboard nut on the interweb. | ¶
» Retro Remake - Wizball
Dust off the joystick - Retrospec has remade Wizball for Windows.
If you had a Commodore64 in the 80's then chances are you had Wizball - one of the classic games on the platform. | ¶
If you had a Commodore64 in the 80's then chances are you had Wizball - one of the classic games on the platform. | ¶
» Operations Competitive Advantage
Those infrastructure guys beavering away in the background really are important - Operations is a competitive advantage.
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» Lessig: Corruption Lecture
Highly recommended viewing - Lawrence Lessig new ten year project is to tackle Corruption - view his presentation here. Starts a little slow but builds momentum and its an entertaining presentation.
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» DHTML Arkanoid
If you grew up in the mid to late 80's then you would have heard of Arkanoid - now it can be played in your web browser as pure DHTML Arkanoid.
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» Retro Mac Wordpress Theme
If you use Wordpress try out the Retro Mac Wordpress Theme in all its one-bit glory. Another brilliant domain name too.
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» For Lego and Apple Fanboys
Nifty - Young Woz and Jobs Playset goes on sale in two days. Goes to show that a little creativity goes a looong way on the interweb.
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Update on the One Laptop Per Child + More
Thursday 28 September 2006 at 09:25 am Some interesting details on how the OLPC is shaping up. Super geek cartoon - Unix Humour. Theres a good vi one floating around somewhere but I can't find it right now . . . Gizmodo looks at the Sony Reader. Pretty cool. I wonder what the uptake will be like ? Two nifty gadgets via Treehugger - the Sun Jar and the Gadget Charging Solar Panel. I'll have to search for something that will trickle charge a laptop that doesn't cost a fortune - that would be really handy - the MacBook battery life is really sucky. Linux tablet reaches its 3rd iteration - Pepper Pad 3. Richard Dawkins new book is popping up all over the interweb. Looks like an interesting read. This anti-Agile programming spiel also seems to be doing the rounds - its well worth a read and provides an insight into how R & D is done at Google. I wonder how well it would translate to a team working on relatively uninteresting but important tasks such as maintaining a tax system for Internal Revenue or keeping track of fines in a Justice collection system ? Also big news - Peter Jackson is setting up a gaming arm to his production company in conjunction with Microsoft. I wonder if he'll do stuff similar to LucasArts or a graphical Infocom ? Completely non-technology related - Mel laments smokey bars. NZ bars have been smoke free for about 6 to 12 months now and its fantastic - you can go out and have a few beers and when you get home you don't feel the need to wash everything you wear to get rid of the smokey smell or feel like your sense of taste/smell have been eviscerated by passive smoking (then again maybe thats the alcohol . . .)Must Write Faster + More
Friday 22 September 2006 at 12:39 pm Charles Stross writes about the perils of writing sci-fi for the near future - ideas for a new book are coming true now - Must Write Faster - IBM has a secret island headquarters hideaway inside Second Life.Definitely a better concept than Pop Idol - My Dream App - vote for your favourite application idea.
NetXen has released a Virtualisable 10Gb NIC - it plays nice with VMWare ESX so you can carve up bandwidth per VM.
This would be amazing if it actually turned out to be true - Cringely discusses where he thinks Apple iTV strategy is going.
Something for the consumer terrorist parent - Child Safety Labels We'd Like To See. Printing these out and sticking them onto toys in a shop would be cool.
Touching in a super geeky way - an ode to a dead PowerBook G4. My favourite laptop is a close contest between my old Duo 230 and my iBook 600 - each one was a generation apart from the other but they provided me with stable computing for 2-3 years apiece which is a pretty long time in IT terms.
Congratulations to Genshin Fujinami - the most recent Marathon Monk.
Nasty - Ozone mini-hole means sun risk on Sunday. So now we can't even enjoy the weekend without worrying about skin-cancer ?
Insanely Fast Climber + More
Wednesday 20 September 2006 at 06:38 am This one is for Chris - I'm sure he'll appreciate this Google video of Dan Osman scaling a vertical wall/cliff in no time flat.The 2007 - Death & Taxes Infograph is out - see where the USA spends its tax dollar.
More excellent stuff from StorageMojo (I accidentally called them StorageMofo in the last post which sounds better but I've corrected the typo) - Mission Impossible: Managing Amazon�s Datacenter, Pt I. Can't wait to read the rest. Darn good idea putting the devs oncall too - make them experience the pain they put the end user through rather than have the sys-admin act as the middle man.
Sleuthkit + More
Sunday 17 September 2006 at 3:43 pm Another handy forensic toolset - Sleuthkit. Now comes with Win32 binaries too. Tools include mactime which shows a timeline of file activity (unfortunately no Win32 version of this tool yet).A handy use for an old 64Mb USB stick - Boot a Dead PC with Nothing but a Thumb Drive. Makes use of the RIP (Recovery is Possible) mini-distribution.
An IBM DeveloperWorks article on NFSv4. It looks like it addresses some of the security concerns surrounding previous versions.
Another QuickSilver / LaunchBar clone for Win32 - Colibri is like a slicker Launchy. QuickSilver was pretty slow on my old iBook but now it positively sings on my MacBook - definitely an indispensible OS X application - if you don't need all its bells and whistles try the simpler Namely.
Most IT professionals already know this but its #1 in the list of the Top 10 Most Stressful Professions. I guess its the fact that people don't seem to understand that IT systems aren't perfect and think you're making excuses for services which just winds up the client.
Useful guide to LSOF (Lists of Open Files). Apparently its the utility with the most switches - so many that it uses both '+' and '-' for its arguments.
StorageMojo on Flash-drives - Low End Streetfight. I didn't realise high-end memory sticks used RAID 0.
Charles Stross discusses the human side of Microsoft Windows - Spinning the Hamster Wheel. Definitely a lot to be said for running enterprise apps through a terminal session or web-front-end to minimise the annoyances associated with supporting the base OS.
Monit + More
Sunday 27 August 2006 at 07:58 am From the Debian Help site comes a short article about configuring Monit. The Monit site covers the tools features in more depth. As well as the usual monitoring it lets you setup conditional actions based on alerts. Awesome - Weta releases Retro Rayguns. Its still odd that people would spend chunks of money on toy rayguns no matter how neat they are. Privacy integrated into webmail - Freenigma. Use SMS text message to control eight devices. Someone needs to commericalise this - something like a simpler X10 controller - plug an old mobile or phone into a power strip which you can signal via SMS to switch off and on connected devices. Useful for kiosk applications and driving screen displays - Puppy Linux running on a $100 PC. The MicroClient Jr looks great - shame its only 166MHz. Also gets pricey when you add in some of the extras. With security starting to get out of hand here is the ultimate t-shirt - I am not a terrorist. In arabic of course. On a related note - this is a genius cartoon from Wondermark.The network that runs better since the administrator quit + More
Thursday 17 August 2006 at 10:05 pm Sometimes true (but definitely not always) - The network that runs better since the administrator quit. IT people often have the tendency to meddle and tinker - not good in a production environment. Dev/Test and then UAT (even if it is just to the extent of discussing it with someone else before ticking the box that may cause problems for your client community) it before putting your tweaks into production.Looks like a good read - Satan: A Biography.
Genius - Chaucer Blogs about his XBOX.
Wonderful flash animation - Creation battles Creator.
Mouse-over the articles - How right-wing readers view the New York Times.
EFI in Apples Intel PC's - How Apple�s Firmware Leapfrogs BIOS PCs. The good thing is you get more control - the bad thing is that it makes it trickier to install a standard Intel based OS that expects to deal with an old fashioned BIOS.
Two useful links for people who want to use legacy Mac applications in a Classic environment - Sheepshaver will run OS 9 and for more serious nostalgia MiniVmac - Run a MacOS 7 from a USB stick. I've had good experience with Basilisk too.
Interesting UI links - Mac UI Ain't All That: The Future & History of the User Interface.
I'm always on the hunt for the perfect application launcher on Windows - something like DragStrip or DragThing would be ideal - I'll give RocketDock a crack for now.
The Coming Conflagration + More
Monday 14 August 2006 at 08:52 am Something to look forward to perhaps - The Coming Conflagration. Fingers crossed that John is wrong.Wonderful - a series of Infographics by the International Network Archive. Providing some interesting data on topics such as the global arms-race, movie, fast-food and transportation.
Genius - 3D maze using CSS and DOM. Now someone just needs to turn it into Doom.
One of those things everyone should know how to do - Rsync Incremental Snapshot Backups via SSH.
On a related note - Flash - useful for Sun Solaris systems - Using Flash Archive in the Solaris Operating System for Disaster Recovery. Handy for taking system snapshots.
Interesting - Basic Introduction to OpenBSD - possibly one of the most secure out of the box OS's available.
The first font to get the movie treatment - Helvitica: The Movie.
Thrill Power Overload - Dave Bishops Blog. Dave worked on 2000AD for quite awhile and is writing a historical overview of the comic on his blog. I didn't realise he was a Kiwi according to his Wikipedia profile . We're everywhere.
Excellent - Insecure.org has updated their list of the Top 100 Security Tools.
Interesting - ZoneCD: The Secure Way to Share Your Internet Connection. Some really good tips on securing wireless and also providing a safe/secure public wifi access facility.
Workfriendly Web Browser + More
Tuesday 08 August 2006 at 06:56 am Covert web-browsing - Workfriendly - Browse the interweb via something that looks like a Word window.Two brilliant photos depicting a high concentration of genius - 1958: Jazz Musicians in Harlem (Basie, Gillespie, Mingus, Monk) and 1927: Physicists at Solvay (Einstein, Curie, Bohr, Shrodinger, Heisenberg).
Interesting Poor Mans Thumper. Shame they're not looking towards a linux/zfs combo with a smaller footprint. Nice idea though.
Long running experiments - Longest Running Scientific Experiments. One of them is a clock at Otago University in NZ which has been running without winding since 1864 and relies on temperature fluctuations in an airtight container.
Awhile back Mark Russinovich of the excellent Sysinternals (creators of the excellent Filemon, ProcessExplorer and many many more tools) site moved to Microsoft. He discusses his first week at Microsoft.
Joels Spolsky - the first in a series - Three Management Methods. Useful for any IT manager.
Spoof comic ads by Alan Moore.
Manage an IT Team + More
Tuesday 01 August 2006 at 11:13 am Interesting - Considering an offer to Manage an IT Team. I'm way to easy going to manage anyone but theres useful advice for anyone who is considering it. I think I rely to much on peoples own motivation to do whats required - you soon find out that some people just do the very bare minimum to get by; encouraging them to contribute to the team again is a real art.Ed Brill (a Domino/Notes guy) discusses the requirements for Exchange 2007. It looks like Microsoft are relying on Moores law to come to their rescue. You also wonder if the requirements are designed so as to discourage upgrades and encourage clean installs on a new box and migrate.
Just a little tongue in cheek - Samsung Q1 UMPC vs Apple Newton. Someone needs to invent a top trumps for PC geeks. 2.5 hours is pretty miserable battery life on the Q1 though (30 hours on the Newton is optimistic if you use the backlight, modem or network for any length of time); my old Psion 3a would last about a month on a pair of AA's.
I need to try this - Fix underexposed pictures. I have plenty of non-digital pictures which I managed to botch and came out way to light - after scanning them in they lack vibrancy.
iTunes for your paperwork - Kip. Looks like an interesting idea. They should make this into a more generic personal document management system.
Kind of true - Death of the commandline. This is the kind of thing that spawned the GUI in the first place. You could look up the obscure command that you'll use once in a blue-moon or you could just use the GUI.
Speaks volumes for the mentality of troops in Iraq - "I came over because I wanted to kill people". I'm also tempted to say an armed forces or police recruiting system should weed out rednecks and psychos but then I guess they'd be mixed in with the general population. At least if they're concentrated in a few places you can keep an eye on them.
Nasty but clever - USB Social Engineering. So many clever ways to circumvent security. Definitely something to be said for locking down the desktop.
Simple but addictive Game Boy Advance carts from - Bit Generation.
Commandline image manipulation via feh. Nice name.
This looks really useful - Gorilla Tape. Duct tape is really really useful but sometimes the stickability leaves a little to be desired.
My permalinks are broken which is annoying. Seem fine in cgi mode - just an incorrect file reference in static mode. Off to bug the Blosxom mailing list . . .
