June 14, 2005 — August 13 2010
You had so much potential, it’s a shame you died so young…
You had so much potential, it’s a shame you died so young…
"Discovery consists of working at the same thing as everyone else and thinking of something different."
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
1893-1986
Sidebar
Dutch security researcher Niels Teusink has discovered a method of attacking wireless presenter devices allowing remote code execution on the host PC by sending arbitrary keystrokes to the presenter dongle!
The full description and source code is in his blog post Hacking wireless presenters with an Arduino and Metasploit
Kurt Grandis carried out an awesome Django vs .NET experiment at his company:
Almost two years ago I was in a rather unlikely situation in that I was running a software engineering department containing both a C# team and a Python team…It slowly dawned on me that I had a perfect test bed. Here we had two teams using different technology stacks within the same department…they shared the same development processes, project management tools, quality control measures, defect management processes. Everything was the same between these groups except for the technologies. Perfect! So like any good manager I turned my teams into unwitting guinea pigs.
- With the result:
- We found the average productivity of a single Django developer to be equivalent to the output generated by two C# ASP.NET developers. Given equal-sized teams, Django allowed our developers to be twice as productive as our ASP.NET team.
While the SVN Book talks about custom logging for SVN with Apache, the example format doesn’t include one of the most important pieces of information, the SVN repository being accessed!
It took me quite a while to find this, so here it is. On SUSE Linux, add the following lines to mod_log_config.conf:
And the following line to default-server.conf:LogFormat "%{%Y-%m-%d %T}t %u@%h %>s repo:%{SVN-REPOS-NAME}e %{SVN-ACTION}e (%B Bytes in %T Sec)" svn
CustomLog "/var/log/apache2/subversion_log" svn env=SVN-ACTIONInstead of the normal unreadable rubbish, this should emit lines similar to the following to /var/log/apache2/subversion_log:
2010-04-09 14:41:50 peternixon@192.168.0.219 200 repo:myproject checkout-or-export / r5317 depth=infinity (875377105 Bytes in 217 Sec)
While XMPP has been around for quite a while it wasn’t until Google Talk that a major player started using it. Now, Facebook has enabled XMPP as a way of using Facebook Chat and it seems pretty clear that XMPP will end up ruling the IM world.
AirTies is one of five Turkish firms reflecting diverse business backgrounds, from food delivery to high tech, to have been selected to participate in the U.S. Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship! A global initiative launched by President Obama in Cairo in June, the summit initiative will take place in Washington, D.C. in the spring.
Today I started to rewrite my website in HTML5 to see what it was like, and was so exited by the result that I put the new HTML5 version of the site live after only a few hours!
If you are trying to view (possibly unsuccessfully) this site with an older web browser (or any version of Internet Explorer), please upgrade to the latest version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari
For any web developers who haven’t yet looked at HTML 5 and CSS 3, do so soon, because it makes a lot of things easier, better, cleaner and brighter! Did I mention easier? Better?
On Friday the Sydney Morning Herald reported that an Internet censorship protest site had been set up under the banner ‘Stephen Conroy: Minister for Fascism‘ and was ironically registered under the very name of the Australian Communications Minister responsible for trying to mandate the compulsory filtering scheme in federal law, stephenconroy.com.au. Within hours of the story being published, auDA, the Australian Domain Name Authority, had shut down the site, giving the owners only 3 hours to respond to a request to justify their eligibility for the domain. Normally auDA would allow several days to weeks for this process. An appeal to request an extension was denied, with no reason given. The site was quickly moved to a US domain, stephen-conroy.com in order to stay active while the dispute with auDA is resolved.
Petr Horava, a physicist at the University of California in Berkeley, has a new theory about gravity and spacetime. At high energies, it actually snips any ties between space and time, yet at low energies devolves to equivalence with the theory of General Relativity, which binds them together. The theory is gaining popularity with physicists because it fits some observations better than Einstein’s or Newton’s solutions. It better predicts the movement of the planets (in an idealized case) and has a potential to create the illusion of dark matter. Another physicist calculated that under Horava Gravity, our universe would experience not a Big Bang but a Big Bounce — and the new theory reproduces the ripples from such an event in a way that matches measurements of the cosmic microwave background.
You simply MUST watch this 10/GUI video! I want one now!