Dropsafe

In conversation with a colleague on IRC the other evening, I nipped upstairs to the machine room, scanned and uploaded this photo of myself and my colleagues at University of Aberystwyth Computer Unit, circa 1990, in the era when I was first fighting to make sense of DES S-boxes and trying to make E-expansions go

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With the exception of a small number of DRM-faffed CDs: Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf David Grey: White Ladder …which will doubtless succumb to LAME on Linux; aside from these plus one DVD-Single with which I have yet to work-out what to do, my iPod now contains every music and spoken-word

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Now I do not always quite agree with everything that our ponytailed leader says in public, but in this one Jonathan is, as we Brits say, bang on the money. Solaris and its nifty new features is not a threat to any of Linux, linux, or GNU/[Ll]inux; it is a competitor to those firms which

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Spotted by Bart: [news.bbc.co.uk] A bold amphibious escape bid by a bear at Berlin zoo has been foiled in a dramatic shoot-out. Juan the Andean spectacled bear first paddled across a moat using a log for a raft, then scaled a wall. Finally he appeared to commandeer a bicycle, before zookeepers with brooms cornered him…

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Nearly-Live Planetary Desktop Backgrounds! Cool! [taint.org]

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So i pointed a colleague at the new iMac – which I don’t like for some reason, looking rather boxy – and he cited several other PC-In-A-Monitor solutions from Computer Trade Shopper. He then cited this one – Computer-In-A-Keyboard – and I said: It’s a Sinclair QL, innit? Or maybe an Oric? Dragon32? VIC-20? Just

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worth a read, from [www.oblomovka.com] Me: In the Autumn, you take one of these horse chestnuts, drill a hole in it, put a piece of string through the hole, and play conkers. You flick the chestnut at the other persons’ chestnut. The chestnut that doesn’t break into pieces wins, and goes on to battle other

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For years I have been saying variations upon a theme of: There are no new security bugs, there are merely ever-more-complex re-incarnations of the same classes of bug. …and that pretty-much every security bug ever described eventually collapses down to being one of a small number of common fault-categories that you need to be really

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I parked-up the bike, dismounted, and sauntered under the eaves of the large marquee, and into the middle of the tent. “It’s a funny thing,” I started, “– you ride a Suzuki into the middle of a campsite full of BMW owners, and they look at you like you’re some sort of space alien…“. The

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I keep a small number of metrics – touchstones – that help me keep track of my progress through the year. Amongst the impending-post-summer ones, are: Outbreak of crops of small funghi in the surrounding woodland and in my garden – last two weeks. Staying up late enough to see Aldebaran rising, and the Pleiades

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[www.csamuel.org] Oops, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has pulled up Microsoft over an advert that tried to claim that Windows cost less to run than Linux. Unfortunately the advertisers only managed to achieve this claim by including the cost of the hardware into their "study" and putting Linux on a massive IBM Z900 mainframe (which

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Well, the LiveJournal users might get mildly discomforted by my occasional use of this, but hopefully my site has been delisted from all the differing this is an evil hacker site databases by now, thus I am instituting a RSS form of the LJ-CUT tag, internal to blosxom. FOO Like this. See? Hopefully it will

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