Bluetooth about to become really useful

Late is better than never - at least for bluetooth and its users (yours truly included). Can't wait for Wireless USB (WUSB).

Weekend

I was 'offline' for most of the weekend; I still didn't have time to look at some of this stuff:
Edd Dumbill takes "A Closer Look at iFolder" (I mentioned iFolder in my previous post).
For some unknown reason, I haven't taken a closer look at IronPython which seems to be quite interesting. It certainly has potential (if all goes well): imagine every PDA with .NET (or preferably Mono) and IronPython, or better - every computer. I got to read part of the CPL because of it.
Another good idea is Coral. Since it showed up on /. I guess world+dog has heard of it.
Yet another good gmail tool: GmailFS, probably the best yet (at least the best hack). And I still don't know anyone with a gmail account which means that I wont get one anytime soon.
Version 1.0.1 of Xsupplicant was recently released. Little more than a year ago, when CICA told us their plans to set up a faculty-wide wireless network and we began experimenting: trying to get authentication right (with RADIUS), the one missing component for an entire FOSS implementation (on linux) was xsupplicant which wasn't good enough at the time. Good to see it has come this far.
FreeBSD is nearing another release.
Logitech introduced i's new laser mouse.
Deja vu?

Avalon and Indigo in XP, WinFS delayed.

Microsoft revamps its plans for Longhorn removing winFS - no suprises here. It will also be releasing Avalon and Indigo for Windows XP. WinFS's delay is obviously good news for the Novell's iFolder. The fact that Longhorn is more than two years away is also good news to the OSS community. Linux 2.6 should be the dominant kernel at the time. Great projects such as dashboard, gnome storage (I think I saw a similar project to this one, also for gnome that looked better but I can't remember where) and KDE's new search engine will be concluded. Firefox will probably be at version 2+, if version 0.9 is this good (so much better than IE), just think of what version 2.0 will include and how much better it will be than IE then. Think machine learning (?) (I've made a note to myself to blog about this latter)! Not to mention that mono may have picked up quite a pace by then. And let's not forget that you rarely (never?) hear microsoft software early-adopters say they're happy. Competition is increasing and delays in products may cause Microsoft more problems than just temporarily lower stock prices.

UPDATE: beagle. nuff said.

Bayesian filtering

Bayesian filtering is the process of using Bayesian statistical methods to classify text documents into one of several categories. Bayesian filtering gained currency when it was described in the paper "A Plan for Spam" by Paul Graham.

Links:
Bayes' Theorem
Better Bayesian Filtering - improvements to the algorithm in "A Plan For Spam".
SpamArchive.org - a community resource that provides a database of known spam to be used for testing, developing, and benchmarking anti-spam tools. Donate your spam!
POPFile - automatically sorts your messages and fights spam.
Mozilla Thunderbird - Mozilla's next generation e-mail client. Also uses bayesian filtering.

Open Source Licenses

This post together with the first comment pretty much sum my own opinion on the matter. I also think that all licenses should have a human-readable version like the Creative Commons (example) instead of just having the lawyer-readable legal code (example). Is the open source community made of lawyers? Off course not and most of the open source contributions have so far been made by individuals not companies. These individuals are usually tech people (programmers, system administrators, engineers, etc) who have no special legal expertise. It's not that licenses are hard to understand, they're usually not (well, at least not the ones I've read - BSD, MIT, part of the GPL - too boring for me, and a few others). It's just a waste of time and raises the bar for people who are either new to the community or just want to make a casual contribution. It might even scare them initially.

ATI is smug but Nvidia's the bug in the rug

Charlie Demerjian, looking straight at the horizon and through the marketing fog, is the author of the best piece of IT journalism I've seen in a very long while.

Comics

Ctrl Alt Del - Tragically l337 is about two guys playing video games. One of them, Ethan, does all these insane things like beating up a game company executive, declaring a holiday season (winter-een-mas), blow up the PC, and so on. The other guy ends up 'cleaning the mess'. Later a linux geek with a pet penguin and a 'gaming girl' join the group. Ethan even creates an intelligent robot out of his Xbox which also becomes part of the group. This is my favorite comic strip.

VG Cats (video gaming cats) is also about video games but more focused on them than Ctrl Alt Del.

Everyone knows Dilbert and reads it religiously right?

Sinfest - uncompromising originality.

And the classic: Garfield.

UPDATE:
Terrible mistake: I forgot userfriendly.

ControlFreak

ControlFreak is a remote control plugin for series 60 phones using bluetooth. I've been using it while reading in bed to change the volume (my mp3 are not normalized) or ocasionally skip a track.

Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening System (CAPS)

Probability theory put to good use:
Carnival Booth: An Algorithm for Defeating the Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening System

"To improve the efficiency of airport security screening, the FAA deployed the Computer Assisted Passenger Screening system (CAPS) in 1999. CAPS attempts to identify potential terrorists through the use of profiles so that security personnel can focus the bulk of their attention on high-risk individuals. In this paper, we show that since CAPS uses profiles to select passengers for increased scrutiny, it is actually less secure than systems that employ random searches."

It is an interesting read for people who like to see good old mathematics crush political arguments or for those that never thought about it.

For those who think these and other (in)security measures (such as secret laws) would never be misused, think again - US senator Edward Kennedy's (Democrat) adventure.
Implications? Civil Liberties? Freedom of Movement? Freedom of Speech? I won't even mention privacy - no one seems to care about it anymore.

del.icio.us firefox search plugin & extension

Just made a search plugin to search my bookmarks at del.icio.us from the mozilla firefox search bar.

You can download it here.

Unzip the file to the searchplugins/ directory in your mozilla firefox directory. You must be logged in for it to search your bookmarks.

Someone else wrote a firefox extension.

Social Bookmarks Manager

Jon Udell blogged about this site (and has another blog entry related to it). Sounds cool.

Far Cry - I like guns. I don't like mercenaries.

A pile of dead mercenaries. They are not very smart, are they?

Far Cry

Today I mostly wasted my time playing Far Cry. I bought a new graphics card. I just couldn't wait for the nvidia GF FX6600 which is only coming out after september (presumably). I bought a FX5900XT. Far Cry runs smoothly now and I must say that in terms of graphics and gameplay it's one of the best games I've plaid in a long while. Filipe is also playing but he is way ahead of me. It will take a while for me to finish Far Cry but i'm already looking forward to doom 3.

Apart from shooting mercenaries and mutant apes I installed samurize and edited a config file and downloaded YahooPops.

Secrets and Lies

I just started reading Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier - it's an amazing book. I've added it to the (small) list of books wish I had read years ago. This one even before it was published. It would've made an amazing impact back in '97 when I started learning about computer security. It will make a difference now neverthless, just not as big But still quite considerable.

I've also read and do recommend Bruce Schneier's cryptography classic Applied Cryptography.

Gush

Gush is a beautiful newsreader and an IM client with an innovative feature called "Announcements" (IM blogging). I haven't made any announcements yet but one day I will.

Gush now runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (it was previously only available for windows and OS X). Its interface is well designed and very aesthetically pleasing.

If only they made it possible to blog to blogspot from within gush... sigh.

Jail time for blaster variant author?

Nickenamed BlasterMaster, a 19-year-old from Minnesota is responsible for creating and releasing a version of the infamous blaster worm. He now faces up to three years in jail and a fine. A sampling of p2pnet comment posts is avaibale here. People who commit violent crimes, or crimes under the threat of violence, drug deallers and drug addicts deserve the death penalty - I shouldn't even call them 'people'. Jails, in their current incarnation only make bad people worse. I don't think that those who commit crimes that don't hurt or threaten the physical wellbeing of another individual should be locked up in cages. Heavy fines and hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of community service are more than lesson enough and are a good deterrent for that kind of people. People like virus writers. This guy didn't even write blaster, he just slapped a backdoor on top of it.

Windows, Blogger, Mono, Tomorrow II

Just great, as if Windows wasn't allready literally overflowing with non-intention 'features' (read bugs), MS had to make life harder for windows users with intentional stupid 'features'. Now I know why MS will provide a tool to block SP2... unfortunatelly i learned this to late...

Blogger is not making me all that happy either specially after having used MT before the new licenses showed up. I was only testing it and never made any real posts so migrating wasn't a problem. It's good enough for the temporary solution it is tough and I'll make my own template some time soon (soon, yeah right!). I also activated comments, don't expect me to read them, they're there just for your sole benefit - I promise I'll peek occasionally. How that benifits you is another question... look over there!

Know what would go well with this account? A gmail account. Unfortunatelly gmail is still a beta and I don't know anyone with a gmail account. I'm sure as hell not going to purchase an invite at ebay or beg for one in forums like a lot a people did.

I've downloaded the windows version of mono but I decided to try (and make an effort this time) to install mono on slackware.

A lot of the stuff I needed to do tomorrow I managed to do today. I went to the gym in the evening (8 pm) and didn't take care of my uncle's new PC because he'll be away on vacations for the next week or two (didn't ask). So tomorrow will be a slow day. I''m going to Chefax in the afternoon again but I don't think there's anything to do there. Filipe Carvalho will be there, he wasn't today. I just went there to drop something and João Paredes (Chefax's President) had stuff to do so there wasn't much time to chat - there's always IM but it just isn't the same.

Note To Self: get spel-cheking.

Windows, Blogger, Mono, Tomorrow

With Windows XP SP2 out I finally felt like it was worth installing windows again. I deleted it about 2 months ago for a size adjustment to my main hard drive's partitions. I tried to install it a couple of weeks after that but the patchs were so many I gave up. Yesterday or something I downloaded the new SP2 via bittorrent and today i did it: i installed windows. Remembering a news story about something called picasa and everyone's favorite search engine I decided to google for it... one thing led to another and I ended up creating a blog...

Actually I've been wanting to create a blog for a while now but there really isn't a single open source solution that meets the requirements - and i've tried'em all, including the CMSs (Content Managment System). Hopefully this will change soon but until then my blog will remain at blogger.com.

I could stop complaining and code the "Publishing Platform" myself like Filipe Carvalho (Chefax's VP) suggested but I promised myself I would only code again in C# (bash scripts excluded) - what a lame excuse! It doesn't seem likely I will learn C# anytime soon tough. I've been unable to compile mono and I don't feel like trying too hard for now, too bad they don't have slackware packages (those outdated external ones from the super-lame www.slackcare.com don't count - i'm not downloading from there!). Maybe I'll download the windows version in spite of always feeling kind of weird to code in windows.

Tomorrow will be a busy day, my uncle gets his new computer and I told him I would configure it and install a few programs (like Open Office) - he will drop it off at my house around 1 pm and I told it would be ready by dinner time, I also have to be at chefax early in the afternoon - I have no idea how I will accomplish this considering that I've been leaving at noon and arriving from the gym around 3 pm (just in time to buy lunch or cook something quickly) and slulmbering the rest of the afternoon....