Zynga is getting ready to IPO. They’re the group that does “Farmville” and other games on facebook. The problem with their planned $1B IPO, though, is that they rely completely on facebook’s continued existence to make any of their earnings. Last year their profits were in the neighborhood of $400M. That’s a lot of dough. …
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Category:technical
digital lostness
As with many others, I suppose, I have various email address come and go: perhaps via job changes, or graduating/changing schools, deciding to sell a domain, or any of a host of other reasons. There’s a problem with that, though: when those changes happen, sometimes access to other digital resources becomes…difficult. For example, I have …
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chimneys and fireplaces
About 14 years ago, good friends of the family bought an old farm house with some outbuildings in rural Schoharie County in NY (outside Middleburgh, in a locale called “Hunter’s Land”). One of the first things they wanted to do with the house was to re-engineer the heating, which included properly insulating the house, and …
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it was nice while it lasted
There have been a variety of stories recently about MacDefender, and the recent [small] wave of malware attacks on Mac OS X systems. For years, one of the most-touted features of the Mac was its [relative] immunity to malware: the number of viruses, trojans, etc for any edition of the Macintosh is remarkably small: with …
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about time :)
Saw in a tweet from David Pogue that someone has finally implemented a DVR-for-radio. Only took three years for someone to build 🙂 I haven’t started playing with DAR.fm yet, but it looks pretty cool!
square foot gardening by mel bartholomew
Years ago, my mom and I would routinely try to catch episodes of {{Square Foot Gardening}} (SFG) on PBS. Hosted by {{Mel Bartholomew}}, a retired civil engineer, SFG was a program whose aim was to enable gardening by the masses in confined spaces (though, naturally, if can be implemented in larger settings as well). Mr Bartholomew’s …
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moab con 2011
I was in Provo UT this week for Moab Con 2011. It was a great week – got to meet lots of interesting people, learn how different companies and institutions are using Adaptive’s Moab product, and see where the roadmap for the product should bring it over the next 1-2 years.
bglug presentation – haiku fun
On 21 May I am presenting at the BGLUG meeting. The topic will be Haiku. I was an ardent BeOS fan/user for a while during their early Developer and Release days, and was among the saddest* to see them disappear as a company, and then even more saddened when Palm totally blew their chance to …
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mtbf – is it really *that* hard?
Most manufacturers will list an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) on their products – at least in the computer hardware industry. A typical number might be 1 000 000 hours. For those keeping track at home, that’s about 114 years! Now, since no harddrive has been running for more than a century, how could they …
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virtualization myth – reduction of servers
Ars Technica has had a great series of articles recently on virtualization (1 2 3 4 5). But a statement made in part 5 repeated what has been too-often stated as a benefit of virtualization: the reduction of servers, and associated management tasks – The benefits of performing a large-scale P2V conversion are pretty clear: …
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applied cryptography, 2d ed by bruce schneier
As recently promised, here is my review of {{Bruce Schneier}}’s seminal work, {{Applied Cryptography}} (2d edition). I received my now-signed copy of Applied Cryptography (2d ed) for my 16th birthday – about a year after it was published. Of all the “odd” books I asked-for when I was younger, this single volume had to take …
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ip addresses for sale
Microsoft is trying to buy ~650k IPv4 addresses from in-bankruptcy-proceedings Nortel (for $7.5m). What gets me is that IPv6 has been a standard for over a decade, and yet so few have moved to it. Way back when I was in college the first time – in 2000 – our networking professor told us we …
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oracle discontinuing itanium support
This morning I saw the headline on InfoWorld: “Oracle stopping development on Itanium — slap at HP or obvious decision?” At my previous employer, we were entertained by a couple visits from both HP and Intel folks ballyhooing the Itanium, HP-UX, and the future of the platform – especially in the database arena. I thought those visits …
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folding@home – ewok cabaret
For several months (I guess, more accurately, “years” now) I have been contributing to Stanford’s folding@home project. That’s my team I just linked-to (88135). If you’re interested in donating your spare CPU cycles to a pretty worthy cause, I’d invite you to join my team 🙂
firsts – programming
I realized earlier this week that it’s been 19 years since I first started programming. Not my first exposure to computing, which was in about 1986 on my aunt’s Mac 512 .. but still a long time ago 🙂 My aunt gave me a Tandy 102 laptop that had a whole walloping 21446 bytes of …
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wordpress plugins
I’ve started writing [simple] plugins for WordPress – the blogging tool I use to manage antipaucity.com. As I write more, if I think they’re worth sharing, I’ll write about them here. A full list will also be available at http://antipaucity.com/plugins.
cloudy driving in progress
In follow-up to a previous post, I saw this on Wired.com today. Seems Ford sponsored a class at UMich to develop Cloud Computing apps… for the Commute. The new Fiesta can Tweet while it’s driving. Not sure I like that idea… but it’s interesting, to say the least.
blogger frustrations
I maintain another blog on a very hap-hazard basis with a friend of mine on another domain. We use blogger. Turns out that you cannot specify an alternate port for sftp publishing with blogger. So my changes to the ssh daemon on the server to run on port !22 are useless if we want blogger …
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driving into the cloud?
From a news story I saw today on RIM acquiring QNX, this quote jumped-out at me: “RIM’s acquisition of QNX could open the door for tighter integration between Blackberry devices and car computers, a capability that could be important as cars begin to drive into the cloud.” I wonder what folks would think if car …
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Wolf2 reprogressing
As is often the case with a first attempt, improvements need to be made. My Wolf1 (reference) one-way hashing algorithm, while operational, does not avalanche as well as it should: one-bit changes to the source being hashed are not creating vastly different outcomes. I’m reworking the Wolf1 process into a new version, and will post …
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nook
I’ve not yet been impressed by any of the e-book readers I’ve seen – with Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader being the apparent “market leaders” in the segment. However, Barnes & Noble’s new Nook may change my mind. From the early reviews, it appears to have a better screen, longer battery life, and more natural …
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end6 must die
Have any of you seen end6.org? Apparently some web sites choose to redirect their viewers to end6.org rather than render in IE6. Yes – IE6 is old. Very old. But hundreds of thousands of us are stuck using it while at work due to bad IT policies, or upgrade paranoia. Taking me to end6 instead …
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nasa searching for new challenges
I saw this in /. earlier in the week. Apparently NASA is turning to the American public for new challenge/contest ideas. I don’t know whether to be impressed that they’re trying to get new perspective.. or scared that they can’t come up with it on their own. There’s lots and lots of smart people at …
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almost drr…
With the new iPod nano from Apple, it looks like someone is starting to implement a digital radio recorder. It’d be nice if it wasn’t just the “skip” or “pause” protection, but it’s a start.
avoiding the voicemail prompts
I just found this article from David Pogue that indicates how to avoid the voicemail prompts and greetings: It turns out that each carrier offers a “bypass the instructions” keystroke that takes you directly to the beep. (It bypasses both the person’s own recorded greeting and the 15-second carrier nonsense.) To be as evil as …
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