Business

Digital images have fingerprints (news to me, didnt know they had fingers, or hands…)

Whoa! Digital photographic fingerprints! Neat!

Who’d have thought that the forces of entropy were *against* the idea of anonymnity 😀 Entropy 1, Privacy 0! I wonder how long it’ll take for them to adapt this to digital video as well. Theoretically you would also see a uniform variation even when the background image was changing. Like having a cobweb on your TV.
A comic take (pun intended):

MOM! Kodak left fingerprints all over my images… and Cannon left the toilet seat up again!

I guess all those young pervs will have to stop taking candid shots of their sisters 😉

DK

w00t!

My camera *DOES* have a single-button-multi-photo mode! I figured out how to access it… sometimes… now to *UNDERSTAND* it… but… baby steps… I now know I have one!

Cheers!

Yawn

Well here I am in bed, and I have to say that scott was right. The reason you get a small notebook (in this case an ibook 12″) is so that you can, reflexively, pick it up and waltz around the house with it at will.
I’ve been doing this recently, and It’s great. It’s light, not clunky, and I dont use *any* accessories with it. I pick it up and go… and… I *DO*.

I’d used notebooks in the past, but always the 17″ “desktop replacement” notebooks. The funny thing about the deskttop replacement notebooks is that that’s EXACTLY what they became! I would sit the thing on the desk and hook up all kinds of attachments to it, and it would never… ever… move. Unless it *had* to move, and then I grumbled about it constantly because things werent as I remembered it, or expected it, or wanted it.

I have a lot of stuff to work out, such as the idea of storing my mail/firefox/IM preferences in a version control system for a simple commit/update/go of my “important” stuff. For this it would be nice to have a RCS which actively manages all files in a directory. I hear Git (?) does this, and I *know* subversion doesnt… perhaps I’ll explore this idea a little bit more.

I’ve also looked a bit at dogster, and It doesnt seem to have any of the “active” social stuff for dogs and their owners, more passive/presteige (SP) type stuff. I’ll keep looking, and perhaps make something myself if I dont find anything worthwhile.

Anyhow

Cheers

DK

Generic function/class names

This is especially true when you’re writing a library which is meant to be absorbed into a larger codebase, but also true of a codebase in which you know you will be using foreign libraries to accomplish tasks. And I’m as guilty as anybody when it comes to this!
When you are naming your functions and classes be mindfull of the possibility of collision. I think that we (as a group of programmers) are generally mindful of this when we lay out things like our database schema, but can overlook this when we’re writing our libraries.
For example a class/function name of something like “database” seems good ad first glance: It’s clear, to the point, and descriptive (okay… *somewhat* descriptive). However consider that anyone who’se writing anything even remotely related to a database (and these days what *isnt* tied to a database?) will think to themselves at one point “hmm if i name the class database, it’ll be short enough not to be annoying to type, long enough to describe what its used for, and no one’s going to think its used for processing text strings!”

So, now, its possible that every library has a right to use this class name for their code because of its qualifications. But then you will be limited to only using one persons external libs (assuming that your internal libs arent already using it)

What we *ought* to do is, for our project Foo, call the class “databaseFoo”, then we can simply use something like $database = new databaseFoo; and we loose basically nothing, and be assured of compatibility with other libs.

DK

Bad router, BAD!

So, in noticing general trends, I seem to have uncovered an (in retrospect) obvious link between cheap routers, port forwards, and network disconnects.

It seems that, on a cheap router, if you have X port forwards you are increasingly likely to have random disconnects and such (especially with wifi) as X increases…

so if your internet throughput is crappy. you’re experiencing ertratic ping times, and getting lots of crappy disconnects… try removing all your port forwards… seems to9 really work. My best guess is that theres just not enough cpu/ram to maintain the tcp stream states.

Of eye candy, pretty pictures, desktop operating systems, and promoting the linux utopia

First, take off your developer / admin / analyst / guru / |power-user hat. Why? Because if you’re going to think about the genre of the desktop operating system you cannot approach the idea with any of those hats on. If you do you will be wrong. Completely. Forever. Wrong. Second, drop the word “statistics,” “Performance,” and “logically” from your vocabulary. Those words do not belong here. Third, start thinking scope.

You’ve said it. You know you’ve said it: “if everyone would just use Linux”, “Linux is better”, and a whole slew of hot-headed, bad-mouthed, bible-thumping propaganda. You’ve said that Linux is better because of X, Y, and usually Z. The funny thing is that you were right, and it didnt make any difference. The problem is that you’re applying a very small statement to a very, very, very large target.

As much as I wish it were otherwise… Linux is not ready for the main stream desktop.

“It’s not hard to setup” … for you

“It’s not hard to maintain” … for you

“It just plain works” … for you

The problem with Linux is that you’re prescribing it for everybody, and it doesnt scale – in that way. Linux is about choice. Linux is about freedom. Linux is about the ability to do anything you want! Heres the problem. Grandma doesn’t want to have to make a choice. Your parents like rules and boundaries. Your next-door neighbor has absolutely no idea WHAT they want. See, Thats where it all falls down. It’s too complicated. These are just a small smattering (a pittance, if you will) of the questions faced by someone looking to use Linux…

Do I want Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, Slackware, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian?

Whats the difference?

I was told that apt is better than rpm by one person, and that rpm is better than apt by another?

Do I want Xfree86, or X.org?

Which of the 75 different IM clients should I use?

Who should I ask for help?

Why did they ask me to RTFM? Whats that mean?

Why did someone tell me to run a command that broke my desktop when I asked for help?

Where’s the manual?

What does “To do — cover this topic mean”

Why does it say “To do, document this better?” I need it now, not later!

I bought a new computer and the video|sound|usb|periferal card wont work, why not?

What’s root and why cant I just install things?

Why do I have to install 17 other programs when I just want this one?

How do I find out that I wanted that one?

Why cant I install this software? Windows programs wont work?

Windows is slow, insecure, clunky, restrictive, repetative, and stifling. But your neice, next door neighbor, grandfather, and parents see something different: I didnt have to make any complicated choices… matter of fact the pc came with it. I can follow the same instructions everyone else got. I can get just about any program from a friend and install it… it’ll work. It came with an I’m client… I’ll just use that. My blue E gets me on the internet, My Blue E with the envelope lets me do e-mail. It does everything that I’ve been told that I should want it to do, why should it be anything else? This is fine. it works.

The things that will never happen are the things that will mean that forever and ever there will be some mainstream entity who has the lions share of the market. All of those things center around a couple of key phrases: “without the user having to understand”, “reliably”, “consistently”, “agree on one”, “stop bickering”, and last but not least, “that it’s OK not to know”

But thats not the nature of the linux community. Which is fine. It doesnt have to be. But it needs to understand what it *is* and what it *isnt*… Know thyself, and all that jazz…

OSX Mail.app and GpuPG (gnu’s free PGP (also called GPG)) (damn acronyms)

I finally decided that I wanted PGP for my e-mail again… I had been using thunderbird for my e-mail back when I was on a PC+Linux bu, for reasons of my own, I decided that I would try and stick it out with OSX’s Mail.app…

Google’ing led me to a post by Hanno Kaiser on the “Law & Society” Weblog

I was able to follow those directions pretty much verbatem (sp?) up intill it said that Mail.app would give me an error… it never did… so I just went along merrily… Mail.app told me I didnt have a key, so i closed it down, and launched the GPG Keychain Access app, generated myself a 4096 bit key (which took a suprisingly long time (i would have thought that It’d frozen)

As a matter of fact I *DID* think that it was frozen, and I killed it. After i went back into the krychain access utility and saw one half of the 4096 bit keys made I realized that it just was going to take an ASS long time. As a self-proof-of-concept I made first a 1024 bit, and then a 2049 bit key… when both completed apporpriately I decided to go for the throat and make the “holy grail” of gpg keys (at least the one with the biggest damn number of bits).

So, if you were paying attention you realize that I already had 2 functional keys… why waste my time on making the “makes your MacMini so slow you can tap in morse code faster then it can now accept keyboard inputs” (yea i had lots of other apps going, dont bother flaming me) key? *BECAUSE I CAN* and *BECAUSE I WANT ONE*… I mean, hell, like you dont buy hardware upgrades to give yourself the gratification of having better numbers on paper…

Anyhow… over 2 hours later I’m back to the same conclusion… creating a 4096 bit DSA key with this setup is not possible… ahh well… 2048 bit here I come…
Just goes to show… there’s always room for improvement.

DK