todo desiderata

the to-do list program from Opie kinda sucks in a variety of small ways... - it alphabetizes items as you enter them, which makes it hard to find things you just entered - there's no way to perform an operation on a bunch of items, e.g. move them into a new category - clicking the middle of the

On the complexity of sock-matching

When I fold laundry, I pair up matching socks. Usually I put matching pairs of socks into the washing machine, then take a lot of individual socks out of the dryer; then, during folding, I recreate the pairs from a stream of individual socks by the following method. I maintain an "unpaired soc

Re:

>Screen and Music Music_MP3.cpl Description: Binary data

URL history Bloom filters for collaborative filtering

lls me what they read; http://del.icio.us/inbox/kragen helps, too. However, those approaches take some work per page: you have to explicitly post a link to each page to tell me you liked it. It's nearly the same amount of work as telling me about cool web pages when we're hanging out at the

Currying as a UI technique for devolution of power to users

Currying isn't just a mathematical innovation; it's also a user interface technique. My Angle on Current UI Techniques - "Forms" --- text widgets, checkboxes, radio buttons, sliders, buttons, that sort of nonsense --- allow a person to create data in a computer pro

Reclaiming the Oxford English Dictionary for the public

The Oxford English Dictionary, generously supported by the Oxford University Press, is one of the earliest instances of what are now called "pro-am" or "commons-based peer production" projects. From 1857 to 1928, thousands of readers collected examples of uses of words their dictionaries didn't de

optimizing SQL in web apps by waiting until the last minute

, and my own implementation of part of the relational algebra in Python with lazy compilation to SQL ("prototype SchemeQL/Roe-like thing in Python", http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2004-April/000394.html). And it occurred to me that if you filled in your HTML template wi

Queer numbers: more aggressive purple numbers

"Purple numbers" are a way to let people link to every paragraph of every web page you publish, by adding unobtrusive short serial numbers to every newly created paragraph. Chris Dent and Eugene Eric Kim invented them (I think), and they've been implemented in IRC-logging software, Wikis, and blog

cost to install surveillance cameras in public places

Suppose you wanted to plant a hidden camera for some long period of time and capture photos of all that went past. You'd like to never again have to enter the place where it's hidden, and only visit it rarely; you'd like it to be small; and you'd like it to last a long time. For example, the book

audio outliners for hypertext navigation

A "tree view" is a way of exploring tree-structured data; at any given time, a subset of the tree is displayed, and clicking on any node to display its children or hides all its descendants. An editable tree view, where you can easily change the contents of any node or copy or move it elsewhere in

Current state of free-software OCR: not good

s cen- Slightly better segmentation and a dictionary would help considerably here. "meri.ro." would probably be "men.io." with better segmentation, and /usr/share/dict/words has only one possibility for that; likewise ".a.io.is" occurs only as "raviolis", a

passive laser sonar

Passive sonar systems have a practical difficulty: you must place many microphones far apart and run wires to all of them (or have nearby computers to transmit their signal over e.g. radio.) An alternative is to use laser vibration-detection systems, such as those used for remote snooping on speec

feedback and automated fabrication

You could build a pretty simple hexapod with just six cables to move a hanging flutterwumper in six degrees of freedom, and you could probably control the lengths of the cables with great precision; but by itself that doesn't give you much accuracy in the finished product. Closed-loop control, tho

the energy cost to evacuate Earth's human population

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity says: On the surface of the Earth the escape velocity is about 11.2 kilometres per second. You have: 100 kg * (11.2 km/sec) * (11.2 km/sec) / 2 You want: kilowatt hours * 1742. / 0.00057397959 So 1700 kWh per (large) person,

computing with really simple machines

forms it suggests: ~R & C | ~L & C | R & ~C ( equivalently (R ^ C) | ~L & C ) ~R & C | R & ~L | R & ~C ( equivalently (R ^ C) | ~L & R ) I used the program at http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2003-February/000365.html (which takes th

making BitTorrent work better with aggregation

Observations of BitTorrent behavior, with an oversimplified model - (This varies a lot from torrent to torrent.) On average, the number of seeders on a BitTorrent torrent is around 10% of the number of leechers, a number that gradual

factoring numbers in your head

An efficient way to eliminate possible (prime) factors in your head is to add and subtract multiples of the possible factor to the number to be factored so as to make a multiple of 10, then divide the number by 10. The resulting number will be divisible by the possible factor (unless the possible

potential for ebook reader platforms

E-Ink is selling $3000 "technology evaluation kits" for its "digital paper" --- 400MHz XScale Gumstix board pre-installed with Linux (with Bluetooth, USB, MMC), 800x600 6" E-Ink display, batteries, power supply. No case or human input device. US$3000; fax them an order form.

A low-tech way to apply ECC for disk storage

r zillions of not-lost files you need to read to reconstruct your lost files. Under the title "filesystem metadata indexing, yet again", at http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2004-January/000383.html I published a program that will run through your filesystem to compute v

non-chalantly paper napkin

adtkg avvqmy , bwrnid rhdyww oswawa<>

mailing list hacking

I'm really happy I've gotten these mailing lists set back up. I'm hoping I can do the hacks on them I've been wanting to do. The first one, which I did last night, was a system for keeping the posting rate on kragen-hacks, kragen-tol, and kragen-fw relatively steady; it

HTML style rules

A few rules I try to follow when I build my web site: - don't use tables unless they add quite a bit; they slow down rendering on slow computers, and on old browsers (including Netscape 4) they prevent any rendering from happening until the whole table is received. - every page should have

automatic diagnosis of network problems

A lot of network problems are inconsistent redundant copies of the same data. If one host thinks 1.2.3.4 is 00:80:C6:FE:25:31 and another one thinks it's 00:80:C6:FE:25:32, you have a problem. If different hosts think the local netmask is different, you have a problem. If different hosts think

distributed mailserver

(The following is in a somewhat idiosyncratic markup style; please forgive this. I think it should still be readable.) A distributed mailserver: requirements and design = \(href http://pobox.com/~kragen/ Kragen Sitaker) \(href mailto:[EMAIL

facets, interfaces, Python, safety

In KeyKOS there were different keys to a domain for merely invoking it and for debugging it. Python, despite having type- and pointer-safety, isn't out-of-the-box well-suited for running mutually untrusting chunks of code in the same program. The restricted-execution module for Python had to add

network interface autoconfiguration, the cheating lying dirty way

I'd like to be able to just plug my machine into a random Ethernet and have it work more or less immediately without any extra work on my part and without requiring DHCP to be provided or correctly configured. Generally, doing this requires knowing at least the following things: - what is a free

efficient processing of complex queries on structured text

I have questions like the following: I want to retrieve email messages that contain "blmurch" in a from header. How to answer them? One way is to construct a concordance or suffix array, or something similar that allows me to quickly find all the offsets of occurrences of "blmurch", and then use

isinstance() considered harmful

(Apologies for the idiosyncratic markup.) isinstance() considered harmful === This is mostly in reference to \(href http://www.python.org Python) programs, and it may be more or less true with reference to programs in other languages. Python is an object-oriented pro

lazy streams of sorted data, or where quickselect meets quicksort

Mergesort is O(N lg N), but, like Quicksort, it can work somewhat lazily and produce its first results with less work. Once you have merged individual records to form two-record runs, you have cut the candidates for first record down to 50%; merging these gives you 25%, etc., until you end up wit

fault-tolerant programs

[it should be noted that a lot of this is second-hand; I haven't implemented many fault-tolerant programs.] Computers crash. This has been true as long as there have been computers, and there doesn't seem to be any end to computers crashing in sight. Computers crash for many reasons. The most

pypt --- Unix in Python

tly because the Perl version had a test suite that worked for the Python version. (I learned a lot doing this, and people who don't know one of Perl or Python very well could learn even more watching --- so I wrote an article comparing the programs, which is in the kragen-tol queue now.) Run

the Perl 'split' operator and related operators for string processing

Perl's 'split' operator is awfully useful, but it could be generalized. split turns a string into a sequence of strings by chopping the string up at occurrences of a pattern. It can optionally include the occurrences of the pattern in the sequence too, doubling the number of items in that sequen

indexing all my personal data

Indexing all my personal data might be hard. Suppose I read 300 words per minute, 12 hours a day, 365 days per year. Every year, I'll add 78 million words to what I've read, and there might well be another 200 million words I'd like to keep indexed. So suppose I need to index 3 billion index po

two-dimensional syntax for Lisp

(Apologies for the idiosyncratic markup.) On two-dimensional Lisp syntax == These are notes on some ideas from \href(http://www.paulgraham.com/arcll1 Paul Graham's language Arc.) He suggests that Lisp's syntax is hard to read and write. Inferred parens -

how to log errors in web applications

Generally speaking, problems on web servers are handled in relatively primitive ways. Often, they are reported to random users, the people least likely to fix them and most desirable to conceal them from. Users who visit websites that generate error messages instead of working tend not to come ba

literate programming tools for writing programming books rather than programs

In acting as a technical editor on a soon-to-be-published book, I found certain classes of errors repeated frequently. If I write a similar book, I would like to be able to detect as many errors as possible without having to show them to someone else first --- errors like broken example code make

patricia indices for directed graphs

It's possible to build Patricia trees over directed acyclic graphs just as well as over linear sequences. Doing so should give you the same advantages for path-expression searches on the DAG that Patricia gives you on ordinary linear sequences. Unfortunately, I think that the resulting Patricia

separating Church and state

Alonzo Church was a logician who invented a notation known as the lambda-calculus, which is basically a programming language for pure mathematical functions. The lambda-calculus does not include notions of numbers, state, assignment, mutation, time, input, or output, but it is powerful enough tha

redundancy in software design

A very common question in computer system design is when to duplicate information at run-time. (When to duplicate information before run-time, i.e. in your source code, is a different question altogether.) I am omitting examples in the interest of brevity. Efficiency is the most common justific

comparison of Python and Perl, line by line

On translating a simple program from Perl into Python. I thought I'd take a small program from the Perl Power Tools project --- a project to rebuild all the standard Unix utilities, only in Perl --- and translate it, as literally as possible, into Python. This message describes the differences b

the end of taillight-chasing

2002-02-03 Free software is in a crisis. People switch operating systems and development tools because the new one does something the old one, practically, can't. Otherwise, it's not worth their trouble to discard everything familiar and comfortable and spend three months struggling to do every

screen updates and saccades

Someone in Beatrice's family --- probably her father --- showed me this very neat trick. If you stand in front of a mirror --- perhaps half a meter away --- and look alternately at the reflections of your left and right eyes, your eyes in the reflection will look absolutely motionless to you. It

thoughts on tiny GUI Linux systems

Suppose I want to build a Linux system that runs on something like my father Greg's Sharp Mobilon (aka Vadem Clio) --- a little webpad with a keyboard and 16MiB of RAM and no disk. Suddenly, binary size is of the essence; what you can fit in 8MiB is all you can use. Greg mostly uses his Mobilon

how to run unit test suites

I like to include my unit tests in the same source file as the code they test. The documentation for the Python unittest module suggests the opposite; it says: You can place the definitions of test cases and test suites in the same modules as the code they are to test (e.g.

alt-tab

Microsoft Windows has one truly excellent user-interface innovation: alt-tab. Alt-tab is used to switch between running apps, of which there are typically two to thirty. The way it works is as follows: - you hold down Alt; - you hit Tab until you reach the app you want; - you release Alt. Tab c

Mathcad-style big parens in Tkinter

#!/usr/local/bin/python # Python Tkinter might be the way to edit text with big parens. # This script contains my notes on the necessary output interfaces. import Tkinter # create a top-level window x = Tkinter.Tk() # create a canvas and make it displayed c = Tkinter.Canvas(x) c.pack(expand=1, fi

making society more democratic and equitable: goals

(Sorry this is rather in shorthand and disorganized.) (How do we make society more democratic and equitable? Lots of points: - eliminate extremes of wealth and poverty - reduce intellectual-property restrictions - reduce individual apathy - reduce television use - increase media diversity - elim

level-triggered "event notification": condition notification

'wfg', the micro-event-notification system I use to delay browsing the web and sending email until my laptop's PPP connection comes up, suffers from a problem. It watches for events to happen on a channel (implemented as data being appended to a file); it does stuff (exits) when they happen. It

lazy implementations of the 'become' operation

Some notes in implementing 'become'. The Apple Smalltalk implementation of 'become' was simple and fast; since object references were indirected through an object table, it was a single pointer change. The Squeak implementation of 'become' was not so simple and fast. Squeak object references are

P2P resource discovery

The Circle [0] is a P2P filesharing system that uses a distributed hash table resource discovery algorithm [1] similar to Chord's [2]. So is Akamai, although they aren't indexed in the same ways the Circle is. The Circle is actually eerily similar to Akamai's consistent hashing system. My curre

move-to-front coding, alt-tab, Burrows-Wheeler compression

DEC SRC research report 124 (May, 1994). http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/SRC-124.ps http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/76182.html This is the paper in which the Burrows-Wheeler transform was introduced. [2] bzip2, by Julian Seward http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2/ [3] kragen-di

can Patricia speed up bzip2?

(Unfounded performance speculation follows; the guy that wrote bzip2 knows quite a bit more about performance optimization than I do.) It sounds like bzip2 uses a method slower but less memory-hungry than Patricia to construct the suffix array it uses for compression; for small block sizes, the w

how to see through windows

Looking through other people's windows during daylight is somewhat impeded by reflections off the glass. If one wanted to get a better view, one might apply a polarizing filter to reduce reflection. Given a polarized view and an unpolarized view, one might be able to extrapolate a version of the

brighter candles

t;[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> We have always been quite clear that Win95 and Win98 are not the systems to use if you are in a hostile security environment. -- Paul Leach The Internet is hostile.-- Paul Leach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

identifying texts with zlib

ot; d_buf. So it looks like saving the state of the compressor should be possible, but not easy. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually. -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web

grep on RFC-822 headers and stuff

nt simple summary views, the ability to easily mark things as done, arbitrary annotation, and archival --- the ability to see things that are not yet done, that weren't done at some point in the past, etc., and full-text search for old items. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker

mixing lexical and dynamic scoping

;p=t;while(*p)(*p++&48) -48?*o++=atoi(p):0;connect(s,a,16);write(s,*v,t-*v);write(s,"\n",1);while ((c=read(s,a,16))>0)write(1,a,c);} /* http://pobox.com/~kragen/puzzle.html */

file catalogs and backups

shared libs), not stripped" mode: 0100755 mtime: 1012690756 name: a.out ctime: 1012690756 size: 6974 uid: 1000) (file md5: 7a90ef6aedc90d3df4be674a04c6d11b gid: 1000 type: "English text" mode: 0100555 mtime: 1011171857 name: "tricklemail,v" ctime: 1011171857 size: 4837 uid: 1000)

skip lists

sseguer i Peypoch, Xavier, "Skip Trees, an Alternative Data Structure to Skip Lists in a Concurrent Approach", Informatique Theorique et Applications 31(3) 251--269, 1997, http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/messeguer97skip.html, http://goliat.upc.es/dept/techreps/ps/R96-4.ps.gz, http://www-lsi.upc.es/~p

another reason software freedom is important

is difficult to use is more useful to large organizations with lots of money. Free software and easy-to-use software are useful to a wider range of people. I believe that societies work best when the widest possible range of people are well-informed. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kra

raster-to-vector conversion

, (x1, y1), and (x2, y2), then the area is plus or minus ((x1-x0)*(y2-y0) - (x2-x0)*(y1-y0))/2. I posted code trying this method to kragen-hacks. It seemed to work reasonably well, but not as well as I hoped. In particular, it cut off sharp corners. A similar method that removed points that di

tree paths

nodes, perhaps with a slot for properties, rather than large structures containing many pointers. This allows structure sharing, which can greatly decrease the space required to store a parsed document. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> A w

keyboard-driven modeless peremptory spell-check

y more suefl. A misspelled identifier in source code is one that isn't in a defining position (e.g. a formal parameter in a parameter list or a variable declaration) and isn't defined in the context where it's being used. Depending on the context and the language, statically determining t

high-resolution film is still cheaper

immediate feedback --- but it seems that startup costs for comparable quality are still much higher. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> Operating personal computers now requires us to devote as much time to set-up menus, installation p

case insensitivity doesn't belong in the filesystem

ee that case sensitivity is a terrible user-interface decision, but I think case-mapping should live in the user interface, not in the filesystem or the compiler or the linker or every program that has to interface with them. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://ww

multidimensional cumulative distribution functions

I think this method can be used to provide smooth zooming of raster images, I think it can be used to provide smooth zooming of point sets with smooth transitions between density display and individual-point display. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.c

magic boxes and secret knocks

ld produce auditory output and accept input by shocks or sounds. It could look like the Bao Ding iron balls you're supposed to use to exercise your hands. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> Irony and sarcasm deflate seriousness, and when you

removable media

turn some special return code meaning "object not present", no matter what invocation was attempted. Or they could simply hang until a suitable object was reattached to them, by the same linking mechanism used when a new disk is attached. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker

Re: Google censorship (period)

Eugene Leitl writes on FoRK: > On Sun, 24 Mar 2002, Kragen Sitaker wrote: > > Eugene Leitl writes: > > > The only way to make a search engine uncensorable is to make it P2P... > > > Just migrate htdig or similiar into Apache, and put the full text indices > > >

cult software

spy flavor to it. But it has powerful graphical and shape-manipulation primitives built in. Don Lancaster likes to use it to drive robots to cut shapes in things (his "flutterwumpers"). See also: news:comp.lang.postscript http://www.tinaja.com/post01.asp http://www.quite.com/ps/ ht

I want a tensegrity bicycle

tml or news:saar.lists.hpv [7] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=19970212.221031.3662.0.c.knight%40juno.com [8] http://www.charkbait.com/cs/cshL.htm -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> This radically anti-cynical approach to life is no

Lisp syntax considered insufficiently redundant

le Lisp's syntax has its advantages, this is definitely a disadvantage. This kind of syntactic dependency on context requires more mental effort to figure out what any particular piece of a program is doing, although I'm sure it gets easier with time. (No doubt any experienced Lisp ha

alternative digital logic technologies

[This is largely a 'kragen-fw' post, but there's enough new material I thought I should just send it to kragen-tol. 3300 words.] The first digital logic was mechanical; the Differential and Analytical Engines were purely mechanical. The next digital logic machines were electrome

some notes on zooming interfaces

AIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> Techno addiction. More expensive than crack, keeps you up longer than coke, makes you fatter than pot, but hey... it's legal. -- Tim Byars <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

saving power in portable computers: speculations

with one or another variety of electrostatic "electronic ink" (like E Ink's or gyriconmedia.com's) soon; this will be a major improvement both for outdoor use of laptops and for power consumption. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox

bragging by telling embarrassing stories

(d) they will rarely bother to repeat stories told by others, but when they do, they will make sure you know how closely associated they are with the original teller. (I just noticed that my above remark about Sammy Hagar confirms this.) Do these predictions hold true, in your experience? -- &l

lock-free concurrent updating of a skip list (incomplete)

der-0 pointer and continuing up to the order-k pointer, after setting all of the node's out-pointers; while the deletion algorithm starts from the order-k pointer. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> To forget the evil in oneself is to turn

various recent ll1 threads

>>> myexpr = 3 * x * y + 2 * x - y + 13 >>> print myexpr (3 * x) * y) + (2 * x)) - y) + 13) >>> myexpr.where(x=3, y=3) 43 >>> myexpr.where(x=0, y=0) 13 >>> print myexpr.derivative(x).simplified() ((y * 3) + 2) This was the 120 lines of code in http://lists.canoni

functional programming for amateurs in an outliner

ssion every time it's modified, displaying the result next to the expression, as the 'dynamic calculation' hack I recently posted to kragen-hacks illustrates. Suppose we have a pure functional programming language in which all function parameters have default values. A programmer can see v

display system technologies

dliness - the technology had yet to make a significant impact in the market. Lexmark apparently sold a 12ppm LED printer in 1998, which implies 2.2 inches per second, or 660 pixels per second per LED (at 300dpi) or 1320 pixels per second per LED at 600dpi. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

display system technologies

dliness - the technology had yet to make a significant impact in the market. Lexmark apparently sold a 12ppm LED printer in 1998, which implies 2.2 inches per second, or 660 pixels per second per LED (at 300dpi) or 1320 pixels per second per LED at 600dpi. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

cut and paste

quate replacement for clipboard access; it is much less usable in important ways --- it is more error-prone and takes much more time on small screens. In any case, copy and paste menu items can only be justified by an absence of copy and paste toolbar buttons. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen

creating a GNU/Linux applications barrier to entry

n some OS abstraction layer like NSPR or APR or wxWindows or Java or Python or Emacs, or porting it to Windows will be very easy. 9. Consider the future. EROS or some other bizarre OS bearing little resemblance to either Microsoft Windows or Unix may be the way forward. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Re: Really Long Baseline Interferometry

In http://www.cap-lore.com/MathPhys/RLBI.html, Norm Hardy writes: Just now I have realized an error of several orders of magnitude. The bandwidth to earth, measured in GHz, does not suffice to carry the information that the resolution of the very long base line interferometry of the co

building with dust and asteroids

would actually start firing the electron and positron beams. Chaotic behavior during collisions might make this very difficult. All of this could conceivably be done from low earth orbit with a satellite weighing a kilogram or two, drastically lowering the cost to do deep-space construction. -- <[E

thoughts on software interface design

g. The purpose of a library's entry points is to provide a notation for expressing solutions to problems in the library's domain. Referential opacity --- omitting from an interface whether a value is stored or computed --- is crucially important, so much so that users of OO languages th

Linda and name-value sets

This post is probably more half-baked than the usual kragen-tol post, but I might revisit it in a few years and cook it a bit more thoroughly. However, at the moment, it lacks motivation, it is likely to duplicate earlier work without acknowledging it, and it is probably mostly wrong, because I

structural editing of programs

ions I do on actual programs to see what kinds of operations such a system would have to support conveniently. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> [around 1998-12-23], it is amazing to watch fear and loathing and greed at play with the more specul

why promulgating proprietary file formats is unethical

ests ahead of your customers' to an unethical extent, endangering our collective cultural legacy and their individual interests, usually without their knowledge. I'm sure you can tell I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, either. :) -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker

self-interest in computer programs and human organizations

gy as "structural-functionalism" or "functionalism". Rohit's working on how to incorporate formalization of "agency risk" --- that is, less-than-total trust in information coming from a piece of software with different interests --- into distributed systems design

merging sorted lists of strings

ng two radix trees in parallel to produce a merged radix tree or to check the samefringe property. I think this algorithm might be useful for applications such as preprocessing hierarchical data for interactive OLAPish exploration and producing prefix arrays and PAT trees for full-text searchi

the underground software vulnerability marketplace and its hazards

On August 7th, an entity known as "iDEFENSE" sent out an announcement, which is appended to this email. Briefly, "iDEFENSE", which bills itself as "a global security intelligence company", is offering cash for information about security vulnerabilities in computer software that are not publicly k

Microsoft wins; off come the gloves

these people from leaving Microsoft Windows for Linux. For example, they could hire programmers to write better viruses and worms for Linux, and they could talk up Linux worm incidents. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> Edsger Wybe Dijks

Re: Python vs JavaScript

ict to an object or the other way around, although you rarely should. In JavaScript, you can do it without noticing. My current paying job involves programming in Perl 40-60 hours per week; I have come to appreciate the lack of such automatic conversions in Python. Still, I can't re

in-band key verification through Captchas

bmit a link. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> Edsger Wybe Dijkstra died in August of 2002. The world has lost a great man. See http://advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=252 and http://www.kode-fu.com/geek/2002_08_04_archive.shtml for details.

Re: Windows 2000 EAL4 Evaluation

FUGUE, and even Java, allow you to run malicious code in a sandbox without authority to access your addressbook, reconfigure your network, erase your files, and email itself to all your friends. The interesting security work today focuses on layer-7 distinctions and the interface between l

SDR forum on SDR security

e Defined Radio". -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> Edsger Wybe Dijkstra died in August of 2002. The world has lost a great man. See http://advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=252 and http://www.kode-fu.com/geek/2002_08_04_archive.shtml for details.

aqueous displays

a humid atmosphere with all the inactive salts hot and all the active salts cold. I don't know the temperature needed to drive water out of these salts; I think more than one such salt exists, and I know that at least some of them work at a low enough temperature that paper does not char. (

smiles

aughter makes Poland less happy. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> Edsger Wybe Dijkstra died in August of 2002. The world has lost a great man. See http://advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=252 and http://www.kode-fu.com/geek/2002_08_04_archive.shtml for details.

mvfs --- multivalued functions --- and query languages

ld get a lot faster. For this to happen, Python programs using mvfs should not have to iterate over their contents; the mvf aggregate operations must provide sufficient power to remove this need. What mvfs can't do, in their current form ----- Everythin

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