lawyers obviously have too much time on their hands. Cobalt is suing apple for copying the design of the Qube. this is really getting ridiculous.

1. one of the simplest geometric shapes is copyrightable? you’ve got to be kidding me. i suppose i should mention that i currently have designs for pyramid and spherical computers; so if anyone makes computers with that shape in the future, i want a lot of money from them.
2. does anyone remember the NeXT cube? i seem to recall cube shaped computers being around in… the 80’s. i don’t recall hearing about any lawsuits brought against cobalt for copying their design. and wasn’t Wozniak (or maybe it was Jobbs, i can never keep them straight) in charge of NeXT at the time anyway?

i must say that jwz’s redesign is currently rocking my world. i guess i’m not the only one who appreciates the abstract beauty of a hexdump. i’m tempted to try reassembling it just to see if it does anything. i certainly wouldn’t put it past him. unfortunately i don’t think i have a hex editor installed right now and i’m too lazy to go download one. i’m sure there’s a way to reconstruct a binary from a hex file on the commandline, but i’m not quite clever enough to figure it out right now.

if i get bored sometime, perhaps i’ll write a program that monitors things and keeps track of how often i screw up when typing in my passwords or passphrases. i bet it would be a pretty good indicator of my overall stress level — higher the percentage of mistyped passwords, the more stressed out i must be. i could put it as a little meter on /dev/random and people could tell by looking at it that they should just leave me alone for a while.

i don’t think i typed in a single password right the first time all day today…

you just know it was chelsea…

salon.com has an interesting article on free software in china, and in particular the linux OS. it details the ease of use, availability of native language versions, and policical overtones separating linux from windows.

the Potassium Hydroxide virus is definately the coolest computer virus i’ve ever heard of. when it infects a drive, it politely asks if you would like the data on the drive IDEA encrypted. it’s entirely beneficial and sounds like a really convenient way to encrypt your data if you’re using windows (i know linux already has support for encrypted filesystems but i’m not so sure if windows does).

i really like the idea of beneficial viruses. what someone really needs to write is a virus that secures your system and patches the most common security holes, perhaps also with the capability to watch for and automatically download security updates. hell, maybe even just a vb script virus that when it infects someone, it changes their settings in Outlook so they won’t get infected with anything else. if that one went around once, it would probably catch 90% of the people who would be susceptible to email viruses and would just nip that whole problem in the bud. i’ll stop just short of advocating the linux installation virus…

today, one of my coworkers informed me that if i were an animal, i’d be a chameleon. i guess that makes sense. anyone who has known me for a while can vouch for the fact that i’m basically invisible (people in the service industry in particular seem to have a hard time seeing me. roughly 30% of the time when eating out, the waitress will go around the table taking orders and just completely skip over me). i can also move my eyes indepentantly of each other. however, i don’t yet have a prehensile tail. sure would come in useful.

perhaps i ought to switch over to SuSE linux…

Broadcast message from anders (pts/2) Tue Aug 8 23:31:40 2000…

on saturday i have to move out of my current room and into my fall room (hopefully. there’s a slim chance that i won’t have anywhere to stay for the next two weeks in which case my stuff goes into storage and i get an enforced vacation in maine). that means the familiar ritual of a new IP address and the days of being disconnected while the network people get their shit together. this time around though, instead of suffering downtime, i’m going to temporarily move things to my linux machine at work while my home machine gets moved all over the place. please just continue to use thraxil.dhs.org, a-nders.dhs.org, etc. with any luck it should be entirely transparent to everyone but me. however, don’t be surprised if things are a little weird for the next few days as i adjust settings and change dns entries. just be patient and let me know if you notice any problems that i should probably fix.

back to the freenet thread, at&t takes a crack at supporting free speech online. it’s nice to see the big boys play fair once and a while. look into their safeguards to debunk the “tool for pirate deviance” angle, no search feature, and max file size of 100k. i think i like them for this, and that whole unix thing.

some things i will never understand. i’m sure it’s all some terribly funny inside joke that i’m just not in on but columbia has coke and pepsi accounts. if you finger the cocacola or pepsi accounts, you get what is at least supposed to look like inventory information for soda machines on the 7th and 8th floor of Watson (the building on campus that houses ACIS) respectively. you will also see that pepsi hasn’t logged in since 1995, but cocacola has logged on fairly recently. remind me not to drink anything from the pepsi machine in Watson.