Geeking

They say that the nice thing about Open Source software is that all the users are looking at the source checking it for bugs, so it will be higher quality than closed-source software. Heh. I have proof that people don’t read the code they are installing. Since the earliest widely-distributed releases of Cricket, there’s been an easter egg in it. It is hidden in code that should arouse the curiosity of anyone doing a security audit, but it is hidden well enough that someone poking around in the code won’t see it. To my knowledge the only person who’s ever found it was Javier Muniz, my officemate when I was writing Cricket. And that was only after I dropped a hint that I’d put an easter egg into Cricket. Javier’s a bright guy, and it didn’t take him long to find it. ...

I just noticed a really cool feature of Gmail. This is subtle, so hang in there with me… It, like other mail programs attempts to automatically maintain your address book for you by adding entries for addresses in mail you send. When you reply to someone who’s e-mail arrived without a real name, just an e-mail address you’ve got a problem: how do you add a useful address book entry for that? ...

I use Firefox, and I like the little search box thingie in the upper left. I decided it might be fun to figure out how it works by making a search plugin for the website SamSpade.org. Sam Spade looks up whois data and other interesting things about websites, and I find myself using it from time to time. If you’d like to get the Sam Spade plugin for Firefox, visit this page. After installing it, you’ll have a new search type in the popup menu in the upper right. Look, ma, no restart! ...

This guy arranged for thousands of email messages to be sent to his Gmail account at once, and surprise, surprise! It fell over. What a jackass. One way to know for sure he’s a jackass is the theory about compression and RAID. First, Gmail doesn’t use RAID. It uses the Google Filesystem. It is like RAID, but implemented in user space, which lets Google play games with filesystem semantics you can’t do when you are restricted to one of the Unix filesystems on top of a hardware RAID box. It also leverages the CPU power you get for free when you buy thousands of PCI busses and IDE interfaces. The mainframe guys figured out long ago the key to throughput is lots of I/O paths. The Google Filesystem lets them use lots of CHEAP I/O paths, instead of the insanely expensive I/O paths that Netapp and Sun sell. ...

First the good news: Firefox 0.9.1 for Win32 fixes my crashing problems. (So all you Mozilla zealots that found this page last time I said something about Firefox, please don’t spam me.) The bad news is that Firefox 0.9 was a crashy mess, and it stomped my icons such that my HTML files that I saved out of Excel no longer had the “Excel generated HTML” icon, and no longer had the “Edit” option on the context menu. ...

There must be something in the chemical they use to deodorize urinals that makes you smarter, because every time I have a hard programming problem and take a break to take a pee, I come up with the answer.

Check out these two funny posts: The Mac is a harsh mistress … and Linux is your psychotic ex. For the record, my computing environment is as follows: Windows XP on a laptop with SSH and PPTP (depending…) over 802.11 to get connected to work. The VNC viewer gets me in touch with a bunch of xterms on a FreeBSD server where I do my real work on real computers (at Tellme, that’s Solaris on Intel). I use Mozilla Firefox almost exclusively. I often go a week or so between using Internet Explorer for some bogus website that requires it. I have Microsoft Office installed on the laptop. I abhor Word, but I really like Excel. I use it to work on clues for the Game, to visualize data while debugging systems, and even to draw rack diagrams! I also love PowerPoint… but I use it as a poor-man’s desktop publishing system, rarely for giving talks. I prefer impromptu talks with whiteboards to prepared talks. ...

Google’s Gmail is pretty cool. In fact, I’m using it as my primary user interface for my personal mailbox right now. Now I’m trying to figure out how to make mailto: links result in a jump to the Gmail compose screen. The first step is getting Windows to turn “navigate to a mailto: link” into a jump to a parameterized URL of my choosing. Then the second part is to figure out what a Gmail compose URL looks like. ...

This is the coolest keychain tool ever.

I currently live in California. It is not considered a “key battleground state” for the presidential election. Both parties have essentially conceded the electoral votes to Kerry. As long as Californians as a whole vote the way everyone expects them to, Democrats in California can afford to ship some of those votes off to other precincts in the nation, where the election will be more competitive. The same reasoning would allow Republicans to move some votes from states like Texas to the battleground states. ...