For a post on HN talking about programmers’ fonts, I thought I’d post mine so that it’s in a sane place with a screenshot..
I use a small bitmap font that was originally public domain, was modified by my boss (Don Stokes), and then further modified by me. More details are in the README.
Here’s a screenshot:
More to the point, do you trust Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook?
In this telling article from The Register, Zuckerberg apparently is more than happy to give his friends private info on Facebook users. The chat transcripts were from 2004, when Facebook was primarily being used by students.
But moreover, the more press their recent privacy changes are getting, the more Zuckerberg and his cronies show their true colours. They think it’s your fault that everyone can see your information, because you’re publishing it. If you want it private, they say you shouldn’t put it online. They also say that most people are happy with the new public “privacy” settings. But I’m going to take a stab in the dark that most people simply have no idea of the consequences. Some say they know, but think it isn’t as bad as everyone’s making it out to be, while others are just blissfully ignorant of the whole debacle.
Continue Reading
Sony recently announced that they are going to stop producing floppy disks in March 2011. It seems they’re only halting production to the Japanese market, but humans being what we are have naturally assumed that this means global production will stop. Perhaps it will. Perhaps there’s an announcement about global distribution I missed.
Interestingly, the BBC posted a question asking who still used floppy disks, and got their response. Turns out only a few are legitimate uses. Reading through them, one struck me as most fascinating. One old man who still uses floppy disks because they’re easier to catalogue like a paper filing system. Write a label on them and put them in a flip file. Yep, I used to do that and only a couple of months ago threw out boxes and boxes of Amiga floppy disks, many of them in flip box thingies.
Floppy disks, after going through a few incarnations of varying sizes and capacities from 8″ to 5.25″ to 3.5″, eventually gave way to CDs and memory sticks. A modified version of the media was released called a Floptical, which according to Wikipedia started life as a 21MB disk, but I only remember the 120MB LS-120′s. Maybe the 21 meggers never saw their way into the NZ market. Anyway, they were 3.5″ disks that had different media allowing it the higher capacity.
Then there was Iomega’s ZIP and JAZ drives, which had 100MB, and 1GB respectively, and those were quite popular for a while.
Blah blah blah, OK, who gives a fuck? They’ve all been and gone, past their use-by dates, and the world is a happier place. Well, not completely happy, USB flash drives are sooooooo slooooooowwww..
CD-RW’s and DVD-RW’s can be used as portable, removable media, but I don’t think they’re very reliable. It may be different with DVD-RW’s, but I remember using a CD-RW many years ago as backup media for my docs. After a while, files started disappearing. I don’t know where they went. Maybe the file allocation table was limited, so it started dropping files off the front. I dunno. But it did sour me off that media.
And like the old dude, I’d like to be able to have some kind of “permanent,” or more appropriately, shelvable (is that a word?), rewritable media that I can file. A medium that doesn’t require anything mechanical to operate. CD-ROMs and floppy drives are spinning media, and require lots of moving parts. On laptops in this day and age, that’s unforgivable. Don’t start me on netbooks with spinning hard drives and CD-ROMs..
I’d like to see a “drive” that read some kind of flash memory (preferably bypassing a slow bus like USB — attaching them to the SATA bus could be interesting), about 2″ square — making them big enough to write labels on, and allowing us to file them away. Any smaller just makes labeling them impossible, and handling them difficult.
While Micro SD cards are frikkin awesome feats of technology managing to pack in decent capacity into stupidly small form factors, it’s tough to make them the removable media of choice because they’re so damn small that they’re too easy to lose. Imagine something 2″ square that had the same thickness and data density of a Micro SD card.
That’d be a whole lotta win in my book.
After spending a weekend at a (really frackin’ cool) hacker con, and while setting up some bookmarks on my laptop, I decided to make all my login links point to https pages — because when you’re on an open wireless network, all your traffic is being sniffed by at least one person.
It’s well known that TradeMe store your password in a plaintext cookie in your browser, but that’s OK (?) because your box has to be owned before that matters. However, people sniffing network traffic shouldn’t be able to sniff your password. And given that most people use wireless now, the likelihood of this is pretty high. So I tried to change that http://www.trademe.co.nz to https://www.trademe.co.nz. Should be a simple thing — one extra character on your URL ensures all your requests are encrypted.
OK, so I hit their site with https, and my browser tells me there’s something funny about the certificate. Really? Were they too cheap to get it signed by a known Certificate Authority? I mean it’s a few hundred bucks a year, but this was a company that was purchased by Fairfax for seven hundred fucking million dollars. Plus an extra $50 million if they met certain targets over the next two years, which apparently they did.
Right, so they can afford a cert.
I pull the cert up to have a look at it and find something a bit more innocent. It was registered with a proper CA, but they registered secure.trademe.co.nz and www.secure.trademe.co.nz (the latter of which, incidentally, doesn’t even resolve in DNS). But, no problems, I plug https://secure.trademe.co.nz expecting to get to a secure login page. Guess what? It just automatically redirects to http://www.trademe.co.nz. WTF? I tried appending /Members/Login.aspx at the end of that secure URL and I still get redirected. Try it yourself: https://secure.trademe.co.nz/Members/Login.aspx
Thanks TradeMe, I can’t use your site while I’m on a wireless network.
If anyone from TradeMe ever reads this, why did you buy a certificate if it isn’t being used? And why can’t I log in via SSL? This isn’t complicated shit (nor expensive) we’re talking about. I’d offer to fix it for you guys, but you couldn’t pay me enough to touch a Windows server. Actually maybe Fairfax could.
