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My wife and I bought a 1999 Jeep Cherokee that I plan on doing some upgrading to with a lift kit and bigger tires soon. So far it seems like a fun vehicle to tinker with. If your interested in Jeeps check it out here.

Hopefully this will be my last post about the Sony DRM rootkit stuff. Sony has announced that they are stopping production of all CDs with the rootkit DRM software, at least temporarily. This decision could be related to the slapdown they received by the Department of Homeland Security. Stewart Baker, the DHS’s assistant secretary for policy said the following at an event on combating intellectual-property theft.

“I wanted to raise one point of caution as we go forward, because we are also responsible for maintaining the security of the information infrastructure of the United States and making sure peoples’ … Continue Reading

I’ve been considering purchasing a Mac for a few years. I was never overly impressed with older version of Mac OS, but ever since OSX was released I’ve been excited about the possibility of having a high quality Unix based desktop OS. Now before anyone can say “but what about Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris x86/KDE/Gnome/whatever?” let me say that I have used every one of these in the past and actually liked most of them. I ran a Linux desktop as my primary PC for around 3 years and would still be running it if I didn’t have a need for a few … Continue Reading

I just came across an O’Reilly article about the reasons people switch to Linux, and how most people who switched did not do it out of hatred of Microsoft.

I’ve used Linux off and on since around 1996 or 1997, and am currently in one of the rare periods where there is no Linux box anywhere in my house. I think in a lot of ways it comes down to choosing the best tool for the job. In 1998 I built a dual-homed Redhat box to act as my firewall for my home network. At the time you … Continue Reading

If you’re a Windows programmer you should know who Charles Petzold is. Ten years ago his Programming Windows book was the best source of information on the win32 API, and now he has written a handful of .Net books. Apparently he’s come to the conclusion that Visual Studio Rots the Mind and his lengthy rant is excellent. Personally I don’t think this is Visual Studio’s fault, especially since in many ways Visual Studio is just keeping up with competitors like Eclipse, but is more a commentary on how current development tools encourage development to follow certain patterns that focus … Continue Reading

A while back I posted about Paul Graham’s Startup School. Basically he helps groups of CS students start a company by giving them business advice and just enough money for them to rent a cheap office, buy bandwidth and some computer equipment, and buy a few months supply of Ramen Noodles and mac and cheese. The kids then spend a few months focusing on building a product and hopefully end up with a commercially viable company when they are done. I just came across a blog entry from a guy named Chris Sacca who attended one of the … Continue Reading

The concepts in my Calculus class seem cool enough, but I’m just barely passing. Each week we get problems assigned and I do ok on them, but on the first exam I just blanked out. There is a big difference in reviewing a section in the textbook and solving several problems using a particular technique and getting a list of problems where you have to figure out what techniques are appropriate. The real bummer of the whole deal is that if I exclude the math classes I’d have a 4.0 GPA instead of my 3.7 or whatever it is.

I use my Ipod mainly for listening to audiobooks on my trips to work and school, and have been frustrated with the wireless FM transmitters that I’ve been using. Back when I was a kid we had a car that just had an AM radio, and we had a little FM box that mounted under the dash and went in-line with the antenna, so you tuned your AM radio to a certain frequency and it played whatever the FM box was tuned to. I’ve been hoping something similar would come along for external mp3 players, but have only been able … Continue Reading

Oddly, the paper from my last post received a perfect score while the class average was only 88%. Now if I could be that lucky in my calculus class…

This is a paper I just finished for my technical communications class. I argue that software development should be considered as a creative art like other forms of writing. It’s not especially well written as it was one of those “write a paper by next week in your spare time between work and other classes” type assignments and I had to throw it together in a few hours, but the main point is still valid. Maybe another argument for coding being creative is the fact I’m better at it than I am writing papers.

I think that the process of creating … Continue Reading