sunspot.net - plugged in: “Though many amateurs may be looking for, and finding, holes in Windows, the FreeBSD Unix code that forms the foundation of OS X has been prodded by legions of expert programmers for 30 years.”

Tony Blair for President

Ars Technica: Macintosh Browser Smackdown is a well put together article about the state of the Macintosh browser market including the speed, compatibility and support of standards in current browsers. Most interesting to me, of course, was the fact that they used PGA.com as one of their test sites. I don’t think that something I have worked on has ever been used in this manner. Equally interesting was the ability to compare our load times against ESPN.com across all of the browsers. As a team, we know we have some work to do in the page weight and markup department on the main site, some the issues resulting from an image heavy design, others from limitations imposed by the content management system that we use.

Considering I’ve read all his books except for his newest, just released one, Diary, it’s pretty surprising that I hadn’t made it to Chuck Palahniuk’s Web site before today. Lots of good stuff over there, I ended up knowing how to pronounce his last name properly, and with a list of ten other authors I plan on checking out.

Paul Thurrott says: “Is Windows inherently insecure? Of course not. We’re targets because we represent 95 percent of the computing population. Attackers aren’t going to attack Mac OS X users for an obvious reason: The OS has only a few users. If we all jumped ship to Linux, for example, that platform would then come under attack.”

I keep hearing this argument from people, that Windows has more exploits only because it is more widely used. I have to take issue with this gentleman's statement, and those of a similar nature. I understand the context he is coming from, that he has built his career around reporting on Microsoft, so he is subjective, but I believe he does his readers a disservice with this particular set of statements. Of course one of the reasons why there are more exploits for Windows is that it has marketshare. Where I take issue, however, is with his implication that Windows is just as secure an operating system as Mac OS X or Linux. It simply is not as secure. Linux has a large amount of the Web server market, yet I haven't heard of a worm bringing down thousands of Linux machines across the Internet. This isn't to say that Linux is without exploitable security flaws at all, I've had machines that were attacked or exploited. In virtually every instance, it was my fault for not patching something. Microsoft is more concerned with getting product out the door than they are in getting things right on the security front. This has made each of us who use a Microsoft OS beta-testers. The second and more relevant reason why there are more exploits for Windows XP than Linux or Mac OS X is that Microsoft has provided people who wish to develop exploits with a lot of facilities for creating them, so it is far easier for someone to create an exploit. I would like to see some of these very biased Windows journalists admit this fact for a change, it's as annoying to me as partisan politics in this country, throwing practicality and fact to the wind in order to advance a very biased viewpoint linked to a career path.

Here's a Slashdot thread with some interesting information on this subject.

Truncat is a sequel of sorts to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

I really enjoyed reading this Ernie Ball Story on News.com. Nice to hear someone debunking the idea that “you can’t run a business without Microsoft products.” Especially amusing to me because my bother Chris' wardrobe consists of almost nothing but Ernie Ball shirts. Big up to Have Browser for the link.

A week ago, the latch on my 12 inch Powerbook, which has become my primary computer over the last couple of months, broke. I could no longer close the lid. I dreaded sending the machine back to Apple because it meant being without it for several days, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised. I backed everything up, because you never know, and dropped the machine off at the local Apple for shipment back to Apple on Thursday. I was absolutely shocked to get a call yesterday to let me know that it was back and I could come pick it up. That’s the best turn around time I think I have ever had on a computer repair, and they had to replace the whole bezel, so it wasn’t a trivial repair. They also replaced the missing feet from the bottom of the machine that have been missing since I bought. All in all, a great experience, thanks Apple.

The application formerly known as Hydra is now SubEthaedit? Um, not a good name, sorry guys.

I’ve been trying out Thunderbird as an Outlook replacement on my PeeCee laptop. I don’t think that I could be happier with it, aside from some wonkiness with its address book, it is a perfect snappy replacement for Outlook.

The Matrix Revolutions

Mach-II for ColdFusion 1.0 has been released. I haven’t had time to take a look at it too closely yet, but it looks interesting.

The New Diamond Age is a great article, which is also the cover story of the most recent issue of Wired, about man made diamonds and their implications for both the jewelry and processor industries.

iChat Streaming Icon lets you automagically set your buddy icon based on any video source, I’m using it with my iSight, and it works great.

I think if I lived in California, I would be casting my vote for Terry Tate, Office Linebacker.

It’s going to be a very long week, we have The 85th PGA Championship going on Thursday through Sunday. You’ll be able to see the fruits of my coding stylings over there then.

If you have Showtime, you really owe it to yourself to watch an episode of Out of Order. It is, without a doubt in my mind, one of the best things on television right now. If I had to make a choice, I would be very hard pressed to choose between it and Six Feet Under on HBO as my favorite show. The writing is just great, and even Six Feet Under doesn’t have some of the great one liners that the writers of this show have come up with. Like most things I like, it is inventive and innovative.

I picked up an iSight a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t really had the time or inclination to set it up and play with it. I only know one other person who has purchased one, and we work in the same office every day so don’t have any real need to videoconference. I finally decided to unpack it and have a go this afternoon during some server downtime at the office. EvoCam makes a great companion piece of software for it, it supports a Java applet based stream that is pretty neat, and does the normal ftp webcam thing that you would expect. It’s very customizable, including timestamps and any other text that you might want superimposed on the webcam image. Best of all, it will only set you back 20 dollars, definitely a good deal, and I will be registering my copy as soon as my trial runs out.

BLOGGER finally has Safari blog bookmarklet support. Perhaps I shouldn’t be spending all this time moving to Movable Type after all. On that note, I was quite surprised to see that Movable Type’s preferred import format is a plain old text file. I’ve maintained an xml version of all my posts, mainly thinking in advance about havign move to either blog software written by me or someone else. It’d be nice if I could just map my xml to their post format and hit a button or something. I guess I can do what I need to do pretty easily with XSLT though.

I’m sitting in my neighborhood Starbucks, taking advantage of tacking unlimited hotspot access to my cellphone bill for 20 bucks a month. When I first did it a couple of months ago, I would rarely see anyone else here with a computer, let alone accessing the net. Over the last couple of months however, the number of people using the hotspot seems to have been going up at an incredible rate. Today, there are a total of five of us, all using Powerbooks. This in what I wouldn’t consider a high tech neighborhood at all.

Well, I have jet lag. Not because I traveled, but because I had to pretend that I was living in the same time zone as London for the last four days while our team covered the Open Championship. The site turned out great, and everything ran smoothly in the Golf Scoring/XML parsing land that my work is comprised of. I’ve actually become a much bigger fan of golf in the last few months working on the site, and it was fun this weekend to see these amazing players challenged with a course and conditions that made them struggle. Now I have to attempt to get my sleep schedule to return to normal.

I think that the thing that disturbs me the most about the two party political system we currently have in this country is that both groups feel the need to stretch the truth or resort to unprovable rhetoric in order to make their points. This is probably meant to muddy the waters for people who take things at face, but it is incredibly difficult to attempt to educate myself on important issues with all of the “doody” floating in the waters.

I went and got my hair cut this afternoon. For years, I had long hair, and I only got a haircut every three of four months, there was no need to do otherwise. Since I went the short hair route six months ago, I have to go every six weeks or so to keep the appearance of neatness. Not that I mind the whole personal grooming routine, I think I actually enjoy it more than most men I know. They mostly seem to want to go in to get their hair cut and spend as little time maintaining their hair every day as possible. Anyway, I’m digressing, this is supposed to be an essay about will power or, more accurately, the battle of the hair styles that occurs on my head every six weeks. I go to a fancy salon, it’s an indulgence that I allow myself, and I really enjoy the whole process of going, changing into the special salon robe, getting a scalp massage, a shampoo, and finally getting my hair cut. While this has all gone well, it’s the styling part, post-haircut, where the trouble arises. While I am keeping things pretty conservative, my stylist likes to make some artisitic choices when styling my hair that I am not certain work for me. He’s an artist though, and I don’t want to belittle his judgement because he probably does know better than I do what works. Don’t laugh at me when I call him an artist, do you have any idea the havoc that a bad haircut can wreak in one’s life? So anyway, I’m sitting here in Starbucks, connected to the Wi-Fi, wondering whether I should be styling my hair when I get up tomorrow the way he styled it this afternoon, or the way that I think it should be styled.

Well, I will say that it seems like quite a lot of squabbling has been going on in blog-land the last couple of weeks. Taking a simplistic viewpoint, it might seem like Dave Winer against the rest of the blog-tool vendors and a smattering of community folks. It seems, from my perspective, that both groups have written things that are somewhat questionable, but I don’t really want to get into a “I’m gonna take a side and here is why the other guys are wrong” position. From my perspective, as a real long term blog maintainer guy, it seems like there was an infrastructure in blogland that worked pretty well, and could be enhanced over time if everyone could work together, which seems unlikely from what I have seen. Since it seemed unlikely that everyone could work together, which, in my perception, has very little to do with the technology side of things, one group decided to build a new set of infrastructure for blogland. It seems like a huge undertaking from the perspective of arriving at a consensus and then properly implementing and testing this consensus in software. These wheels are in motion, and while it does no one any harm for me to express an opinion about this, I doubt there is much that anyone could do to halt the inertia of the situation. So I will just say this, it seems, from what I can tell, that there is no one in this situation who is primarily motivated by the practical good of blogland itself. I find this frustrating, but I am going to go get a nice cup of coffee now, and then I might read a book.

Scott’s got a good Buddy Hackett story on his blog type thing.