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January 31, 2002

bbedit 6.5.2

New version of BBEdit for Macintosh: 6.5.2

win2k security standards

NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has released
a guide
to increasing security in Windows 20000 Professional. The site
also provides a link to the previously-released guidelines
released by the National Security Agency.

January 30, 2002

veritas for linux

Veritas has announced
the release of their Foundation Suite
product (consisting of Veritas File System and Veritas Volume
Manager) for RedHat Linux.

January 28, 2002

mac tools

Two very cool MacOS extensions: one
to put the "Services" menu in the right-click "contextual" menu
when text is selected, and
the other
is a Service to let you search for selected text
using Google.

moveis and menus

From the O'Reilly Mac DevCenter,
Movies and Menus
. The Quicktime stuff is interesting, but
the real gold in this article is the stuff about contextual and dock
menus.

more LoTR

Another
article
about the tech side of making "Lord of the Rings:
Fellowship of the Ring." Wowzers, 45TB of data just for the
first movie.

January 26, 2002

fbi technology

Interesting
article about the old technology prevalent inside the FBI, and
to a limited extent, the CIA, NSA, and other government agencies.

old unix available

A bunch of versions of the original UNIX (AT&T and BSD both)
are now open-source and available from the
The Unix Heritage Society
. An HTTP link directly to the
archive is here.

ebay cheater

Continuing in the "don't steal from geeks" vein,
here
is a story from the Chicago Tribune about a group of
Ebay buyers that banded together using the Internet to track
down and (some would say) harass a seller that allegedly
cheated them out of as much as $125,000. It's just plain scary
sometimes how much information is available on someone if
you really go looking.

January 24, 2002

stolen mac

Here's an amazing story about how a stolen iMac was retrieved using AppleScript and Timbuktu. That'll teach them to steal from geeks.

history of video games

It's The History of Video Games, all the way back to 1889!

January 23, 2002

new sun blueprints

This month's Sun Blueprints articles online, and there are a
couple of really good ones. The
first
is a guide on implementing Sun Cluster software from
a hardware installation perspective. The
second
is an excerpt from the new Sun Blueprints book
"Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology", which is
definitely going on my to-buy list.

designing large-scale LANs

Chapter 3, "Design Types," of Kevin Dooley's new book from
O'Reilly, "Designing Large-Scale LANs" is
available
online at the O'Reilly site.

January 22, 2002

maxosx backups

Found an article
entitled "MacOS X: Backup and Restore Entire Volume" which
discusses some of the issues involved with backing up files
and filesystems on MacOS X.

wayback machine

Wonderful article from the O'Reilly Network about
Brewster Kahle
and the
Internet Wayback Machine
, which is attempting to archive
the entire Internet into a massive database. The really cool part?
The database runs on open-source software and a big cluster
of FreeBSD machines.

January 21, 2002

albatross

Albatross
is a Python toolkit for building web applications. Seems to be
very well designed with lots of useful features like server-side
session support (although it uses a separate "session server"
which I'm not wild about) and model-view-controller support.

primestar airport

A great geeky
article
on how to use a surplus Primestar (ie.. satellite TV)
dish as a high-gain directional antenna for 802.11 wireless. The
guy was able to get full bandwidth at 10 miles!

January 15, 2002

kernel hacker interviews

Two new interviews with well-known Linux kernel hackers: the
first is
with Alan Cox, and the
second
is with Rik van Riel.

January 14, 2002

eff history

From the Los Angeles Times comes a great
history
of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation.

January 11, 2002

linux journal macworld

Interesting article
from Linux Journal, entitled "Penguin Angle on the Ox: Day One at Macworld."
It covers the MacWorld trade show from the perspective of a
Linux/UNIX user.

January 10, 2002

lucene java search

Lucene
is a powerful open-source Java toolkit for full-text indexing
and searching. See also this article
from JavaWorld.

data refactoring


Data Refactoring
takes the concepts of Refactoring,
from Extreme Programming, and applies it to database design.

java on mac

Several good
articles
on developing for MacOS X using Java can be found
over on O'Reilly's OnJava.com
site.

January 8, 2002

scrolling about box

From Cocoa Dev Central, a
tutorial
on writing an About Box with scrolling credits under
MacOS X. Lots of good stuff on that
site
.

sendmail clusters

More geeky goodness from IBM:
Highly Available/Scalable Sendmail Using Sendmail Clusters
on Linux.

Usenet archive

From Salon, an interesting
article
about some of the hackers that saved old copies of
Usenet messages, which
Google
used to fill out their 20-year archive.

January 5, 2002

solaris releases

Interesting article on a somewhat confusing subject: the difference between Solaris releases (i.e. Solaris 8 vs. Solaris 8 10/00 vs. Solaris 8 Maintenance Update 4).

teenaged cissp

The CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) certification is an expensive ($450) and grueling (6 hours, 250 questions) exam, and is one of the most sought-after certifications today. Namit Merchant is a 17-year-old Indian high school student and the first teen-aged CISSP. Cool!

bellovin firewalls book

The full text of Steven Bellovin and Bill Cheswick's book "Firewalls and Internet Security" is now available online. It's an easy read and a great book from two experts on the subject.

Two new MacOS articles from

Two new MacOS articles from the
O'Reilly Mac DevCenter:

Turning on PHP4
under Apache, for sysadmins, and
Animating Graphics in Cocoa
, for programmers.

January 3, 2002

new python features

Nice little
introduction
to two of the new language features in Python 2.2, iterators and simple
generators. More stuff to learn. See also IBM's
three
part
series on functional
programming in Python.

January 2, 2002

mkrdns tool

New DNS-management tool to checkout:
mkrdns
automatically generates PTR records for multiple zones.

ion storm

A long
article
from Salon on Ion Storm, one of the most infamous
computer game companies in recent memory, run by the well-known
"personality" John Romero of "Doom" fame.

VIM article

A nice, in-depth,
article
written by the author of the
VIM
text editor. It ain't
emacs
, but it's a lot better than plain old VI.