kerneljack's diary

Big kerfuffle happening since MT decided to impose some charges upon its users. Mark Pilgrim has a very well-written piece called Freedom 0 which has been linked to death by many people; he ended up writing a follow-up to it. There is a nice breakdown of most blogging software and their features here

I’m still using MT as I installed it last year. Since I’m the only one publishing to this blog at the moment, I don’t see any reason to change over to anything else. Nevertheless I will keep a close eye on Wordpress and may switch to it sometime in the future as Tom and many others have done. It’s not that I’m against what MT have done in any way; it’s just something I need to think about.

Been doing a lot of linux work lately at home and am quite pleased with its progress on the desktop Kernel 2.6, Gnome 2.6, gdesklets, etc all make for a really nice desktop and OpenOffice is getting better everyday. The GNOME developers are quite busy these days as can be witnessed by reading the PlanetGnome blogs.

A very serious exploit has been discovered on OSX, and everyone using Safari or any other browser on OSX (even FireFox or IE) are urged to follow the instructions here so they can temporarily stop the exploit from working, at least until Apple gets its act together and fixes the problem. The fact that Apple have still not fixed the problem, which they have been aware of since February strikes me as a very stupid thing to do. I don’t know if fixing the exploit would require many in-depth changes to the OS and maybe that’s why it’s taking so long for Apple to fix. One would hope that this is indeed the case. They should have at least warned their users about this a long time ago. Leaving an exploit unpatched like this for such a long time looks really bad for them, especially in enterprise environments where I hear they are trying to make serious inroads.

It seems the HFS+ file system on OSX is quite good at keeping file fragmentation at bay, almost eliminating it altogether in most cases! Amit Singh has a great article about it here.

A colleague at work asked me today how OSX’s Mail.app does it’s spam filtering and this appeared as if just by coincidence

Created by the engineers who bring the Japanese input method and the Speech technologies to you, Mail’s junk mail filters are outstanding. When trained for a sufficient period of time, the filters can reach 98%+ accuracy against spam and are surprisingly painless to use. In fact, this feature alone has convinced many users to switch to Mail.

The first part of that article is also pretty good, a lot of good stuff about spam, picking good email addresses, etc.

Update: These guys have released a program to fix the OSX exploit.

Some amazing things happening these days. I’ve been using my Sony Clie heavily for quite a while now and have found it to be so convenient while travelling to/from work. I’ve got several ebooks on it (including Cryptonomicon , some music and some technical audio talks, some movies, a few pictures I took in the office, and every morning I sync up all my RSS feeds to it and read them on the way to work It’s got quite a good battery life, requiring recharging every few days or so, depending on how heavily I use it.

The only downsides to using a clie on the Mac is that some things like Memory Sticks don’t show up on the desktop as mountable drives. This can be fixed by downloading the excellent missingsync for macs, which allows you to use the full functionality of the clie, along with iTunes, iPhoto, etc. Memory sticks are one of the things I don’t like about Sony machines though. They are expensive for the amount of memory you get (about 50 pounds for 128MB – official sony store prices are about 70 pounds!). Yes, ebay is your friend

In other interesting news, someone’s written a Mac emulator for the PC that runs OSX! I’ve only just found out that PC fans are falling all over themselves to try this thing. There’s even a website called www.emaculation.com!

One other thing to check out: musicplasma. It’s really cool.

Hourly doses of coffee beat a cup? I better figure this out and change my daily dose, this might be quite helpful.