Listen to the beat of a binary counter!
This is an experiment, where I count one byte up - from 00000000 to 11111111. Decimal spoken, this is from 0 to 255. I have assigned a sound to each bit and when it switches from 0 to 1, the sound is played.
Published in Wired in 1996, this is still an excellent article written by Neal Stephenson, who travels across the globe to document how undersea communications cable are laid. While the article is very long (56 pages), it makes for fascinating reading.
FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it necessitates a lot of banging around through meatspace. Over the course of two months, photographer Alex Tehrani and I hit six countries and four continents trying to get a grip on this longest, fastest, mother of all wires. I took a GPS receiver with me so that I could have at least a general idea of where the hell we were. It gave me the above reading in front of a Chinese temple around the corner from the Shangri-La Hotel in Penang, Malaysia, which was only one of 100 peculiar spots around the globe where I suddenly pulled up short and asked myself, “What the hell am I doing here?”
Here are a few useful shortcuts when using the command prompt in Windows.
We look at some useful keyboard shortcuts and commands that will help you personalize the MS-DOS Command Prompt Window without using the mouse.
You will also learn about hotkeys for executing DOS commands more quickly. The keyboard shortcuts are known to work in Windows Vista and XP command prompt.
Wired has a fascinating story about two AI researchers, both of whom committed suicide.
In 1991, Singh went to MIT to study artificial intelligence with his idol and soon attracted notice for his passion and mental stamina. Word was that he had read every single one of the dauntingly complex books on the shelves in Minsky’s office. A casual conversation with the smiling young researcher in the hallway or at a favorite restaurant like Kebab-N-Kurry could turn into an intense hour-long debate. As one fellow student put it, Singh had a way of “taking your idea and showing you what it looks like from about 50 miles up.”
The field of AI research that Singh was joining had a history of bipolar behavior, swinging from wild overoptimism to despair. When 2001 came out in the late ’60s, many believed that a thinking machine like HAL would exist well before the end of the 20th century, and researchers were flush with government grants. Within a few years, it had become apparent that these predictions were absurdly unrealistic, and the funding soon dried up.
One user has written a pretty funny post on their experiences with Vista, and “upgrading” to XP. Based on reports like these, I’m glad I skipped the Vista upgrade cycle altogether and went straight to XP.
In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to <gasp> Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP.
Here’s another impressive homebrew computer. It was built with more than 200 ICs, and has similar capabilities to the original 8086 processor. It was recently demoed running a port of Minix 2.
Magic-1 is a completely homebuilt minicomputer. It doesn’t use an off-the-shelf microprocessor, but instead has a custom CPU made out of 74 Series TTL chips. Altogether there are more than 200 chips in Magic-1 connected together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. And, it works. Not only the hardware, but a full software stack. There’s a ANSI C cross-compiler for Magic-1 (retargeted LCC), a fully multi-user, multi-tasking port of the Minix 2 operating system. a TCP/IP stack and hundreds of programs.
Related:
Particletree has an informative article on Fitt’s Law, an important guideline in user-interface design.
Published in 1954, Fitts’s Law is an effective method of modeling the relationship of a very specific, yet common situation in interface design. That situation involves a human-powered appendage at rest (whether it’s physical like your finger or virtual like a mouse cursor) and a target area that’s located somewhere else.
Joel on Software examines the recent Excel 2007 bug.
By now you’ve probably seen a lot of the brouhaha over a bug in the newest version of Excel, 2007. Basically, multiplying 77.1*850, which should give you 65,535, was actually displaying 100,000.
You can now rest easy, knowing that, indeed, you can install 145 operating systems on one PC.
An operating system needs to reside in a home. That is a partition to me. I used 2×300Gb Pata disk and 2×200 Sata Disk to set up 152 partitions. I always put one operating system in one partition. As an extended partition of each hard disk has no storage of its own, one data-only partition is needed for my personal data, another data-only partition to house the common boot loader and one Swap partition is needed for all the Linux I ended up losing 7 partitions leaving 145 partitions to house the 145 operating systems.
Coding Horror has written an informative article on Rainbow Tables, and why Windows servers can be particularly vulnerable.
The multi-platform password cracker Ophcrack is incredibly fast. How fast? It can crack the password “Fgpyyih804423″ in 160 seconds. Most people would consider that password fairly secure. The Microsoft password strength checker rates it “strong”. The Geekwisdom password strength meter rates it “mediocre”.
Why is Ophcrack so fast? Because it uses Rainbow Tables. No, not the kind of rainbows I have as my desktop background.
This site did a little investigation into those software awards that are given out by download sites.
The obvious explanation is that some download sites give an award to every piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will display the award with a link back to them. The back link then potentially increases traffic to their site directly (through clicks on the award link) and indirectly (through improved page rank from the incoming links). The author gets some awards to impress their potential clients and the download site gets additional traffic.
This is a useful tip on those rare occasions when you absolutely need to get into a remote server and all of the connections are tied up.
While I’m sure we all agree that this is an awesome feature, sometimes in an emergency you need to log into a server and all of its connections are already in use. There are a couple of really useful and mostly unknown command line utilities that will allow you to remotely find and kill other remote desktop sessions, whether they are in a connected or disconnected state.
This Firefox extension makes the saved passwords feature of Firefox safer by forcing you to click on the Secure Login button in order to fill in your login name and password on forms. This helps prevent cross-site scripting attacks on malicious sites that try to steal your passwords.
Secure Login provides you with a number of Security enhancements and helps protecting you from phishing:
Disabling the prefilling of login forms prevents malicious JavaScript code to automatically steal your login data.
This is due to the fact that no login data is inserted in form fields before the user clicks on the login button or logs in using the keyboard shortcut.
To make sure you login to the right website, the second level domain of the login url is compared to the second level domain of the current page.
If they do not match a dialog prompt is displayed before login.Secure Login provides you with an optional setting to protect you from all JavaScript code during login.
This can prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks without having to deactivate JavaScript completely.
If you enable this option, your login data will never be inserted in any form fields nor will the login form be submitted.
Instead your credentials will be sent to the login page using internal Firefox methods.
Not all login forms will work this way, e.g. not those using JavaScript routines. Therefore, you can add such websites to an exception list.
Matthias Wandel built this clever adder that uses marbles. It is quite pleasant to watch it in action…check out the video.
It had occurred to me that perhaps with an insane amount of perseverance, it might be possible to build a whole computer that runs on marbles. My second marble machine was however much less based on logic - more on just making lots of noise.
But a few months ago, I had an idea as to how the divide by two mechanisms from my first marble machine could be cascaded together to actually function as a sort of adder or counter. Once I had that idea, I knew I had to try it at some point, and recently, I finally got around to building my marble binary adding machine.
The core of the invention is a modification of the divide by two flipflop to retain the marble that falls off the right side, and retain it until the flipflop is flipped to the left by the next marble. See small diagram above right. The retention of this extra marble allows the state of the marble accumulator to be dumped. The adder would just as well add without it, but the number would have to be read off by the angle of the rockers, rather than have the device dump the count out. Really, if such an adder were integrated into a hypothetical marble computer, reading out the result as a series of marbles would be an essential element.
Related:
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
Touchstone, 1998
In Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Hafner and Lyon take us all the way back to the earliest days of computer networking. We are introduced to all of the central figures that were responsible for building the precursors to the internet we know today. In contrast with the rapid growth we see now, the early days seem glacial. The equipment was primitive and had to be custom built. No one had any idea initially how they could connect disparate computers together and make them talk to one another. The fact that the protocols that they eventually came up with are still in use on the internet today, and have managed to survive its explosive growth, is a testament to the genius and vision of these pioneers. The authors have managed to capture not only the tough technical hurdles that needed to be overcome, but also the motivations and the leaps of insight of the people involved during this historic time. This is an enjoyable book that moves at a fairly brisk pace, but I wouldn’t have minded seeing a little more of the technical details.
Rating: 8/10
Links:
Related:
The Computer: An Illustrated History
Mark Frauenfelder
Carlton Books, 2005
This is computer pr0n at its finest. This large, beautiful coffee-table book chronicles the evolution of the computer through hundreds of photographs. Following the earliest counting devices, hulking mainframes, personal computers and game consoles, the book documents the seminal figures who shaped the industry and the complex machines they created. It’s a delight simply flipping through all of the pictures and reading about the genius and vision behind these fascinating devices. The historic photos and the evocative writing both really draw you into the book and make you feel like you are reliving the golden age of computing. The Computer is a wonderfully nostalgic book that belongs on any computer geek’s shelf.
Rating: 9/10
Links:
If you are interested in HDR imaging, give this open source tool a try. It helps you create and tone map HDR images from bracketed exposures of a scene.
Related:
Just like CRTs, someone can eavesdrop on the electromagnetic emissions from your LCD display.
Back in 1985, Wim Van Eck proved it was possible to tune into the radio emissions produced by electromagentic coils in a CRT display and then reconstruct the image. The practice became known as Van Eck Phreaking, and NATO spent a fortune making its systems invulnerable to it. It was a major part of Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon.
CRTs are now well on the way to being history. But Kuhn has shown that eavesdropping is possible on flat panel displays too. It works slightly differently. With a flat panel display the aim is to tune into the radio emissions produced by the cables sending a signal to the monitor. The on-screen image is fed through the cable one pixel at a time. Because they come through in order you just have to stack them up. And Kuhn has worked out how to decode the colour of each pixel from its particular wave form.
Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 was released with an improved UI and some new features like Saved Searches and Vista support:
Use this useful utility to recover files from damaged disks.
Recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts were not recoverable in the end.
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