Archive for August, 2010
Cautionary Note
Monday, August 30th, 2010Every now and then, someone stumbles across my blog and asks me how they, too, can work in development. I try to be supportive, but usually find myself actively discouraging them, at least at first. You’d better be strong, flexible, resourceful, good with languages and have more than the normal allotment of patience. I’ve been [...]
You Are All Driving Pintos And I Want You To Stop
Thursday, August 26th, 2010I’ve lived with it for a while now, but really, it’s getting intolerable. The vast majority of you are using the computer equivalent of a Ford Pinto. Poorly built, underpowered and yet inefficient, lacking both in style and substance. And unsafe at any speed.
Worse still, you’re not even driving it.
Back in 2007, Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet, stood up at the Davos Forum and announced that, out of about 600 million personal computers worldwide, about 150 million are remotely controlled by criminals. These ‘zombies’ or ‘bots’ as they’re commonly known, are formed into legions of compromised machines called ‘botnets’.
Let’s put this in perspective: If your own PC is not infected, then odds are very high that one of your immediate neighbours is. When you factor in the strict security and controls that many enterprises maintain on their corporate resources, the odds that your home PC (and your neighbour’s) is a bot increase significantly.
An American Dreamer
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010The world is not gentle to the innocent, but no matter how it battered him, Tim Drefahl never let it win. Vanuatu offered solace for a while and, on an island ringed by an azure lagoon, there are people who will never forget his duty, his devotion, his love.
Snippets
Friday, August 6th, 2010On the bus ride back to the office today, I eavesdropped (as I often do) to a couple of women speaking one of Vanuatu’s hundreds of local languages. While I can speak exactly none of them, I know dribs and drabs of about a dozen or so, and it serves as a pleasant game to try to figure out whence the interlocutors originate.
Cheap Shots
Sunday, August 1st, 2010Aspiring photographer? Trying to make an impression on an online world with your nascent mastery of a century-old craft? Allow me to offer a few words of advice…