VC in Russia

A very interesting interview by Robert. It will be interesting watching how tech expands in Russia.

Ruby and Google Maps

via Google Video

Dell and Sun

You can watch the keynotes here.

Thats Michael Dell and Jonathan Schwartz on stage.

font

Droid Sans Mono great coding font: "of particular interest for developers is the Droid Sans Mono font that looks great in Visual Studio not only at my favourite 10 point..."

This is a great coding font, and it looks good on Textmate.

cocoacast

Their are some great introductory screencast for beginning Cocoa programmers at cocoacast.

More on spaces

I've noticed another problem with spaces on leopard. When working on a particular work space, if you chose "Hide others" option, it hides all windows not only the space you are at, but other spaces as well. I'd like it to just "hide others" on the Space I am working on please!

quicksilver goes open source!

Hosted at Google Code Project.

Can we get a linux port please!

via tuaw.com

Operating Systems

Whats with new operating systems these days? I've heard/experienced complaints about all the new operating systems that have been released lately:

Vista
Leopard
Gutsy

Perhaps its because none of these operating systems brought forth a revolutionary change to offset the discomfort of moving from your older OS.

From a users perspective the most useful Leopard feature for me was Spaces. On Linux I use Windowmaker as my window manager which has had virtual work spaces for years. And yet Leopard still didn't get it right. Of course there is technical goodness (dtrace), but their is also badness (java6). If only that was it. Now leopard causes major data loss!

I've been lazy about upgrading to gutsy so I am not really sure if their are real problems there. I hope not.

Maybe I should try switching to this. All I need to do is find a laptop that will run it well. Its a new release like the operating systems mentioned above, and I haven't heard anything bad about it yet! :)

IDA Pro Disassembler and Debugger

IDA Pro Disassembler and Debugger: "IDA Pro has released v4.9 as freeware. Get your copy HERE. It is by far the best disassembler out there for the windows platform. I HIGHLY recommend using it."

(Via Planet Sysadmin.)

This is a really useful tool for debugging (and other stuff).

Skype on leopard

I've been running leopard for a week. I enabled the firewall and rebooted the system and Skype stopped working. Reading the forums I found that this is a known problem with Skype on Leopard. If you have the firewall on, Skype stops functioning.

I downloaded a beta version of skype from here, and it seems to work fine for me.

Update: Skype beta is not working for me too.

Investigating the Leopard Firewall | securosis.com

Investigating the Leopard Firewall | securosis.com: "I feel like I'm missing something, but I think that's it. In short, block mode seems to block inbound connections but ports show as open/filtered. Stealth mode works, partially, but some ports still show on a port scan no matter what (like Kerberos). Bonjour is ALWAYS accessible, unless you're in stealth mode. Application ('Set access') mode is a mess- code signing breaks applications, and the behavior is inconsistent. Any launched services are authorized and you can't change the settings in the firewall GUI.

The good news is that ipfw is still enabled and you can manually configure it or use a GUI like WaterRoof."

(Via Matasano Chargen.)

On my firewall in leopard I have "Set access for specific services and applications" selected. The only service I want available is SSH. Running nmap from another machine, I get:

adnan@adnan-desktop:~$ nmap 192.168.xxx.xxx

Starting Nmap 4.20 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2007-11-01 22:08 CDT
Note: Host seems down. If it is really up, but blocking our ping probes, try -P0
Nmap finished: 1 IP address (0 hosts up) scanned in 4.044 seconds

With the -P0 flag:
adnan@adnan-desktop:~$ nmap 192.168.xxx.xxx -P0

Starting Nmap 4.20 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2007-11-01 22:09 CDT
Interesting ports on 192.168.xxx.xxx:
Not shown: 1696 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh

Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 31.862 seconds

Looks good to me.

Update: Ouch!
Nick left an interesting comment. I'm not sure whats going on here yet. But definitely not nice!

techmeme

Techmeme has a thread about a Techmeme killer! Thats funny :)

Update: I don't like blogrunner. Its too cluttered. I love techmeme, wonderful interface.

Scoble and the CEOs

Scoble catchs CEO of myspace and google!

via Dave Winer

Update: For some reason I can get the right embed video again. If you look at the video their is a way to move back in the video, an arrow on the video.

Quicksilver b53 for Leopard - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Quicksilver b53 for Leopard - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): "Fortunately, Blacktree's servers are now back up and beta 53 (build 3814) of Quicksilver is available for download (download link)"

Jeff Vader?

(Via Majordojo.)

load cycle count

I am running Leopard on my macbook pro, and I thought it would be interesting to see what the load cycle count on my box was. Mind you, I'm not too knowledgeable about hard drives. Just to play around, I downloaded the smartmon tools and compiled from source.

Running smartctl -a /dev/disk0 I get:
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 097 097 000 Old_age Always - 66403

According to the original article he was at 56000 load cycles! I'm at 66403! Yikes!
I bought the machine in June of this year!

Upon further reading it looks like this might not be an operating system issue.

The following things might instead cause aggressive power management settings :
your (laptop) harddrive firmware might have aggressive power management defaults (operating system independent)
your (laptop) BIOS might set your harddrive to use aggressive power management (operating system independent)
you might have enabled laptop-mode in /etc/default/acpi-support (disabled by default) which will set your harddrive to use aggressive power management

Anyway, I don't think I'm going to really get worried about this any further.

mysqldb on leopard

To get mysqldb working on leopard I found I had to edit _mysql.c and edit out the lines:
#ifndef uint
#define uint unsigned int
#endif

I also had to edit site.cfg and mark threadsafe to False.

What every programmer should know about memory

• What every programmer should know about memory, Part 1 [LWN.net]


• Memory part 2: CPU caches [LWN.net]


• Memory part 3: Virtual Memory [LWN.net]


• Memory part 4: NUMA support [LWN.net]


• Memory part 5: What programmers can do [LWN.net]

Links for 10/29/07 [my NetNewsWire tabs]

• The Little JavaScripter


• Playing with functional programming — Yoan Blanc’s weblog


• ONLamp.com: Building Decision Trees in Python


• rococo - then rubble


• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review: Page 2


• Semi-automatic offline synchronization of a digital media player - Arve Bersvendsen


• Making a Pylons Blog - Pylons Cookbook - PythonWeb

"Open in TextMate" from Leopard Finder – The Pug Automatic

"Open in TextMate" from Leopard Finder – The Pug Automatic: "Download OpenInTextMate.zip, extract the file somewhere (I keep it in /Applications/Scripts), then drag it onto the Finder toolbar. You'll need to wiggle it a bit for the toolbar to catch on."

(Via Simon Willisons blog.)