geoff.mollyandgeoff.com

This screensaver goes out to google and searches for publicly accessible surveillance cameras, and displays what they see. I don’t know whether it’s fun or just creepy. I’m leaning towards creepy. There’s a Windows version too.

I’ve kind of liked podcasts for some time now, but have not listened to them on a regular basis largely because of a flaw that I had entirely imagined. Today I drove around running a few errands, listening to one of my favorite podcasts from these guys. I was mildly annoyed when I finished up earlier than I thought I would and had not gotten to the end of my podcast, because I knew I’d have to fuss around to figure out where I left off and hear the end. Since I’m generally only in the car for 20 – 40 minutes at a time, this characteristic of podcasts has left me less enthusiastic about them than I might be. Today, though, out of dumb luck, I plugged the iPhone in to sync/charge a few minutes before I double-clicked the podcast to resume listening. I was quite happy to hear it pick up just where I had left off in the car. I can think of three or four podcasts I’d have listened to more regularly for the past couple years, had I discovered this feature sooner.

There’s a very handy script floating around that makes it easy to add an “Open Terminal Here” button to finder windows. It can even make sure the terminal goes into a new tab. For some reason, I wanted the tabs opened by this button to have a particular (non-default) them. Making this work proved trickier than it ought to be, because the script was just sending a command-t keystroke to the terminal in order to open a tab.
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According to Bloomberg.com, Microsoft has offered $30 a share to buy Yahoo!, whose stock was trading at around $19 as of COB yesterday. I guess this should be construed as an admission that Ballmer does not consider MSN to be a successful business unit.

BusinessWeek has published their review of the latest shiny from Apple, the MacBook Air. I have to agree with the reviewer on most points, though I’m probably not really the target market for this laptop. The price is right, but, for me, being restricted to a single battery really kills the deal. In order for an ultraportable to hold value for me, I need a full working day of freedom from AC. 5 hours just won’t cut it; I might as well carry a larger machine at that point. One of the reviewer’s comments simply misses the boat, though:

Meanwhile, it would be nice if Apple would end its pigheaded insistence on a single mouse button, as it has on desktop mice.

Just as quietly as with desktop mice, they have in fact ended this limitation for over a year now. To activate the “second button” simply enable two finger taps in the system preferences application. This lets you tap the pad’s surface with two fingers at any time to “right-click”. It’s a tremendous improvement over a second button, which is much easier to inadvertently activate. I constantly find myself wishing Apple’s competitors would ditch the second button and adopt that feature instead.

With VirtualBox, in order to compact sparse images effectively, unused blocks need to be set to zero. The traditional

cat /dev/zero >fillerup

Doesn’t seem to give good results. Here’s what worked better for me.

This info comes from the virtualbox forums but seems to have absolutely no google-juice, so I’m reposting it here in hopes of making it easier to find.

The end result still isn’t spectacular, but on my image that should occupy 2.1G if the disk image were perfectly sparse, it resulted in a 2.8G image. Copying from /dev/zero prior to compacting resulted in a 3.6G image. That makes the difference between wanting to compress the image when I burn it to a DVD and being happy to leave it alone.

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DHS has sponsored use of Coverity’s products against several prominent Free/Open Source projects’ work product. It’s great news. The projects never could afford to sponsor such themselves, and they will doubtless find and fix some errors. ZDNet’s coverage makes you wonder just what kind of errors they’ll find, though:

Coverity uses static source-code analysis to spot errors in code, such as open brackets. Projects on Rung 2 will move on to use the company’s “satisfiability” techniques, which use a bit-accurate representation of a software system, translating every relevant software operation into Boolean values (true and false) and Boolean operators (such as and, not, or).

Sigh.

Word on the street is that CompUSA plans to close their remaining stores. I guess I’m sorry to see them go; I’ve found many good, if overpriced toys there over the years. Sure, their prices aren’t as good as most any online retailer, but they have the distinct advantage of offering a local spot where you can pick something up today. I’ll miss them for that, anyway. (via ars)

ES&S voting systems show every sign of being horrifically insecure; if you voted on one, you should feel no assurance that your vote was counted. That much is clear. The big question for me is, why did California wait until after they had purchased, deployed and used the machines to test? I don’t understand politics at all. Passing this test should’ve been a prerequisite to purchase in a sane world.

If this doesn’t make you want patent reform, you must be an IP lawyer:

A system and methods for extracting value from a portfolio of assets, for example a patent portfolio, are described. By granting floating privileges described herein, a portfolio owner can extend an opportunity for obtaining an interest in selected assets from the portfolio to a client who lacks the resources to accumulate and maintain such a portfolio, in return for an annuity stream to the portfolio owner. The floating privilege can take many forms, depending on the needs of the client and the nature of the assets in the portfolio. The privilege is executed for a set of assets selected by the client and approved by the portfolio owner in accordance with a floating privilege agreement controlling the floating privilege.

Essentially, they want to patent the “business method” of leasing your patent portfolio to others for use in litigation threats. When litigation becomes a valid business method, something is very wrong… Read the whole thing.