Software, Technology, Business & Life

Smart-phone platforms: iPhone, Android, WebOS, Maemo, etc.

All are super-cool. But all are also astonishingly divergent in their approach to many of the details. So much so that one has to learn each one separately. My wife (an Android user) picks up my (webOS) phone and gets frustrated with it.

I find this particularly surprising since we’ve been making “intuitive” Graphical User Interfaces for a generation now, with standards that have been around nearly that long.

I’m sure they’ll converge again before too long, as (hopefully) the best ideas are adopted broadly.

Here’s a screen-shot of ClamWin.com’s main page, as of today.

Notice the giant Download button on the right. That’s really an ad for who-knows-what. To download ClamWin, you want the much-smaller download menu item on the left.

Caveat emptor.

Google has just introduced its Google Art Project.

It’s Google Street View inside the prominent museums of the world, with high-resolution images of each work.

What a great concept! Hat’s off to them.

I’ve been through Amsterdam three times (stop-overs to other destinations), and never got to see either the Rijksmuseum or the Van Gogh Museum. I look forward to exploring them here.

I hope and expect that this will increase museum traffic.

The SourceForge site was hacked last week, with the attackers going as far as putting a hacked SSH daemon in place.

Since hacking pushes one towards paranoia, let’s go there for a minute.

An attacker being able to change source-code in any SourceForge repository, bypassing change-logs and hacking files’ time-stamps, could introduce compromised source-code to a lot of open-source projects that touch on security. The commercial packages that rely on them multiplies that compromise up by who-knows-how-much.

Wow. Ugly.

Over the weekend I installed the latest Flickr Uploadr for Win32.

The install popped up the familiar “Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable” installer as part of its installation.

Microsoft Visual C++ 8 is still solid and widely used.

In this piece from the UK’s Register, Dominic Connor savages British Computer Science Higher Ed:

No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

His biting style is a little over the top, but entertaining. I hope not everything he claims is true.

A couple gems:

Java fanboys tell me that it is “easier” than C++, and seem miffed when I agree in a sneering way. A CompSci grad is supposed to be able to do difficult things that arts grads simply can’t understand. … BMW don’t say their cars are “so simple that they are built by cows” …

As far as I can tell, only Queen Mary College has undergrads bright enough not to be scared of C++, and even then less than half take the option. Kings College students/victims told me that they do operating system internals in Java, and no they weren’t joking.

Ouch.

I wrote a graphics-intensive application for one client. He reported that when he tried to drag it from one monitor to another it seemed to lock up. Then he reported the fix: adjusting the fan for one of his multi-monitor video cards, to keep it from overheating.

When you push bits all day, it’s hard to imagine these kinds of real-world interactions.

Or when a multi-threaded, calculation-intensive program kicks the PC’s fan up a couple notches, you realize: hey, I did that.

Embedded developers joke about the HACF machine instruction: Halt and Catch Fire. You don’t expect that on your desktop machine, but don’t rule it out completely.

Dora the Explorer turns ten.

It’s a TV show, but it pretends the TV is a computer. (When Dora asks where something is, you see a mouse go across the screen and click it.)

But we watch it off of the Netflix instant queue on our computer.

So our computer acts like a TV acting like a computer.

And our computer’s monitor is a TV set.

So the TV acts as monitor, for a computer acting as a TV acting as a computer.

How many full circles is that?

Wikipedia compares C/C++ IDE’s, and Netbeans C/C++ pack looks surprisingly good.

But being written in Java, I suspect that it’s as resource-hungry as large Java apps are.

The perpetrators of what sounds like a big zombie-net have been arrested:

Three Spaniards arrested in alleged global hacking scheme

Apparently, 13 million computers were infected.