Category: tech

How do you know if the company that you work for is making evil software? Here’s the on-screen help that I got for the command-line parameters:

	-D       Become a daemon (default)

	-i       Run interactive (not a daemon)

Well at least they give you the option of not becoming a demon.

For clarity, I like to add diagrams to the guides that I write. Here’s my concept for this one:

Hold on. The command-line help says “daemon”, not “demon”. Never mind, then.

A “daemon” is a server process, apparently. I guess this means that my company doesn’t necessarily serve the powers of evil after all. That’s a relief, because I kind of like it here.

Over at Penmachine.com, Derek espouses the virtues of the flat-panel monitor… without actually owning one. He suggests several brands, but I can just cut to the quick and recommend the Samsung Synchmaster 191N. It’s big, it’s bright, it rotates 90 degrees to portrait mode, and the price is very reasonable.

The difference between LCD and CRT is amazing: where a CRT can be blurry, distorted, and can flicker, the LCD monitor provides a steady, crisp image. I’ll never go back to a CRT if I can help it.

I mention this here only because Derek refuses to put a comment link on his blog, which annoys me to no end.

If you have read as much science-fiction as I have, you’ll be familiar with the concept of the solar-sailed spacecraft. In the pages of fiction, these craft use large surfaces to capture the pressure of particles emanating from the sun. Theoretically, the pressure could be used to propel the craft — slowly.

Could such a spacecraft actually work? We’ll find out in September, when Cosmos 1, the first solar sail spacecraft, launches from a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea.

Will the solar sails work at all? Some scientists claim that those pesky laws of physics will get in the way. I’ll be watching eagerly.

Link: Wired.com: Solar Sail Plying Turbulent Seas

Nerds become nostalgic about their first computer in the same way that car buffs get all misty-eyed about their first wheels (and the car attached to them). Oldcomputers.net is a museum of the original home and personal computers.

I first got my hands on a computer when I was too young to really know what it was. Back in the seventies (maybe ’76 or ’77), my dad introduced me and my brothers to the DEC PDP-11 at the university. It was a row of red-and-black refrigerator-sized boxes with all the buttons, switches, and spinning things you could ever want. I remember playing Space Wars and Lunar Lander… badly. My Lunar Lander games would last about five seconds before I crashed in a little explosion of lines and dots. All those poor Tron guys… they met an untimely death at my hands.

Anyway, the first home computer I got my hands on was an Apple IIc at a local school. I still didn’t “get it”, but I could at least use LOGO Turtle Graphics to make some cool line drawings.

And then… ooooh…. portability. Or at least an early-eighties attempt at a portable computer. The Hyperion was an 8088-based IBM clone that weighed a ton. I wrote a lot of fun adventure games on that thing.

I think I started down memory lane today because I have a Dell PIII with Windows Me. It BSDs regularly, of course. It makes me yearn for a reliable old 8088 and a copy of WordPerfect for DOS.

What was your first computer and what did you do with it?

As an aside, the Blogger spell-checker suggested that I replace the word “nerds” in the first sentence with “Nordic”. When will Blogger replace that useless spell-checker??