I got fist fist bumped by a 7 year old today! I don’t know whether she was showing me respect or just being cool (she was). Either way, it made my day. :-)

I finally put my money where my blog is!

I can only encourage everybody to pick a worthy cause and contribute if you can.

“I don’t have hard drives. I just keep 30 Chinese teenagers in my basement and force them to memorize numbers.”

I needed to upgrade the internal HD on an iBook and it was obvious that Apple never meant for users to perform that kind of upgrade. This was underscored by the 60 something screws I had strategically arranged on my work area as I was trying to reassemble that beast!

I must say that ifixit.com has been invaluable in getting that project completed. Their detailed step-by-step guide was the only thing that kept me from a nervous breakdown. I can highly recommend this site as a referenced for the casual Apple hardware hacker as they have a ton of other guides that will keep you from ended up with a heap of spare parts. That said, I did end up with an extra screw at the end of the project, but it did not seem to have affected the functionality of the re-assembled iBook in any way. :-)

Needless to say that the same upgrade on more recent models is a matter of minutes - not hours.

I took my time reading Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. I that did not because it wasn’t fascinating, but because I wanted to savor the experience. This book is an unusual love story with some definite sci-fi elements. The story is gripping and will engage you from the first to last page. However, what really fascinated me about this book more than anything was how well the author was able to channel both main characters. I can’t recall having read a book where the writer was able to lay bare a character’s emotional life with as much finesse as Niffenegger exhibited in this book. I was especially impressed how she was able to paint a picture of Henry, the main male character, in my head as both sensitive and strong. This definitely a departure from much of the crime / mystery escapist fiction that I usually consume, but it is one of those books that has me thinking about it long after I close the last page and put it down.

The other day I was putting some gas in my car and the gas pump was one of those with a TV screen to torture you with commercials interspersed with unsolicited content. Well, this one had crashed and instead of the intended programming, it was showing an error dialog. Naturally, I whipped out my phone and snapped some pix. Afterwards, I didn’t stick around too long because I didn’t want the guy watching (or not) the security cam to come out and accuse me of being a terrorist. Here are the pix.

ok, so I’ve become a little biased over time. Many eons ago, I used to code in Java - before the advent of most of the frameworks in use today and before many of the libraries. Now I find myself having to go back to Java because it is being used in a big project and I can’t do anything about it. However, what a pain the whole Java universe seems to be these days! Here are my gripes:

• Java has become so huge that it is nearly impossible for any one programmer to be an overall expert. What with JDK, J2SE, J2ME, J2EE, and tens of thousands of libraries, who can keep track of it all?
• XML files suck! Don’t get me wrong, XML files have their place in in certain types of data exchange, etc. But, I’m sick of seeing hundreds of XML files polluting a project. XML files for configuration are overly verbose - especially as config files. And despite what some people will tell you, they are not that human readable. Simplify - use some thing like YAML.
• Every time I look at Java code, I find myself wishing for a modern scripting language. It’s not that bad, for such a high-level language, it sure takes a lot of code to get things done.
• Performance. Yeah, yeah, I know they have been optimizing Java year after year and it is supposedly as fast as some lower level languages. But it still bugs me that it takes close to five minutes to launch a sufficiently large application in debug mode from Eclipse.
• Speaking of Eclipse … yes, it’s awesome how much you can do with it but it is still a slow, resource sucking behemoth of an application. And guess what, it’s written in Java!

Wow! Blowfly (look it up) would’ve been proud.

I’m an avid listener of Steve Gibson & Leo Laporte’s weekly Security Now! podcast. If you care about security on the Net, you should be a subscriber. Since they have been doing this for over 3 years, there are a log of back episodes to catch up on. I’d like to recommend the 6 episodes they did on encryption as an excellent and easily understandable primer on the subject:

• Episode #30: Cryptographic Issues
• Episode #31: Symmetric Stream Ciphers
• Episode #33: Symmetric Block Ciphers
• Episode #34: Public Key Cryptography
• Episode #35: Cryptographic Hashes
• Episode #37: Crypto Series Wrap-up

The German word for performer is ”Interpret.” Actually, it is mostly used for singers although it can be applied to actors and such as well. The English equivalent, which is spelled the same way (forget about capitalization), has the definition: “to give or provide the meaning.” I think that is exactly what a gifted singer does, he or she gives meaning to a melody and lyrics. Of course it’s subjective, but singers whose voices have always grabbed me as soon as they open their mouth include: Joe Cocker, Sam Cooke, Willie Nelson, & Van Morrison. I don’t think there is any instrument that can compete with the human voice when it comes to communicating emotion. What are some of your favorites that make your spine tingle?