iNODE

There’s some level of irony at work here…

In the darker reaches of the net where file sharers trade illicit bits with one another, the compression scheme of choice is the .rar file.  This “bad neighborhood” is also home to most of the bots, trojans and viruses that eventually end up infecting/harrassing more mainstream users. So today (December 21) we find that when Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus scans a *.rar file, it opens itself to buffer overflows that could enable an “evil-doer” to gain complete control of the system. Wouldn’t you think they’d have extra strong handling of .rar files just as a matter of course? Maybe the cybernetic equivalent of lead shielding at the very least? Guess not…

http://xforce.iss.net/xforce/xfdb/23705

No fix yet as of this writing, so Symantec recommends disabling scanning of *.rar files. If I were on a Windows machine, I think I’d refrain from extracting .rar files too.

Apple has launched a website dedicated to IT Professionals. From the introductory text:

“…Combining the power of UNIX with industry-leading ease of use, Apple offers a unique value proposition for IT managers. It begins with our commitment to open source technologies and open standards, making it easy to fit Apple products within your existing environment. Versatile, scalable, and surprisingly affordable solutions help you maintain and extend your infrastructure on a limited budget. And making it all work is no sweat, thanks to innovative management tools and Apple’s unmatched hardware/software integration.”

I’d agree with most of that marketing speak—although I’m still finding a bit of sweat forms when porting some open source applications to OS X (it’s not always well documented which tweaks you need to make).

http://www.apple.com/itpro

Converted iNode over to Release Candidate 3 for WordPress 2.0. Seems to work fine—at last. For a while there, major portions of the admin interface didn’t work at all. Solution was to bump up the “maximum memory per script” value in php.ini—that fixed it. PHP’s default of 8MB was not enough. Once I discovered the problem, I found some older posts on the WordPress support blog suggesting that the default value was sometimes a problem with large weblog installations (not what we have here)…so I guess WP 2.0 brings a bit larger memory footprint.
When I hit publish, I’ll find out whether the last bit of this thing works correctly.

Had a bit of a snow day today so I had a chance to catch up on a couple of podcasts, the best of the day being the Dan Bricklin interview on Robert Cringely’s NERD-TV. I remembered Bricklin mostly for his Demo program (a prototyping/demonstration program that made vendor demonstrations of vaporware a staple of tradeshows), but discovered he was also a co-creator of VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet).

So why do I bring this up? Two things…

If you wonder whether software bloat is real, consider this. The original version of VisiCalc was 27K. Yes, smaller than the jpg image file that illustrates this entry. You can still download a working copy of this program from Bricklin’s website at: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm.

The fact that you can still download that working version brings me to the second point. Because it wasn’t copy-protected, it can be distributed to you and still run on your computer nearly 25 years after it’s 1981 release. Poking around a bit more on www.danbricklin.com, I found a document entitled “Copy Protection Robs The Future” that I recommend. It examines the relationships between copy protection and preservation and while it must be a few years old (based on a few of the internal links), it’s still relevant to libraries, open-access and a number of other things we deal with daily.

Nature (Number 438, 900-901 (15 December 2005) | doi:10.1038/438900a) has an interesting article comparing the frequency of errors in both Wikipedia and Britannica—the error rate is similar. Basically, 42 entries from each of the sources were given to “experts” who conducted a blind “accuracy” test.

“…The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.”

Read the article

No, Google’s not a portal (yet) but they keep getting closer…

Google Widgets

Apple has a java-based widget system with Dashboard, Microsoft’s in the game with Gadgets, Yahoo! purchased Konfabulator and now Google enters the widget world. Who’s left?

According to Google, coding to their API is an excellent way to begin building web application programing skills. If this is as successful as other Google endeavors, we’ll have to soon develop OPAC searching widgets and other more interesting things for library users.

If you happen to have a 5G video iPod, you may have wanted to hook it up to your TV but figured you weren’t ready to give Apple another $19 for the special cable. Well, you don’t have to. The cable that comes with a camcorder is probably all you need (once you know the secret).

The secret is that Apple switches the inputs on their cable so you can’t just take any old AV cable and hook red->red; yellow->yellow and so on and expect it to work. Instead, you have to connect the Red jack to the TV’s Yellow RCA input, the Yellow jack to the TV’s white RCA input, and the White jack to the red RCA input.

To me, this proves that you don’t have to install rootkits to protect your product in today’s marketplace. Anyway, if you’re interested in viewing your iPod’s video on the big screen, you can get all the details on how it’s done from this post on MacDevCenter.