Google's Summer of CODE

Ok coders break out the technical manuals, buy a case of energy drinks and say goodbye to your social life (well outside of the geeks circle of course).

I got a link here that sorts the categories of the organizations. check it out and contribute and karma will thank you for it. There are some very cool projects out there very savvy ideas and its a great thing to add to your resume.

Not to mention that you will learn more about programming by actually doing programming for real world applications than writing a hello world program.

117 reasons why I hate IE 7 for Windows

Ok, Microsoft, thank you for pissing off all of those hard working web developers and showing us all how much a multimillion dollar company can totally SUCK at fixing their own bugs and making us code-monkeys look like a bunch of complete idiots.

Not only did your non-compliance to standardization of any type, make my clients angry with me.   But your stupid virus program that you call Vista just makes me even more pissed off.

Sure, I can boycott your inferior operating system and sing praises to Leopard (despite the 0% battery bug I have to look at every day, yes Apple I am looking at you too, but I will admit Leopard by and large KICKS ARSE)

If there are any Microsoft advocates that want to point the finger that Leopard has problems, I would implore them to point their browsers (use IE 7 at your own peril) to this link and read.

High Expectations For Android

The great battle of the cellphones.   iPhone vs./ Android (gPhone).   This is a big deal for both companies both Apple and Google.   Each company has advantages and disadvantages attached to them.   Slashdot has a great link on the story.

Apple, well, put their iPhone on the market.   Its a slick phone, with touch screen capabilities and a sweet GUI interface.   Actually a nice phone.   But it has some serious fatal flaws attached.

First off, Apple mandates AT&T as the sole service provider, yes the same AT&T that has a monitoring station in San Francisco for the Government ease dropping program.   AT&T mandated the need for social security numbers just to activate one.   In addition to the insane initial price of the phone itself $600, a 2 year minimum contract was required, figure at least $100 a month for 24 months...$2,400 + $600 = $3,000 total.   I call bullshit on that.

Also, initially there was no SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iPhone.   Well, now there is but the insanity of the Non-Disclosure agreement prohibits any other developer from advising or helping further the development of this platform.   Are they serious?!?

The iPhone has been hacked only to be patched to turn the hacked iPhone into a bricked $600 paper weight.

Apple, did some very bone-headed maneuvers with the iPhone, but they have a real phone on the market.   A phone that I have absolutely no desire to have.

Don't get me wrong, I love Apple's products.   I have a PowerBook G4 (PPC) that I have had virtually zero downtime with and a MacBook (Intel) that, aside from a Battery Bug with Leopard that does not charge my battery.   Works very well.

But, even with their newer systems like the Mac Air, altho beautiful, lacks an optical drive and has only one USB port!?!   But I digress, back to the showdown between Apple and Google.

What does Google have to bring to the table?   Well, nothing, but virtually something...the Android platform.   Yeah, they don't have a phone, they have many phones that only need to be Linux compatible.   Google, is smart, they have a actual open OS available to any and all that care enough to develop for it, literally any way they choose.  Hell they even put prize money out to sway developers.

Now, I will be the first to say that Google is not just being altruistic, they are in business to make more money, just like Apple, but the main difference is this they are smarter about how they approach business.  They know enough to give a little to get a little.

Resurrection of the Black Beauty

My Mac is back, and with a full install of Leopard.   I have been laying the foundation of this Uber unit over the weekend and so far, it is working like a charm.

Parallels, was one of the first programs I installed on this beauty, nothing says pie in your face to the Microsoft crowd like having Windows running on a Apple.   I have XP pro corporate running in a Virtual Machine, I gave it 1GIG of virtual ram and about 30GIGs of expanding "virtual" space.

Ubuntu, is a Linux install I wanted to do next.  But I ran into some issues with it, stalling and unable to capture screen resolution correctly.

I discovered this was not a unique problem.   I had to install Ubuntu 7.04 (installing 7.10 has complications).   Its always stupid little things, but thankfully Google saved the day.

Cryogenically frozen RAM bypasses all disk encryption methods

This is a very savvy exploit, according to the video and article the conventional wisdom of when you turn the computer off, the active volatile RAM is erased. However, it seems, conventional wisdom has to elaborate a bit more on the details of precisely how soon that data within the RAM disintegrates.

Apparently the "data" within the RAM slowly fades away when the power is cut, giving a window of opportunity to attack and crack any encryption on the hard-drive, by making a copy of the encryption key.

While no exotic equipment is required for this hack, software that reads the RAM may be required to implement correctly. SOftware of this nature should be readily available on the Internet. One thing is certain, there is always a way around security and this is a proof of concept video.

Check it out.

Enjoy.