Hans Reiser (inmate BFPS63) finally heeds the advise of his lawyers. After ignoring the advise of his lawyers and taking the stand to defend himself at his trial Hans now resorts to silence. A juror said after the trial that Reiser might have been acquitted had he exercised his constitutional right against self-incrimination.

Too bad Hans resorts to silence now because Threat Level, who have been following the Reiser trial all the way, came to visit Hans Reiser in Santa Rita jail to ask him some questions. All for nothing because Hans declined any comment “on the advice of my attorneys”. From the article:

And as he hung up the telephone handset connecting us through the glass, all this reporter could think was that Hans Reiser waited too long to start heeding his lawyers’ advice.

Today is the 44th birthday of the first BASIC interpreter. At Dartmouth college two professors, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, ran the first program in their new computer programming language BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). They created BASIC to provide access for non-science students to computers. At 04:00 (AM) on May 1st 1964 the General Electric GE-225 mainframe of Dartmouth college started running a BASIC interpreter. This made the power of computing available to students and staff members who could not program Algol or Fortran.

BASIC was so simple that it became the language of choice for virtual all homecomputers albeit each had its own dialect. Exchanging programs always required considerable porting effort. However the computer industry owes Kemeny and Kurtz a lot. BASIC allowed the computer to enter the homes of millions of users and was one of the factors that made people accept and embrace computers.

BASIC has since evolved into a “serious” object oriented language. The rise of the BASIC compiler made it a viable alternative to develop production code in BASIC. For a long time BASIC was the scripting or ‘automation’ language in a lot of Microsoft products (VBA). I learned to program BASIC when I was 12 and abandoned it a few years later in favor of 6502 assembly. Maybe today is a good day to program a “hello world” in BASIC. You can do that online, have fun.

Well now, this blog exists for six months now. I tried to waste your time with 253 posts and you returned the favor by posting 366 comments. Luckily the spam filter caught 803 spam comments with only a few false positives and only two or three comments required manual spam flagging. The adsense counter already reaches $30.30 which is a stunning $5.05 per month. I still enjoy formulating provocative and highly biased statements so don’t expect me to quit anytime soon.

Unfortunately most statistics over 2007 are lost. I did recover some of it using google adsense. However from 2008 on I keep some statistics around. Over the first 4 months over 2008 the server got 75406 requests for articles (278571 total requests) from 8566 different IP addresses.

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I have a fairly strict power management and security settings on my Mac. This will cause the screen to dim when the laptop is not used for a few moments. Furthermore the screensaver will kick-in after a couple of minutes and requires my password to unlock. Now this can be annoying when you are watching a movie on YouTube or something that don’t require interactivity with your Mac. The screen will dim and after a few minutes the screensaver will hide the movie. Sure, you can change your power management and security settings but that is also annoying. So just put your Mac on caffeine. It puts a tiny icon in your menu bar and allows you to (temporarily) disable the screen dimmer and the screensaver. You can even trigger it on a timeout so you will never forget to ‘restore’ the settings. After the specified timeout Cafeine will turn on the dimmer and the screensaver again.