Fabrice Bellard –of QEMU fame– has implemented a PC-emulator in JavaScript. So now you can boot Linux in your browser. How geeky is that? Enjoy the show… Here are some technical details.
There is a small C-compiler available. It is ‘tcc’ (also from Bellard). You can use it to compile the sample (hello.c) 
Oh whow this is really nice… The iPhone uses its front-facing camera to track the head of the viewer. Since it knows where the head of the viewer is it can actually simulate a 3D display as can be seen in the video below… is that a cool piece of software or what?
Also on the iPad:
Ever wondered what π sounds like?
Helaas. Elf jaar te laat maar liever laat dan nooit zullen we maar denken. Een website als deze had nooit nodig hoeven zijn maar nu die er toch is… Ik doe dit niet vaak maar ik zou graag willen oproepen om dit prachtige initiatief van Microsoft® van harte te steunen. Microsoft® wil graag het marktaandeel van IE6 naar minder dan 1% terug brengen. Op de website IE6 countdown geven ze onomwonden toe hoe slecht IE6 eigenlijk is… Webdevelopers wisten dat al 10 jaar geleden. Een stukje zelfreflectie-gebeuren naar de webdeveloper toe… 10 jaar te laat.
Maar goed: steun dit initiatief! Sterker nog: laten we de lat nog net iets hoger leggen. Streef naar een Microsoft®-vrij internet! Op technologisch inferieure producten zit niemand te wachten. Dus als je toch van IE6 wilt afstappen: overweeg eens een echte browser! Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera of één van de andere gratis webbrowsers… Ook een raadzaam advies om op te volgen als je een nieuwere versie van IE gebruikt. Dumpen die handel!
Bedankt Microsoft®! En voortaan met je smerige poten van open standaarden afblijven. Schorem!
Dit artikeltje spreekt voor zich:
Today (11-02-2011) is a palindrome-day. Your next opportunity to celebrate palindrome-day is on the 1st of october this year (1-10-2011).
Microsoft is once again back at its core business: stealing from others. Here’s a remarkable writeup on a analysis of search results from Google and Bing (Microsoft search engine). Google was suspecting that Bing was somehow copying its searchresults… So they set a trap and guess what they caught (red handed)? Read it here.
For all Unix-lovers out there: happy 15000th epoch day.
Now I will be the first to post hilarious screenshots of windows oddities… just because I think that windows sucks. Big time, that is. Now I encountered a funny thing on my Mac as well.. I was updating my OS and it started downloading. When almost done it showed a very funny estimated time of arrival: -2147483648 hours. So basically I got my update 244978 years ago… Now isn’t that amazing?
The words ‘hacking’ and ‘hacker’ are used in many context nowadays. I like this definition on Wikipedia:
In home computing, a hacker is a person who heavily modifies the software or hardware of their own computer system. It includes building, rebuilding, modifying, and creating software (software cracking, demo scene) or electronic hardware (hardware hacking, modding), either to make it better, faster, to give it added features or to make it do something it was never intended to do.
Now we all know people who actually ‘hack’ equipment (in the definition given above) but there are also people who treat their body as a piece of equipment. They actually operate on themselves and make bionic modifications to their body. They are called ‘biohackers‘ and they are performing ‘transhumanism‘. How fascinating. Here’s a quote
She does her own surgery, with a scalpel and a spotter to catch her if she passes out, and an anatomy book to give her some confidence she isn’t going to slice through a vein or the very nerves she’s trying to enhance.
from this article. Read and think about the concept of regarding your body as a device you can tweak… fascinating… Now let your imagination run wild… What would you like to add to your body if you could? Drop a comment if you have a really cool idea. I would like a device that automatically records everything I hear or see with a recording time of around 1 hour. So 1 hour after the recording I can still back it up to some external device using bluetooth… or maybe a USB connector that I implanted behind my ear. So much cool stuff you could do…
At the Chaos Computer Club Congress Microsofts Bruce Dang shared the knowledge gained by analyzing the Stuxnet worm. Stuxnet appears to be written to specifically attack Irans nuclear centrifuges. It spreads through windows based systems and is pretty nifty… well the most shocking of all is to see the enormous amount of stupid privilege raises that happen because windows doesn’t have a very secure foundation on which it is built (“a print-spooler flaw that allowed remote guest accounts to write executable files directly to disk”… tsk tsk tsk). This is a nice read-up about the stuxnet worm.
Well we’ve all been in a situation where the location you work at allows restricted access to the internet. To an IT-guy restricting access to the internet is like squeezing his throat. We can’t breath without unrestricted access to the internet…
Now I do understand you don’t want to grant any employee unrestricted access to the internet from the corporate network. At least half of them will double-click (execute) files called ‘clickme.exe‘ or ‘funny-picture-of-your-mom.exe‘. So here’s a nice trick to get yourself a little more freedom (and privacy) in the office. I will not explain all details. You already need to understand how to tunnel your SSH through the corporate proxy. If you don’t: you are out of luck… and probably someone who would click on ‘unreleased-justin-bieber-song.bat‘ anyway.
Whoahaaa… Good collegue Eric told me he was fiddling with his Samsung Galaxy S phone and he heard a ‘camera snapshot sound’ and got a message ‘Screen captured. Saved as image file.’
Reproducing how he actually did that wasn’t successful. Googling for the phenomenon showed a lot of links that requires the Android SDK to be installed… Browsing a little more showed a link to this page that describes how to do it from the phone itself. It’s really easy:
For this to work you probably need to have Froyo (Android 2.2) installed on your Samsung Galaxy S. This trick may (or may not) work on other Android phones with Froyo installed. Please try it out and leave a comment that indicates if this works on your phone as well. Thank you.
Here’s (the resized) result. In this case I started the camera application pointed it at my desktop (the fractal you see in the background) and I opened the menu of the camera application:
I did an online nerd-test. My advice: don’t take it! Just don’t! Really. You’ll feel bad. I feel bad. I mean I don’t mind being a bit nerdish. I like the “ish” in nerdish. It implies that there are other qualifications that apply.
You see I don’t consider myself to be a nerd. Maybe a bit of a geek but not a nerd. I’ve answered honestly & didn’t cheat. For instance: I don’t have any subscriptions to scientific magazines at the moment. I don’t want to think about what kind of über-nerd a subscription would make me…
It says 98% of the people who took the test are less nerdier than I am.
Not everything at Microsoft is bad….
