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.

Now this is a remarkable piece of technology. Ksplice allows you to patch a running Linux kernel without the need to reboot your system. Of course there are restrictions. The patch should not introduce semantic changes to kernel datastructures. Now this is not really a restriction since most security patches won’t change the kernel datastructures and this technique is typically used to apply security patches to running systems. ZDnet also reports on Ksplice.

When I have the time I will definitely play around with this software.

Oh the lucky bastard. This guy went to a flea market and came across roms for the old Colecovision console as the label read ” Cabbage Patch Kids’ Day in the Park” which was only released on Coleco, and a very poor game by the way. At home he took a close look at all the eproms and noticed some labels mentioning “CPKPark Atari 2600″. An amazing find. The 2600 rendition of the game is never seen by anyone other than its creator Ed English as described here.

Now he only needs someone who can help dump these eproms. Great story! The Atari 2600 scene is very much alive these days so hopefully we will get some screenshots soon

When Windows Vista was released we were led to believe that Vista was the best and most secure Windows ever. It didn’t take long before the first complaints came in. Very limited hardware and software support. Annoying user interface that keeps bothering users with ‘security related’ questions. Vista was a big disappointment and one of the worst windows versions ever. Now we finally know the reason: according to Steve Ballmer Windows Vista is not finished. It is a work in progress. Steve confirms what we already knew: Microsoft sells unfinished beta-software with known defects. Thanks you Steve. Put Vista where the sun doesn’t shine.

Now this is nice. IBM piloted using Macs in the IBM office. Currently IBM uses Microsoft Windows. The users are very positive (no surprise here). Not all users were that happy. One of the Mac pilot users visited customers offsite. His remark: “When presenting at customer or external meetings, I have been greeted with the ‘wow factor.’ ‘Where’s the ThinkPad, IBM uses Apples now?’”. Most pilot users (19 out of 22) wanted to keep the Mac for their daily business. This was despite some software that they needed but didn’t work on their Macs:

• IBM’s own DB2 database and Websphere application server
• IBM’s Rational Application Developer IDE for J2EE apps
• IBM’s WebSphere Integration Developer SOA development tool
• support for IBM’s InfoPrint workgroup laser printers
• Microsoft Visio diagraming software and NetMeeting video conferencing tool

This article has some nice quotes from the pilot users. Way to go IBM! Give it a positive swing: “Mac OS X the best alternative for OS/2″.

That Sun bought MySQL is old news but that Sun will split it into two products “MySQL community” and “MySQL Enterprise” is less known. Now it turns out that many features in MySQL Enterprise will not be in the community version. The extensions will not even be open source. Sun revealed this at the MySQL Partner meeting as part of the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, CA.

Enterprise will have online backup features that will not appear in the community edition. So the ‘few’ paying customers of the Enterprise edition will be running code that is virtually untested at large. I think this may very well be the end of MySQL. Time for the MySQL-fanboys to switch to PostgresQL. Goodbye MySQL. Or would some renegade group fork it and continue without Sun? Let’s wait and see…

Update: The strong reactions made Sun backoff already. More features will be in the community edition. However the license that will be used is still not decided. If Sun doesn’t open it up MySQL will die where it stands. RIP.

After eight release candidates the new Linux kernel is here: 2.6.25. Of course there are many fixes and support for new devices and even support for a new architecture (MEI MN103E010). Control groups were introduced in 2.6.24. You can assign tasks to so-called cgroups and control the amount of memory and CPU to the group of processes. There are many more enhancements. I had to download this puppy and try it out. Thanks to all the kernel hackers for this great release.

Nieuwe ontwikkelingen aan het front van de OV-chipkaart. Wetenschappers in Nijmegen weten alle sleutels van de kaart nu te kraken na één transactie en dat binnen luttele seconden. Tijdens de demonstratie voor de commissie van de universiteit van Londen, die een contra-expertise van het TNO onderzoek aan het verrichten zijn, duurde het nog een minuut om te sleutels te kraken. Nu het een kwestie van seconden is komt het uitlezen en namaken van kaarten in het bereik van de practische toepassing.

Het zijn natuurlijk niet de vervoersbedrijven noch de overheid die het slachtoffer worden van dergelijk misbruik. Immers het fenomeen ‘zwartrijden’ is verdwenen. Ieder reisje wordt betaald maar mogelijk niet door degene die de reis maakt. De reiziger laadt de kaart van te voeren op met een bepaald tegoed en dat tegoed kan door anderen misbruikt worden om te reizen. Zolang als slechts de reiziger slachtoffer is van dit misbruik en de OV bedrijven er voordeel bij hebben (geen zwartrijden meer) zal de OV-chipkaart gewoon ingevoerd worden.

Update: Groenlinks wil dat Tineke Huizinga de kaart uit roulatie neemt

True, true, I don’t like Python all that much. I don’t like programming languages where whitespace matters. Give me brackets, lots of brackets. Anyway this demo is very cool. Recently Google launched Google App Engine. An application hosting engine where everyone can create and upload their application. Here’s a small demo of how simple it is to use Google App Engine. Brett Slatkin uses Python to quickly create a small web application for shouting out messages (twitter anyone?). Nice to watch and makes you want to program something, really just anything. Where’s my editor?

On the third of april my good buddy Sander won an award for his flash animation of a Rube Goldberg machine. Saturday the 5th of april the national Rube Goldberg machine contest 2008 was held. The goal was to create a machine that assembles a hamburger in as many steps as possible. The winner was a team from Purdue University.

More and more stories appear in which ISP’s (internet service providers) spy on their customers. In the Washington Post is an article about an ISP that uses “deep packet inspection”. Based on the protocol of the package it extracts the payload of the data. That way the ISP can extract all communication of the customer. From incoming and outgoing email, visited webpages to even telnet sessions. Relevant data is sold to advertisement companies who are interested in the webpages you visit etc. The ISPs claim that no personal data is revealed. In the ISPs we trust.

Finally after many years of hard work ethereal, meanwhile renamed to wireshark, has finally hit version 1.0.0. There is now even an experimental OS X implementation. Mac OS X users could already use wireshark using the MacPorts BSD ports collection but a native tool is always much nicer. No this is not an April fools joke since it was published on the 31th of march. You can read the release notes or download the new software.

Many thanks and congratulations to the development team members of ethereal & wireshark for this great piece of software. Kudos.

Ik heb ze altijd gemogen die gasten van de Chaos Computer Club. De roemruchte groep hackers hebben al vaak de wereld wakker geschud met sterke stunts. Wat ze nu weer geflikt hebben slaat alles. In Duitsland -net als in Nederland- is de overheid druk bezig om biometrische data te verzamelen en vast te leggen. De Chaos Computer Club is hierop tegen maar vindt geen tot weinig gehoor. Dus hebben ze de vingerafdruk van minister Wolfgang Schäuble (binnenlandse zaken) gepubliceerd. Niet alleen op papier maar ook met behulp van lijm op een stukje elastisch rubber dat je bij hun tijdschrift krijgt. Een hacker heeft al 20 verschillende scanners gefopt met deze afdruk. De vingerafdruk is verkregen door een glas waaruit de minister gedronken heeft op een conferentie mee te nemen. Nu heeft u naast de tè hoge prijzen nòg een reden om de horeca te mijden.

Tweakers.net heeft een artikel hierover net als de CCC zelf. Conclusie: vingerafdruk biometrie is onveilig. Nu alleen nog doordringen tot de onwetende en eigenwijze hoofden van politici. De ervaringen in Nederland hebben geleerd dat men nogal hardleers is. Tineke Huizinga gaat gewoon door met het invoeren van de OV chipkaart.

Now this is a hilarious parody on the presentation of the MacBook Air. Remember Steve Jobs with the brown envelope… now watch this

I reminisce the old days of home computers. I’ve got my share in my time. The whole line-up, starting in 1983, in order of purchase: Oric-1, Oric Atmos, Acorn Electron, MSX-1, Atari 1024 ST+, Amiga 600HD. After the Amiga I left the home computer realm and entered the realm of personal computers.

Now Cybernet introduces a retro Commodore 64 look-a-like. An “all inside the keyboard” computer that holds everything except a display. From the side the computer really looks like an old clunky home computer case.

Although I really love the old days of home computing I can’t help to think that we really don’t need this. I will definitely not buy one of those. A laptop will be a way better alternative that also has everything on-board including a display. I’m very curious if anyone thinks this is actually cool?