Dijkstra is one of the most influential (and controversial) authors in the history of Computer Science. In How do we tell truths that might hurt? (PDF), he writes
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
Required reading for anyone who works in information technology or computer science.
Heather summarizes very well what procrastination is about. The only thing that I have to add to that is:
“and for some reason, it seems to be a structural problem that manifests itself mostly on Friday afternoons”
While reading one of her posts, I picked up on a point that Heather is making:
Many students are not in school for the education part of it. They are in school, particularly community college, for the training and skills that will help them get a better job
I have wondered about the same question quite often, since I have the feeling that we have been continuously lowering the standards that we expect students to live up to. If certain topics are considered hard, we remove them from our educational programs, rather than paying more attention to them.
Make the distinction between `training' and `education' might just be why...
The nice people at VMware are now giving away their VMware server platform for free.
VMware Server (formerly known as GSX server) is a daemonised version of VMware running in a host operating system. It is very useful for software developers who want to test their software on multiple platforms.
I also use it to run Microsoft Windows XP on my Linux box, and it works fine. Especially the snapshot feature has saved me many a Windows reinstall.
Caveats:
I guess they are afraid of the competition that they are getting from Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, User-mode Linux and Xen.
Thanks to b3n for the pointer.
While watching the 3km Olympic speed skating competition today, I noticed one of the banners being held up by the public. I cannot agree more:
"As a finishing touch,
God created the Dutch!"
Very cute :)
PS: Of course, the gold and the silver medal were won by Dutch competitors...
I chose a new theme for this web site. Please let us know what you think!
Pop quiz: where was the photo in the page header taken?
PS: make sure that you are signed in, or else your comments will not be published!
I have mixed feelings about Google. While I generally think that they turn out very good products, I do have my doubts about their data collection strategies.
Anyhow, I just checked my Gmail account online, and to my surpise, they have now added some kind of chat feature. Why?! Do I really need even more chat and IM capabilities? I mean, right now, I am online in the following ways:
Do I really need another channel? Honestly, I don't think so. However, it does seem like the next ‘natural’ step to the Google Desktop OS…
update:b3n just pointed out to me that there is yet another Google IM-like thing out there. It is called Google Talk.
It seems more and more like they are adopting strategies that we have seen in other large software companies: Embrace, Extend and Extinguish…
I have mixed feelings about Google. While I generally think that they turn out very good products, I do have my doubts about their data collection strategies.
Anyhow, I just checked my Gmail account online, and to my surpise, they have now added some kind of chat feature. Why?! Do I really need even more chat and IM capabilities? I mean, right now, I am online in the following ways:
Do I really need another channel? Honestly, I don't think so. However, it does seem like the next ‘natural’ step to the Google Desktop OS...
Who would have thought that it would be so hard to record a telephone conference on my computer?! My desire is simple; to record a full telephone conference. The solution turned out to be harder.
Ideally, I would like to record the conversation directly to my computer, but I would be happy with just recording it to a casette tape too. My first attempt at it was through Skype. I figured that since Skype is already on my computer, it should be relatively easy to record a Skype conversation to disk. Well, no. Skype itself does not support it, and after trying about ten different add-on programs (both on Microsoft Windows XP, as well as on Ubuntu Linux), I concluded that Skype was NOT the way to go forward.
My next step was to call our Audio Visual Center and make my problem their problem. Well, the helpdesk guy assured me that it was trivial and that all I needed to do was to pick up a cassette recorder that would sit between my telephone and the receiver and I was all set.
After picking it up (they don't deliver), and hooking it up to my telephone, I called a colleague. He immediately noticed a seriously deterioration of the sound quality. Despite that, I tried recording some of our conversation, and it turns out that the recorder only captures the incoming part. In other words, I would not be able to record myself asking questions or making comments, but I would be able to record answers.
While sub-par, I would settle for that. However, in addition to the bad sound quality, there was also an echo-back to the other side, and a crackling on the line. Recorder out.
Third attempt: My office has two networking outlets that are patched for the same telephone number. So, theoretically I should be able to use one of the phones and record our conversation using another. It also turned out that I still had an old modem in a storage closet that had speaker out and microphone in jacks.
In the end, I ended up hooking up the modem to one phone outlet, running an audio cable from that modem's speaker out to my computer's microphone in, and a serial cable between my computer to the modem so I can make it pick up when I want to start recording. Then, on the computer, run Audacity to record the conversation. I had to install minicom (rs232 terminal program) and dig in memory to remember my Hayes command set. But, in the end, I prevailed!
Funded by SURFnet B.V., the Infolab has analysed the business processes of computer security incident response teams and designed and implemented an Application for Incident Response Teams. Professionals assess the results as of "great promise, [...] The goals are laudible", highly relevant, well-designed and "of significant practical interest".
The work will be presented at the 18th annual conference of the Forum for Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) in Baltimore, USA. A preliminary version of the paper is available.
Snow is now that common in the Netherlands. While we get some every year, it usually is wet and icky. Today we got a nice light dusting of snow.
Here are some fotos of the view from my office.
