Techblog: IT industry is lousy at lobbying.

Not much to blog about. Bug reports, bug reports, bug reports…

CNET has the news. Xerox should have patented the drop down menu. And the mouse/pointer system. It would have made millions on licensing alone. But hey, back in the day, computers were considered geeky curiosities, not mega-business.

A lot of programmers have had the RMS-ian “if I don’t program I will starve” feeling at some time or the other. And in these economic times, the danger of starving is (while not strictly true) more real than ever before. And in keeping with the times, kuro5hin presents a Guide to Eating on a Shoestring Budget.

I’ve been trying out BestCrypt for awhile now, and it’s pretty good — it seems to strike the right balance between privacy and security. I wouldn’t throw away my PGP though — this strikes me as protection strictly against the garden variety snoop, against whom the pain of individually encrypting/decrypting PGP files is a pain not worth taking (yes, I know about PGPdisk, and it crashes my system for some weird reason). All I have to do now is check this out during network use.

The interesting bit is, there’s a developer on my team who (on his spare time) been trying to create something similar for sometime for sftp — essentially create a namespace extension in Windows so that sftp-accessible resources show up on the desktop. Anybody with experience creating namespace extensions out there willing to help out, for a product that’ll be released under an MIT or BSD-style license? (The scp code uses psftp‘s routines, and the namespace extension code is pretty half-baked so far, primarily because this was an exercise in learning how to write NSEs). Please contact me if you have ideas.

Slept through half of the May day holiday. Fun. While on May day, here’s a topical Slashdot thread.

The Social Engineering wars continue.

The Radio Userland Aggregator page would sure improve if it had either frames or a hierarchial display of stories.

About the only reason I feel apprehensive about Radio is that it’s too heavy. I develop for a living. My machines are pretty beefy, but I need most of them to be running at top capacity, with no spare cycles going anywhere. In fact, one of the reasons I like MovableType is that it plugs in nicely into an Apache box, not consuming any resources until I’m actually using it. Sigh — one can’t have everything, can one?

I am using Radio 7.1′s outliner to document a project I’m working on, and I have only one thing to say: it rocks!

Actually, I have used Word’s outliner before, and it’s very good too, but Word fences you in. There’s no way to export your outline to an HTML page, for example. Anyway, I’m gonna keep my Radio 7.1 installer close to me from now on, I can tell you that. (Maybe even buy 8!)