Ramblings & ephemera
From Jim Giles’ “The inside story of the Conficker worm” (New Scientist: 12 June 2009):
23 October 2008 … The dry, technical language of Microsoft’s October update did not indicate anything particularly untoward. A security flaw in a port that Windows-based PCs use to send and receive network signals, it said, might be used [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Philip Larkin’s “Aubade“:
I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature | No Comments »
From David Foster Wallace’s “Laughing With Kafka” (Harper’s Magazine: July 1998, pg. 26):
… the really central Kafka joke – that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
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Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature | No Comments »
From Sam Hiser’s “Achieving Openness: A Closer Look at ODF and OOXML” (ONLamp.com: 14 June 2007):
An open, XML-based standard for displaying and storing data files (text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) offers a new and promising approach to data storage and document exchange among office applications. A comparison of the two XML-based formats–OpenDocument Format (“ODF”) and [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
From Adam Swiderski’s “A History of Copy Protection” (Edge: 9 June 2008):
Fortunately, the games industry is creative, and thus it was that the offline copy protection was born and flourished. One of its most prevalent forms was an in-game quiz that would require gamers to refer to the manual for specific information – you’d be [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Brian Hayes’ “The Post-OOP Paradigm“:
The architects of the earliest computer systems gave little thought to software. (The very word was still a decade in the future.) Building the machine itself was the serious intellectual challenge; converting mathematical formulas into program statements looked like a routine clerical task. The awful truth came out soon [...]
Posted on April 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, technology | Comments Off
Image via Wikipedia
From Wikipedia’s “Canute the Great“:
[King Canute (994/995 - November 12, 1035)] is perhaps best remembered for the legend of how he commanded the waves to go back. According to the legend, he grew tired of flattery from his courtiers. When one such flatterer gushed that the king could even command the obedience of [...]
Posted on April 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history | Comments Off
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