history

A brief history of backdoors

history, security, technology / /

From Network Magazine:

Ken Thompson, a designer of the Unix OS, explained his magic password, a password that once allowed him to log in as any user on any Unix system, during his award acceptance speech at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) meeting in 1984. Thompson had included a backdoor in the password checking function that gets included in the login program. The backdoor would get installed in new versions of the Unix system because the compiler had Trojan Horse code that propagated the backdoor code to new versions of the compiler. Thompson’s magic password is the best known, and most complex in distribution, backdoor code.

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The innovation of the margin

commonplace book, history, language & literature, on writing, technology / /

From InfoWorld:

In chapter 4 of Klaus Kaasgaard’s Software Design and Usability, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) alumnus Austin Henderson says that “one of the most brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin.” There was always space for unofficial data, which traveled with the official data, and everybody knew about the relationship between the two.

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The late great Hungry Buddha

business, commonplace book, history, musings, true stories / /

This was written 15 January 2002, & the Hungry Buddha is gone now, but this is still an interesting description.

The late great Hungry BuddhaJust got back from lunch at the Hungry Buddha. Man, that was good. It’s a small place on Washington Street in downtown St. Louis. There are signs all along the walls: “Buddha would bus his own table”. “Buddha would tip”. “Overfilling your bowl is bad karma”. A stereo played a mix of tunes, everything from Smashing Pumpkins to other stuff — and at a reasonable volume that made conversation easy.

The food was really great. Basically, you grab a bowl and go through a vegetable buffet — probably the best vegetable buffet I’ve ever seen, with peppers, sprouts, carrots, celery, shitake mushrooms (!), and more! — filling your bowl, then go to the counter and answer a few questions:

“Rice, noodles, or broth?”
“One bowl or all you can eat?”
“Tofu?”
“Water, tea, or soda?”
“What kind of sauce?”

They take your bowl into the kitchen and cook it up to your specifications. 10 minutes later, a hot, steaming bowl of yummy goodness is delivered to your table. Cost? $6.50 for a bowl, or $7.50 for all you can eat.

I got the Sichuan sauce with rice & tofu the first time, and then I went back for Black Bean Garlic sauce with rice & tofu. Both were excellent. However, next time I go, I think I’ll just get one bowl — I ate both, but I think I accumulated some gluttony points with the hereafter.

If you’re downtown and feeling hungry, check out the Hungry Buddha — you won’t be disappointed!

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Sleazy books

cool stuff, history, language & literature / /

From sleazy and how!:

I’m a sucker for a sleazy mystery or a trampy romance novel from the 1950’s-60’s. I usually buy these silly books more for the covers than the stories, but sometimes both are equally bizarre.

This is a gallery of some of the better books I’ve come across. Some have book summaries, others I just liked the covers.

Passion Prize Here are some of the ones I liked: Women’s Doctor. Chinese Lover. Come Sin With Me. Studio Apartment. Musk, Hashish and Blood.

Frenchie, with this exciting passage: “He was all ready to go. The easel was under one arm. Suddenly she couldn’t think about what she should have done. There was no right or wrong way to act, there was only one way. She ran to him and pulled him down toward her. Her fingers bit into his arms. ‘No, no,’ she murmured brokenly. ‘You mustn’t go. You can’t. I couldn’t live…'”.

Illicit Desires, which includes this blurb: “Passion’s Slaves! There’s many a sizzling tale about the ‘farmer’s daughter’, but never has the truth been told so revealingly as in this story of Eva, a member of ‘Ja-Ja” Steinhart’s household; of Mazie, her buxom, full bosomed rival, and their spirited fight for their mutual lover, Joe.”

And Call Her Wanton (“She was fair…she was frisky…she was oh, so much fun…A lusty novel of wilderness passion and a wife too naughty to be true!”).

Or The Manatee (“He had a passion for his ship’s figurehead that no living, breathing woman could satisfy.”).

I think the prize for blurb writing goes to Shady Lady: “Some people called Leslie Fentris a shady lady and most people thought that was putting it mildly. She had money and brains, and plenty of lure. Yet she was mixed up in one shameful scandal after another. Actually, she was a fine and honest person who acted the way she did for very good reasons.

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The mystery of the Voynich mss

commonplace book, cool stuff, history, language & literature, security / /

From John Baez:

A page from the Voynich mssThe Voynich manuscript is by far the most mysterious of all texts. It is seven by ten inches in size, and about 200 pages long. It is made of soft, light-brown vellum. It is written in a flowing cursive script in alphabet that has never been seen elsewhere. Nobody knows what it means. During World War II some of the top military code-breakers in America tried to decipher it, but failed. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania seems to have gone insane trying to figure it out. Though the manuscript was found in Italy, statistical analyses show the text is completely different in character from any European language.

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Movies in the night

commonplace book, history, true stories / /

Another image that enters my mind unbidden:

My brother and I are spending the night at Grandma & Grandpa Scott’s house. We’re pretty young … I might be 8 and my brother 6 or 7. It’s the mid-70s. At our grandparents, we go to bed pretty early … say by 10 p.m. This night, Gus and I know that the original King Kong is on TV, and we are determined to see it. We stay awake talking in bed (we’re in the guest bed together), and then we quietly sneak into the family room and turn on the TV, ever so quietly, and watch a 40-year-old (only 40 years!?) black & white movie, listening carefully for the footsteps of our grandparents. I don’t think we were caught.

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Early winter morning with my father

commonplace book, history / /

An image of my father that enter my mind at odd times:

I’m in high school in the early 80s, it’s the dead of winter and early in the morning, so it’s still dark out, and very cold. My Dad always got up at 6 a.m. and was at his gas station by 6:30. I’m sleeping on the couch in the front room of his small house, and it’s a school morning … my mother must have been out of town. At 7:15, I’m awoken by the sound of my father coming in the front door to wake me up and take me to school. I look up bleary-eyed from the couch to see his face in the small window at the top of his front door, never locked. When I remember this event, I think of my father’s love for me, often hard for him to express, but obvious to me here.

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The spirit of the real Texas Rangers

commonplace book, history, overheard, true stories / /

I rather like this, even if it’s probably not true:

The story goes that Captain Jack Hayes and his men, the fabled Texas Rangers, were surrounded and vastly outnumbered during one of the many skirmishes of the Mexican War. He made the following prayer, certainly one of the most colorful ever made before battle: “Oh Lord, we are about to join battle with vastly superior numbers of the enemy, and, Heavenly Father, we would like for you to be on our side and help us; but if you can’t do it, for Christ’s sake don’t go over to the enemy, but just lie low and keep dark, and you’ll see one of the damndest fights you ever saw in all your born days. Amen.”

As I said, probably apocryphal, but a great story nonetheless.

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Man, I lived a lot of this

business, history, technology / / 
Ode to the 90s
Found on FuckedCompany.com

I part-time telecommuted
as a Webmaster
for a dot com
in Y2K consulting.
They said it was
temp-to-perm.

it didn't pay
but there were options.
I swung by the office to make trades.
(Not that there's anything
wrong with that.)
cause we had a T1 Line
and there was a bull market
with a strong,
virile President.
and you never knew
when it could
crash.

I was a millionaire at 27
for thirty seconds.

I dug grunge.
then eighties.
Tony Bennet.
then Chumbawumba.
how bizzare.
how bizzare.
smoked Cohibas.
(Not that there's anything
wrong with that.)
but I didn't inhale.

Alrighty, then...

I learned HTML
and swing dancing.
moved to Seattle
but I was back on the redeye.
why did I eat
those krispy kremes?
it all seemed like a good idea
at the time.

I had a Pentium III
yeah
baby
yeah
with 9 gigs and a DVD.
It can do anythingh
even play movies.

I fell in love
in a chatroom
with a .BMP
I got the .JPEG
I wasn't so sure.....
I got emails,
but I couldn't Reply
my server was down
and our IT can't handle the MIS.
And my email didn't allow enclosures...
her ICQ was in my PDA
but I upgraded and
the memory's gone.

[Boing Boing Blog]

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Love those pamphlet titles

commonplace book, history / /

From “American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante“, a review of a biography of Anne Hutchinson, in Salon:

If [Anne] Hutchinson had been born a man, some historians argue, she might have found a place in her society as a minister. She might have carved out a life like that of John Cotton, the unorthodox founder of Congregationalism, Hutchinson’s teacher and the man her family had followed to Boston when he was forced to leave England. On the other hand, she might have turned out like the renegade Rev. Roger Williams, another early settler of Rhode Island, who was driven out of Boston for voicing a variety of objectionable views, most notably the belief that the English had no right to claim Indian lands or subject Native Americans to forced conversions. Williams conducted a pamphlet feud with Cotton, set off when he published ‘The Bloody Tenet of Persecution,’ a tract in support of religious freedom. Cotton then put out ‘The Bloody Tenet Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb.’ Williams responded with ‘The Bloody Tenet Made Yet More Bloody by Mr. Cotton’s Endeavor to Wash It White in the Blood of the Lamb.

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Famous domain name sales

business, history, technology / /

From Michael Tchong’s “GreatDomains.com” in ICONOCAST (24 February 2000):

In 1997, idNames.com sold “business.com” for $150,000 … That same domain recently sold for $7.5 million. Here are some of the more notable domain-name sales:

+------+---------------------+------------+
|  Rnk | Domain              | Sale Price |
+------+---------------------+------------+
|   1. | Business.com        |   $7.5M    |
|   2. | AltaVista.com       |    3.3     |
|   3. | Loans.com           |    3.0     |
|   4. | Autos.com           |    2.2     |
|   5. | Express.com         |    2.0     |
|   6. | Fly.com             |    1.5     |
|   7. | Bingo.com           |    1.1     |
|   8. | WallStreet.com      |    1.0     |
|   9. | ForSalebyOwner.com  |    0.8     |
|  10. | Drugs.com           |    0.8     |
+------+---------------------+------------+

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Relativism in political institutions

commonplace book, history, politics / /

From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:

"There is nothing absolute in the theoretical value of political institutions," Tocqueville wrote. "Their efficiency depends almost always on the original circumstances and the social conditions of the people to whom they are applied." 

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Gershwin the prodigy

commonplace book, history, true stories / /

From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s "Jazzbo", about George Gershwin, in The New Yorker (10 January 2005):

[Gershwin] had been saved by the piano. On a fateful day in 1910, a secondhand upright was hoisted through the family’s Second Avenue window and, to general shock, scapegrace street fighting George, age twelve, sat down and tore through a popular tune like a vaudeville virtuoso. He had never studied a note. Many years later, Gershwin recalled the musical epiphanies of his early childhood: sitting transfixed outside a penny arcade as an automatic piano emitted noises that turned out to be Robinstein’s "Melody in F"; feeling a "flashing revelation of beauty" when the strains of Dvorak’s "Humoresque" reached him from the school auditorium while he was, in fact, outside playing hooky.

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Science, secrecy, & mysticism

commonplace book, history, science / /

From "Secret Science", on Ockham’s Razor:

Etymologically, the word ‘science’ just means knowledge, and in pre-modern Europe, when most people would have framed their understanding according to a religious doctrine, questing after new knowledge about the created world could be rather suspect. Things understood according to the word of God were revealed to you, and the work of creation was revealed to your senses. Any form of knowledge that had to be earnestly sought after was by definition, hidden. A landmark study of magnetism, published in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth’s physician, William Gilbert, begins with a statement about "the discovery of secret things and the investigation of hidden causes."

Gilbert’s book was to become one of the foundation texts of the new science of electricity a century later, but writing in 1600, he was aware of the need to argue the case for why ‘things formerly hid in deplorable darkness’ must be brought to the knowledge of mankind.

In Gilbert’s time, seeking forms of knowledge that might enable you to perform operations with material objects and substances carried the implication that you were interfering with the divine work of creation.

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Feral cities of the future

commonplace book, history, politics, security / /

From Richard J. Norton’s “Feral cities – The New Strategic Environment” (Naval War College Review: Autumn, 2003):

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain science-fiction genres, where they are often portrayed as gigantic versions of T. S. Eliot’s Rat’s Alley. Yet this city would still be globally connected. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants would have access to the world’s most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city.

…

The putative “feral city” is (or would be) a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.

In a feral city social services are all but nonexistent, and the vast majority of the city’s occupants have no access to even the most basic health or security assistance. There is no social safety net. Human security is for the most part a matter of individual initiative. Yet a feral city does not descend into complete, random chaos. Some elements, be they criminals, armed resistance groups, clans, tribes, or neighborhood associations, exert various degrees of control over portions of the city. Intercity, city-state, and even international commercial transactions occur, but corruption, avarice, and violence are their hallmarks. A feral city experiences massive levels of disease and creates enough pollution to qualify as an international environmental disaster zone. Most feral cities would suffer from massive urban hypertrophy, covering vast expanses of land. The city’s structures range from once-great buildings symbolic of state power to the meanest shantytowns and slums. Yet even under these conditions, these cities continue to grow, and the majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave.

Feral cities would exert an almost magnetic influence on terrorist organizations. Such megalopolises will provide exceptionally safe havens for armed resistance groups, especially those having cultural affinity with at least one sizable segment of the city’s population. The efficacy and portability of the most modern computing and communication systems allow the activities of a worldwide terrorist, criminal, or predatory and corrupt commercial network to be coordinated and directed with equipment easily obtained on the open market and packed into a minivan. The vast size of a feral city, with its buildings, other structures, and subterranean spaces, would offer nearly perfect protection from overhead sensors, whether satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles. The city’s population represents for such entities a ready source of recruits and a built-in intelligence network. Collecting human intelligence against them in this environment is likely to be a daunting task. Should the city contain airport or seaport facilities, such an organization would be able to import and export a variety of items. The feral city environment will actually make it easier for an armed resistance group that does not already have connections with criminal organizations to make them. The linkage between such groups, once thought to be rather unlikely, is now so commonplace as to elicit no comment.

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Drunken sailors

history / /

From "Peter Smalley – HMS Expedient", at Books and Writing:

Peter Smalley: … In the 18th century, each seaman was given half a pint of rum a day…in our terms (because of the strength of the rum), a pint of rum a day. So they were permanently drunk, more or less. Well, they led terribly rigorous lives, and that was the way the navy kept them happy.

Tony Barrell: And when Captain Rennie, who’s one of the main protagonists of HMS Expedient, its captain, threatens to withdraw the rum ration; that’s worse than threatening them with the lash.

Peter Smalley: I think in most ships it was regarded as the ultimate punishment because these guys were alcohol-dependent. If you took away their grog they suffered withdrawal, it was as simple as that, and they hated that more than anything. They’d rather take a dozen lashes than have their grog withdrawn. That’s absolutely true.

 

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The history of =

commonplace book, history, science / /

From "The History of the Equals Sign", at The Science Show:

In 1543, [Robert] Record published The Ground of Arts, the first ever maths book in English, which ran through over fifty editions … Until 1557, mathematicians had finished off a calculation by laboriously writing out the words, is equal to, which was sometimes abbreviated to AE or OE from the Latin word for equal, aequalis. But Record had a better idea, why not use a symbol, he said, to avoid, as he put it, the tedious repetition of these words he proposed the use of a pair of parallel lines. Using this simple device that we now call the equals sign released an enormous logjam in the efficient handling of numbers and the implications extended far beyond pure maths.

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The printed book results in more handwritten mss

commonplace book, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From “William Caxton“, at The Science Show:

More than 500 years later a copy of Caxton’s first edition of Chaucer became the most expensive book ever sold, knocked down at auction in the 1990s for 4.6 million pounds. But in the 15th Century, the obvious appeal of the newly printed books lay in their value for money. Books became so commonplace indeed, that some snobs employed scribes to copy Caxton’s printed editions back into manuscript, while both church and government became alarmed at the access to new ideas that the printing press offered to a widening public. [Emphasis added]

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The first printed English books

commonplace book, history, technology / /

From “William Caxton“, at The Science Show:

In 1474, his History of Troy, his own book, became the first book to be printed in English and two years later he brought his press to England setting up shop near the Chapter House in the precinct of Westminster Abbey, where parliament met. Caxton had an eye for a good location. Along the route between the palace of Westminster and the Chapter House shuffled lawyers, churchmen, courtiers, MPs – the book buying elite of England. The former cloth trader also had an eye for a best seller. The second book he printed was about chess, the game and play of the chess. Then came in fairly quick succession, a French-English dictionary, a translation of Aesop’s fables, several popular romances, Mallory’s tale of Camelot in Le Mort d’Arthur, some school text books, a history of England, an encyclopaedia entitled The Mirror of the World and Chaucer’s bawdy evergreen collection, The Canterbury Tales.

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