Over the last couple of days, I have ordered four, count them, four programming books for the Mac.

• Head First Java
• AppleScript : The Missing Manual
• Programming in Objective-C
• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

I’ve been told by my supervisor at work that Under No Circumstances am I permitted to ssh into my Linux system at home and –gasp– LEARN stuff about computers. So, I guess I’m on track to better myself and find a position somewhere that demands more from me than helping somebody set up their email.

Heh… how prissy do I sound? Yes, definitely becoming a nerd.

Because of the utter stupidity of Symantec’s ‘Norton Internet Security’ app, I have been recommending to customers for a long time now to rely on the Windows XP firewall. You’d expect that with all the fuss Microsoft has been making about their New Approach To Security that the XP SP2 firewall would be pretty safe, even if (like most home users) the user is running with administrator privileges, right? Right?

Dead fucking wrong.

The sheer stupidity of Microsoft’s programming staggers me.

Last night Crumpet interrupted my geeky gaming to let me know that she’d sold the rights to use a couple of her paintings on the covers of some music education books. Money! Money she owes me! Yay!! Go piggybank!

Last week I found a link to a torrent file of the entire South by Southwest music festival - one song per artist. I downloaded them into a new iTunes playlist, and lookee, two entire days worth of music. Surely there’s something for everybody in there, and for free who can complain? My iPod is bursting at the seams.

Link here.

I got back from the mechanic with the motor about 45 minutes ago, $1140 poorer. Hopefully that’s the last we’ll be spending on the car until the next general service.

Here’s an excerpt of what I did with the silly thing that Giz and I did a couple of weeks ago. I guess he won’t recognise most of it as all the guitars have been redone and I added another section… anyhow. Whatever.

I’ve been reading a bit about the future of the music industry (there’s an excellent interview with the founder of the online music label Magnatune here), and I have to agree that digital rights management, even as liberal as Apple’s music store is, just isn’t worth paying good money for. This quote (which I read on Slashdot) sums up the ridiculousness of the studios insisting on encumbering their product with anti-copy technology:

Complaining that hacking hurts the entertainment industry is like complaining that gravity hurts the airline industry.

There’s been a bit of excitement at the moment over a program for the PC called CherryOS. It claims to allow your PC to run Mac OS X, and indeed it does. Problem is that it appears to be a thinly disguised copy of PearPC, open source software under the GPL. As is increasingly the case, DrunkenBatman has an excellent summation of the proof, and I’d encourage you to check his site out if it’s not already in your bookmarks.

The CherryOS ‘people’ (it appears to be one guy masquerading as a company) have included the PearPC Altivec patch, which allows it to emulate a G4 processor rather than a G3. They claim this makes their software “3 times faster” than PearPC (which has not included this patch into their standard install, and therefore not benchmarked with it as yet), and therefore well worth the US$49.95 they’re asking for the software.

To demonstrate the performance you should expect from CherryOS, I took the liberty of comparing my 1.5Ghz G4 PowerBook results with CherryOS. The CherryOS PC is an AMD Athlon XP 3000 running at 2.16GHz, with 1Gb of RAM. Certainly not a slow machine.

Here are the results. Draw your own conclusions.

Microsoft might like you to believe that their software makes it easy to publish a web page, but they didn’t take into account the level of stupidity their customers demonstrate.

I just had a call from a customer who’d uploaded their website to our IIS server and was still seeing our default page (which says basically ‘This page has not been created yet’ and gives links to our online help). I had a quick look for myself:

ftp> ls
200 PORT Command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
drw-rw-rw- 1 user group 0 Mar 17 15:17 .
drw-rw-rw- 1 user group 0 Mar 17 15:17 ..
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 1741 Apr 16 2004 Default.asp
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 34816 Mar 17 15:17 Home Page.ppt
226-Maximum disk quota limited to 50000 kBytes
Used disk quota 34 kBytes, available 49966 kBytes
226 Transfer complete.

No sir, saving a PowerPoint file with the name ‘Home Page’ does not magically turn it into a website. So sorry.

This might be the ultimate Mt. Everest hack. That is, because it’s there.