So, I'm back from my holiday hiatus.

Just a quick one this afternoon: Anyone remember the classic Star Trek:TNG drinking game that was popularized ~1991? Back then I was still in college, and although nobody I knew ever even considered playing it (you try to keep track of a several-page list of actions to drink to, while getting drunk and watching a TV show) I have fond memories of reading down the list, chuckling at classic ST:TNG jokes such as:

A new alien has latex on its forehead: 1 drink
A new alien doesn't have latex on its forehead: 2 drinks
Klingon is spoken: 1 drink
English is spoken by Klingons when they are alone and have no reason to speak English: 2 drinks
Data uses a contraction: whole beverage

But, there's my personal favorite, especially because we know it will never happen...

Wesley swallows really hard: 1 drink
Wesley has his life threatened: 2 drinks
Wesley has his life threatened and he dies: Party like it's 1999!

I recently came across an excellent essay by Paul Graham. (by way of a post on Slashdot) in it, Paul, the author of Hackers and Painters, discusses why hackers are concerned about recent developments in intellectual property law & civil liberties, and why this is an important warning sign for all of us. Although you can certainly disagree with his conclusions (although I don't), he does make an interesting and novel argument. Check it out.

OK, here's a link for all you die-hard PC users: from none other than AnandTech, the hard-core PC geeks' home. A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective is a review by a longtime PC user who spent a month using a G5. The reviewer does a good job of writing a well-balanced, realistic and objective review of OS X and Apple hardware. It has some valid complaints (hardware cost, safari performance, lack of games) but is generally quite positive, and points out a number of things OS X does better. (memory use/caching, drag-and-drop, expose!)

The article sums up the experience with the position that while OS X is "a very strong platform," it is a tough sell, due to some missing pieces; games, missing applications (like Blackberry support), and price. I must agree on the price issue: a $3000 desktop is awfully expensive, especially when compared to what you can get in the x86 world. However, I would offer an alternative suggestion: instead of buying a $3000 G5, buy a ($1600-$2800) PowerBook or even an ($1000-$1500) iBook instead - while there's definitely a premium on desktops, Apple laptops (their biggest selling computers) are much more price competitive. For fun, try pricing a PowerBook and a similarly outfitted Dell (Latitude) Laptop - you'll find that the PowerBook is actually cheaper. Compare the $2000 15-inch PowerBook vs a comparably equipped Latitude D800 - it's $208 more with XP Home, $268 with XP Pro, and is 2 pounds heavier.

As seen on Slashdot: Apple. It appears that the first IRC-bot style trojan has now been spotted in the wild. From the first comment posted on the MacInTouch page, it's clear that the bot is still early in its development cycle: currently it does a good job of taking over the system, adding backdoors, remote control software, a keystroke monitor, and steals passwords and serial #s, putting them in a hidden public share.

This (below) has to be one of the absolute coolest (hidden) features of Gmail... now I have a good reason to start using it ... I'd still want IMAP support, though, and I'd even pay for it. However, it looks like Google just added forwarding support, which is good enough for now.

From ranchero.com:

P@ Sunglasses: Gmail adds Atom feeds: "From Steve Rubel I learnt that Gmail added an atom feed to read the emails from your Gmail account in a RSS aggregator... Your RSS aggregator must support https and basic auth." Which of course, NetNewsWire does! (Thank you, Brent!)

PS. You can email me at my-first-inital+my-last-name @ gmail.com. (Leave out the +)

If you haven't checked out FactCheck.org yet, now is the time to do so - before November 2. Sick and tired of political spin, untruths and factual distortions? FactCheck is for you!!!

OK, I admit this is more Politics than News, but I don't have a "Politics" category yet...

Update: I have added a "Politics" category.

While perusing Bruce Schneier's new weblog, Schneier on Security, (I'm a long time Crypto-Gram subscriber) I found that a couple of issues he raises this month really resonate with the upcoming election. First, an analysis of the psychology of terror alerts, and the follow-up ... the move towards "wholesale" surveillance.

Here's a nifty tool that was posted to the ranchero.com weblog. It provides an attractive and easy to navigate front-end to the PHP documentation. Very handy for writing code when you're off the net.

The PHP Function Index for Mac OS X"is a simple browser to quickly look up any PHP function. Its search offers realtime-filtering of the function list and its AppleScript interface lets you look up functions easily from within your favorite editor (like BBEdit or any other scriptable app)."

Admittedly, one topic you won't see very often on the OpenBSD mailing lists is Windows 2000. However, for many of us who use OpenBSD in a corporate environment, Windows, and OpenBSD-Windows integration is an important issue. After the recent post of mod_auth_kerb to to the ports@ mailing list, I decided to take advantage of Kerberos to secure an OpenBSD hosted website, using Windows 2000 as the KDC so I wouldn't have to maintain local accounts. I've documented below how I accomplished it.

Fortunately, I came across this tutorial, which described exactly what I was trying to accomplish, although it wasn't OpenBSD specific. I had to make some changes to account for OpenBSD, and I also decided to take advantage of login_krb5 to eliminate local passwords for login accounts as well.

Take a look at Novell's Patent Policy.

They must be feeling guilty for selling off the Santa Cruz Operation, eh?