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Open Hardware – What Would Change

I have just read an interesting post speculating about the possibility of open source hardware [1].

To some extent things have been following a trend in that direction. Back in the bad old days every computer manufacturer wanted to totally control their market segment and prevent anyone else from “stealing their business”. Anti-competitive practices were […]

Finishing a Presentation too soon

In my previous post about Advice for Speakers [1] I referred to the common problem of going through presentation materiel too quickly due to being nervous. In extreme cases (which tend to happen when giving a presentation for an unusually large audience) the materiel for an hour long presentation may be covered in 10 minutes […]

Banking with an Infected Computer

Bruce Schneier summarised a series of articles about banking security [1]. He mentioned the fact that banks don’t seem to care about small losses and would rather just deal with the problem (presumably by increasing their fees to account for losses).

There are some other interesting bits in the article, for example banks are planning […]

My SE Linux Etch Repository

deb http://www.coker.com.au etch selinux

The above sources.list line has all the i386 packages needed for running SE Linux with strict policy on Etch as well as a couple of packages that are not strictly needed but which are really convenient (to solve the executable stack issue).

gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key F5C75256 gpg -a --export F5C75256 […]

Reach Out – Only to People with New Computers

There are currently some adverts on Trams in Melbourne for some sort of community organisation. They have an amusing picture of an “Amazon” character from an RPG with statistics such as Self Esteem at zero.

They have a web site at www.reachoutcentral.com.au which firstly tries to launch a popup window (did the web designers not […]

Lazyweb Posts

A common practice in the blog space is to write posts that ask a question in the hope that someone else will answer it via a comment or a post. This is known as a “Lazyweb Post”.

It seems to me that the way of managing such posts could be improved with a little informal […]

Insider Threats and Small Storage Devices

Danny Angus writes about the potential threat posed by small storage devices with large capacity [1]. His post was prompted by a BBC article about Hitachi’s plans for new hard drives [2], they are aiming for 4TB of data on a single drive by 2011 and a 1TB laptop drive. One thing I noticed about […]

War is Bad for the Environment

I just read a nutty post claiming that Neo-Conservatism is good for the environment [1].

The first bogus claim is that Saddam had WMD and war was required because he was a despot. The fact is that the Iraqi government was always repressive, there are many factions in Iraq that don’t like each other and […]

Introverts

I am amazed that I had never read the article Caring for Your Introvert [1] before. One of the interesting points concerned acting like an extrovert (I can do it for the duration of a typical job interview). Another was the issue of recovery time after having to deal with people. When living in hotels […]

Blog Copyright Infringement

I have previously written about some of my efforts to counter sploggers [1].

Since then I have had a particularly brazen splogger copy one of my posts entirely and claim to have written it. The only reason I noticed the copyright violation (my blog license is on my About Page [2]) was because the post […]