Until very recently I thought that it would be almost impossible to get someone worse than George W Bush as the leader of any significant country. Unfortunately it seems that I was wrong and John McCain and Sarah Palin promise more of the economic, regulatory, and military disasters that are the trademarks of the US […]
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One of the many interesting ideas in Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn series [1] is that of Combat Wasps. These are robots used in space combat which may be armed with some combination of projectile weapons, MASERs, thermo-nuclear and anti-matter weapons. In a lot of science fiction the space combat is limited to capital ships, […] The design of levels for computer games is a form of programming, particularly for games with deterministic NPCs. It seems to me that for a large portion of the modern computer user-base the design of games levels will be their first experience of programming computers, the people who don’t start programming by creating games levels […] One thing that concerns me about using any online service is the security. When that service is a virtual server running in another country the risks are greater than average. I’m currently investigating the Amazon EC2 service for some clients, and naturally I’m concerned about the security. Firstly they appear to have implemented a good […] I’ve updated my package of the Amazon EC2 API Tools for Debian [1]. Now it uses the Sun JDK. Kaffe doesn’t work due to not supporting annotations, I haven’t filed a bug because Kaffe is known to be incomplete. OpenJDK doesn’t work – apparently because it doesn’t include trusted root certificates (see Debian bug #501643) […] A couple of days ago I attended a lecture about the Drizzle database server [1]. Drizzle is a re-write of MySQL for use in large web applications. It is only going to run on 64bit platforms because apparently everyone uses 64bit servers – except of course people who are Amazon EC2 customers as the $0.10 […] I just watched an interesting TED.com talk about video games [1]. The talk focussed to a large degree on emotional involvement in games, so it seems likely that there will be many more virtual girlfriend services [2] (I’m not sure that “game” is the correct term for such things) in the future. The only reference […] A recent news item is the “hacking” of the Yahoo mailbox used by Sarah Palin (the Republican VP candidate) [1]. It seems most likely that it was a simple social-engineering attack on the password reset process of Yahoo (although we are unlikely to learn the details unless the case comes to trial). The email address […] One ongoing problem with TCP networking is the combination of RPC services and port based services on the same host. If you have an RPC service that uses a port less than 1024 then typically it will start at 1023 and try lower ports until it finds one that works. A problem that I have […] |
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