The Next Miserable Failure?The Next Miserable Failure?
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[...]
Combat WaspsCombat Wasps
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[...]
Programming and Games for ChildrenProgramming and Games for Children
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[...]
Some RAID IssuesSome RAID Issues
I just read an interesting paper titled An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack [1]. It contains an analysis of the data from 1,530,000 disks running at NetApp[...]
EC2 SecurityEC2 Security
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.[...]
Updated EC2 API Tools packageUpdated EC2 API Tools package
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[...]
I Won’t Use DrizzleI Won’t Use Drizzle
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[...]
Future Video GamesFuture Video Games
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[...]
The Security Benefits of Being UnimportantThe Security Benefits of Being Unimportant
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[...]
RPC and SE LinuxRPC and SE Linux
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[...]