The Quantum Mechanic

We’ve come a long, long way.

Bruce Schneier provides plenty of rope for the Head Weasel of the TSA to hang himself. And there are still two more parts to come!

A friend of mine has a company called SmartFlix. The idea is that instead of buying how-to videos for $N00, you can rent them instead. Check it out — lots of interesting stuff.

Enjoy.

Tamagotchi are back. And they can communicate with each other. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I’ll prefix this by saying I believe pirates should be dealt with very harshly and that I view most of the “information wants to be free” crowd as lamers trying to develop a high-falutin’ rationalization for their thievery.

Despite all that, Sony has gone way too far. They are putting out so-called “copyright-protected” CDs which can only be played on a computer if you use the player that’s on the disc. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the player patches the Windows kernel to hide itself from spyware programs and disables your optical drive if you uninstall it (looks like you’d need to reinstall Windows to fix the damage).

Here’s the Washington Post blog entry on it and here’s the excellent forensics at the Sysinternals blog.

UPDATE:
You don’t need to re-install windows. You can delete the driver filter (see the Sysinternals blog) and get the optical drive working again.

I never had anything as interesting as CARDIAC, but I do have fond memories of a few old computer-y things I’ve owned.

• A Radio Shack 4-bit microcomputer trainerwith around 64 bytes of RAM. Oddly, it had the usual springs-and-wires of a typical RS electronics kit, even though there was only one way to wire it up. Input was a hex keypad in the form of a matrix of cheap pushkey switches and output was some LED dots and an 8-segment display. The manual was pretty interesting and was not very dumbed-down. You really could learn some good assembly language concepts from it.
• I had another computer-y toy whose name has sadly completely slipped my mind. It was pre-fabricated and like the one above also had a simple keyboard — pushswitch keys (so a step up :-) that were at least a hex keypad, but maybe more additional keys. Output was a speaker, either one or two 8-segment LEDs and, fascinatingly, a 4×4 (or maybe 5×5 or 6×6) LED dot array. The keypad was on the main body of the thing and the output unit (speaker, array, 8-seg displays) was a separate piece that attached to the main body via a short stalk. I don’t recall the manual being as technical as the Radio Shack trainer was (this one was marketed more as a toy than as a trainer). I don’t even remember if it gave you enough information to write your own programs. But because of the LED array, the programs that the manual had you key in were much more interesting :-). There were programs that would draw moving patterns. I think there was a “don’t let the snake eat its tail” game. There was even an animation program — you could “draw” (by using keys to set/reset dots) five or six or so animation frames. I really loved this toy and wish I could just remember the name of it.
• Somewhere over the years I picked up an AMD microcontroller trainer. It has a 1969-era microcontroller on it, a few hundred bytes of RAM, some LEDs, and a set of toggle switches for toggling in bytes, single-stepping, etc. It’s all mounted on a one-foot-square PCB. You have to supply the 5VDC yourself. The manual even comes with instruction coding sheets so you can hand-assemble your program.
• I had the Radio Shack Digital Computer Kit which was a set of eight quintuple-pole double-throw switches and eight light bulbs, each in its own compartment. There was a set of opaques (well, they weren’t transparent :-) generally organized with input labels to the left and output labels to the right that would slide into place in front of the bulbs. The idea was that you’d slide the switches that lined up with the inputs to light up the inputs you wanted to activate, the “computation” would be performed courtesy of the particular wiring pattern you had been instructed to wire up for that particular “opaque”. Ironically, the kit really was more of an analog computer. The manual/opaques had instructions for the basic logic gates and then a bunch of trivia, etc. quizzes. You couldn’t do any real programming since it had no state at all (other than the state of the switches).

What do you know? transparent aluminum.

In another stunning display of FEMA idiocy, registering for disaster aid through the internet requires you to use IE6 as your browser and to have JavaScript enabled. See eWeek’s article about it. I just checked the FEMA site in question myself and that really is the case. Un-be-lieveable.

And even if IE6 weren’t required, why the heck are they requiring JavaScript to be enabled? Sure, it might make things look slicker, but is it really needed for what, ultimately, is going to just be a form submission. Sure, JS can do client-side input verification, but it wouldn’t be hard to have the server do it and come back with an appropriate error page. I concede it’s a fair point that that would put more load on the servers. So you have the slick page that you figure most people use and then an alternate page (something that can be used by lynx, say?) for others.

And how much do you want to bet the FEMA page doesn’t follow the government’s own 508 standards?

The list is out.