Applied Miscellany

I’ve been using Adobe Reader 7.0 for Linux for a while now. When I first installed it, I went through the Preferences settings to see what new and interesting features were available. One thing that caught my eye was a setting to enable/disable Acrobat Javascript. Since I couldn’t think of a reason why I would […]

A recent New York Times article reports that Microsoft has unveiled a mock-up for a “cellphone PC” that would be used to bring laptop computing to the people of developing countries. While this is a great plan, it is clear that it is in reponse to the brouhaha between Microsoft and Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of […]

The other day, I attended a talk by Bill “Ches” Cheswick of Lumeta at the Princeton Joint Chapter of the ACM and IEEE Computer Society. If you haven’t seen him give a talk and you have the opportunity to do so, I recommend it. His style is quite entertaining. He co-authored the book Firewalls and […]

PC Magazine provides some insight into the traffic that is sent back to Apple when users listen to songs in their iTunes collection. This is apparently a due to a new “feature” called “MiniStore.” This allows Apple to place advertisements in your iTunes window. In a follow-up posting, the author, Oliver Kaven, comments on how […]

The BBC reports that a passer-by discovered hotel registration cards in a skip (dumpster) from the Grand Hotel, Brighton, UK. The cards contained signatures, credit card numbers, and contact information. This news item caught my eye as I happened to be there at last October’s SOSP’05 conference. Fortunately for me, I stayed in the hotel […]

Since there were no postings of consequence (yet!), folks probably didn’t even notice that this weblog was down for a while. My upgrade to WordPress 2.0 went smoothly. The trouble started when I was having a “Monk moment” and started to fiddle with the backend database so that I would eventually reuse the ID numbers […]