Rui CarmoTough day at the office. Spent my usual cooling off period (the hour or so I wait until traffic dies down) archiving mail (too much already for so few workdays) and getting Gentoo to run inside coLinux as a preliminary step to my forthcoming attempt to install it on a Cobalt box. emerge reminds me a lot of my FreeBSD days - short bursts of FTP traffic followed by long compiles. VNC was particularly painful, and WindowMaker failed for some reason. I was too busy sorting through the mail to bother checking why.
In the meantime, Freemind has found a niche in my workflow as an outliner. I started jotting down notes on a few documents I was reviewing and ended up with a 200-node behemoth spanning my dual-screen XP desktop. I dragged a few branches together, exported them and voilá, instant presentation. The Mac OS X version is almost unbearably un-Mac-like, though, and I can't wait for an update.
I've got too little time on my hands tonight to pursue the umpteen other things I have to do on the site (like posting the next converted section of the Python/Grimoire), but here are some news:
- An amazingly ordinary Wi-Fi phone. I'm still skeptical of using Wi-Fi for any sort of "open" public voice service - the footprint and roaming technology just isn't there - at all. Still, there is also a Vonage-enabled kit available.
- It looks like the post-DVD (whatever it is) will be a lot harder to crack than the "toy" encryption embedded into deCSS. Yessir, now someone is going to have a go at AES, or rather, at how vendors implement it. The discussion is crammed with insightful arguments (for a change) and my personal bets are:
- It will require some form of online updates, like some of the newfangled mobile DRM concepts.
- It will be even more embarrassing when it's cracked.
- Cingular is testing HSDPA. Yep. It works. On a not completely unrelated note, their Blackberry (a 7100 variant) is a bit on the ugly side.