I _Really_ Don't Know

It made me cry.

Apple's have been more secure than PCs for about as long as I can remember. It's generally acknowledged, though, that a main reason for that is the lack of value in attacking one.

Seriously, writing a virus, some spyware or other piece of trojan software for the Mac would be pretty pointless with the market penetration they currently have. That's not a dig - I'm a big Mac fan. I drool over the 17" Powerbook whenever I pass one and if virtual pc for the mac were just that bit faster then I would seriuously consider it. But if you want market penetration for a piece of malignant code it's not the platform to exploit.

Alan Francis has started a wonderful Grid Blog about Fatherhood and I thought I'd add some thoughts in the vain of "things nobody will tell you".

Poo.

I need to start this entry by stating clearly that I love my parents very much and have throughout my life.

But...

thinking about this here screensaver a bit more I've decided this is a seriously flawed piece of kit.

Firstly, the idea is flawed. Spamer economics is based on very small, sometimes infinitesimally small margins, this applies to their mailings and is likely to apply to their hosting also. Even at its peak this screensaver is not likely to really impact them.

BBC via Clarke Ching via alan francis:

Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.M

Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.

Update: I did start to wonder if this was for real. I mean, there are probably laws that this screensaver violates - or should. But I took a look at what it's doing. I turned on the logging on my firewall and it really does visit the sites, it makes several requests...

I'm working on a product team building the next generation of a very large metadata storage solution core to library systems. I've been about 6 weeks now and have spent a good chunk of that time looking at the standards and protocols that are in use in the environment.

The first is "a computer protocol that can be implemented on any platform, defines a standard way for two computers to communicate for the purpose of information retrieval" - the ANSI/NISO standard for Z39.50. The interesting thing, having been working with web services since 1999, is that this standard was ratified in 1988 and by 1992 had a second ratified version. Even more interesting is that it is both more efficient than SOAP and delivers on 90% of the promises made by SOAP, which is probably more than SOAP does.

Talking with some friends a few days ago we were talking about the value of use cases, amongst other things.

My product team are in the process of identifying user classes, looking at defining personas for them and getting really clear on the use cases required.

The signal-to-noise ratio of technical recruitment amazes me. The number of CVs I see where the technologies listed don't match the must-haves of the job spec is astounding.

Last weekend saw an impulse purchase of Canon's new EOS 20D Digital SLR. Well, hardly impulse actually. I'd been thinking about buying the 10D for some time, but had never quite convinced myself; then I heard the spec for the 20D, jumping up to 8 mega pixels. I've checked and they're all there.