Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

While filling in a silly personality questionnaire (you know the annoying type: If you’d have been X, what type of X would you be?), I figure out the most computer geeky personality question ever!

It was obviously way too geeky for the task at hand, so here it is now for you to answer – or better yet: invent your a worst geeky personality question:

If you’d have been a design pattern (or an anti-pattern), which design pattern you’d be and why?

I, for laughs, I’d say I would have been a Duff’s device – complicated and impossible to debug 😉

As Intel confirmed, the HDCP master key has been leaked (using PasteBin of all things¹ ), and have been reproduced² around the web in blogs and forum posts.

One, more industrious, individual went a step further and reproduced the HDCP master key as a Python program to generate sink and source keys according to the leaked instructions – which is reproduced here fully for the purpose of mirroring (no copyright notice was added so I don’t know who to thank for this). More musings about the meaning and purpose of all this – after the break:

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1. Where it quickly went out of control, people don’t seem to understand the concept of  “mirror” or “offsite backup” 😉  [↩]
2. 1890 sources, total for today and not including this one [↩]

While I’m maintaining RPMs for the Kohana PHP framework, as I discussed here, I thought it will be a good idea to track the stable “upstream” development.

The Kohana project have recently released an update to their 3.0 release, so I’ve integrated this back to the RPM distribution and you can now get an updated RPM package from the RPM repository here and a source RPM is as usual available here.

For all of you who are not up to date on my latest news, I’ve got a new phone last week – a Motorola Milestone running Android 2.1 (I expected more Moto* application with the Motorola brand, but I only got a Media Dock home app and a driving home app – not even the “Motonav” navigation software, not that I mind – I use Waze).

Its a pretty cool device and (to my surprise) it allowed me to abandon all the other phones I was carrying with me, pretty much with in a couple of days (I expected it will take me at least a week to transfer all the things I was doing with mobile connected devices to a new device). So now – probably to the surprise of many of my friends – I carry just one phone instead of 3.

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In case you missed it, starting yesterday, Google‘s home screen doodle is a full fledged PacMan game:

What is interesting (to me anyway), is that the game is full encoded using HTML and Javascript – each ghost or pacman and also all the dots are graphics assigned using CSS to HTML DIV elements, which are moved on the screen using Javascript (source code is here at the moment – it is minified but its not hard to figure out what is going on).

[Update:]

As per the schedule, the pac-man game was removed after about 48 hours.

A band I found out about not a long time ago, and is interestingly named “I Am Not Lefthanded” [sic]. To me they sound like how K’s Choice would sound if they were Irish and had male supporting vocals.

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I’ve been moaning on and off about how much e-mail clients, or more specifically – “personal information managers” – simply suck. All of them – there isn’t one client software that is useful in all aspects.

I mean – if you are a simple e-mail user: have one account with which you send a few emails, receive a few e-mails and sometimes forward something to your list of friends – then you have several good options including a few web-mail systems.

If, on the other hand, you are more serious in your communication requirements and you need to:

• Work with multiple e-mail accounts and manage them separately but with the option of moving stuff between accounts.
• Connect with MS-Exchange (still most companies in Israel use MS-Exchange for their groupware backend)
• Work with multiple mailing lists with different policies and different internal filing requirements
• Keep all your past communications for reference
• Inter-operate with multiple shared calendaring systems, and specifically with other people’s calendars in a heterogeneous environment (some people do not believe there are e-mail clients other then MS-Outlook)
• Do all this on multiple computers so that e-mail, address books, calendars and what-not are transparently available on all computers
• Use Linux as your computing platform of choice.

Then you are basically out of luck. The Linux requirement is not that of a problem really (contrary to what many people keep saying when they nag me about moving to MS-Outlook) as the situation isn’t really better in Windows or Mac except that you can’t get Evolution to work there and theoretically Evolution could provide what I need.

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Part of the HomeRunner site, you can find this amazing retro game: Trogdor!

The sprite collision detection is not brilliant, but you can burninate villagers!

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למי שחי תחת אבן בחודש האחרון, בעיצומו של שבוע זה אנחנו חוגגים בישראל (ובקהילות היהודיות בעולם) את חג הפסח שאחד העקרונות החשובים שלו היא החירות – החופש לא להיות עבדים או אסורים על ידי מישהו אחר – זר או מקומי.

מעניין שדווקא עכשיו מתפתח בארץ סיפור מוזר (more…)

שימו לב לוידאו הבא:

הוידאו ביו-טיוב

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