LookIt

Another Apple first

One fact that has been overlooked by (as far as I can tell) all of the people singing praises to Tiger, aka, Mac OS 10.4: it's the first major operating system upgrade distributed on a DVD. Yes, you can get it on CDs for older Macs, but you'll have to pay and you'll have to wait.

Apple's forward-thinking on distribution media starts 21 years ago when the first Mac came out with 3.5-inch floppies when essentially no other personal computer on the market had them. PC users laughed about that one until they realized that having greater capacity and many fewer media failures might be a good thing. Later, Apple was the first major vendor to distribute personal computers with no built-in floppy drive. Apple was also the first major vendor to include DVD readers as standard instead of as an option.

I have no predictions on where this is going...

Next steps for hash algorithms

NIST will be holding a cryptographic hash workshop on Halloween to help determine what needs to be done to make better hash algorithms. This has the same format, and could be as important as, the workshops that led up to NIST picking the new symmetric cipher now called AES. Some people think that SHA-256 is the shoe-in for the next hash algorithm, but there is some trepidation about it based on the current attacks on SHA-1, and there is growing interest in new hash algorithms based on AES such as Whirlpool.

I'm planning on submitting a paper talking about some novel design considerations for the new algorithm. It will be based on some of the conclusions that Bruce Schneier and I came to in our Internet Draft on the current state of hash use in Internet protocols.

A very good cookie question

Mark asks "Should cookies be shared between your RSS aggregator and your Web browser?" I say, yes indeedie. Optionally, of course, and maybe by cookie, but I know that my RSS reader would have more good stuff for me from some sites if it did so.

Is it too late for a good pope election cartoon?

I certainly hope not.

VMWare version 5: good

I'm kinda surprised by the lack of reviews of the new version of VMWare Workstation, but maybe VMWare users are cautious about upgrades. In short: go ahead and do it. If you duplicate your existing virtual machines by hand, you will pay for that $99 in a couple of months. And there are a bunch of other nice features.

You can now have multiple snapshots for a single virtual machine, and can revert to any particular snapshot. This makes experimentation even easier than before. I have already saved an hour of time with just that one feature.

Cloning virtual machines is between cool and wonderful. "Full" clones are cool: they properly copy everything you need to duplicate the virtual machine and make the right amendments to the file that says where all the requisite files are. "Linked" clones are wonderful: they are essentially separable snapshots, which in turn saves on a lot of disk space if you clone a lot. Put the base of a linked clone on a networked disk, and everyone gets to do their own deltas to that in their own work.

The new "teams" feature lets you tie together a group of virtual machines. If you think of VMWare as creating a restartable PC, a team is a restartable network of PCs, each rerunning independently.

One thing to look out for, though: the new "take and restore snapshots in the background" feature. At first blush, this should be great, because it lets you continue to work while you're making a snapshot. However, it causes weird usability issues when you start up from a snapshot. The window comes up looking like you can work in it, but it doesn't really take user input, may flash black, and just act flakey.

Oh, and VMWare's tech support has gone downhill, if my experience last week is typical. It took five rounds of back-and-forth, two of which were because the tech support person disappeared after I answered his/her questions, to find out that the problem I was having was related to this new feature being turned on by default. Whoever Ajay is, he/she needs either to learn how to not ignore customers when they ask questions to which you don't know the answers, to be able to diagnose issues better, or to find a job in a different line of work.

IETF Last Call on the Atom Format

What Tim said. Well, maybe with a different slant. The reason I, as co-chair, pushed for the document to leave out "lots of things" was not (as Tim says) because We only felt confident enough cover the areas where there’s a lot of prior art and the arguments are mostly over.

Our charter was to create a document that had the core of the format, not everything everyone would have wanted. You can argue about what is "core" (and we certainly did), but at the end of the day, you need a document where everything in it is useful to a developer who picks it up new five or ten years from now.

Layer on top of that mushy definition of "core" the way things work in IETF Working Groups, namely by consensus (another mushy word). No voting allowed. Had Atom been done in a standards body that had voting, I am quite sure it would be at least 50% longer, and full of features that people were passionate about in the past year but didn't really feel like "core" to the whole group. Such a document would probably be better for developers in the short run and a disaster in the long run. It would limit the way that people think of Atom, thereby narrowing the innovative uses folks in the Working Group can't imagine today.

And, as Tim says, Anyhow, Atom’s extensible; I’m pretty sure the market is creative enough to converge on good extensions to address any important things we left out. Using the new shorthand for "I agree" that I encountered for the first time in this Working Group, +1.

Googlemilking

See the rules here (thank you, Rogers). My contributions to the game: "he doesn't know it yet but" and "she doesn't know it yet but". As for other phrases, "kissed me on the top of my" of course comes up with some good ones (mostly "head") (as in the one with ears on it), but "kissed me on the bottom of my" returns nothing.

Effective anti-smoking ad

I wish they would show this ad during the shows my 13-year-old niece watches. Doesn't seem likely, though.

How does one welcome new readers when one posts almost nothing in which they are interested?

Hello to folks who came here via Largehearted Boy. That was awfully nice of David to link to me (twice) for doing nothing other than noticing a great download from the Surf Coasters. If you are here looking for other musical gems, you'll be disappointed, however. I sometimes put MP3s that are important to me, but it is mostly just infrequent personal cruft and technical things.

EasyTree: RIP

Major bummer. It's a very different kind of online community than the one that sprouted up 20 years ago, and I'm quite happy to have been active in both.