Category Archives: Lemonisms

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You can’t stop it … gene therapy is going to change everything
After reading the article below, along with this article, about this particular discovery I realized that the genetic revolution is coming much faster than we believe … and its not going to stop. And no matter what the various sports and Olympic groups believe, they are only going to fall behind the times if they think they can “test” for “enhanced humans.”

As we learn more and more about how genes work, and how to perform “gene therapy” the modifications that occur are going to become more and more “natural” … harder and harder to detect. The only differences between this, and “breeding” people is that this can be done in less time. “Genetic manipulation” is going to become a way of life … we might attempt to control and regulate it here … however there will be other places or countries that capitalize on allowing it. And it will be tough to tell the difference between “natural” and “genetically manipulated” …

Gene Therapy Shows Its Muscle. Scientists working to help muscular dystrophy patients have developed a gene therapy that could be used illegally to build super athletes. Sports officials are looking for ways to detect the genetic manipulation. [Wired News]

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Sharing photos … and information
I liked reading about this application since it reminded me of a project that I set aside. A couple of years ago, I began to work on my “slide-show screensaver” … something that a lot of people have. A screensaver that flips through a directory on my hard disk, displaying each of the photos saved there one after the other. This is no big accomplishment, except that I then expanded it to begin to sync the directory with one on my server. Now I have a screensaver that pulls the photos from my server when new ones are placed there … by anyone.

What makes this a useful application is that I don’t have to go looking for photos for my screensaver. I don’t have to update the photos on my hard disk. If I, or anyone that I permit, puts new photos on my server they just start to show on my laptop. And on any other laptop running my application.

I really believe that it is the ease of use – and the automation – of applications that makes them more and more usable. And more accepted. This is why RSS news aggregation makes so much sense, and is used so heavily. I don’t have to go looking at web sites to search out the news I want … I subscribe and receive the information automatically.

I like this application … I’m going to dig up my source code and experiment with my screensaver again … this gave me some new ideas!

Share That Photo: Hit Save. Some photo buffs have so many pictures from their digital cameras, they don’t know what to do with them. And sending by e-mail is clunky compared with new technologies that make storing and showing as simple as pie. [Wired News]

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The Operating System Monoculture dilemma
It is often fun to speculate and point at problems … the solutions, however, do not always come easy. This article is about the issues surrounding a paper written about the “Windows Monoculture” … proposing that so many people are running Microsoft Windows products that a single major flaw could be discovered that causes massive damage (to the entire human race?) when millions of computers are effected.

There are a number of “flaws” with this model, although it points at some potential issues to be learned from. One thing is that no real solution is outlined … and the “obvious” solution is that the world ought to be running on tens or hundreds of different operating systems to solve this dilemma.

Replacing one ‘monoculture’ with a different ‘monoculture’ is not a solution. So having GNU/Linux dominate the earth would simply spawn a new group of “anti-GNU/Linux” people who would call that wrong, and create their alternative. There are only two real ways out … to create something within the technologic substrate that is superior to what is possible in the biologic substrate … or to have a large and diverse number of operating systems.

I actually think that what we are going to find is that the technologic substrate will allow for the emergence of entities that far exceed the capabilities of the biological world that we are a part of.

Warning: Microsoft ‘Monoculture’. A security expert warns Microsoft’s dominance of software is a set-up for global disaster — and promptly loses his job. His comparison is to biology, where species with little genetic variation are vulnerable to catastrophic epidemics. [Wired News]

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Autonomic tools from IBM … the coming abstraction
I found two articles recently that cover the release of the IBM tools for Autonomic computing. Even if you are not interested in IBMs tools, there is a lot of very good reading about its core concepts.

The article below, and this NWFusion article both give a brief overview of what IBM released, and contain links to where you can download the tools or read more about them.

I do believe that they are introducing some powerful models for developing software that are able to exist in highly-distributed networks, and that are able to deal with failures effectively. Much of this is accomplished using some very simple concepts.

There are several of the same areas that we have been exploring with our web services work, and our application substrate. I really like their Installation and Deployment model as it mirrors much of our same functionality … there might be some aspects that we embrace. All of this continues to support a growing abstraction above the operating system.

IBM delivers autonomic tools. Big Blue packages up the results of its research into self-managing systems with an open-source toolkit that plugs into the Eclipse development set of software. [CNET News.com – Front Door]

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Good comments on the leaked Windows source code
As usual … this is a interesting read about the Windows source code that was floating around the net last week. It seems pretty objective …

We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source. A quick, superficial look at the style and content of the leaked Windows 2000 source. I quote from the comments but not the code, so this should be safe for developers to read. [kuro5hin.org]

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More hope for less spam … soon …
This appears to be some good momentum in the anti-spam area, as a good first effort to combat the problem. There are no doubt other proposals and standards that will emerge.

This specific solution will force companies to define their mail servers in DNS in a way that allows them to be held accountable for spam. This will provide a way to deny e-mail from being received, if the source of that mail can not be tracked down. It’s a very good start.

eWEEK: New Anti-spam Initiative Gaining Traction. A grass-roots movement to improve the SMTP protocol that governs e-mail traffic is gaining acceptance, and its lead developer hopes to get fast-track approval by the Internet Engineering Task Force to make the emerging framework a standard. [Tomalak’s Realm]

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Blogging direct from Iraq!
I found this a good article for a variety of reasons … however the most important was that it linked me to a lot of blogging that is going on in Iraq. I enjoyed this blog in particular, and the other blogs that it links to. I must have spent a couple of days just reading posts and being impressed by the overall opinion that the Iraqis have of our efforts to free them from Saddam, and introduce them to Democracy.

I am thoroughly impressed … and I look forward to the day that I get to visit Iraq …

The Blogfather’s Hit List. InstaPundit.com is the most visited blog in the world. Glenn Reynolds keeps it that way by focusing on important facts that don’t make the headlines. Wired magazine gets the lowdown on Reynolds’ reading list. [Wired News]

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Where to get .Net?
I liked reading this article, in the Register, about .Net / Mono / dotGnu. I do like the idea of C# and .Net on all sorts of operating systems, however the author hits on some key points about the open source efforts.

I like to see C# and .Net on more operating systems since it only continues to make the operating systems commoditized. Who cares what operating system if they all support the same applications? The point this author seems to make is “Who wants to get a partial solution that is a copy of something?” It will be interesting to see what happens with Mono and dotGnu … I wish them the best!

Mono and dotGnu: What’s the Point? [Slashdot]

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Open Source Audio/Video Editing
I am always impressed with where audio and video editing software is going. When I upgraded to Windows XP on my latest laptop, I was pleased to find the Windows Movie Maker … a very easy-to-use software package for creating digital videos. I’ve been using it lately to create animations from the .png images created by PieSpy.

This is an impressive package that takes things even further to the professional level. It is amazing the software that is being created.

Cinelerra 1.1.9. A complete audio and video production environment for Linux. [freshmeat.net]