First, I am finally back on the East Coast; however, updates will still be infrequent because I need to prepare for exams.
Second, I read Euclid’s Window by Leonard Mlodinow, a book that I found lying on my parents’ dinner table. The book is five stories, loosely tied together by discussions of Euclid’s Parallel Postulate. The […]
First conviction under UK’s anti-modchip law. I personally found it to be very odd. The guy was selling XBoxes with a bigger hard driver full of pirated games — yet instead of nabbing him for massive copyright infringement, he is found guilty of installing modchips. Insane! There are a few cases where laws limit what […]
To my surprise, Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle is still showing in my area; saw it on Saturday. Impressions: very pretty (and there is no CGI). The overall genre is a steampunk fairytale. In general, I find steampunk to be the last refuge of the least competent of writers and artists (see Steam Boy for […]
Why PHP sucks (and couple more articles on the same theme). I agree — PHP is the Visual Basic of the open source world. And yet, this blog runs on PHP… (Of course, Wordpress’s constant security issues — Gentoo had it masked as insecure for a few months this year — doesn’t help PHP’s cause […]
The US has decided to keep permanent control of the root DNS servers. Several years ago, it had announced that the root servers would be transferred to ICANN, the internet’s governing body; now, ICANN has been relegated to the role of a “technical manager”.
There are a number of aspects to this story. First, for […]