Amazon can reach in and randomly destroy the books on your Kindle remotely over Whispernet, without asking your permission first. Well, technically, thanks to the terms and conditions that you have to agree to before you buy the Kindle, you gave them permission in advance. Well, no thanks. I think the Sony e-Reader is a much better choice as a result. Yet another reason why people should Just Say No to DRM.

Last night I managed to finish up a rather satisfying improvement to ext4’s inode and block allocators. The ext4’s original allocator was actually a bit more simple-minded than ext3’s, in that it didn’t implement the Orlov algorithm to spread out top-level directories for better filesystem aging. It also was buggy in certain ways, where it would return ENOSPC even when there were still plenty of inodes in the file system.

With the price drop, I finally decided to get a 32GB iPod Touch, and I have to admit, Apple has done a really nice job. Its decisions about which applications it decides to arbitrarily blacklist from its AppStore (either now or without warning in the future) is evil, of course, but I don’t plan to develop on a locked-in platform such iPod/iPhone, so that’s not a problem. And of course, given AT&T’s evil customer service, I won’t be getting an iPhone any time soon (life’s too short to play cat and mouse with Apple’s cell phone locking games), this was probably my only opportunity in the short time to play with the iPhone/iPod touch’s e-mail application.

I looked at the Foleo and played with one while I was at Linux World a few weeks ago, but it is so restrictive in what it can do that I was completely unimpressed. First of all, according to one of the people at the booth, it will only work with a select set of Treo’s; mostly the newer ones. A colleague I was with had just gotten a Treo 650, and the person at the booth said that it wouldn’t work with that model of Treo.

… besides the fact that their cables are generally ripoffs:

Q: When is a frivolous lawsuit not frivolous? A: When it’s filed by a corporation.

Monster fiercely protects its name: Cable products company sues those who use M-word

Well, shoot. I guess it’s time to retire my Nokia 6310i and get myself a new phone. It turns out my 6310i is way vulnerable to bluesnarfing, which means that an atttacker can grab pretty much all of the data stored on the handset, including the address book and IMEI. Worse yet, Nokia is claiming that this is “not a serious problem”, so they don’t plan to fix it. Oh, really?

Whee! A quick ten minute hack involving some left-over X-10 hardware,

“apt-get install heyu”, a quick edit of a configuration file, and I

can now remotely reboot my kernel crash and burn test machine, even if

it’s completely wedged, by the simple set of commands:

heyu turn computer off

heyu turn computer on

I am so pleased with myself.

I am such a geek.

I’ve recently been reading about powered parachutes (also known as PPC’s), and they are very, very tempting! I’ll want to get demo flight first, of course, but I can see myself dangerously close to dropping $15,000 to get myself one of these babies. A PPC is basically a three-wheeled go-cart with a large fan attached on the back, and a parachute, which acts as the wing/airfoil for the aircraft — hence the name, “powered parachute”.

Well, it should almost be time to start watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer… it’s far enough into the hour that I should be able to skip all of the commercials using my TiVo without running out of recorded material.

I love my TiVo! (And Buffy is very addictive. 🙂