the finger-keyboard synapse - October 2004 Archives

October 2004

My favorite London picture (23:43) - Without a doubt, my favorite picture from my recent trip to England is the one of London's Tower Bridge open for ship traffic. Perhaps it's overly sentimental of me, but one of my strongest memories of being in London when I was 6 years old was Tower Bridge opening on my birthday. When we went into London a few weeks ago, I hoped that I would be so lucky, and even though it wasn't my birthday, it was still a...

Always check the cable (21:36) - I was installing a new scanner this morning for someone, and I was running into a really baffling problem: the scanner drivers installed, but when I plugged in the scanner to the USB port, Windows XP would say it found new hardware and then say "Unrecognized USB Device." I did the logical thing and tried uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling them, but that didn't help. After messing with a few settings, I decided to call Canon. It looked like some... | 5 Comments

Jack & Bobby (23:33) - No, I'm not talking about the Kennedy family. What I am talking about is the new show on the WB called Jack & Bobby about two brothers growing up, one of whom serves as President of the United States from 2041 to 2049. Fortunately, the mystery of which brother it will be was revealed at the end of the first episode. The story of Robert McAllister's presidency is told both through stories of people close to him--his wife, the vice... | 3 Comments

MacWorld recognizes BitWise for confidential chats (21:32) - If you have the November issue of MacWorld magazine, turn to page 35, or if you don't have it handy, click here for the electronic version of the ChatBarrier X3 10.3 review. I can't help but notice how closely this review of ChatBarrier mirrors my "review" that I posted back in June right here in this blog. The mention of "military-grade" encryption still causes this involuntary rolling of my eyes... Anyway, the best part of the review is in the... | 2 Comments

You can't copy protect analog (10:04) - A few weeks ago, I got a CD made and sold overseas (coincidentally, England). Much to my surprise upon receiving the CD, it was marked as being "Copy Protected & Pre-Ripped for PC." I have turned my PC into a jukebox with all of my CDs, making it really easy for me to listen to my music with juggling CDs. I don't use any file sharing like Kazaa, so I'm not doing anything illegal. I'm not just saying that, either--I... | 4 Comments

7 days without Internet access -- bliss! (21:56) - I have returned alive and well from England. A good time was had by all, the wedding was nice and I really like Sian's groom. He seems like a nice guy and I'm sure he'll treat my 2nd cousin well. It was nice to visit with family and see everyone that I haven't seen in a long time (or at all--Claire, Sian's older sister, now has 3 girls of her own!). I am glad to see that BitWise can survive... | 8 Comments

I need a vacation... oh wait, I got one! (09:38) - I'm sure that this is an absolutely horrifying thought for many of you: it's entirely possible that I may not post for a whole week. ;) Naturally, I'm thrilled about this because the reason is that I'm going to England! One of my 2nd cousins is getting married, and so my mom and I are going for the wedding. My brother and has family are also going, and since they live in Moscow, Russia it will be a great chance... | 3 Comments

Kevin Hock, author (23:02) - I have some very exciting news to announce: I have recently joined Julian Smart, original founder of the wxWidgets C++ GUI framework, as a co-author of the new wxWidgets book to be released next year by Prentice Hall. I will be contributing chapters on sockets, data structures, installing wxWidgets and creating cross-platform projects. It is an honor to contribute to this book alongside Julian and other core wxWidgets developers. This truly is an amazing opportunity for me as a developer... | 3 Comments

Me and 100 of my closest friends (15:42) - I found an interesting article the other day about IM and IM viruses/worms. The article itself wasn't interesting for the technical discussion about the worms, but rather for the facts it had about people's buddy lists and social habits. You can view the original article if you wish, Super-connected users could aid IM worms. The virus throttling technology works by limiting the number of IM messages infected IM users can send outside their "working set," the small number of regular... | 5 Comments

Tradeoffs: the glory and the difficulties (23:41) - It's been a few days since 1.0.3 was released, and things have been smooth overall. It's always a relief to roll out a new version and have things work well; releasing always causes some anxiety because suddenly many people are switching to a newer version that doesn't have the known reliability of the previous one. Anyway, that's not really the subject of this evening's post. We've been getting some really great feedback about the new voice chat feature. Several people...