Pointman’s Page

A language we’ve thought dead or dying for a couple of decades just won’t die. This is one of those things that drives the younger developers crazy since anything older than 6 months old is “old school” and not the “right” way. I, on the other hand still have my college COBOL books - […]

An interesting blog entry on O’Reilly, Why Corporates Hate Perl touches on the knowledge barrier between technology and non-technology in corporations and how a lack of understanding technology at the business level can contribute to the silo mentality so prevalent today.
The biggest point to take from the article is that programming languages are only as […]

I don’t “hate” Flash but I frown on it for casual use such as site navigation, headers and especially advertising. And here comes another malicious use of Flash through advertising which steals what ever you copy to your clipboard.
Advertising presents a larger problem to police mainly because the content is sometimes a couple […]

London hacker loses appeal over US extradition
A London hacker left messages on U.S. Army computers which he’d compromised, saying “US foreign policy is akin to government-sponsored terrorism these days…” and “It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand down on September 11 last year… I am SOLO. I will […]

Because the first step in decentralizing domain name registration went so well they’re talking about taking it even further. Two problems, one is it is a step toward internationalizing an American invention. Second, the inmates are definitely running the domain registry asylum as can easily be seen in the news over the past few […]

I’ve been referring people to Open Source Web Design for many years. Now there is another option along the same lines, Open Web Design. The more, the merrier!

The vid pretty much says it all…

I have used Mandrake/Mandriva since around ‘97 and despite the upsurge in popularity of Ubuntu and its derivatives I’ve found no compelling reason to switch distributions. Linux.com has review of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring which is one of the better reviews Mandriva has received during occasionally the bumpy ride homogenizing Mandrake and Connectiva into […]

It looks like Microsoft may actually be serious in their endeavors to become more than a niche player in the event management field with the Operations Manager product line. Event management that only works with one platform is immediately handicapped and restricted to small to mid sized companies. But when you add cross platform extensions […]

I can only laugh at the latest explanation of the missing Whitehouse Emails, they migrated from Lotus to Exchange and Exchange does not have a defacto archiving system. First thing I want to point out is that such a lapse is due to very poor product capabilities evaluation or poor communication of requirements. I […]

After some decades I finally found something on which I can agree with the New York Times (second question)….

Microsoft has released a USB thumb drive device that allows police to completely unlock a “suspects” Windows based computer system. And it will only be used for legitimate purposes… I suppose we should be grateful there isn’t a little pi symbol in the corner of our screens eh? But then why be so obvious when […]

Yet another article in the main stream continuing to throw doubt on global warming. So now you know why the global warming crowd kept saying “we must act now!”… before they were found out for the frauds they are.

Three divergent articles on global warming, or the lack thereof, today. The first one is on the lack of temperature rise since 1998 which is a pretty startling piece of information to read from the BBC. Second up is how the lack of major disasters in the last couple of years (where did those forecast […]

Did you hear that using a cell phone for 10 years is more dangerous than smoking for 10 years? No? Bet the cellular companies really don’t want you to read the study.

Wow, an AP tech writer promotes Linux in today’s piece Time Is Right for Linux PCs to Emerge.

In December my wife’s 03 Grand Prix GT went out of warranty. I’ve recounted some of the problems here, probably not all. But final nail in the coffin, though, came this week.
A leak in the horribly engineered fresh air intake allows water to flow off the windshield, through the venting and fill up the passenger […]

I used to believe there was nothing worse han a spammer but I have been proven wrong. End users who get a lot of spam and think IT has a magic bullet to make it go away are much worse. They’re standing in front of you whining and you can’t smack them whereas you […]

We all have on occasion cleaned the smudges and finger prints from our monitors and it helps a lot. But eventually the inside gets dirty, too, and most people don’t know how to properly clean the inside of the screen. So being the tech that I am when I found an online tool to properly […]

The video of Navy missile hitting the satellite is a must see. I don’t really care if it was a weapons test, an effort to protect secrets on the bird or to keep 2500 pounds of scrap from wiping out a village in Africa. The SM3 did its job so all 3 may well have […]

If you’re a Linux user who like Photoshop you’re pretty much stuck having to pay the Microsoft Tax just to run it. Over the last several years I’ve largely converted to using GIMP for most tasks and only occasionally switching to a Windows VM for Photoshop. Adobe has said for many years they’ll not […]

I’m hitting close to 2 years with my Palm Treo 700W so no surprise when it finally came apart this past weekend. Thankfully we keep insurance on all our phones (company plan) so by Tuesday I had a spanking new one in my hands and all my data sync’d back up.
One of the reasons […]

Pull your tin foil hats tight and take a look at some cool big brother technology.

Doesn’t it just figure that the literal day after my Brother and his wife invest in BlackBerrys they have a Nation wide service sut in North America. So you 12 million doing without today now know who to blame..

It superficially appears that Yahoo hasn’t totally lost their senses but then they could simply be fishing for MS to up the bid.
And not that most of you care but the amount that Microsoft bid is about what adding all the AARP members who aren’t paying income taxes to the Federal “Stimulus” packages […]