Recently in Dr. Random Category

One of the joys of getting older is that we get a sense of having lived through some history.

The other night in the place where I hang out sometimes, the folks were talking about the computers and video games they remember from childhood. I laughed. I have played Super Pong on the original set, this would have been around 1976. At least I'm pretty sure that was the model I played. (2 players, 4 games.)

But, it got me to thinking about the old computers I have used. I looked around a bit, to find the first computer I ever used. The first thing that came to mind because of the context was the old HP 3000. The context was computers and games, and I remember that even then a huge portion of my time on computers was spent playing games.

The HP 3000 was an early HP minicomputer that used a 16 bit operating system called MPE. Bob Green has written an informative history of HP 3000. I learned to write BASIC programs on this computer in 1978 in the Fairfax County Virginia public schools. I also learned to play Star Trek.

I searched Google and found a nearly original copy of the source code of Star Trek by Mike Mayfield, which is an early character based computer game. Even though it is character based, some of the output is meant to represent crude graphic displays. You may be interested to read Michael Birken's article about the history of the Star Trek program and the re-written C source code.

But even before the HP 3000, I remember Barry Sperling, who was also the Chess Club advisor, teaching us in his 7th grade algebra class to write simple programs on the HP 9810A. This was in essence a desktop programmable calculator with three memory locations, (x,y, and z). You had to use two memory registers to perform math, so that really left only one memory register for "long term" storage. I vaguely remember some convolutions involved in moving things between registers, and of course since it was an HP product, this is where I learned about RPN.

It's probably boring to most people, but to people like myself who are fascinated by computing and its effect on humanity, these were formative times, and I am glad for the perspective experiencing them has offered me.

You may wish to review RFC 5513 which was submitted yesterday. It identifies a serious problem facing the Internet community. (No not the virus thing, far more serious than that.)

This has real security implications for all of us, and we need to do something about it now. Congress should hold hearings.

Furthermore, it should be noted that we are rapidly approaching World Acronym Depletion (WAD). It has been estimated that, at the current rate of TLA allocation, we will run out by the end of September this year. This timescale could be worsened if there is the expected growth in demand for mobile acronyms, IP-TLAs, and TLA-on-demand.

And if that wasn't bad enough this issue may effect those of us in the business of securing systems even worse:

Many security algorithms are identified by TLAs. It is a clear requirement that someone implementing, for example, MD5 should be understood to have encoded the well-known Maybe-Decrypted-Deciphered-Decoded-Disambiguated-and-Degraded algorithm, and not any other security algorithm with the same acronym.

Make sure to write your US Senator or Representative today about this pressing problem. Congress is going to fix everything else, why not this thorny problem?

(Thanks to Susan for pointing this out and Adrian Farrel for writing this much needed RFC)

When I tell you that I once spent a day trying to figure out how to change the NETBIOS hostname on a Macintosh, you know what I mean when I say understanding dots per inch (DPI) is best if you don't think about it. By the way, the hostname is in the network configuration for Macintosh... which makes perfect sense if you discount the possibility of a non-networked computer. And that little bit of knowledge may be the last time in this post that I state anything useful, the rest may be wandering thoughts about pixels... you are warned.

I have had the discussion about DPI many times with different professionals in different professions. None of them appear have the slightest clue about any resolution other than what they are used to. Print folks always want to see 300 DPI. Don't ask me why. The personal laser printer I bought in 1992 had the capability to output files 600 DPI, why would I want to produce files at half that resolution? Modern ink jet printers are capable of physical resolutions of 1200 DPI and they claim that through software to achieve resolutions twice that high. Yet in speaking to the fine art printer who is putting some images on canvas for me, their practice is to use their software (standard commercial stuff) to adjust the resolution and image to print always at 300 DPI.

And for the screen, we really don't care. Anything over 72~90 DPI is lost anyway. Thats how many dots per inch are on a computer screen. (For reference your large screen HD television is even lower resolution than this, but since the pixels are "moving" you tend not to notice.)

Its recently come to my attention that a certain competitor of KinetixHosting.com (blatant plug) has servers named UGH and one named SHEKEL.

I just wanted to remind everyone that it could be worse.

http://www.microsoft.com/library/media/1033/technet/images/archive/winntas/support/xng_d05a_big.gif"

I almost hate to poke fun at the folks from Redmond about this, because I think for its time Windows NT Server Resource Kit was an awesome document. As the diagram above shows, naming conventions might not have been the Kit's most enduring contribution to networking, or my understanding of the subject anyway.

RFC 1178

If you are like me, you'll want to know what the RFC on the subject is. Its a good one, especially if you're a history buff like me you'll appreciate the reference to the growth of Internet domain name servers and the slow decline in the use of host files. It got me to thinking:

1) Do you know what your computer is named? (without looking?)

2) Does the name make sense in some naming scheme, or does it just have the name of the person who unpacked the box? (My Macintosh computer is actually named John's Computer, yes that is an apostrophe and a space in the name, and it has nothing to do with anything. Go ahead, laugh.)

Don't ask me what I was writing or to who, but I had occasion to notice this over the weekend. I wonder if either publisher will fix the idiosyncrasy in upcoming releases.

Well, I didn't mention it until now, because my own home page broke when IE 7 was released last week. It really fries my chops, because I know of a couple 7 year old sites designed in tables that didn't break. My site is XHTML 1.0 Transitional and it validates, yet when I saw it in IE 7 I wanted to yell! It looked like some avant garde horizontal CSS layout.

The problem is discussed by guys who do this stuff more than I do, and so they should know. It didn't work for me, but I didn't try very hard to make it work either. (These things seem known.)

I mentioned the 20th birthday of Internetwork Protocol (IP) in this blog, so it seems fitting to mention the death of the 6bone. (At the risk of being known as a the Cliff Clavin of Internet history.)

The 6bone is (was) an experiemental network developed to allow people to deploy IP version 6 in a test environement. Initially they tunneled this protocol in IPv4 (the current IP address type... xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) and later they deployed native IPv6 devices on network links.

May she rest in peace, and thanks to everyone who worked on this project.

Recently I have been thinking more and more about this issue of accuracy. As I read the piece I mentioned from The Economist, I tried to think of these individual efforts at publishing valuable and accurate content.

Maybe he read my posts in AdvisorBits, but more likely he got my address in some other way. At any rate, Jonathan Janson writes to me, introducing his own website devoted to Vermeer scholarship. This site contains interesting details I only vaguely remember from art school lectures 20 some years ago. But beyond the specificity of topic, it is a remarkable individual effort to collect content on a subject matter of interest to the author of the site. He is clearly devoted to accuracy, and I didn't even see any of the ubiquitous ads of the two "new media giants". (NMG?)

Maintaining the highest degree of historical accuracy and objectivity, while continuing to expand the site's depth and breadth, is fundamental. My desire is not so much to express my own thoughts and feelings in regards to Vermeer's life and work, but rather to faithfully reflect those of others more favorably inclined. Since I am a painter by profession, I wish to limit my personal considerations to the more technical aspects of Vermeer's paintings: that's where I really feel somewhat more at home.

If you like the Vermeer site, you may be interested in Jonathan's paintings too.

I was standing in line in the local supermarket a while ago, and I had the hardest time finding the amount I owed on the screen of the cash register.

When I went back I took my camera and the nice lady thought I was a bit crazy for wanting to take a picture of the register. I noticed though that someone who works there must agree with me, because of the bright orange paper they added around the total.

Note to self for design of forms with numbers: Totals are naturally found at the bottom of the list of items, usually on the right. The upper left is the last place anyone looks, no matter how much attention one draws to it.

If you haven't updated to Firefox 1.5 yet, I would wait a while. I think they still have some bugs to hammer out of this version, and there are also a number of extensions that I use which haven't been upgraded.

Today is black Tuesday. (That is what I call the second Tuesday of each month when Microsoft releases the patches for the month, it is usually a long day.) There will be important fixes for Internet Explorer. If you own a computer, you should make sure that your computer gets updated today. On a related note, I was very pleased to find out from E-Bitz that Small Business Server is supported by Microsoft Update now. If you don't know about Microsoft Update, its like Windows Update providing automatic patches, except that Microsoft Update also provides patches to applications such as Microsoft Office, MS Exchange, and now SBS too.

I've been saying it for years and now SANS, one of the of the most respected security organizations in the country, has agreed with me. In the most recent NewsBites, SANS inaugurates a section called the "Application Security Hall of Shame", and the first inductee is ...