Talk Funnel

Harold McGee (author of one of my favorite books, the seminal On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen) tackles the 5-second rule (of food pick-up) and whether double-dipping chips is hygienic.

The short answer? Here’s a hint:

I’m a big fan of clutter-free UI design. That’s what first attracted me to Writeroom and eventually Scrivener (where the full-screen feature is much better designed).

When it comes to blog themes, I find myself drawn to the less-cluttered approach. I intentionally kept the last theme (shown here) simple. But even that seemed too busy. So courtesy of Plaintxt.org we go over to Simpla.

One of these days, I’ll just sit down and write my own. But then again, it’s likely to be running on my own blogging engine.

Discovered on the Berkeley Public Library Online Resources page:

Access to Safari Books Online. There are so many times I’ve ended up ordering a tech book only to read it once and never look at it again. My office is officially in overflow mode. Now I can read through the whole book and if it’s a reference worth keeping, I can buy the paper version. Free to BPL cardholders.
Outfrigginstanding!

When I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard last October, one of the first things I checked was whether the built-in firewall was running or not. To my abject horror, I found out that a) it wasn’t and b) it wasn’t really doing what I expected it to do, namely, keep incoming port-scanners out. Subsequent in-depth security analyses didn’t exactly raise my confidence much.

Since I do most of my development work on my laptop and so much of it entails running various types of servers locally, I set out to find something that actually kept snoopers out. A quick search led me to Intego Software and their NetBarrier product (Symantec’s Norton products don’t run native on the Intel CPU). There are people out there who don’t like Intego and their offerings, especially with the ‘hidden’ annual subscription fees associated with the software (now this isn’t unusual in the Windows world, but it’s something the folks at Intego should mention right upfront.) But I haven’t had any bad experiences with them. Besides, choices were few and I found a deal for under $60.

To be clear, most people at home connect to the Internet through a router that offers them NAT services which effectively blocks incoming connections. For those situations, a software firewall is overkill. But if like me, you spend a lot of time at public WiFi hotspots like coffee shops or away from known, trusted routers, then you’ll want to run a firewall to keep the legions of port-scanners out there at-bay. If you think you’re unlikely to be a victim of port-scanning, think again. Last time I set up a web-server with a static IP directly connected to the net, it took less than 15 minutes from the time the ISP turned on the tap to when the first port-scans came in. By the time I turned the server off a month later, the web-server log-file was chock-a-block full of known exploits and bizarre attempts at trying to break through — most of them through overseas IP sources and zombies.

But I digress.

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Every once in a while, I come across writing so good it makes my teeth itch. This passage from Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown ought to rank up there with the most subversive in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the most memorable in Orwell’s 1984. It might help to explain that Elasticnagar is the name of a fictional military ‘base’ in Kashmir, under control of an unpopular Indian Colonel:

Elasticnagar was unpopular, the colonel knew that, but unpopularity was illegal. The legal position was that the Indian military presence in Kashmir had the full support of the population, and to say otherwise was to break the law. To break the law was to be a criminal and criminals were not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on them heavily with the full panoply of the law and with hobnailed boots and lathi sticks as well. The key to understanding this position was the word integral and its associated concepts. Elasticnagar was integral to the Indian effort and the Indian effort was to preserve the integrity of the nation. Integrity was a quality to be honored and an attack on the integrity of the nation was an attack on its honor and was not to be tolerated. Therefore Elasticnagar was to be honored and all other attitudes were dishonorable and consequently illegal. Kashmir was an integral part of of India. An integer was a whole and India was an integer and fractions were illegal. Fractions caused fractures in the integer and were thus not integral. Not to accept this was to lack integrity and implicitly or explicitly to question the unquestionable integrity of those who did accept it. Not to accept this was latently or patently to favor disintegration. This was subversive. Subversion leading to disintegration was not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on it heavily whether it was of the overt or covert kind. The legally compulsory and enforceable popularity of Elasticnagar was thus a matter of integrity, pure and simple, even if the truth was that Elasticnagar was unpopular. When the truth and integrity conflicted in was integrity that had to be given precedence. Not even the truth could be permitted to dishonor the nation. Therefore Elasticnagar was popular even though it was not popular. It was a simple enough matter to understand.