End the War on Freedom

There is now a Beta Mac version of my favorite BitTorrent client, µTorrent. It's a tiny download, 1.3 megs. It starts up quickly. And it worked for the one torrent I tried. Yay! I don't download torrents often, but when I do, I want a good client.

ERights.Org is the "home of E, the secure distributed pure-object platform and p2p scripting language for writing Capability-based Smart Contracts." It runs on the Java virtual machine, and there's a port in progress to Common Lisp. Very cool. Read E in a Walnut for a pretty good introduction. [zooko]

Canvastic.Net is an on-line Flash® version of a simple kid-oriented drawing program. You've got a brush, a shape tool, and a line tool. You can change brush size and color, undo, replay, save as jpeg, and print. Cool.

Adam DuVander at Webmonkey - An introduction to PhoneGap, which allows you to write an application in HTML and JavaScript and ship it as a native app for iPhone, Android, or Blackberry. There's a wiki. Cool idea. Haven't tried it. [/.]

Bruce Schneier at Wired - why quantum cryptography, though interesting, is a non-starter as a business proposition.

Clipperz hosts an online password manager that, according to them, you don't have to trust with your private information, since it's all encrypted in your web browser before being sent to and stored on their server. This article talks about the general architecture. Security is provided by their open source JavaScript Crypto Library. Their service is free, and you need only a username and password to get started. Your password is never sent to their server, and they cannot recover it. You can save your private information on your machine, read-only, to make disconnected access possible. I feel no need for an on-line password manager at present, Yojimbo works well for me, but I look forward to future zero-knowledge web applications. Very cool idea.

There's also Clipperz Community Edition, an open source version of the password manager server that you can run on your own web site, with just PHP 5 and MySQL.

Armed and Dangerous, the blog of Eric S. Raymond, has been inactive since June 12, 2006. ESR made a number of posts over the last few days, beginning with the linked post. He also has three posts on the Heller decision: A Victory for Civil Rights, Civil Disobedience, and The Heller ruling and the 2008 elections. Welcome back, Eric!

From Civil Disobedience, a report of Eric's visit to his local chief of police:

Ben Lynn has a pretty good practical introduction to using the Git version control system. Only interesting if you write software. I use Git for my personal projects. The companies I work for currently use Subversion. I started using Git after watching this video of Linus Torvalds, Git's creator, and the creator and chief maintainer of the Linux kernel, talking about it at Google. [music]

Yesterday, I received a shiny new Apple Airport™ Express wifi modem. It took ten minutes from unboxing to network working again, including the holes in the firewall for the ports I let through. Works good, so far. Time will tell about reliability. Unboxing pr0n at imacpr0n.com/airport. The photo below shows the white Airport below the DSL modem the phone company gave me, with a nest of cables and power cords and the view from my house in the background.

PGP Desktop 9.7 has been released. I've been without PGP since I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard"), using a command line version of GnuPG when I need to encrypt or decrypt something. 9.7 works in Leopard. Release notes here. Trial version available for download here, after giving them your full contact info. One day, when I have a spare $100, I'll buy a copy, but for now, I'll keep using the free trial. It works for what I need.

Alexis Madrigal at Wired - a team led by Michael Kozicki, at Arizona State's Center for Applied Nanoionics, has developed a new type of solid-state memory, able to store a terabyte on a thumb drive, with much lower power than current flash memory. Expect the first prototypes in 18 months. [wired]

When I tried to run Skype today on my Macintosh, nothing happenned. Looking in the Console log, I found this cryptic message:

Check 1 failed. Can't run Skype

Only found one Google hit, and it wasn't helpful. Tried renaming Google preferences out of the way (in Mac OS X, those are the "~/Library/Preferences/com.skype.skype.plist" file and the "~/Library/Application Support/Skype" directory). Same thing. Reinstalled Skype by dragging from the distribution DMG to my Applications folder and clicking "Yes" on the overwrite query dialog. Back in business. Don't know why it happenned, but that fixed it.

billstclair.com/calc.html is a Reverse Polish calculator for the iPhone. I found the code for this with a Google search, and reformatted it for the small screen. Looks funny in a regular browser, but is just the right size on my iPhone. Scroll down for trig functions, the rest of the machine state, and a calculation record.

ifiMob.org introduces an idea prompted by the iPhone. Any iPhone owner who wanted to could be the disk jockey of his own radio channel. He could play music, talk, sing, whatever. Anybody with the ifiMob software could see all the channels within wifi range, and tune in to any one. Channels that enable it would allow listeners to talk, too. You could squelch talkers you don't like, from just your soundscape. The channel list could show its music's pulsing beat, so that you could pick a channel by the rhythm of its dancers.

I hope Apple opens up the iPhone enough to make this idea possible. I hope somebody writes the software. I want to use it.

Michael Calore at Wired - uTorrent is my favorite BitTorrent client, by a mile, but since I've been using Linux, and now OSX, as my daily computing environment, I can't use it. They're saying that they're going to port it to both. Yay! Slashdot discussion. Slyck News story. The announcement at uTorrent's forum was met with much derision from current uTorrent users. Just fear, I think. Hopefully unfounded. [/.]

Tim Bray - Every time I've looked at an XSD for describing an XML schema, I've felt repelled, as if by a millimeter wave weapon. Tim Bray, and Eliotte Rusty Harold, and others linked from Mr. Bray's post, agree, that RELAX NG is a better schema description language. Slashdot discussion. [/.]

iMacPr0n.com is my new web site for collecting pictures of my new iMac (that's eye, em, ay, see, pee, are, zero, en). Hopefully, it will eventually contain pictures of other people's iMacs, too. I don't actually have my new iMac yet, but I ordered it today, and expect to receive it next week or the week after. Right now, the site contains some text, a screen shot of my invoice, and pictures of the iLugger carrying case I got for the iMac. I'll make another post here after I post the iMac photos.

MacWindows.com has a list of emulators for running Windoze and Linux on OSX and running OSX on Windoze. Last night, I bought iEmulator, an OSX repackaging of Fabrice Bellard's Qemu, which I've gotten to know and love in Windows and Puppy Linux. It ran Puppy Linux 2.12 beta without a hitch on my son's MacBook, though it was no speed daemon. They probably didn't convert kqemu, which makes a big speed difference. I'll probably eventually buy Parallels Desktop. I'll certainly download it and get a free 15-day evaluation key, as soon as I get my new iMac, which will be soon.

Jeremy Ruston has created a new (to me) way to maintain a web site. It brings wikis and weblogs into the Ajax / Web 2.0 world. It stores an entire web site in a single HTML file, using JavaScript for navigation and editing. Trés cool! My description doesn't do it justice. Play with it yourself: TiddlyWiki.com.

tiddlyspot provides free TiddlyWiki hosting. I started a site there: The Frontierist.

Though it's really neat to store an entire web site in one file, the problem is that that file starts out pretty big (over 200K), and gets bigger as you add content. There is discussion on separating the code from the data, and BidiX has created a DownloadService which does just this, with a web backend to allow saving directly to the web (tiddlyspot uses an earlier version of that backend, which saves the whole-thing-in-one-file to the web).

Wiki on a Stick is a minimalist implementation of this idea, with only 50K of script in the initial file. I found TiddlyWiki in the Wiki on a Stick source. Thanks to Kenneth Hensley (klhrevolutionist) for the link.

David S. Joachim at The New York Times - those manufacturers extended warranties that give you three years of coverage instead of the usual one year aren't worth it, says Mr. Joachim. [cafe]