Computer Passions

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Drupal 6 Attachment Views
Published May 24, 2010, 11:00 am in Slashdot Tags:
Trevor James writes "Green's book is without a doubt the definitive practical guide to using the Views 2.x module in Drupal 6, and to create complex and dynamic page, block and attachment-based views for your Drupal site. One big plus to this book's structure is that Green uses a real "live" production Web site project as a guide (he states early on that he was working on the site build for the client while writing the book and that the client approved of using the site build as the book's main example) — all of the chapters and subsequent tutorials are focused on building a site for a company that specializes in hiring out contractors and subcontractors. It's nice to see real-world examples being used in a computer tutorial book especially one focused on Drupal and Drupal Views. The data Green is accessing is real data and this helps to engage the reader and show the multitude of real situations that a developer will get themselves involved with when developing Drupal Views." Read on for the rest of Trevor's review.

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Seagate Launches Hybrid SSD Hard Drive
Published May 24, 2010, 10:20 am in Slashdot Tags:
MojoKid writes "Though there has been some noise in recent years about hybrid storage, it really hasn't made a significant impact on in the market. Seagate is taking another stab at the technology and they've just launched the Momentus XT 2.5-inch hard drive that mates 4GB of Flash storage with traditional spinning media in an attempt to bridge the gap between hard drives and SSDs. Seagate claims the Momentus XT can offer the same kind of enhanced user experience as an SSD, but with the capacity and cost of a traditional hard drive. That's a pretty tall order but the numbers look promising, at least compared to current traditional notebook hard drives."

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Lost Ends
Published May 24, 2010, 9:29 am in Slashdot Tags:
Unless you live in a hatch somewhere, you are probably aware that Lost has ended. If you want a simple, clear explanation of exactly how the series resolved, Lost Untangled will do nothing to clarify things for you. For everyone else, I provide this discussion thread for you to complain/revel in the most spoiler-laden manner you desire.

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High Altitude Balloon Tweets Earth
Published May 24, 2010, 8:52 am in Slashdot Tags:
celsomartinho writes "Spacebits is yet another low cost High Altitude Balloon (HAB) with a computer probe being launched to near space in the 30th of May, this time in Portugal, Europe. The twist with this project, besides the usual very cool electronics, cameras and sensors and other paraphernalia on-board, is the fact that the team provided the online community with a real time web dashboard so that everyone can follow the ~2 hour journey up to 100.000 feet and back to earth. Real time data includes measurements from all it's sensors, including temperature, pressure, humidity and air quality, altitude, acceleration and GPS coordinates and a live twitter feed. The team is also using a public GSM network to send SMSes lat/lon/alt coordinates to anyone willing to go on-launch-site and participate in the probe hunt." The balloon goes off memorial day weekend, so bookmark the page if you're on call.

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Revenge of the Cable Customer
Published May 24, 2010, 8:09 am in Slashdot Tags:
crimeandpunishment writes "After years of poor service and poor reception, years of hoping the cable guy shows up sometime within that four hour window, years of constant price increases ... it may be payback time for cable customers. Cable TV companies are trying to treat customers better. Considering the industry has long had some of the worst customer satsfaction ratings of any industry, it may take a while to overcome that reputation. But they'd better succeed. Cable customers are switching to satellite and phone companies in droves. According to industry research, cable companies lost five million video customers from 2006 to 2009."

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Facebook Bug Lets Hackers Delete Friends
Published May 24, 2010, 6:33 am in Slashdot Tags:
swandives writes "There's lot of talk about Facebook and privacy at the moment, but a bug in Facebook's website lets hackers delete Facebook friends without permission. Steven Abbagnaro, a student from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York reported the flaw, writing proof-of-concept code that scrapes publicly available data from users' Facebook pages and deletes all of their friends, one by one. The victim first has to click on a malicious link while logged into Facebook. Abbagnaro's code exploits the same underlying flaw that was first reported by Alert Logic security analyst, M.J. Keith, who discovered a cross-site request forgery bug, where the website doesn't properly check code sent by users' browsers to ensure that they were authorized to make changes on the site."

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BYO Linux Router To Australia's Fibre Network
Published May 24, 2010, 3:38 am in Slashdot Tags:
An anonymous reader writes "Run a Linux router to connect your ADSL service but worried about what will happen when the Australian Government rolls out fibre broadband to your house or business? Worry no more. It turns out that customers on Australia's new National Broadband Network will be able to run their own homebrew Linux router to connect to the network and route traffic any way they please."

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Military Appoints General To Direct Cyber Warfare
Published May 24, 2010, 12:44 am in Slashdot Tags:
An anonymous reader writes news from The Guardian, excerpting: "The US military has appointed its first senior general to direct cyber warfare – despite fears that the move marks another stage in the militarisation of cyberspace. The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon's ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world's computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland."

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Large Irish ISP To Enact "Three Strikes" Rule For Copyright Violation
Published May 23, 2010, 9:50 pm in Slashdot Tags:
Squeeonline writes "One of the biggest broadband providers in Ireland will make the country the first in the world (according to broadsheet newspaper, the Irish Times) to introduce the 'three strikes' rule. 'EIRCOM WILL from today begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally. Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of graduated response is being put in place. Under the pilot scheme, Eircom customers who illegally share copyrighted music will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off for a year.' ... The mechanism by which it operates was challenged in the courts by the Data Protection Commissioner. Apparently, IP addresses do not constitute 'personal information.' Personally, I use filesharing all the time, but I use it to download large open source Linux ISOs. How will Eircom legally differentiate between that content, and the content that some ragamuffin may be downloading illegally, without infringing privacy laws?"

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Fragmentation vs. Obsolescence In the Android Ecosphere
Published May 23, 2010, 7:40 pm in Slashdot Tags:
whisper_jeff writes "Engadget has an interesting article up discussing whether or not Android is fragmenting. While the article discusses the concept that it may be more about handsets becoming obsolete at a dramatic pace rather than the OS fragmenting, it also begins by noting that there are currently five different versions of Android on the market, which implies there is a notable degree of fragmentation. Regardless of it being fragmentation or handsets becoming obsolete to new feature sets in a terribly short period of time, I believe this development cycle could turn casual consumers away and hurt Android's chances at long term mainstream success."

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Toyota Robot Violinist Wows At Shanghai Expo
Published May 23, 2010, 6:36 pm in Slashdot Tags:
kkleiner writes "The Shanghai World Expo got a special treat this past week in the Japanese pavilion, when Toyota's famed violin-playing robot thrilled the crowd with a rendition of the Chinese folk song Mo Li Hua (jasmine flower). The bipedal artificial violinist hasn't been seen much since its debut back in 2007. Now we have footage of the Toyota bot playing Mo Li Hua in Shanghai as well as its original rendition of Pomp and Circumstance from 2007."

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Do Build Environments Give Companies an End Run Around the GPL?
Published May 23, 2010, 5:34 pm in Slashdot Tags:
Malvineous writes "I have two devices, from two different companies (who shall remain nameless, but both are very large and well known), which run Linux-based firmware. The companies release all their source code to comply with the GPL, however neither of them include a build environment or firmware utilities with the code. This means that if you want to alter the free software on the device, you can't — there is no way to build a firmware image or install it on the devices in question, effectively rendering the source code useless. I have approached the companies directly and while one of them acknowledges that they are not fully GPL compliant, due to other license restrictions they cannot make their build environment public, and they do not have the resources to rewrite it. I have approached the FSF but their limited resources are tied up pursuing more blatant violations (where no code at all is being released.) Meanwhile I am stuck with two devices that only work with Internet Explorer, and although I have the skills to rewrite each web interface, I have no way of getting my code running on the devices themselves. Have these companies found a convenient way to use GPL code, whilst preventing their customers from doing the same?"

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BP Prepares Complex "Top Kill" Bid To Plug Well
Published May 23, 2010, 4:30 pm in Slashdot Tags:
shmG excerpts from the International Business Times: "Government and BP officials are hopeful after extensive preparations, but are not guaranteeing that a complex attempt early this week to cap an uncontrolled underwater oil spill from a well in the Gulf of Mexico will be successful. The so-called 'top kill' procedure that oil major BP is tentatively scheduled to attempt on Tuesday involves plugging up the well by pumping thick "drilling mud" and cement into it. While it had been attempted on above ground wells, it has never been tried at the depths involved with this spill, nearly 5,000 feet below the surface."

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Copernicus Reburied As Hero
Published May 23, 2010, 3:27 pm in Slashdot Tags:
CasualFriday writes "Mikolaj Kopernik, AKA Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland's highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried his coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005."

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HP Confirms Slate To Run WebOS
Published May 23, 2010, 2:22 pm in Slashdot Tags:
Kilrah_il writes "After buying Palm a few weeks ago, many rumors emerged regarding HP's plans to further expand the scope of devices running WebOS. Now it appears that at least one of the rumors is true: The Slate will be running WebOS. 'Today an HP exec has confirmed that the company is developing a WebOS tablet which should be available by October.'"

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