Turtles all the way down

Explained very nicely on Wikipedia.

Apocryphal quote from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

But I like the reference from William James.

William James published a different version in his book The Will To Believe (1898), specifically in the essay "The Sentiment of Rationality" (p. 104 of The Will To Believe in the Dover reprint):

"Like the old woman in the story who described the world as resting on a rock, and then explained that rock to be supported by another rock, and finally when pushed with questions said it was rocks all the way down, -- he who believes this to be a radically moral universe must hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate should, or on a series of shoulds all the way down."

This is about the regressive tendency of thought, and our inability to see to the foundations of our premises. A topic dear to my heart.

Worst passwords of all time!

Weak passwords are one of the greatest vulnerabilities in any application or network environment. Not enough people take it seriously.

Here are the top 500 worst passwords of all time.

Oh, and here's an attack dictionary, kindly offered by a commenter to that blog.

Nice FireFox addon: UrlbarEXT

Lots of utility here for FireFox browsing, plus anonymous surfing.

Looks easier to use than The Onion Router (Tor). Is it equally secure?

URLbarEXT

Botnets for Macs

You knew it was coming.

Mac Trojan Horse OSX.Trojan.iServices.A Found
in Pirated Apple iWork 09

Exploit: OSX.Trojan.iServices.A Trojan Horse
Discovered: January 21, 2009
Risk: Serious
Description: Intego has discovered a new Trojan horse, OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, which is currently circulating in copies of Apple’s iWork 09 found on BitTorrent trackers and other sites containing links to pirated software. The version of iWork 09, Apple’s productivity suite, are complete and functional, but the installer contains an additional package called iWorkServices.pkg.

Easily enough avoided, by those who are sensible.

Stumbling Feedburner integration

Google's acquisition of Feedburner continues to stumble along. Integration doesn't seem to be going well at all. Many users are complaining about broken stats. Me too.

See ReadWriteWeb's review of PostRank as the Feedburner-killer.

Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed.

Interesting stuff.

New MidEast policy

The most important comments in Obama's interview on Al Arabiya:

And so what I told [George Mitchell] is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating -- in the past on some of these issues -- and we don't always know all the factors that are involved. So let's listen.

And the surrounding countries need to be involved, as well: Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and perhaps beyond.

Reported in this NY Times article. Ah, the audacity of hope?

VIM tutorial

nice that vim comes with an interactive tutorial. Perhaps I'll finally remember how to go between edit and command mode.

Just open a terminal, and $ vim tutorial

cool wireframe tools!

Just learned about Balsamiq and IPlotz.

Why would anyone mess around with Adobe tools to develop web page feature placements and plot navigation?

Software development (e.g., web design) needs to be collaborative to be successful.

Enough with the whining

I think people have forgotten what “war” means. If the ratio had been the other way around, Palestinians would have been celebrating instead of whining. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought war was all about killing as many of the other guys as possible, and losing as few of your own as you can possibly manage.

If Israel’s policy was to kill as many Palestinians as possible, they would have carpet-bombed Gaza City (like the U.S. did in Dresden and Tokyo. Talk about civilian casualties? Look at hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, with dubious military tactical purpose. Civilian casualties in war is a huge topic, and, OMG, it didn’t start with the Palestinians and Israelis. GASP! No, you don’t say!? )

Get real. Theatrical whining is so pointless. This is what Nietszche called “ressentiment”. (shall we say that the Palestinians learned it from the Jews?)