Category: Geek

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Geek It Happened to Me

CTV Appearance

Yesterday morning, David Akin in his CTV News guise (he’s also with the Globe and Mail) asked if he could drop by Tucows along with intrepid camerman Lucien and interview both Boss Ross and me about Google as part of a piece on their IPO. We said “come on down!” and an hour later, he was here conducting interviews.


Here’s Boss Ross in his office.


And
here I am. While “Technical Community Development Coordinator” is my
actual title, it’s just too hard to explain and wouldn’t fit on the
screen anyway.
“Carpenters need hammers, internet guys need Google.” Hah! I slay me! I am the Soundbite King!

Ross has posted the video in his latest entry — you can either get the video there or download it from me [1.9 MB Windows Media]. Take your pick!

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Geek

Even More Reading Material — on Spectrum!

[ via Slashdot, Shirky ] The Economist has an article titled On the same wavelength,
which “argues that overcautious control of electromagnetic spectrum, on
the part of regulatory agencies, has resulted in the sheer waste of up
to 95% of available spectrum.” Clay Shirky has just posted an article
titled The Possibility of Spectrum as a Public Good, which puts forth the notion that if the FCC “manages its proposed transmutation of small slices of
spectrum away from property rights and towards a model that regulates
spectrum as a public good”, you’ll get more innovation, citing the example of WiFi.

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Geek

The Only Way to Get Windows XP SP2

This article was posted to The Farm, but I thought I’d post it here too, since it’s of interest to non-programmers.

[ via BoingBoing
] Windows XP SP2 is a huge update: a whopping 266MB. Demand for it and
its fixes, among which are some feature sthat improve Windows XP’s
security, is so great that until August 25th, Microsoft is limiting
downloads to 2.5 million per day.

The site SP2Torrent.com attempted to address
this problem by making the SP2 installer available as a BitTorrent
torrent. (BitTorrent is Bram
Cohen’s
P2P multi-source downloading utility that spreads the work of serving
among downloaders. It’s win-win for distrubutors and users:
distributors have lowered bandwidth costs and users get their files
faster.) Microsoft, upon hearing about this, sent two DMCA takedown
notices to the hosts of SP2Torrent.com, one of whom was merely linking
to a torrent file on another server. Microsoft also updated their SP2
download page with this notice:

To report a website offering
unlicensed copies of Windows XP SP2 for download, please send e-mail
to: piracy@microsoft.com or visit
http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/ReportingUs.mspx.

Take a look at that email address and URL. That’s right: users helping
users (and indirectly, Microsoft) in ways that do not harm Microsoft
are pirates.

Microsoft could argue that it’s possible for someone to make a version
of SP2 that contained malicious code, but it would also be simple for
them to build a small official application that could verify a file
sent by BitTorrent so that people could tell whether they were getting
the real fix.

Luckily, I already got my SP2 via BitTorrent. Thanks, M$. Thanks for
nothing.

Categories
Geek It Happened to Me

The Ultimate Culmination Of Working Stiffdom

And to think I almost missed it!

I was getting started on a report for Boss Ross when I noted the date: July 14th.

“Hey, it’s Bastille Day,”
I thought to myself. Bastille Day is also the birthday of my friend
Henry Dziarmaga. Years ago, Henry and I — over several zombies — came
up with the theory that in an infinite multiverse, there must be one
universe in which people watch our lives as TV shows and therefore we
must live in such a way to keep our ratings up.

Then it hit me: I started working at Tucows on Bastille Day last year. This is my first anniversary.

It doesn’t feel as though it’s been a year. I enjoy my work immensely,
Boss Ross and my mates in the Research and Innovation Department Darryl
and Scott are great to work with, and it’s so enjoyable that I only hit
the snooze button when I’ve been out partying the night before.

I think I’ll be here a while.

(The title of this entry is a play on the The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software, which is what “Tucows” originally stood for.)

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Geek

Don’t forget: I write another blog…

…on matters programmer-y and geeky. It’s called The Farm: The Tucows Developers’ Hangout,
and it covers all sort sof news of interest to software developers and
other folks interested in that sort of thing. In the Monday, July 5th
edition, the articles are:

Categories
Geek

Also trying to find John Lim

I’m also trying to contact John Lim, owner and operator of the smarty-smart programming language weblog, PHP Everywhere (formerly at php.weblogs.com). Drop me a line at my business email address if you know how to reach him.

Categories
Geek

Does anyone know how to reach Ehud Lamm?

I’m trying to contact Ehud Lamm, owner and operator of the smarty-smart programming language weblog, Lambda the Ultimate (formerly at lambda.weblogs.com). Drop me a line at my business email address if you know how to reach him.