I'm on a low-volume personal boycott against Adobe because of the Dimitry Sklyarov bust 10 years ago. See Wikipedia's entry. It was a long time ago, but, it remains an attack against the First Amendment. /soapbox

Aside from that, Acrobat is expensive. Mac and Linux users don't pay anything to produce PDFs because it's built-in to the printing system. Windows users have to pay.

Also, in 2010, they were pretty lax about dealing with some security issues that led to the proliferation of malware being delivered as PDF files.

The top PDF makers are:

I have been holding back on writing this post, but we just bought a bunch of Bytespeed brand computers at work. They're boring but nice. The boring part is the generic looking black case. The nice part is that they only use Intel motherboards, and they have a good return policy and warranty. Hopefully, they'll also be boring and not crash or break.

The other pluses are that it's put together in the US, and tech support is also domestic.

So I was reading the CRM114 documentation, and he notes that CRM is hard to DoS because iterators are designed not to use iteration indices. What an interesting thing to say.

I'm going to send this to Amazon regarding their Kindle, which I like.

Amidst the death and destruction from the earthquakes and aftershocks, it's important to note that they are experiencing 6.0 quakes in Tokyo and other cities. The buildings are nearly all standing.

So I read that they used a rainbow table of 8-char passwords of all lowercase and numerals. That's a rainbow table with 37^8 or 3.5 trillion entries.

The first computer book I read was "Teach Yourself Basic" by Bob Albrecht. It wasn't a really good book - at least not for a child - but there it was. Mr.

There was a period around a year ago when I was on FB a lot. I'm still on it more than most other sites except Google search, but it's utility for me has declined significantly. There's too much ADD on there. I tried to get involved with a 'group' but the groupware features are too weak to support anything (traditional tools like message boards, email lists, chats, are better implemented by the old software that's just "out there" in the internet).

So I'm running some old web software that has possible vulnerabilities. Here's a log line with the hack attempt.

I got a cheapie from AJ Wright for $12, and it works okay, looks grainy but acceptable. At work we have a Logitech, and I think the model is the "9000". It cost around $70 and has a nicer picture, better auto-exposure, and a sharper lens.

The thing you don't notice right away is the "lag" that the cheaper camera has. There's a noticeable lag between the audio and the video, and this also seems to translate to a lag during videophone. I suspect that there's a little DSP work going on in the images, and the chips in the Logitech are faster.

For business meetings, if you have the chance to upgrade, go for it. The Logitech was rated high, as were the Microsoft LifeCam and whatever Apple sold, all in the same price range. Get one with HD resolution, a glass lens, and if you can tell, a fast DSP.

I'm reading up on Exchange 2010 and it's clustering and failover tech. It seems "wrong" to me.

I'm looking at some email archiving systems.

Panu Kinnari did a speed comparison of SSDs and regular hard disks.

On numerous articles it's recommended that dried leaves be shredded to compost them more rapidly. The argument made is that it increases the surface area of the leaf.

That doesn't make sense. Most of the leaf's surface is flat, and chopping leaves only increases the surface area along the edges of the cuts.

While the mainstream is going ga-ga over the HTC EVO and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, there's been an explosion of Android-based mobile internet device (MID) tablets that cost less than $200. This is a weird situation, where cheap displays combined with ARM and Atom chips, and phone engineering skills combine to product low-performance alternatives to the iPad. Without a doubt, these cheap tablets sucks compared to the expensive iPad.