Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

...to eleccham!! Have a good one!

Random jottings

From amethyst_dancer by way of this post by folkmew comes the news that the classic A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates has recently been republished.

The Amazon customer reviews are well worth a read, and the "search inside" feature can provide hours of harmless amusement.

Personally, I found it a little dated. As the only work of its kind, the digits can hardly be considered random anymore, but must instead be regarded as parts of the largest well-known integer that does not have a simple closed-form expression in standard mathematical notation. (At least until ISBNs become accepted as standard mathematical notation, a prospect which purists can only contemplate with horror and disgust.)

Carl and Jerry

From MAKE: Blog comes the link to a collection of many of the Carl & Jerry stories originally published in Popular Electronics magazine between 1954 and 1964.

Dad subscribed to PE; I remember reading many of the stories when they were published. The later years are pretty well-represented in the collection; I hope the rest will eventually follow.

Travelers take warning

At U.S. Borders, Laptops Have No Right to Privacy - New York Times

A LOT of business travelers are walking around with laptops that contain private corporate information that their employers really do not want outsiders to see.

Until recently, their biggest concern was that someone might steal the laptop. But now there’s a new worry — that the laptop will be seized or its contents scrutinized at United States customs and immigration checkpoints upon entering the United States from abroad.

Although much of the evidence for the confiscations remains anecdotal, it’s a hot topic this week among more than 1,000 corporate travel managers and travel industry officials meeting in Barcelona at a conference of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives.

[...]

“We need to be able to better inform our business travelers what the processes are if their laptops and data are seized — what happens to it, how do you get it back,” Ms. Gurley said.

She added: “The issue is what happens to the proprietary business information that might be on a laptop. Is information copied? Is it returned? We understand that the U.S. government needs to protect its borders. But we want to have transparent information so business travelers know what to do. Should they leave business proprietary information at home?”

Besides the possibility for misuse of proprietary information, travel executives are also concerned that a seized computer, and the information it holds, is unavailable to its owner for a time. One remedy some companies are considering is telling travelers coming back into the country with sensitive information to encrypt it and e-mail it to themselves, which at least protects access to the data, if not its privacy.

(from finagler)

Of course there are other hazards when travelling with a laptop -- it might get stolen, or you might be forced to check it (due, for example, to a terrorist incident) and it gets smashed by baggage-handling gorillas.

The problem is presumably much worse if your laptop is your primary machine. Mine isn't -- I load it up with a mirror of my working directories before I leave for a trip, and merge after I get back. Version-control software like CVS, Subversion, or git makes this painless. If you do put a substantial fraction of your working set on your laptop, encrypt your home directory and back it up before every trip.

Hackers and filkers

After reading this article at Linux.com titled "The FOSS community makes new users feel welcome", I was struck by how similar it is to the fannish and filkish community.

After being semi-comfortably ensconced in the world of Microsoft products since the days of Windows 3.0, I recently joined the growing ranks of people who realize the value in switching to open source software. What surprised me most about changing operating systems wasn't the myriad of different Linux distributions (how refreshing) nor the vast control they give users over their systems (what liberation). No, what surprised me most was how friendly and welcoming the open source community has been.
[...]
In every chat room, mailing list, and forum -- almost without exception -- my questions and comments have been received with patience, grace, and humor. I doubt I would be alone in saying that the friendly assistance I've received across the board has been the saving grace during some rather trying installation difficulties I've encountered in recent weeks.

See what I mean?