Category: software

In Search of Lost Time

information technology

‘For a long time I would to go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have the time to tell myself: I’m falling asleep.’  

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Taking the code literally

The performers are reading the machine-code version of Marcel Proust’s novel. During the eight hours of a working day the humans are playing computer. For these purposes the text is first deconstructed into its individual parts — the letter and characters — which in turn are decoded into the Ascii-code — a code underlying digital text processing. Each letter is represented by an individual sequence of signs, consisting of zeros and ones. The performance is situated in an ironic lab situation and attempts to find beauty inside of the microstructures of the digital. During the act of reading, interpreting and presenting the work of art emerges, posing questions about the nature of the digital and the analogue, of work and art, time and beauty.

From the analog to the digital and back again

The sequence of events of the performance is described in this manual.
Starting from the ASCII-Version of Marcel Proust’s novel ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ it is then re-coded into zeros and ones and then read by two performers alternately (one is reading the zeros, the other one the ones). The third person is CPU (the Central Processing Unit): She interprets the zeros and ones with the aid of an ASCII allocation table, cuts out the corresponding letter from the prepared sheets and turns it over to Display, who sticks it onto the wall panel.

After eight hours of performance about 250 characters can be processed.

Concept: Karl Heinz Jeron and Valie Djordjevic

A five minute extract from the performance “A la recherche du temps perdu” on 20 March 2006 in SPACE, London, during the xxxx festival 2006 (http://1010.co.uk/xxxxx_arch.html). Performance by Karl Heinz Jeron and Valie Djordjevic. More info on http://khjeron.de/alarecherche

We are using the electronic versions of the first three parts of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ from Project Gutenberg.

The performance is licenced under the GNU General Public License.

Credits:

First performance on 19 November 2005 at the allgirls gallery in Berlin.

Participants:

True: Valie Djordjevic
False: Karl Heinz Jeron
CPU: Heissam el-Wardany
Display: Dani Djordjevic

Second performance on 20 March 2006 in SPACE, London , as a part of the xxxxx event series.

Participants:

True: Valie Djordjevic
False: Yair Wallach
CPU: Karl Heinz Jeron
Display: Elvina Flower

Third performance on 10 September 2006 in Blumberg, Vienna, during the paraflows festival.

Participants:

True: Verena Brückner
False: Florian Kmet
CPU: Thomas Hörl
Display: Peter Kozek

good programmers

Joel on Software

Hitting the High Notes

by Joel Spolsky
Monday, July 25, 2005

In March, 2000, I launched this site with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company:

The common belief is that when you’re building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn’t been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. We’ll call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works.

For the last five years I’ve been testing that theory in the real world. The formula for the company I started with Michael Pryor in September, 2000 can be summarized in four steps:

Best Working Conditions → Best Programmers → Best Software → Profit!

It’s a pretty convenient formula, especially since our real goal in starting Fog Creek was to create a software company where we would want to work. I made the claim, in those days, that good working conditions (or, awkwardly, “building the company where the best software developers in the world would want to work”) would lead to profits as naturally as chocolate leads to chubbiness or cartoon sex in video games leads to gangland-style shooting sprees.

programming class

Questions Addressed:

How Programming Languages Evolved
How the computer stores data
Numbering systems the computer likes
Different data types
Different programming Syles
Procedural
Functional
Object Oriented
What does it mean when a language is “strongly” or “weakly” typed
What is compiling and do I need to do it?
When I would do it, and when I would not
Why, what advantage does it provide
Modern Computer Languages Overview
Bash
Perl
Python
Ruby
C
C++
Java
Vala
C#/Mono
Programming methodologies
Waterfall
RAD
Summary of Graphical Programming Libraries
GTK
QT
FLTK
SDL
And finally, Programmers tools:
Eclipse
NetBeans
Anjuta

This is a lot of topics, and this week will be an overview. It should get you enough information to recognize the labels on the map, even if you are not 100% sure where the map will lead you. That will be the task for the following weeks.

restore point

To create a restore point

  1. Open System by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, right-clicking Computer, and then clicking Properties.
  2. In the left pane, click System protection. Administrator permission required If you’re prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
  3. Click the System Protection tab, and then click Create.
  4. In the System Protection dialog box, type a description, and then click Create.
For more information about System Restore, see What is System Restore?

horizontal divider lines in Word

There are a few different ways to create horizontal divider lines in Word 2007 and Word 2010. The most commonly used one is done by typing three hyphens (—) and then pressing Enter:

Line

If you want a dotted line, use three asterisks (***):

Dotted line

Three equal signs (===) gives you a double line:

Double line

Three underscores (___) makes a divider of medium thickness:

Medium line

Three number signs (###) generates a thicker line with borders:

clip_image005

And three tildes (~~~) creates a wavy line:

Wavy line

If you ever want to delete one of these lines, you may find it tricky to remove. That’s because they’re not actually lines, they are borders. To remove one, select the line and the paragraph that precedes it, click on the Border button on theHome tab in the Paragraph group and select No Border.

The easiest way to enter an em dash ( — ) is to let Word do it.  Simply enter two hyphen characters between the two words you want to connect, and Word will turn the hyphens into an em dash. If this doesn’t work for you, one of two possibilities exist:
  • You’ve inserted space characters between the words and the hyphen characters. When you enter spaces between the hyphens, Word formats the hyphens as an en dash ( – ), which is shorter than an em dash.
  • Someone has disabled the AutoCorrect option that formats hyphens as an em dash.

Now, this default won’t work for everyone every single time. If you occasionally need two hyphens instead of an em dash, you can press [Ctrl]+Z and Word will undo the em dash character and restore the hyphens. If you find yourself doing this a lot, it might be more efficient to disable the AutoCorrect option and enter an em dash, when you require it, manually. You can disable this option as follows:

 

  1. From the Tools menu, choose AutoCorrect Options.
  2. Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.
  3. Uncheck the Hyphens ( — ) With ( — ) option.

After disabling the AutoCorrect option, you’ll have to enter an em dash manually. Fortunately, there are three easy methods:

  • Press [Ctrl]+[Alt]+-. You must use the minus sign (-) on the numeric keypad; if you use the hyphen character on the alphanumeric keypad, Word will change the cursor.
  • Hold down the [Alt] key and type 0151 on the numeric keypad.
  • Choose Symbol from the Insert menu, click the Special Characters tab, highlight the em dash, and click Insert.
Entering an em dash character is easy, whether you let Word do it or you choose to enter the character yourself.
microsoft word automatically creates it when you type in two dashes — followed by a space. 

alternatively, you can hold down the ALT key, and then type in 0151 on the numeric keypad to create it. 

make sure to type in all four digits, not 151, but 0151. 

if you want more special characters. go to windows start, click on programs, then click on accessories, and select the character map.

the Stuxnet computer worm

When first discovered in 2010, the Stuxnet computer worm posed a baffling puzzle. Beyond its sophistication loomed a more troubling mystery: its purpose. Ralph Langner and team helped crack the code that revealed this digital warhead’s final target. In a fascinating look inside cyber-forensics, he explains how — and makes a bold (and, it turns out, correct) guess at its shocking origins.

Ralph Langner’s Stuxnet Deep Dive is the definitive technical presentation on the PLC attack portion of Stuxnet. He did a good job of showing very technical details in a readable and logical presentation that you can follow in the video if you know something about programming and PLC’s.

The main purpose of Ralph’s talk was to convince the audience with “100% certainty” that Stuxnet was designed specifically to attack the Natanz facility. He does this at least four different ways, and I have to agree there is no doubt.

Ralph Langner is a German control system security consultant. He has received worldwide recognition for his analysis of the Stuxnet malware.

  • Stuxnet worm hits Iranian centrifuges – from mid-2009 to late 2010
  • Iran complains facilities hit by Stars malware – April 2011
  • Duqu trojan hits Iran’s computer systems – November 2011
  • Flame virus targets computers in PCs across the Middle East, including Iran and Israel – June 2012
  • Iran says Stuxnet worm returns – December 2012

Continue reading “the Stuxnet computer worm”

Inkscape

Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format.

KeePass

What is KeePass?
Today you need to remember many passwords. You need a password for the Windows network logon, your e-mail account, your website’s FTP password, online passwords (like website member account), etc. etc. etc. The list is endless. Also, you should use different passwords for each account.

KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way.

The databases are encrypted using  AES and Twofish. For more information see the features page.

KeePass 2.26 has been released today!

You can get it here: Download KeePass 2.26.

This is a stable release. It is recommended to upgrade from any previous 2.x version to 2.26.

KeePass 2.26 mainly features auto-type improvements, integration and usability enhancements, and various other minor new features and improvements.

Hash sums and OpenPGP signatures for integrity checking are available. The .NET assemblies are signed,public keys for verifying are available.

For a comparison of the current KeePass 1.27 and 2.26, see: Editions Comparison.

If you like KeePass, please don’t forget to donate.