Axiomatic Breakfast

Wired has an excellent article about a massive diamond heist in Antwerp, Belgum. The story reads like a Hollywood movie!

Excerpt:

In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable. It was protected by 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations. The robbery was called the heist of the century, and even now the police can't explain exactly how it was done.

Here’s a good discussion about document management/revision control for a company. Document control – how hard can it be?.

Excerpt:

I used to work in a bank, in projects that produced astounding amounts of documentation, and yet the only form of “document control” going on there was a Sharepoint for sharing a few highly visible documents (like weekly status reports) and a huge shared drive that contained a chaotic dump of all the project documentation. Maybe that’s why they’re losing so much money… heh.

F-Secure’s blog has an interesting analysis of a relatively new root kit that attempts to attach itself to the host computer and get into the Master Boot Record (MBR) to load itself before windows.
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Nerdica » Building a BitTorrent Box

Excerpt:

In this guide, you’ll learn how to set a small headless Ubuntu server used to retrieve BitTorrent files, while even saving them to a external USB hard drive that can be disconnected on the go. You even discover how to remotely administer your server from the Web using SSH, VNC, and an inuitive HTML UI, while being able to retrieve files while you’re away from home.

The Cranking Widgets Blog has an interesting article about a software package that provides version control for non-programmers. The article is FileHamster: Version Control for the Rest of Us.

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I like to joke about the future of computing being the Microsoft Mind Link or some other usb-in-the-brain style interface. Well, Slashdot has a link to an article about a non-invasive brain powered computer controller.

Noted computer security expert Bruce Schneier has a good article up on his blog regarding the problem with Electronic Voting Machines. It’s a very good essay on what voting machines need to do to be successful.

Excerpt:

In the aftermath of the U.S.�s 2004 election, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted. And while it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet is buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual elections. Over the next several weeks we’ll see whether any of the information crystallizes into something significant.

Mozilla Firefox is an awesome web browser. I love it! Some people are very attached to the way Internet Explorer works. Here is a brief guide to getting Firefox to look and operate like Internet Explorer, but still retaining the speed and security of Firefox. (Link from Weblog Tools Collection.)

I was reading through a comment on Slashdot yesterday when I found a link to an essay Neal Stephenson had written about Operating Systems. I remember seeing this before but never got around to reading it. I have just started but so far it’s a pretty good read!

Engadget has short review of a new device from CatEye. It’s a device that lets you hook your own bike up to your playstation. Cool idea.

Slashdot has a link to an excellent research project about the possibility of “smart projectors” that will let you project a video image on any surface and have the projector compensate for the shape, texture and color variations of the surface. The video at the end of the article does a great job demonstrating the technology in action!

Dan Brown of Boxes and Arrows has a great essay up regarding the Information Architecture of Email. He gives a good overview of what google did differently, and how it changes the way you work with email.

Gmail revealed to me my email behavior – something I hadn’t previously given much thought. By making certain things easier (and others more difficult), Gmail showed me how “typical” email applications weren’t necessarily designed according to how I used them.

I just wish a desktop email client (Like ximian Evolution) would incorporate some of the features google did.

Gizmodo has a link to John Dvorak’s Bottom Ten List: Worst of the Laptops.

I’m particularly partial to this one (a 20 pound laptop):

8. Macintosh Portable (1989). This machine was perhaps the world’s biggest laptop ever. If you think of it as a desktop replacement, it probably should not be on this list. In fact, it was stylish for its day. It was heavy and large, weighing in at around 20 pounds and using lead-acid batteries. (Another forgettable machine that had lead-acid batteries came out some years later. It was called the Dynabook (one of many computers using that name) and never really shipped.)

This one’s for my biking friends. Check out some of the bike technology in use at the Tour de France this year. (Link from LockerGnome.)

Daniel Miessler has written an excilent article over at Locker Gnome talking about why you should consider jumping to a web browser other than IE. He does a good job laying out his ideas and he does it in a way that is not just your run-of-the-mill Microsoft bashing.
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