a glob of nerdishness

I think I found this through one of those link-swamping sites, so you may well have seen this already. But just in case not, you should see an even cooler demo of multitouch than the iPhone keynote. Forget “the pinch” and 2-years of extra phone bills — Jef Han of New York University did a TEDTalk on mulitouch available for view or download (ed. note: TED=Technology, Entertainment & Design shall save us, Talk=here’s how). That talk shows and explains most, but not all, of the demos you can see in another video on the NYU project homepage, where you can learn more about the technology itself. (I like the photo lightbox best, though the lavalamp is cool too.)

I’m currently back to using two monitors, with one mostly for buddy lists and task logs. It’s a handy arrangement, although since the screens are about two feet apart and at different heights I doubt I’m getting full use out of the extra 17″ patch of real-estate. The Mac seems to deal with additional monitors well. Except for iCal notifications popping up right between the two monitors (maybe that was intentional, but I would have preferred one on each screen instead) things seem to be designed with their usual flair.

But here’s where I hope they go the extra mile some day: system sounds directed to the correct monitor. I’m a fan of sending audio to a stereo system (via Airport and sometimes USB audio) and Mac OS X already provides an good way to keep most system blips and whistles coming out of my iMac. Why not extend that so I can route system output from apps on the second monitor to a second audio device, or event the line-out on the back. Then when someone IMs me in a window on the second display I’ll hear it on my left, and won’t spend time scanning my 24″ screen for new text.

Ok, I’ll admit I don’t know much about this, so I don’t entirely know how critical this is, but apparently SHA-1 has been cracked:

• The Epoch Times | Chinese Professor Cracks Fifth Data Encryption Algorithm
• Slashdot has some interesting comments regarding the reliability of The Epoch Times, the fact that this happened 2 years ago, that SHA-1 isn’t in itself an encryption scheme, and that problems with SHA-1 were already known: Chinese Prof Cracks SHA-1 Data Encryption Scheme
• Wikipedia has some more information about SHA, including mention that MD5 and SHA-1 are reportedly compromised: SHA hash functions

Blogged with Flock

You’ve probably heard the story about old tube-powered mainframe computers being susceptible to bug encounters of the insect kind. What you may not know:

• The word “bug” was used to describe glitches in machines before any mainframe incident(s) occurred, according to the software bug article on Wikipedia.
• The first actual bug found (actually Lepidoptera rather than Hemiptera) has been preserved in the Smithsonian’s American History museum, according to an interesting bug list from Ask Tog.

For any of you who like statistics about the kind of computer hardware and OS people are using, here are some statistics from people who use Adium and software from The Omni Group:

Omni Software Update Statistics

Adium – Sparkle+ Information

Blogged with Flock

While searching for info on how the “ISA Reference” item came to be in my application services menu, I came across a fantastic post on a blog which just got added to the sidebar: Generating Machine Code at Runtime. Esentially, you store machine code in an array (anyone remember POKE in the good old days?) and call the pointer as a function. I was stunned, and then shamed. What else is a function pointer if not a pointer to machine code in memory?

For emergency (i.e. 911) purposes, cell phones are required to be trackable within 50-100 meters. Some phones use GPS to meet this requirement. Will the iPhone? And will it be enabled “client-side”?

Apple, Inc. has put their patents to good use, reviving the Newton MessagePad as a Cocoafied iPod.
Update: Adriano of Notwen is excited.

The default title of this post reminded me of a 24 line piece of code that can be executed in any of five different popular programming languages, producing the usual greeting in each. That code is written by Amit Singh, who is well-known for explanations of interesting inner workings of *nix, including OS X.