The keyboard on my laptop has been failing for the past year or two. Some crucial keys (namely, the End and Down Arrow keys) don't work, which isn't a big deal for chatting and email, but is quite an impediment for most programming work. At home, I almost always use my laptop in its docking station connected to my real keyboard and screen, so the faulty laptop keyboard has never been a problem. On my recent trip to Clemson, though, I found myself using it quite a bit, and the lack of a Down Arrow key really started to be a problem. One night I got on the phone and called Dell and ordered a replacement keyboard, along with a complete set of replacement screws (I'm missing a few on the bottom of the laptop). They said it'd take a week to ship, which meant it'd show up in Covington right around the same time that I'd be returning.

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Hey, you remember how I bought a Maxtor 250GB SATA hard drive back around June 2004, and then it failed in June 2005, one week before the warranty expired? I got it replaced and posted about how happy I was with Maxtor for their service, in spite of the fact that their drive died in less than a year.

I think I might revise my opinion. That replacement drive just died again, only ten months after replacement. And this time, the three-month warranty they gave me on the new drive has long since expired, so I'm out of luck. Awesome.

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Today I discovered the slides for an interesting talk given back in 1997 by Nathan Myhrvold (CTO of Microsoft at the time) titled "The Next Fifty Years of Software". He makes some intriguing assertions, such as "Nathan's First Law of Software:" Software is a gas, that expands to fill its container. This in turn drives hardware development, and is what makes Moore's Law possible.

The part I really liked, though, was where he starts talking about the storage requirements of the human genome, etc. For example, the stuff that makes you genetically unique fits on a 3.5" floppy disk.

From there he proceeds to discuss the "ultimate computer," the human brain. He brings up something I've pondered as well: once computers reach a complexity comparable to the human brain, will it even be possible to program them directly as we do modern computers? Or will we have to devote time to teaching them, like we do with people? As he says, human takes 20 years to boot up.

I just discovered MIT's OpenCourseWare, which appears to be a repository of the course materials for most or all of MIT's courses, available for free and without registration on the web. I went straight to the Computer Science section and immediately found two courses on Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2002, Spring 2003). They actually appear to be the same course, but taught by two different teachers, and the materials seem pretty different. It will probably be interesting to go through both of them.

This website might be a godsend, since I tend to be pretty good at learning things on my own. Of course it's very helpful to have a knowledgeable professor to explain it and to ask questions of, but I can certainly pick up most of it from the course material alone. It's like it was made specifically for people like me — too lazy do do well enough in school to get into MIT, but willing to do a little extra work to learn some of the stuff anyway :)

Update: Actually, I hadn't seen the XTutor section for each course, which seems to be a full set of recorded audio lectures by the professors, along with matching lecture slides, full transcripts, and lecture handouts. There are also weekly online interactive homework problems. In other words, that's pretty damn close to what I would get by taking the course in person. Now I'm even more excited.

This article on Web Browser Forensics (Part 1, Part 2) describes some of the tools and methods we use when investigating a suspected intrusion. I thought some of you might find it interesting/creepy to see how much information can be retrieved from the digital wake your web browser creates as you browse. Some of it is kind of technical, but if you're not interested in the details you can skim through part 1 and look at the screenshots of the various tools and get the gist of what's possible. Example: a cached Hotmail page.

The information described in the article is retrieved from the web browser's cache and history files. Internet Explorer ostensibly lets the user erase their cache and history, but it's interesting to note that the Content.IE5/index.dat and History.IE5/index.dat files — which contain the listing of visited URLs — are not erased when this occurs. In other words, IE will delete the cached content itself but preserves the list of URLs a user has visited. These files are locked by the operating system on startup, so they can't even be deleted manually under normal conditions. To remove them, you have to reboot your computer into command prompt mode and delete them from there. This "feature" has proved useful to us but not as beneficial for the users we've investigated.

In the past few years, LEDs have become more efficient and thus gradually transformed from indicators to illuminators. It’s nice that flashlights and stoplights and taillights can be made with low-power-consumption LEDs, but it seems like the change is universal and there is now no such thing as low power LEDs anymore. Last night was the first time in a long time that I went to sleep in the dark, which allowed me to discover that the amber LED on the front of my computer is bright enough to illuminate the room.

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