• I regret to report that Robert Bruce Thompson has left us, at age 64, of heart problems. He's best-known for his books PC Hardware in a Nutshell and Building the Perfect PC, but he's also written several books on astronomy ( Read more... )

I wrote this three weeks ago and then forgot to take the file to Chicago, duhh. I assume everybody's seen the film by now, but I'm not sure what else to do with the review but post it.


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• I meant to post this back in May but the item went into a notefile while I was traveling and got misplaced: Larry O'Brien did a very nice detailed comparative review of my Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition and Randy Hyde's Art of Assembly Language, Second Edition over at SDTimes. Larry understands better than most people that there are ( Read more... )

• Everyone's talking about a recent Copyright Office ruling that jailbreaking of smartphones is no longer illegal, but few have mentioned that several other significant exceptions to the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions have been issued in the same ruling. Most interesting to me are limitations on ebook DRM where they prevent audio interpretation ( Read more... )

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• It happens all the time, but it's rare that we actually watch it happen: a comet falling into the Sun. (It's unclear to me what the brief tiny streaks are, since SOHO is a spacecraft and the image was not taken through Earth's atmosphere, where meteors would look like that. Meteors in the solar atmosphere?)
• The SOHO spacecraft may also be shedding ( Read more... )

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• The pseudobachelor life does not become me, but I'm working on it. So far, the heuristics seem to be: Stay in touch (our cell phones are being given a workout), stay busy, and socialize whenever possible. I've also found that I must get out of the house at least once ( Read more... )