It's been two months with my 12 inch powerbook and I'm still quite pleased with it. Unlike my AMD based machines which, by their nature, are confined to a room upstairs, the Powerbook stays plugged in in our living room. It's been greatbeing able to have it on while we watch tv to quickly check email or chat with family and friends on AIM.

This is primarily for my father-in-law, a list of links to useful and free software for windows PCs:

I've had my PowerBook G4 12-inch lapop for two weeks now. Here are some of my experiences so far with it. I hope this doesn't come across as any sort of advertisement or rabid fanaticism. Up until now I've been a PC guy and my desktop machine is an Athlon based self-built PC running Debian Linux.

I finally broke down and bought myself a 12 inch Apple Powerbook laptop. I'm still in the honeymoon phase of my purchase so don't expect this to be an entirely rational review of it. So far, I'm pretty impressed by how easy it was to get it setup, particularly the networking aspects of it. I was pretty scarred by networking in the windows world and impressed by how much easier it was on a linux box. It was equally as simple on the Powerbook, especially hooking up to a wireless network. At the office it found our wireless setup and used dhcp to get its settings without any hassle.

A Hilarious letter from the comuter industry to the entertainment industry: We lied to you

Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don't treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less

HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future - Blog Maverick - www.blogmaverick.com:

From: SANS - Internet Storm Center - Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System - Current Infosec News and Analysis, a report that finds that an unpatched Windows XP box has on average 20 minutes before being infected by a port-scanning worm. They have an in-depth pdf showing how to connect a brand new Windows XP box to a Network which details all the steps you need to go through to secure the out-of-the-box network settings before you connect to Windows Update.

One of my good friends, eventually to be known as Doctor Kuhl when he gets his Ph. D. from U. of Maryland, is in the market for a new laptop. He called me on Sunday to get my advice and I was a bit surprised in that he was already predisposed to getting an Apple Powerbook. Surprised because that's what I was going to recommend to him as well. From smarter co-workers, I've gotten the distinct impression that Mac's just work and there's less of the struggle-with-hardware that comes with PC's (both Windows and Linux).

Lemmings was one of those addictive puzzle games available for the PC when I was in high school. The levels required you to use your variously skilled lemmings to lead them safely to the exit. However, if the level really had you stumped or you messed up, you enjoyed the gulty pleasure of commanding them to blow themselves up en masse and watching the fireworks. Well, you can enojoy Lemmings in your browser now!

Dan Willis writes Are Useful Requirements Just A Fairy Tale? (and why an IA should care). The article resonates with a lot of themes that we programmers have been dealing with at work over the last year. Sandy has mostly lead the charge to get more complete requirements written early in the process.