Intriguing: Airlock allows your Mac to lock itself, plain and simple. Using your iPhone or iPod Touch, Bluetooth, and a smidgen of pixie dust, Airlock determines whether you’re near your computer.

If, like me, you work in the software world, you will like the following from Joel Spolsky’s article on software engineering and schedules at Inc.com: Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them. Read more

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror is the most prolific of the programmer bloggers that I read on a regular basis. His content is hit or miss but today’s article, Everything’s Fast For Small n, is worth it for this little animated sorting algorithm comparison:

From the GNU Coding Standards: If you do support Windows, please do not abbreviate it as “win”. In hacker terminology, calling something a “win” is a form of praise. You’re free to praise Microsoft Windows on your own if you want, but please don’t do this in GNU packages. Instead of abbreviating “Windows” to “un” [sic], you can write it in full or abbreviate it to “woe” or “w”. On another note, I need to stop suffixing all of my post titles with “Of The Day. Read more

At work I’m doing some old school C programming, which made me think of the OS class I took at BU. Just for shits and giggles I looked up the man page for longjmp(). The best part of the page, by far, is the NOTES section: longjmp() and siglongjmp() make programs hard to understand and maintain. If possible an alternative should be used. Understatement of the millennium (and the last millennium too). Read more

There are a couple of cool new technology releases today: Google Gears is a browser extension providing a set of Javascript APIs for offline web applications. Review Board is a web based code review application from the folks at VMWare. No CVS support (yet), sadly.

I’ve been sitting on this for a little while, but Ankit Solanki wrote an Emacs Markdown mode, which includes syntax highlighting, a while back. He even used my buffer preview function!

I got an email today from Amazon Web Services saying that the S3 (Simple Storage Service) prices will change on June first. Now S3 will be even cheaper: Storage $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used Data Transfer $0.10 per GB – all data uploaded $0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded $0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded $0.13 per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB Read more

I just upgraded to version 1.99 of Capistrano, the remote deployment tool most commonly used for Rails projects. This is a prerelease of Capistrano 2.0 and installed easily with the following commands: sudo gem install highline sudo gem install -s http://gems.rubyonrails.com capistrano Highline is a new (at least on my machine) dependency for Capistrano and needs to be installed separately because it isn’t present in the gems.rubyonrails.org repository. Following the upgrade instructions I ran capify . Read more

Now, this is interesting.