Chad's News

Apple has donated the MacPaint source code to the Computer History Museum. As with so many other components of the original Macintosh, MacPaint was an innovative and groundbreaking piece of software. The source code has even been studied by software engineers as an example of how to properly write code. I also find it interesting is that it’s so small—a mere 5822 lines of Pascal and 3583 lines of assembler. For modern programmers, that’s just a drop in the bucket.

Link: http://www.businessweek.com/…
(via TechRepublic)

There are advantages to using cloud computing services such as Google Docs, but there are also some definite disadvantages. Chief among these are the potential loss of access to your data, and getting what you pay for.

Link: http://it.slashdot.org/…

Airlines have had e-tickets for some time now, but it’s still necessary to get a printed boarding pass. Well, even that is on the way out. My friend Josh sent this screen print of his iPhone. It’s a “mobile boarding pass,” and the airline accepts it from the phone display.

Lifehacker performed some non-scientific speed tests on the latest versions of popular browsers. As expected, Google Chrome completely destroyed the others in the JavaScript category. This is why I use Chrome for Facebook—Firefox just can’t handle it on my underpowered machine. The only reason I stay with Firefox is because of its wide variety of extensions. Note that I was a bit surprised to see that Apple’s Safari also had very fast JavaScript processing.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Boy this takes me back. The title for the linked article is a bit inaccurate, since some of the products did actually die. And for several of them, only the naming rights have survived.

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/…
(via digg)

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has dropped to a 68% market share, while Mozilla’s Firefox is at 21% and Apple’s Safari is at 8%. In this case, at least, competition leads to innovation, which is good for the user.

Link: http://www.tgdaily.com/…
(via digg)

The linked article performs various speed tests on four different browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. There wasn’t really a clear winner, but Internet Explorer was definitely the loser.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Adobe has posted a fairly important update to its Flash player. You can download it from this link. (I’m not totally sure about this, but it appears that Firefox users on Microsoft Windows may need to install it twice: once under Firefox and once under Internet Explorer.)

Link: http://www.computerworld.com/…

The linked article gives a good explanation of how JavaScript negatively affects one’s web browsing experience. I know that for me, heavily scripted sites such as digg.com significantly slow down my computer. Not only do they prevent the browser from multitasking effectively, but they peg my CPU at 100%. (Note: the WebKit product discussed in the article is part of Apple’s Safari browser.)

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

This Lifehacker poll provides a nice list of free Windows firewalls and their relative popularity. I used ZoneAlarm for a while but gave up on it because it didn’t allow me to unblock specific incoming ports. (Or at least, I couldn’t figure out how to unblock them.)

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file transfer protocol that was used early on to distribute Linux kernel builds. It’s great for quickly distributing large files when you don’t have much server bandwidth. In recent years, however, the protocol has become synonymous with illegal file-sharing of movies and music. So it’s really good to see BitTorrent being used as it was originally intended—in the linked article a Dutch university uses BitTorrent to push Windows updates out to 6500 PCs. Where they originally needed 22 servers and 4 days to distribute the updates, now they only need 2 servers and less than 4 hours. BitTorrent has saved them a lot of time and money.

Link: http://torrentfreak.com/…
(via Ars Technica)

I did instant messaging “back in the day” with ICQ, but it’s only in the past year or so that I got serious about it. And what a mess! Because the people I chat with are on different networks, I had three IM clients running at the same time. But there is a solution. Pidgin is a free, multi-platform IM client that can simultaneously connect to 16 different IM networks, including Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and, yes, ICQ.

Link: http://www.pidgin.im/…