I’ve added thoughts on Spark Large from Marching Band and Canopy Glow from Anathallo on the music blog (http://wpa-music.blogspot.com/). I’ve thought about merging it in here, but I’ll keep them separate for the time being. I’m not so sure how well the audiences will mix.

Quote from Governor Parkinson to the Kansas Board of Regents:

“It’s far more important to me that we have a university academically in the top 20 than we have a basketball or football team in the top 20,” he said at the regents’ annual working retreat meeting.

Unfortunately he won't run for reelection...

Forwarded by my friends at Galos (http://www.galois.com), here is a nice blog entry on various kinds of mitigations for common operating systems attacks. I was familiar with several of them (stack canaries, hardware productions and address space layout randomization), but this article does a great job of outlining these techniques in just a page or two.

In the article you’ll also find a link to an article entitled Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit (http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html) that is a nice view from the “other side”. Lots of nifty code in there with significant detail on how stack-based attacks are perpetrated. Of course I don’t condone this kind of thing, but you have to know what the bad guys are doing if you’re going to stop them.

Another birthday in the news, PowerPoint is 25 years old (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8207849.stm). I’m not so sure how happy I am with this one, although one of the developers is supposed to be a KU alum. Having been numbed by crappy presentations over the years, I have always wondered if PowerPoint is the root problem, or just the tool of choice. It’s now ubiquitous and like Word, there’s almost no way to function in the professional community without a copy of it on your PC or Mac.

Wow. Just opened my copy of Mother Jones magazine to find the MoJo Mini College Guide of 10 schools that will “blow your mind, not your budget.” My first thought was, KU should definitely be there. Bingo! There we are. I’ll post a link when the list goes online, for now, you’ll have to head out to your favorite bookstore and check out the hard copy.

Update: Here’s the link to the MoJo rankings: http://www.motherjones.com/toc/2009/09

It was just pointed out to me that today is the 28th anniversary of the IBM PC. Wow. Less than 30 years.

A friend just suggested that I google for recursion. Try it and see if you get it.

Okay, let's start with something simple and fun...

This is by far my favorite history of programming languages. Definitely fun and more accurate than you might want to admit...