George even has a page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

I’m tempted to get a PlayStation 3 and hack it just to make a statement. Sony, this is not how you should treat customers. I was considering buying a Vaio because they’re some of the best laptops I’ve seen but I definitely changed my plans!

echo 128 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_default_ttl

The road to this hack is quite easy, anyway:

1. install OpenBSD in a virtual machine;
2. look hard at /etc/pf.os and look for possible useful differences;
3. see that Linux uses a TTL of 64 while Windows XP uses 128;
4. profit!

Item 1 was needed because I couldn’t find a copy of /etc/pf.os quickly, so I figured that it’d take less to just install an OpenBSD.

… The temporary file is created in the root directory. …

Say what?

No, really… WHAT?!?!?

Let’s put aside for a second the fact that any sensible administrator will never, ever allow write access to the root directory of a network volume. AFAIK, the root of the C: drive is read-only on Windows XP if you don’t have administrative rights, so this would break.

You guessed it, today I got one too much of such “the server doesn’t work” complaints.

If you’re using KDE like I do, some good soul already set up all the pieces for you: open the “Advanced Background Settings” window, click on “Use the following program for drawing the background:” and select “xplanet” from the list. You’ll probably want to tweak the options and maybe even the Xplanet configuration file. This is the command line I’m using:

xplanet -config desktop -latitude 30 -longitude 11 -radius 35 -glare 0.001 -base_magnitude 0 -background ~/pics/noao/veil_1280x1024_darkened.jpg -geometry %xx%y -num_times 1 -output %f.jpg && mv %f.jpg %f

I’m setting the Sun glare to 0.001 because the Sun passes just above the top of the picture at night and the glare would turn the background into a pale yellow splotch.

I’m setting the base magnitude to 0 because the background picture already provides all the stars I want. I scaled the background image to the right size and darkened it a little bit to get rid of the nebula’s faint diffuse glow and to reduce the amount of stars.

Here’s the important part of the configuration file:

[default]
max_radius_for_label=0 # never draw labels

[sun]
shade=100 # No night side!

[earth]
magnify=40

[moon]
magnify=40

The bodies are enlarged 40 times, otherwise you wouldn’t see the Earth and Moon in the same image very often.

Of course you’ll want to add color maps, a specular map and a bump map. For the image above I used maps from James Hastings-Trew’s Planetary Pixel Emporium. Note that I’m not using a bump map on the Moon because it would add too much detail.

“Lime del Zip del socio con ZipMan?”

It’s so completely meaningless that it took me a few seconds to realize what it meant, then I almost fell on the floor laughing. I don’t know if “to file” in English is used in the sense of working on an object with a file (the tool, not the computer abstraction), but if that’s the case, the back-translation to English could be (with some interpretation, as the original is incorrect to start with):

“File the Zip of the associate with ZipMan?”

I’m sure none of my associates would like me to apply a file to their zips.

The traslation is so completely wrong that it was probably made with an automated tool and certainly not checked by someone who speaks Italian. The original English sentence must have been something like:

“Associate Zip files with ZipMan?”

and the correct Italian translation would be:

“Associare i file Zip con ZipMan?”

There is an important lesson to be learned here:

• Translations should always be made by someone whose native language is the destination language: at least they will be grammatically and syntactically correct.

In the end, ZipMan didn’t work at all on the file I was trying to open, so I installed s60zip and used that. It is supposed to asociate itself with zip files too, but it didn’t. Maybe it’s because I installed it before removing ZipMan. But at least it didn’t make me laugh.

Of course I plan to install Debian GNU/Linux on at least one of them. In fact, I think I’ll put all the memory and both hard drives into one workstation and keep the other for parts.