Some things you do for the money. Like keeping a job. Most people that I know have a very strong likeness for eating and being warm.
Other things you do for the experience. Like bungee jumping into the Grand Canyon. You will pay good money to put yourself at risk just so that you can say you’ve done it.
Well, the second category is where make your own MP3 player firmly sits. When you can but a cheap MP3 player these days for under $50, many people would say that you are crazy to dish out $115 for a pile of parts that you still need to put together and get working.
The kit is and open source kit from Make Magazine called the Daisy. Of course, if you do not want to pay for the kit and you can source the parts by yourself, you can build everything from information at the designer’s website.
I think that this would be a great learning experience, especially when my soldering skills are pretty limited at this point. I also like the fact that you can download the code that runs the MP3 player and then modify it to work the way you want it to work. The ability to fine tune something to my specifications has always been a big plus.
I don’t know if I will be doing anything with this in the near future but I will be definitely keeping it in the back of my mind.
I have previously written about some of the interesting USB mods that people have come up with in an attempt to personalize their USB drives. But, when Guido Ooms of Oooms Design Studio talks about USB sticks, he is talking a bit more literal.
According to the New York Timesarticle, Ooms first got the idea when he was trying to think of a way to get computer systems to look less like science fiction. He believes that:
The computer stuff that is coming out right now, it is all plastic and symmetrical and aerodynamic in shape, like “Star Trek” stuff! I think there’s no reason for that, really, other than that it looks like it works properly.
And it appears that he’s not the only one. He has sold over 3,000 sticks and is looking at potentially outsourcing production.
Personally, I really don’t care what my USB drives look like. It just has to work. But, then again, the color of my car is also not a significant factor for me either. So, what do you think?
Is this a good idea?
Would you buy one?
What do you think should be made into a USB drive?
I was once talking with a friend of mine about wireless networking and I indicated that my company had no plans to deploy it within the company. He looked me square in the eye and said a sentence that chilled me to the bone:
“Either prepare to deploy this technology for your company’s employees or they will deploy it for you!”
The truth of the matter is that he is right, and not just about wireless networking. There is a history of technologies gaining popularity out side the enterprise and then creeping into the corporation. A good example is e-mail.
This is why it is so important to not only know and understand new technology but be in control of it in your enterprise. Arguably, the most critical component to this is the sandbox. According to Wikipedia, a sandbox is:
… a testing (or virtual) environment that isolates untested code changes and outright experimentation from the production environment or repository, in the context of software development including web development and revision control, and by extension in web-based editing environments including wikis.
Nemertes Research has written an excellent article entitled Build an Open Source and Web 2.0 Sandbox. It talks about the importance of the sandbox as part of your testing and control management process along with some important considerations when setting up a sandbox.
I believe that it is important for every company, regardless of how small it is, to have access to a sandbox. This can be something as small as an old desktop no longer in use or as large as an entire server room running several virtual servers. Regardless of the size, make sure that you are segregating the sanctioned from the unsanctioned to protect your company’s IT assets.
In the past number of years, the term “hacker” has been spun by the media to mean someone who illegally breaks into computer systems for selfish gain or needless destruction. They are cold and ruthless people who think of no one but themselves. So, it usually shocks people when I tell them that I consider myself to be a hacker.
When I talk about being a hacker, I am referring to the original usage of the term. I recently found an excellent article entitled How To Become A Hacker by Eric Steven Raymond which talks about the true spirit of being a hacker.
How To Become A Hacker addresses some of the fundamental misconceptions about hackers. For example, there is a belief that hackers are misfits who are socially inept. Raymond writes:
Contrary to popular myth, you don’t have to be a nerd to be a hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers are in fact nerds. Being something a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking.
For this reason, many hackers have adopted the label ‘geek’ as a badge of pride — it’s a way of declaring their independence from normal social expectations (as well as a fondness for other things like science fiction and strategy games that often go with being a hacker). The term ‘nerd’ used to be used this way back in the 1990s, back when ‘nerd’ was a mild pejorative and ‘geek’ a rather harsher one; sometime after 2000 they switched places, at least in U.S. popular culture, and there is now even a significant geek-pride culture among people who aren’t techies.
If you can manage to concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still have a life, that’s fine. This is a lot easier today than it was when I was a newbie in the 1970s; mainstream culture is much friendlier to techno-nerds now. There are even growing numbers of people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material.
If you’re attracted to hacking because you don’t have a life, that’s OK too — at least you won’t have trouble concentrating. Maybe you’ll get a life later on.
Another myth is that hackers are all math wizards. Raymond disagrees.
Hacking uses very little formal mathematics or arithmetic. In particular, you won’t usually need trigonometry, calculus or analysis (there are exceptions to this in a handful of specific application areas like 3-D computer graphics). Knowing some formal logic and Boolean algebra is good. Some grounding in finite mathematics (including finite-set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory) can be helpful.
Much more importantly: you need to be able to think logically and follow chains of exact reasoning, the way mathematicians do. While the content of most mathematics won’t help you, you will need the discipline and intelligence to handle mathematics. If you lack the intelligence, there is little hope for you as a hacker; if you lack the discipline, you’d better grow it.
When Raymond is asked by people to help them break into systems, he responds as a true hacker would:
Anyone who can still ask such a question after reading this FAQ is too stupid to be educable even if I had the time for tutoring. Any emailed requests of this kind that I get will be ignored or answered with extreme rudeness.
These people Raymond correctly identifies as crackers:
There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren’t. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.
The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.
I urge you to spend some time education yourself in the true culture of hacking. It can be a very rewarding and satisfying lifestyle.
Network administrators spend all kinds of money and effort keeping their systems secure for all sorts of online nasties. Yet, they may have a gaping security hole sitting right under their noses and not even be aware of it.
I am referring to USB storage devices that come and go on the network without a second thought. Yet, they can bring viruses, spyware, trojans, etc. into the network and carry important corporate secrets out of the network.
In Reducing the USB Threat, I look at the risks that USB storage devices pose to networks and computer systems along with some practical solutions to issues such as podslurping and lost USB drives.
Some things you do for the money. Like keeping a job. Most people that I know have a very strong likeness for eating and being warm.
I have previously written about some of the interesting 
I was once talking with a friend of mine about wireless networking and I indicated that my company had no plans to deploy it within the company. He looked me square in the eye and said a sentence that chilled me to the bone:
In the past number of years, the term “hacker” has been spun by the media to mean someone who illegally breaks into computer systems for selfish gain or needless destruction. They are cold and ruthless people who think of no one but themselves. So, it usually shocks people when I tell them that I consider myself to be a hacker.