Sam’s random musings

X Prize Launch At Mojave Spaceport:

knovis writes “The Ansari X Prize is being attempted at this moment: 9:30am EST. Bert Rutan and Paul Allen’s Scaled Composites is preparing to make the first of 2 launches necessary. For the uninitiated, the X-Prize is a $10M prize available to the first entirely privately funded organization that creates a vehicle that travels to 100km above the earth’s surface (low earth orbit) twice within 2 weeks. IIRC, SpaceShipOne is planning 3 flights for that 2 week period, for safety. Best of luck to Private Spaceflight. Did anyone else notice that Virgin Galactic has just been launched?” Project Zen writes “MSNBC has an article about how the seats won’t be filled with people but mementos of the crew.” Several readers sent links to CNN’s story on the flight, and space.com’s continuing coverage, including by webcam; NASA TV also has an eye on the launch. (Watch this space for updates.)

(Via Slashdot.)

Melvill to fly SpaceShipOne:

Mike Melvill, the pilot who flew SpaceShipOne on its historic suborbital spaceflight in June, will…

(Via spacetoday.net.)

SpaceShipOne bids for X-Prize:

First flight today

(Via The Register.)

mac.com email:

Is it just me, or is the mac.com email down?

i have been having probles sending certainly.

(Via Adam Curry.)

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(Via Lockergnome Bytes.)

For Whatever Reasons:

USA Today technology columnist Kevin Maney complained last week about having been hit hard by a Windows virus on his home computer:

…

Anger about this stuff is spreading as fast as the viruses. At our end-of-summer block party, I mentioned to a group of neighbors that a virus had crashed our PC. Instantly, every one of them launched into stories about unstoppable blitzes of adware (which throws pop-up ads on your screen, or worse) and spyware (which can find stuff on your PC and send it somewhere) and computers brought down by viruses

The message I get is that people are fed up with the vulnerability of Windows. They are increasingly willing to consider other options. And, for whatever reasons, Apple Computer’s Macintosh and Linux-based computers hardly get infected or invaded at all.

“For whatever reasons” is the key point I tried to make in “Broken Windows” back in June. The reasons why are subject to argument. But you can’t argue about the net effect: Windows users, especially with their home computers, are plagued by insidious malware; everyone else is not.

Read the rest of this post and the Broken Windows from june

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Analyzing Amavis logs:

Turn your spam into colorful art!Use amavis-stats and rrdtool to chart out your spam/ham/virus history from your mail logs.

(Via AFP548 Full Feed.)

Terminal.app’s “Secure Keyboard Entry”:

There was a new command added to 10.3’s version of Terminal.app: File -> “Secure Keyboard Entry”.

So, what does this command do? Why should I enable it? Don’t I want my keyboard entry to be secure all the time?

The only documentation I can find comes from Terminal.app’s own Help entry:

(Via rentzsch.com: Tales from the Red Shed.)