bsowell

Hallelujah! Gmail Gets IMAP support. Now it’s possible to use a native email client and keep everything synchronized. It’s nice that this came just in time for Leopard and its new Mail features.

And the IT worker has to know in their bones that if they make a mistake, things can go horribly wrong. Tension and cynicism are constant companions, along with camaraderie and competitiveness. It’s a lot like being a spy, or necromancer. You don’t get out much, and when you do it’s usually at night.

–Ken MacLeod, from the introduction to The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Real hackers — computer programmers in the sense that the word was coined at MIT in the 1960s — are meticulous, intelligent, mathematically and linguistically inclined obsessives. Far from diving in and out of your bank account details, they’re more likely to spend months working on a mathematical model of an abstraction that only another hacker would understand, or realise was an elaborate intellectual joke.  

–Charles Stross, from the afterward to The Atrocity Archives

Texify is a webapp that lets you typeset LaTeX and get back the corresponding image. It’s based on mimeTeX, which is also used in a number of plugins for blogs and wikis (via MeFi).

I was sorry to hear that NBC’s shows will no longer be sold on iTunes. I regularly bought Heroes last season, but it sounds like NBC was making unreasonable demands. There’s no way I would spend $4.99 on one episode of television.

Science Friday has a podcast up on nanotechnology. Nanotech is often used in the media as a sort of science-fiction deus ex machina, so it’s good to hear a more scientific take (via Cornell).