Monthly Archives: March 2007

The Power of Morse

Watching BBC correspondents and analysts poring over footage of the British sailors being ‘interviewed’ by their captors on Iranian television reminds me, as it must others, of the Vietnam war, and how captured American pilots were wheeled out for propaganda purposes. What has this got to do with technology? Well, if you recall, one Jeremiah… Read More »

Goertzel, Rugby and the Sweet-talking Scam

The South China Morning Post reports (I’ve got the hard copy here; everything there is behind a subscription wall, so no full link I’m afraid) of a clever scam where the bad guys steal just enough stuff — cards + identity — from a victim to be able to social engineer their way into trust,… Read More »

Phones Aren’t About Telephony

Skype is a powerful tool because it’s found its way into the hands of people who need it most — ordinary folk. Now it and the companies that make devices to use Skype on need to understand that it’s not about telephony anymore, if it ever was. It’s about two or more people sharing each… Read More »

Sudoku’s Secret: Open Source Collaboration

Great piece in the NYT/IHT on the company behind Sudoku and similar games. Their approach — no trademarking, harnessing users to help develop and perfect games — all sounds very Open Source: clipped from www.iht.com Nikoli’s secret, Kaji said, lay in a kind of democratization of puzzle invention. The company itself does not actually create… Read More »

How to Convert Word 2007 Docs for Macs

A few readers have asked how to convert Word documents created in the new Microsoft Open Office XML Format with the docx extension so they can read them on a Mac. The answer: awkwardly. Windows users have a converter they can download. The Microsoft Mac team promised something similar back in December and yet haven’t,… Read More »