The Original Macintosh vs. Boot Sector Viruses

My discussion of the absence of boot sector viruses from the original Macintosh gets good coverage today over at Roughly Drafted. Since the Mac community is currently celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Mac's introduction, the timing is even apropos.

For those not familiar with my history in the Macintosh anti-virus world, I wrote the Gatekeeper anti-virus system.

True story: As I was working up to the first release of Gatekeeper, I interviewed with Apple for a job. At that time, working at Apple looked to me like the holy grail of jobs, so I went into the interview nervous as hell, but with high hopes. In order to demonstrate the various Mac software that I had developed, I brought along a hard disk, and booted one of their Macs from it. When the Gatekeeper icon appeared on the startup screen, nobody recognized it, so they asked what it was and I explained that it was a generic anti-virus system I was developing that could defeat viruses without any prior knowledge of them, because it watched the behavior of software for actions likely to be unique to viruses, and prevented those behaviors from successfully completing. I was laughed at, and was not offered the job.

The nitwits at Apple notwithstanding, Gatekeeper did work. It wasn't a perfect solution (of course), but it did, among other things, result in the first detection of at least one, and possibly several, viruses. (After 15+ years, I'm a bit vague on the specifics.) And, in the last several years, it has been dusted-off and cited as prior art in order to invalidate at least one software patent.

Nest Box Preparations

To prepare the screech owl nest box for the possibility of nesting by my local screech owls, as of this evening, I've now evicted various numbers of squirrels from the box three times, have opened-up and cleaned the camera compartments, and have repaired a broken wire from the entryway sensor. So, the box is being kept available to, and ready for, the owls, should a pair choose to claim it this year.

Unfortunately, I still haven't setup the A-to-D converter board I bought to replace the one that burned-out a few years ago, so I have no data on whether, or not, the box is being visited. Hopefully, I'll work-up the energy to do that soon. And this time, I really must use an optoisolator in the circuit.

Otherwise, the only remaining problem with the setup is a semi-persistent humming noise on the audio circuit. It has bedeviled me ever since I put a microphone in the box. I assume that it's a grounding issue, but I've grounded everything I can think of to the common household ground and the problem still occurs. The intermittency of the problem makes trial-and-error resolution especially difficult, although I've pretty much run out of ideas, anyway. Needless to say, I'm open to suggestions from anyone with relevant experience.

Black Zones

NASA's Wayne Hale offers a fascinating discussion of the "black zones" in crewed spaceflight - the periods during flight when saving the crew from an emergency is impossible, and how the various types of vehicles we've flown over the years compare. (The original blog postings can be found at NASA Blogs, but SpaceRef has performed a useful service by collecting the multiple segments of the "Black Zones" piece into a single page.)

Mandelbrot Fractals

I recently returned to my explorations of the Mandelbrot fractals, using my custom, multi-processor implementation of the classic algorithm. One rude surprise: Java's Bicubic interpolation, which my code had counted-on for antialiasing the images, has spontaneously ceased to work somewhere in the couple of years since I last went diving in Dr. Mandelbrot's seas. One custom down-sampler later, and I'm back in business, but still wondering what happened to the Bicubic interpolation support. (Some Google searches confirm the issue, but don't explain why it ever worked, or how to get it working again.)

Anyway, some of these images are new, while some are higher-resolution renderings of images I'd previously produced. All use 16:1 antialiasing for clarity. Unfortunately, Blogger has scaled-down the images in accordance with its internal size limits. To see these, and other Mandelbrot images, at full resolution, visit my Mandelbrot fractals page.

The image above had to be computed to a depth of 2.5 million iterations. At lesser depths, the structure appears to be a part of the Mandelbrot set. How many other apparent parts of the set would turn-out not to be, if they were examined deeply enough?

Wow

Barack Obama will be President of the United States of America. An eight year nightmare is ending, and what an ending. It'll take a while to fully sink in for me.... We have a staggering mess to cleanup, but now the process can begin. At long last. Wow.

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And just to anticipate a question: No, I don't trust electronic voting machines one iota more now than I did before the candidate I supported won, and neither should you.

One Down, Eight to Go

My show of photographs over at the New World Deli & Café continues, basically because the owners like the look of my work on their walls. Which suits me fine. The longer it's up, the more time there is for confidence in the economy to grow to the point that some people can think about spending serious money on art again. And, wandering in on Saturday for a meal and a chance to spend a few hours reading a good book (The Eternal Frontier by Tim Flannery), what to my wondering eyes should appear but a "SOLD" sign on one of the canvases. Specifically, "Lake, Turtle, Sunset", artist's proof no. 1. It was purchased by the Café's owners. Here's wishing them many years of enjoyment from it.

I'm still operating at a significant loss on this show (no surprise), but it's nice to sell a piece, regardless.

Explosions at the U.T. Tower

I was just startled from my work by a running volley of explosions coming from south of the U.T. Austin Tower, where I work. I had no idea what they were, but they were coming fast and furious, echoing off of neighboring buildings and making themselves very clearly heard from my north facing office on the 25th floor. I went to the south-facing windows in our elevator lobby / conference room to find that the brilliant explosions were occurring directly outside of our windows. If I'd opened one of the windows (it's an old building, so we do have windows that open), the smoke and burning projectiles would have come right in. As it was, I could hear material pelting the window.

It turns out that the campus was staging a fireworks display for some event being held down on the South Mall, below the tower. The fireworks were being launched almost straight-up the length of the Tower and were bursting at heights ranging from the 25th floor and up. Until you've seen fireworks from inside the exploding balls of color, believe me, you have not seen fireworks.

Had I only known this was going to happen, I'd've brought proper camera equipment. As is, you'll have to settle for the vague impression shown above, which was captured by the camera in my iPhone through our permanently grungy windows.