Steve Levy's Hackers

I've recently started to read "Hackers" by Steven Levy. Actually, this is my second attempt. On my first try, I got stuck in all the talk about railroads in the first pages. This time, I directly went to page 30.

And I have to say (while this might reveal what a incurable computer-nerd I actually am), reading this book repeatedly sent shivers down my spine. And although our computers are several orders of magnitude smaller, and more powerful, the basic fascination is still the same.

It is pretty amazing to see how they came up with all these ideas of interactivity, or time-sharing even then, because it just seemed to be the right thing. Otherwise computers might still be some huge machines sitting in some basements with access restricted by several layers of bureaucracy.

Anyway, if you want to know if you're a computer nerd at hard, take a look at this book ;)

Tool of the Week - Part II: sshfs

Recently I stumbled upon sshfs. And this is really the best thing since sliced bread. sshfs allows you to mount a directory over sftp (of course, under Linux). Since it relies on sftp, you can mount remote directories as soon as you have an ssh access, without the need to set up further servers or using vpn or anything.

Being able to access remote files like normal files means that you can use any program to modify these files. For example, I have a small personal webspace which allows access only via sftp. This made updating quite ugly, because I couldn't just rsync everything to the server. But with sshfs you just mount your webspace and do a "local" rsync between two directories - and you're done. Amazing!

Gadget Wishlist

How about a small GPS-mouse sized device which bridges from bluetooth to wireless. Think about it. Almost every cell phone or PDA has built-in bluetooth, and a web-browser. But very few come with support for wireless.

Please, somebody build this baby and sell it for around 50€!