September 2004

El Reg is reporting on a rather bizarre development of Canada's Institute of Information Technology.

Known as a "]", this rather curious device replaces your mouse by letting you move your mouse pointer with your nose! Apparently, a webcam tracks the movement of the end of your nose and allows to blink your left or right eye to simulate the relevant mouse-click.

While such an invention seems far from useful at first glance, surely the ability (in 3D games) to dispose of opponents merely by winking at them is too good an opportunity to miss.

Funny how much can happen in the blink of an eye nowadays.

Following on from June's warnings by CERT (the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team) against using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which led to a small but significant gain in market share for Mozilla and its derivatives, the German Federal Office for Information Security has become the latest influential security body to do likewise.

With Mozilla Firefox already more secure and feature-laden than its rival, as well as being totally free of charge, you'd think it's only a matter of time before we see some interesting new trends begin to emerge.

Of course, it's not always that simple when Microsoft's marketing department are involved.

I've been a user of Gentoo Linux for about a week now (no, it's not my first foray into Linux - it's just the first one that I've had a blog to write about it in!). The unusual thing about Gentoo is that everything is compiled specifically for the hardware you're using, which should result in better performance once it's installed. The downside of that is that it takes the best part of the weekend to actually install. In Gentoo's defence, there are apparently prebuilt installations available but in my case, I got the disc from Linux Format, who only included from-source installation as an option.

Seems to be worth it though. Portage (the package management system) is wonderful, the online docs are great and the community is outstanding.

Indeed, it's largely the community aspect that makes it special. With Red Hat now using the community to pre-test technology that "may eventually make its way into Red Hat products" (via the Fedora project) and Mandrake charging membership fees for access to their forums, it's quite refreshing that in the Gentoo Store, the t-shirt actually costs more than the OS itself! Sure, it's understandable that companies have to make money but it's still nice to see distros that are aimed at the enthusiast, rather than the corporate dollar.

And then there's Larry, the Gentoo cow, who I'm not going to comment on.