I found this post on creativebits about how famous companies got their names. I’m sure some of them are apocryphal but it’s a some what amusing light read. Here’s a short version of the list but do visit the blog. It’s pretty good.

• Apple Computers
  Favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 o’clock.
• Xerox
  The Greek root “xer” means dry. The inventor, Chestor Carlson , named his product Xerox as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying.
• Hewlett-Packard
  Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
• Hotmail
  Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters “html” – the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casings.

Source: creativebits

I’ve read Daring Fireball for years. Today John has a post about Stanley Kubrik. I like some of Kubricks work but that’s not why it’s quoted here. I’ll let you chew on it.

About his work Kubrick is the most self-conscious and rational of men. His eccentricities — secretiveness, a great need for privacy — are caused by his intense awareness of time’s relentless passage. He wants to use time to “create a string of masterpieces”, as an acquaintance puts it. Social status means nothing to him, money is simply a tool of his trade.

Source: Daring Fireball

Attention ARTS229 students. I have a clarification for you. Your outline says to read Chapter 2. Well, there’s some stuff in there that’s a little more than we’re doing for class. So read chapter 2 pages, 60 to 66. Skip the stuff about setting up Apache on OS X and Windows (66-77). But do read “Creating the site definition”, pages 77 to 88. Then skip “Using version control with Subversion”, pages 88-95. Finally, read from “Setting options that apply to all sites” onward.

Read Ch 2 – 60-66, 77-88, 96-100

Sorry. I wasn’t thinking when I made the handouts. I suspect there will be more coming… Having said that; if you think you want to be a serious Code Head, you might want to read the Subversion stuff.

Who’d a thunk it but using a password such as “123456″ or “password” isn’t a very good idea! Gizmag is a blog that I read every so often and today they have a post about stupid passwords. Data security company, Imperva, has done some research and announced the 10 dumbest passwords that people use. They also tell the story of a site called Rockyou.com. Last December, a hacker gained access to all of Rockyou’s members’ usernames, email addresses and passwords (which had been stored in plain, unencrypted text) and posted the passwords to the Internet.

Here’s three thing to help you pick a better password but make sure you read the whole article, eh?

• It should contain at least eight characters (30% of users had passwords that were six letters or less)
• It should contain a mix of four different types of characters (i.e: upper case, lower case, numbers, symbols)
• It should not be a name, word, or contain any part of your name or email address

Source: GizMag

Thom Holwerda has a post over at OSNews about the German government telling people to stop using IE. I guess you can file this one under, “DUH!”

The German government has warned web users to find an alternative browser to Internet Explorer to protect security. The warning from the Federal Office for Information Security comes after Microsoft admitted IE was the weak link in recent attacks on Google’s systems. Microsoft rejected the warning, saying that the risk to users was low and that the browsers’ increased security setting would prevent any serious risk.

Source: OSNews

<australian>
     That’s not a mouse. This is a mouse.
</australian>

Time is short so I just copied the original post from OhGizmo:

This is the Cyborg R.A.T. and it’s a highly customizable mouse. If you spend as much time mousing as I do, you’ll appreciate just how customizable it is. You can control the exact weight, length, width and even texture of the mouse. With a few twists of an Allen wrench (which is carefully stored within the mouse itself) you can change the very dimensions of the device so that it perfectly fits your hand.

For those times where you have your mouse set to a high DPI, but need to be extremely accurate. As long as you’re holding down a button, your DPI is dropped way down, allowing you to focus on only a small area. Once you release the button, it goes back to normal. Great more moving things around in Illustrator or sniping in for favorite combat game.

The R.A.T. series currently has four different models. The R.A.T. 9 includes all of the features and is wireless, while each of the lower models lose one or two along the way. Prices start at $129 and work their way down to $49, so there is a model for all budgets.

The only thing I don’t see, and this could be a deal breaker, is side scrolling.

Source: OhGizmo

Let’s kick this semester off with a peek of Photoshop CS5: