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It's been around 3 months now since I've had my 12" iBook (G3/800 with 640M, 40G HD, Combo DVD/CD-RW, Airport), and I have to say I am liking it a lot.

My boxes at home and work are MS Windows 2000 Professional, but most of my development work was done ssh-ing into the Debian boxes at work.

I'm trying to do more work from home now and, while the Win2K box is perfectly adequate, I think the iBook is almost an all-in-one solution. I've got Mozilla as my browser and IMAP mail client (when they implement roaming profiles and remote bookmarks, I will be in heaven). I've installed jEdit, which is a pretty kick-ass "text editor", which gives me built-in secure access to my CVS repositories (Apple's ProjectBuilder is pretty good too, but the CVS is a bit slow and flakey). And I just finished replacing the Sendmail that came with OS X with Postfix ... took all of 2 minutes with help from Fink and Fink Commander.

So, with my little wireless network at home, I can sit in the big comfy chair in my living room, or at my kitchen island, and surf/email/code in comfort.

I used to hate Macs, probably because I never used them (except for 2 weeks as tech support at an ISP which made me support Mac users ... I had no clue what to tell them!) But it took me a few weeks to discover the Mac-equivalent of some Window-isms, and now I feel pretty confident with it all. The under-the-hood Unix makes it even better.

In fact, I'm liking it so much I've moved my finances off of MS Money into Quicken on the iBook. And most likely my next home computer will be a Mac. Time to save for a 23" Cinerama display!

According this article at Security Focus, the RIAA has hired hackers to find vulnerabilities in common media players, create virii to exploit those vulnerabilities, and have now infected "95% of P2P application users". Do all your base belong to the RIAA now, or is this posting a hoax? Certainly sounds suspicious to me.

I like to cook. This Christmas, I found an amazing bargain at my local Williams-Sonoma on a stainless steel sauce pan from All-Clad. At around 70% off the regular price, I couldn't resist.

All-Clad makes good products, and they come with a lifetime warranty. I noticed that they now allow you to register your product online. So, I went to their website and clicked on the registration link.

The form they presented struck me as very odd. Nowhere on it do they ask what product I purchased, nor where nor when I purchased it. In fact, it appears that they are only interested in collecting my personal information. To what end, I wonder?

Anyway, it prompted me to write them the following email. Too bad that personal information harvesting isn't limited to spammers mining the WHOIS data.

To: info@allclad.com
Subject: Your "warranty registration"

Sirs:

I went to register my All-Clad product online and noticed the following on your website:

By submitting the information below, we can confirm the date of your purchase, which helps us expedite your warranty inquiries. The additional information you provide will help us to develop new and exciting products for your future enjoyment. Thanks again from all of us at All-Clad!

However, the only required information is my name, address and phone number. Nowhere do you require the make or model of the product I purchased, nor the date of purchase.

How do you propose to "confirm the date of my purchase"? Why not just admit that the purpose of registering my All-Clad product is to collect information for marketing purposes?

Rest assured, I will continue to enjoy using my All-Clad products. I will also be sure to take you up on the lifetime warranty, should I ever need to. However, I will not be giving you my personal information so that you can use it for marketing purposes.

Sigh.

Oops ... seems like the folks at the RIAA left a back-door open in their site administration pages, allowing Joe Hacker to come in and post bogus news articles on their site. The main site is down now (although the back-door is wide open), while they clean things up, I imagine, and start pouring through the web logs. Be prepared for a spate of DMCA suits!

With this and my Sony submission, I hope no one comes knocking on my door. Seriously, I just report what I hear! I swear!