You can't complain about your computer in public without some jerk telling you that all of your problems will be solved by switching to a different platform. This weekend I was at a Christmas party, and of course at some point during the evening, the conversation shifted toward computers. It seems a few Mac people convinced one of the partygoers to buy a Mac after repeated insistence that OS X is the perfect platform, and that Apple hardware was so perfect that he'd never have to worry about computer problems again. As it turns out, things only got worse post-Mac.

Despite the topic the title implies, Designing BSD Rootkits is actually more of an introductory FreeBSD kernel developer's guide than it is a text on operating system security. If you're okay with that, it's a decent -- if somewhat short -- book.

On my primary World of Warcraft (WoW) server, I have several high-level characters on the Alliance faction -- all male. Every now and then I get sick of guild drama or the game's snail-like progression through the high level armor and weapon set upgrades, and I head over to another server where I have some Horde characters. I think of this other server as my own personal Bizarro World, where I make totally different character choices than I would on my Alliance server. As such, most of my Horde characters are female -- not for any other reason than wanting to make different choices so that I can see parts of the game that I've never seen before. That mission was easily accomplished; the entire social aspect of WoW is completely different between male and female characters. Here are a few of the things I've discovered about playing a female character in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

I'm working on some laptop mouse reviews, and I found myself expressing a degree of surprise in discovering that Bluetooth mice still exist. Not only do they still exist, but they're growing in capability (this laptop mouse can switch between conventional 2.4Ghz and Bluetooth wireless technologies) and popularity, and prices are coming down. It would take too long to figure out exactly how long ago Bluetooth peripherals made their debut (mid-2000?), but I know I've been seeing Bluetooth mice and keyboards for at least a few years. I never expected it to last this long.

I have about 400 bookmarks between Opera and Firefox on my workstation and laptop computers. Every once in a while I sort through them to remove dead entries and figure out if I still need to keep some of them. Despite my efforts, I usually end up deleting very few bookmarks. I've been trying to analyze why this is; for some reason I have an emotional attachment to links, some of them on pages that I have not fully read, some of them on pages that have information I can't use. Some of them are even on sites I don't particularly like.

Traditionally, system administrators have had to rely on expensive course training and personal mentorship to learn the skills required for their jobs. These days, self-learning through books, practice on home computers, and computer-based training programs on the Web are taking a larger role in sysadmin education. My recommendation for aspiring Unix/BSD/Linux sysadmins has always been to put BSD or Linux on a spare computer and learn to set up services on their own by reading manual pages, tutorials, guides, and comprehensive books on each service. I urge sysadmins-in-training not to rely on any one seminar, class, article, guide, or book to form a solid system administration foundation. After reading O'Reilly's Linux System Administration, my opinion on that matter is further solidified.

According to SoftMaker president Martin Kotulla, the only commercial word processor available as a native FreeBSD application, TextMaker, will no longer support that platform as of the upcoming 2008 edition. There will of course be a Windows edition, and a native Linux edition (which should be able to run through the Linux binary compatibility software in FreeBSD), but the FreeBSD edition will not grow beyond TextMaker (and the full SoftMaker Office suite) 2006 unless there is more demand from FreeBSD users, and the operating system itself becomes easier to develop for.