Having finally read Claus' post about Kon-Boot from the 25th, I thought it pretty cool and felt like posting about it over here.

He goes into some detail about the tool, so you can check it out if it interests you. But here are the juicy and important points.

What it does is modify the operating system kernel in memory (grabbing control at the BIOS to bootloader handoff), changing the necessary parts to disable the need to use a password to log in. It runs off of a CD (or a floppy… maybe you could get it to work off a USB stick, too). Hot stuff.

From what I read at GSD, such techniques aren't new, but this is a pretty sweet implementation. It doesn't work with computers on a domain setup, but that makes sense; you would have to inject code into the server, too, to make it work, because the computer needs to authenticate with the server, and unless the server is compromised, too, it's not gonna let you login with out proper credentials (password, keycard, whatever). And even if you could get through to a local account on the computer, you might not be able to nab anything important since user data might be stored on the server. I'm not sure about the caching methods used, though (I'm talking about Windows here; I don't even know if Linux has domains). Maybe some user data would still be cached on the hard disk, I don't know.

In any case, it's a pretty cool technique, even if I'm not so geek about it as Claus.

It seems to me there was a point when blogging was 'in'. At least with the younger population. It was, well, a fad, and like all of them, it passed (or should I say will pass? passes?).

But why did the young'ns not stick around? I believe the answer to be simple: writing about what you did today gets boring after a while -- for reader and likely enough the blogger, too. And if you're not celebrity, what stranger in the world is going to read your boring personal weblog?

Now that you've figured it out, consider the hundreds of non-celebrity blogs that get a nice chunk of readership. Why do they get readership? Content, content, content. Plus presentation, of course. Your average personal blog might have a terrible template (or just a popular and familiar one), but I think people appreciate good design, whether consciously or subconsciously. It also seems to me that blogs with high readership have a topic, or a category to their posts -- thus a reason for people to come back: more content in that category. Example: Download Squad. Though it covers tech news, they are always talking about software, new and updated. So people have a reason to come back. Unless you are some hot celebrity, your personal life probably is not enough to draw someone back to your blog.

And one note: it seems to me that a lot of popular blogs (at least that I run into) are run by a team. Keeping quality content coming is important, too. Who would get used to watching TV if programs came on randomly, sporadically, and far between?

Enter microblogging, and by the numbers, Twitter. And Facebook*. Why do daily details of your personal life suddenly become hot fodder for the internet masses (OK, maybe just your friends, but I do have random people follow me on Twitter -- it's been spammers recently, though)? Manageability. Or should we put it, digestibility. And the social ties. One can eat spoonfuls, in fact, one wants to eat multiple spoonfuls in a day, but not six whole pizzas.

Check out this article, In defense of Twitter. After you read this quote from it, that is:

Of course you'd like to think that most of your daily conversation is weighty and witty but instead everyone chats about pedestrian nonsense with their pals. In fact, that ephemeral chit-chat is the stuff that holds human social groups together.

So while we post some more personal stuff to the blog (and it can't help bleeding through), I like to think of it as a sort of formal publishing platform. It's information, subjective and objective, and it's there for your taking. And if you feel like coming back because it interests you, do. If not, don't. If you're my friend, you might find such disconnected and random thoughts as Twitter produces to be noteworthy.

Anyway, some interesting thoughts…

*Facebook status updates

How annoying. A day or two ago, Javascript popups started opening in new tabs. They are popups for a reason. I had Firefox set so that links that would open in a new window would open in a new tab, but popups like this didn't use to be affected.
Anyway, after another Google today, I found the fix. 1st Byte Solutions has the answer. Quote:

if you open about:config in your address bar, you can change the setting manually.
Change: browser.link.open_newwindow
Mine was set to 3, which told the popups to always open in a new tab.

Niceness. It's a pretty easy fix. Set it to 2. I just wonder what changed it to 3. Wasn't me. It appears this is something of a longstanding issue; the Firefox team should probably add a GUI option for this. Check out this thread on Mozillazine, where the same fix is given (in 2004) and this one, where Tab Mix Plus is the solution (it occurs to me TMP might change that value).
Go give some kudos to 1st Byte if this makes you happy.

Update; Feb-15-2010: So it busted again. And this time setting browser.link.open_newwindow to 2 didn't fix it. Garr. Fortunately, setting browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 2 did fix it. Thanks, harrymc.