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Hmm… when I see Jobs talking about the iPod, he’s standing on a stage in a turtleneck, confident.

When I see Ballmer talking about the Zune, I see a red-faced, sweaty, 60-year-old guy in a suit trying to sound like he is somehow in touch with what “the youth want”.

I think they need a new face for Zune PR…

According to LinuxWorld, the OLPC is going to drop the caps-lock key in favour of a key named “view source”. The purpose of this key is to allow the children to figure out how the current webpage or application is written.

I’m not sure why this key appeals to me so much. Maybe it has something to do with typing in BASIC games on my old computers and being able to edit the source of GORILLA.BAS and other interesting programs to make them do what I wanted. I think it is a fantastic way for the children to get to know how things work. Think of it as a transparent case on an engine or an analog watch.

On the simultaneous release of both IE7 and its first vulnerability

Out of curiousity, I started reading about Microsoft’s BitLocker technology. This is a way of encrypting a whole hard drive that stores keys in the machine’s trusted platform module (TPM).

My conclusion (though I may be wrong) is that a laptop that uses BitLocker without either an external crypto token or a secure boot ROM is likely susceptible to some relatively easy hardware attacks. BitLocker may defend against casual snooping on random stolen laptops, but a determined attacker with a deliberate target probably won’t be thwarted unless the extra precautions mentioned above are taken.

We’ve spent an interesting month with our new Roomba Scheduler. The role it fills is a “between-vacuuming” cleanup.

It works really well on carpets. It gets pretty much every spot that it can reach, and its small, round shape lets it get a lot of spots.

How it works on tile is a different matter altogether. I don’t know if it’s because our kitchen tile is a dark color, but we’ve found that it missed pretty much all the dirt along the edges of the kitchen, and a fair bit in the middle too. I guess the Scooba is designed to excel at this part of the cleaning, but it would be nice if Roomba had better support for cleaning smooth surfaces.