General

Cats prevent heart attacks

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Kevin Drum writes: A recent study shows that cats help protect us from heart attacks & strokes. Dogs don’t have the same effect.

The study, by researchers at the University of Minnesota, found that feline-less people were 30 to 40 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than those with cats.

Yet dog owners had the same rate as non-owners. “No protective effect of dogs as domestic pets was observed,” said the study, presented Thursday at the International Stroke Conference in New Orleans.

Dr. Adnan Qureshi, a stroke expert at the university, said he decided to raise the question because other studies have suggested pets can help reduce stress. He and his team analyzed a group of 4,435 people who had answered questionnaires about pet ownership and other risk factors.

But the cat-dog differential came as a surprise. “We don’t understand this,” he said, but “it’s probably not a coincidence.”

Here are my two protectors:
MidnightCody

MacBook Pro Keyboard Firmware Update

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I installed the keyboard firmware update on my MacBook Pro last night and it fixed the annoying keyboard problem I’ve been having since I got this machine.

I didn’t even have to reboot when I ran the updater; it simply required quitting all open applications. It took about 20 seconds to run and the keyboard was fixed. The console log showed a series of messages from HIDFirmwareUpdaterTool ending with “Flash image verification succeeded” and “bootload success”.

Happy Birthday to Minipundit

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Minipundit turned 18 today, which means he’ll be able to vote in the most important election of our lifetime. He’s been working for Obama’s campaign. I’ve known Dylan since MacHack 2001 and I’ve known his father, who wrote Fetch, even longer.

Reason #55234 that Windows sucks

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I’ve been porting some Windows code to Mac OS X for the last few weeks, which involves converting Windows API calls to the equivalent functionality in OS X.

The thing that really annoys me about Windows programming is that every function takes a HANDLE, which can be a window, communication channel, file reference, or any number of other things. There’s no type safety, so you can’t tell if you’re passing the wrong type of handle until it barfs at runtime.

In Mac OS X, even though most Core Foundation functions take some kind of CFTypeRef, all of the functions are defined as using a specific class, so you’ll get a compiler warning if you use the wrong type.

111 Years Ago, Indiana Almost Legislated Pi

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Via Slashdot: On February 5, 1897, 111 years ago today, the Indiana legislature very nearly passed a bill ‘introducing a new mathematical truth,’ that would have erroneously established pi as the ratio ‘five-fourths to four’ or 3.2. The story explaining the rationale behind the bill and how they were prevented from legislating it when a real mathematician intervened is quite interesting, because the man who discovered the ‘new mathematical truth’ wanted to charge royalties, which could have made pi the first form of irrational property.

"Free Public WiFi"

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Did you ever wonder what those “Free Public WiFi” adhoc networks you see almost every place people use laptops? David Pogue explains it. A stupid Windows bug that acts like a virus but it really isn’t a virus.

The original article goes into more detail:

If a laptop connects to an ad-hoc network it can later start
beaconing the ad-hoc network’s SSID as its own ad-hoc network without the
laptop owner’s knowledge. This can allow an attacker to attach to the laptop
as a prelude to further attack.

This is basically a configuration error that spreads virus-like from laptop to laptop. In field tests, numerous ad-hoc SSIDs such as “linksys”, “dlink”,
“tmobile”, “hpsetup”, and others have been documented.

In other words, if a Windows laptop connects to such a network, it will start advertising the same network name without the owner’s knowledge.