David Maynor figured out a way to hijack Macs via a flaw in the Wireless driver. He's released his hack "for public scrutiny" and "hopes to help other Apple researchers with new documentation on things like Wi-Fi debugging and the Mac OS X kernel core dumping facility."

This is, of course, nothing new. Hackers are often motivated by better design (rather than nefarious activities.) Such stories get a lot of play on Slashdot, but it seems that a similar story in the New York Times or the Washington Post would be covered much differently.

John W. Backus, the developer who led the creation of Fortran, died on Saturday.

When I was an undergrad, you had to take Pascal first. This was not awesome. We were told right at the beginning that we were learning a dead language. This is something that the authors of SICP found especially disturbing, so they attempted to build a text around Lisp so that students could learn how to build programs with a flexible "less idiosyncratic" language. This is something I dealt with in my RSA paper last year, but i digress...

Anyway after we were finished with that dead language, we moved on to Fortran...a less dead language I guess. The whole thing was very "let's-learn-Latin-because-it-will-help-with-all-of-the-romantic-languages." Still, as the NYTimes article notes, Fortan was an important step:

Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language.

This "important step" is especially interesting to me because it seems to be a move toward making programming more "human friendly." There have been a number of languages that have attempted this, and I wonder if the whole push isn't about getting to a "transparent" language...one that allows us to "speak" to the computer the way we speak to other humans. Then again, a number of programmers will insist that programming isn't about communicating with the machine at all - it's about communicating with other programmers.

At any rate, computer programming has lost an important figure. Backus was the epitomy of a hacker. Too smart for college (failed out of the University of Virginia) and a rule-breaker (caused a bunch of trouble in prep school.)

Two Google programmers have put together a presentation called "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People."

They provide an interesting way to go about refocusing an open source project that is bogged down by "poisonous" people, and they argue that often such people are not necessarily malicious. More often than not, such folks are perfectionists that can't stop the nitpicking to just pick a color for the bike shed.

I wonder whether some Wikipedians might benefit from this discussion of "poisonous people." There can definitely be some slippage between "poisonous people" and "careful thinkers," but there's clearly a line to be drawn. The question is, how does a community draw such a line? Short answer: it depends. But this google presentation offers some interesting ideas about focusing a project or dealing with messy email list exchanges.

Google will roll out a new open source search engine called Krugle next month. Open source coders will be able to more effectively search for code, and they'll also be able to save 'workspaces' with unique URLs so that programmers can send friends a page of possible solutions to their very nerdly problem.

So will Krugle be available in China?