Chromium OS (I has it)

I attended a session at Google Chicago about HTML5 and especially the new Chromium OS.

Slides presented are here: http://slides.html5rocks.com/#landing-slide

The sell of the presentation was twofold- one, HTML5 has built-in everything previously accomplished with tiresome individual repetition... and two, that he did the whole thing on an onstage- just-unboxed Chromium netbook.

Then, midway through the presentation, the presenter (whose identity I don't actually know yet!) announced that everyone in the room would be getting a new Chromium netbook. I may have said "What??" somewhat loudly.

And indeed, after the presentation everyone stood in line and signed a terms of agreement (in a google form), we were each handed a beautiful box. In fact, I'm typing on it now.

Dozens of people are probably doing in-depth analyses of their new hardware just this moment, and I don't need to join their ranks. It's hardware version Cr-48, has 2MB of RAM, and you get to the terminal with ctrl-alt-T (and exit with "exit" ...there's ssh! But no man pages, or really anything. No built-in dev tools. But the browser has a nice pseudo-firebug debugging extension, which you summon using ctrl-shift-J.

To get and change the keyboard mapping, use ctrl-alt-/

ctrl-n is a new window.

forward delete is alt-backspace

to switch windows, alt-tab

In chromium, to see tak manager go to shift-esc

got to about:flags to see some awesome experiments.

I'm now inspired to:

Write in HTML5 because it is beautiful and useful

play excessively with my new netbook

Buy a goddamn cover for the netbook because every laptop needs a protective case

So far my annoyances with the netbook include:

No end or home keys, or anything that maps to them

No forward-delete key

You can't really develop code on it. Ruby, Python, or anything else... i.e. no native support for it. Need that!

Too much awesomeness to handle! :)

Edit: The speaker was Ian Fette, as in https://code.google.com/u/ian@chromium.org/updates

Google: security

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2010/11/rewarding-web-application-security.html

In other words, Google will pay you (and make you famous and possibly hire you) to find their security bugs for them.

Rocking.

Sadly I don't know where I would start on a project like that. Maybe some googling will give me some ideas. (ahaha irony)

EDIT: after reading parts of the Hall of Fame for people who've won the money, I'm less convinced that I can make an immediate contribution, but more convinced that I want to.

2 sysadminish articles

There is a guy who is a sysadmin at Google, and he wrote a short bit about what it's like. In short, it's awesome. Read closely. http://everythingsysadmin.com/2010/09/sysadmin-at-google.html

He also posted three excellent ideas on secure logins to SSH into your server. Just read it; if you have a server, then you have security worries. If you have security worries, this will rock your socks. http://everythingsysadmin.com/2010/09/the-most-simple-ssh-backdoor-i.html