The Mystery Behind the Hacking the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

by Miguel de Icaza

A decade ago some hackers went into the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and replaced the guided tour audio with their own content. The identity of the hackers remains a close guarded secret and one of Boston's biggest unsolved mystery's. Investigators could only agree on one thing: that the voice in the tape did not belong to Lev Davidovich Bronstein.

I got my hands on the audio file back in 1999 and during one of my visits to MIT that year I saw the news paper coverage of the event. I vaguely remember the news article, but it described the reactions of the visitors and featured interviewed with shocked citizens.

This is the recording.

Update: Dylan tells me that the cat is out of the bag. Read the interview with BJ Novak here.

Posted on 29 Sep 2010


Chicken Tikka Masala Burrito

by Miguel de Icaza

	toshok: oh man… chicken tikka masala burrito
	toshok: i got it to share with conchita, but she's asleep on the couch...
	

20 seconds later:

	toshok: it's so good, i might eat it all
	

Posted on 16 Sep 2010


Unix Stack Exchange: Call for Help

by Miguel de Icaza

Thanks to everyone that helped us get the Unix StackExchange group up and running.

The site went into preview in record time, and then we went into Beta.

My call for help: I am currently at 1,211 points, on 6th place answering questions on the site.

So what I need you guys is to go and ask some interesting questions about Unix, Linux, Gnome in there, and I get to answer them with some awesome background.

If you ever had a pressing Unix question, now is the time to ask it on the site, and help me get those points up.

Posted on 14 Sep 2010


This was news to me

by Miguel de Icaza

I have been living in the US for 10 years, and I never thought that people that many of the people that went through college end up with huge debts that they had to repay for 30 years.

This is probably creating a generation of graduates that is unable to take risks, start their own business, take a year off, launch the next startup or just catch a break.

During the discussion today on Twitter, this link came up, this one as well as this infographic from College Scolarships:

Posted on 13 Sep 2010


Great News for MonoTouch Users

by Miguel de Icaza

Apple has removed the restrictions that were introduced earlier this year (the famous section 3.3.1).

Although Apple had not blocked any MonoTouch applications since the new rules were introduced, many developers either took a wait-and-see approach, or switched their development. We never stopped working on MonoTouch, just yesterday we released MonoTouch support for the new iOS 4.1 APIs. We did this within eight hours of the new operating system going public.

With these new terms, the ambiguity is gone and C# lovers and enthusiasts can go back to using MonoTouch. Developers that like garbage collection and their strongly typed languages can resume their work.

In addition, Apple has published their detailed review guidelines for application developers. This should help developers get their apps approved. And the MonoTouch Book is a great way to get started.

Thank you!

We would like to thank the MonoTouch community that stayed by our side all along and helped us improve MonoTouch and continued to build great applications during this time.

Those of us that have a crush on iOS and .NET are grateful to Apple and the Apple employees that helped make these changes happen.

Expanded MonoTouch iOS investment

Although we continued to extend, improve and polish MonoTouch the older terms made it harder to justify taking on some larger tasks, the risk was high.

We had some big projects in mind for MonoTouch. We are going to start prioritizing these new features, but we want to hear from our users, and we want to know what is more important to you. Please fill out this survey to tell us what do you think it would be more important to bring to MonoTouch.

We will balance your input with our own "gut" (we would not be truth to the Stephen Colbert spirit if we didn't).

....and discounts!

Joseph Hill has just told me that we are doing a 15% discount for the next two weeks for anyone buying MonoTouch. Use discount code "MONO-331" on http://monotouch.net/Store.

We have also a surprise in store for existing MonoTouch customers that we will be announcing next week.

Posted on 09 Sep 2010