eWeek posted an interesting story on Komoku, a startup with a PCI bus card and corollary host software that ferrets kernel-mode rootkits. This seems like a sensible approach. I imagine that it will become a standard feature of high-end MB designs to have some sort of dedicated SPU over the next several years that's supported directly in the OS kernel. In the meanwhile, solutions like that proposed by Komoku look intesting.

>> Government-Funded Startup Blasts Rootkits

Vicki and I are in Washingon this week searching for a new home. After a lot of driving around, and a lot of dissapointing trips to see houses packed one-atop-another on hillsides, I think we've found where we want to be in Duvall where we made an offer on a house this morning. It's not a done deal yet. We're holding our breath. This place is great and if I thought I had access to a lot of woods in Maine... Man is it nice out here and not too far from Redmond.

... extracted from a posting I made earlier this morning on the Code Generator Network discussion list:

Goggle Challenge:

Put on your amber abstraction goggles and focus of applying generic programming techniques to codifying the infrastructure required to meaningfully express, synthesize, and execute hierarchically-specified systems regardless of their semantics. In other words, build a generic component factory, and generic glue to assemble, audit, and actuate graphs of manufactured components that conform to an abstract design specification (encoded in a language of your design).

For the challenge, you're allowed zero coupling between your factory and glue infrastructure code and the semantics of any problem domain. Additionally, you're allowed zero coupling between problem domain semantics and the syntax of your design specification language (i.e. it needs to be self-describing). Note: you ARE allowed to couple your glue infrastructure with the syntax/semantics of the design specification language (ultimately, something has to be nailed down).

Extra credit: Provide an API that lends itself equally well to both human and programmatic exploitation.

Vicki and I walking the Huskies on Popham Beach, Phippsburg Maine.

Q: What happens if you point Windows Explorere at a network directory containing 5K files?

A: Nothing. At least not for about a week.

It's official: I'm joining Microsoft to work on tools and technologies related to the Windows kernel in mid-May.

>> Microsoft Redmond campus building #40 Aerial View