A couple of months ago as I was checking my web server access logs, I came across something odd. A single image file was being requested repeatedly and often from the same host IP. Although I wasn't aware of the term at the time, I had become a victim of Hot Linking. Since I wasn't aware of a technical means of blocking this heinous practice, I simply performed a reverse lookup on the IP, then emailed the owner of the domain with a "cease and desist" warning. Turns out it was a college dude, and he promptly removed the link.

So, we all know that a 'kilobyte' is not 1,000 bytes but 1,024 bytes (2^10), right? Wrong. A kilobyte is actually defined as 1,000 bytes, and therefore is a rather useless word to everyone except hard drive manufacturers. What we really mean to refer to is a kibibyte. Seriously. And scaling up there are mebibytes and gibibytes. Or so the International Electrotechnical Commission decreed in December 1998. The topic was discussed in the March 1999 Tech Beat, the online publication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology

A common complaint I hear when one of my clients upgrades to a new system is how Apple abandons their old users. It's frustrating. Trust me, I understand. This was never more evident than in the transition from OS 9 to OS X. Without trying to justify Apple's reasoning, I'll offer a little support here.