Ida

Four-piece pop band from New York, formed around the nucleus of Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell. Probably the best comparison is to describe Ida as a faster and less minimalist Low, as they share a similar approach to instrumentation and vocals.

Ida have released some exceptionally fine albums, "Tales Of Brave Ida", "I Know About You" and "Ten Small Paces". They had a major record label deal for a while, but are now independent once more, and due to release two brand spanking newies over the course of 2000.

Update, June 2001: In 2000, Ida released the exceptionally fine "Will You Find Me", and have just released the follow-up record (recorded at the same time) "The Braille Night". Daniel and Elizabeth (who married in 2000) also became parents for the first time in May 2001.

Also, a commonly used abbreviation for the Investment Dealers Association, a self-regulatory organization of financial firms in Canada. All brokerage houses are covered by the various provincial Securities Acts, but the IDA provides additional regulations that member firms must follow, which are generally more stringent than the law. Among them is a capitalization requirement for member firms, which is to the advantage particularly of smaller, independent members, since the consumer then knows that any IDA member firm they deal with, large or small, isn't likely to go out of business any time soon.

Interactive Disassembler, a fabulous debugging tool by DataRescue. Since replaced by the superior IDA Pro.

Frequently used by hackers, back when hackers broke copy-protections rather than broke into government computers. It works especially well in conjunction with Nu-Mega's SoftICE.

It distinguishes itself from other disassemblers by being interactive, allowing the user to specify what parts of the program represent code or data, and how they should be rendered. Conventional disassemblers, such as Sourcer, require the setting of several complex configuration options to specify regions of data, and this is usually more complicated than it's worth. IDA can also magically recognize runtime libararies used by common compilers, and produce appropriate symbols for them, even if the debug symbols are not present in the binary. It takes pretty good guesses at assigning names to regions, and when it guesses wrong it's easy to fix. It lets you jump to the location of a symbol by clicking on its reference. It can generate assembly source files that usually work.

IDA works with a baffling array of execuable formats, including COM, EXE, NE, PE, LE, LX, COFF, ELF, Java, and a even more baffling array of instruction sets. I believe it only has clients on DOS, Win32, and OS/2, though.