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Towing Scam | 05-13-2010 - Nick VujicIc You've probably never heard of the guy. I've seen something like it back on 60 minutes years ago. I'm not sure if it's the same guy, but you must watch the video on him. I've also made note of the website where he sells his DVD. Just when you think your life is really bad and you have many overwhemling problems, then revert back to the video. It will put your life in perspective. (0) Comments 04-28-2010 - Samba and Windows 7 It appears that Windows 7 and Samba 3.0 have some incompatabilities. I have been told Samba version 3.4 should resolve this. After search for a while I found a really good tutorial. I'm still doing some testing with it, but it looks promising. The tutorial is on compling sources. Too bad it wasn't just s simple apt-get. (0) Comments 04-22-2010 - 101.9 The End... has ended It appears as of this morning 101.9 the end has changed formats. It's now a jockeyless GenX 90's music station. Part of me wants to say ever since the Mr. West incident I didn't like Chunga, but really there was his stand up routine at the Gangrene festival that was his downfall for me. I personally miss the music format it used to be 15 years ago. (0) Comments 01-28-2010 - USB Drive Data Recovery For a handful of years now we have had problems with people losing their data on their USB sticks. USB memory sticks are nice and small, but seem to lose their ability to store stuff after 2-4 years. We've used R-Undelete for years before USB sticks got big. The problems is that R-Undelete only helps with deleted files on hard drives. For the past year we've been recommending DataDoctors since it was the only option I knew of. In some cases, they can be really expensive. Yesterday, Mark decided to try to find another program that would work specificly with USB Drives. BadCopy Pro was program that stood out ahead of the pack. He used it yesterday with some really good success. Usually, windows would detect it as empty and just ask if you want to reformat. With BadCopy Pro it seemed to get past that error and actually let you recover the files. I still have some testingof my own to do with it, but it was definitely worth mention on my blog to remember in the future. (0) Comments 12-21-2009 - Setting up courier-pop3-ssl For a while now I've had users asking if they could have POP3/IMAP4. I've been dragging my feet cause it adds more of my time to support their login configuration. Funny questions like "What's my username?" and "What's mypassword?" and "What are my inbound andoutbound servers?". Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, just do it anyways. Well, I found a great tutorial that answered my questions in a clear conside way. Towards the end when it mentions that if you want to force SSL for the POP3 connection then just stop the courier-pop-ssl service... I felt stupid. The whole time I thought courier-pop-ssl rode on top of courier-pop. It even had a quick way to remove it from startup. (0) Comments 12-16-2009 - MakerBot Cupcake CNC I've had a way ton of things going on in my life to has slowed me down on posting on my blog. A couple days back my friend Chris told me about it. I kept on meaning to look at it, but kept on forgetting. Finally, I looked at it today. The MakerBot Cupcake CNC is awsome. 3D printers can run $50,000. This one you assemble yourself for under $1,000. It's been a while since I've been impressed with something like this. Basically, it allows you to print plastic parts based on a 3D frame image you create on a computer. It looks like they are having a hard time meeting demand since mid January is the next date for new shippments to go out. Even though I have a big family to support, I am going to save all my pennies to buy one. (0) Comments 10-16-2009 - Mersenne Prime Numbers Just recently I saw posted a new Mersenne Prime number had been found. I knew that prime numbers were important to encryption and the theory that numbers were so big that it would take forever for a computer to solve it by trial and error. What I didn't know was the EEF was paying $100,000 for the number found and there were two other prizes at $150,000 and $250,000 still unclaimed. Now for the real great part of the story, after reading through wikipedia it was posted that a Dell OptiPlex 745 was the machine used to find the latest Mersenne prime number solved. LOL! No way! On EEF's website itself it states that using super computers or ditributive processing seemed to be the only practical methods left for finding more Mersenne Prime numbers. I verified on UCLA's website just to make sure someone wasn't tampering with wikipedia. It appears it was just the main controller computer and that they had atleast 75 other machines in the lab running the program when they weren't in use. (0) Comments 09-04-2009 - Adobe Flex Probably over a year ago I had some friends entertaining the idea that it would be better to use flew then javascript. There reason for this was compatibility issues. This made sense since Internet Explorer and Firefox have little differences, that if you are not aware of can cause a huge headache. Then there is Safari on Mac which is another added combination of problems. Anyhow, here it is a year later. I was asking them "Did it fix the compatibility problem"? Their response was interesting. They said a browser compatibility problem is a rare issue. After thinking about it, it made sense to go that direction. For the most part, new computers are already loaded with the latest version of adobe flash. So even if at that moment a year ago not all machine would be instant compatible, over time they will be. This has caused me to re-evaluate what I know in the computer world. It is important enough that I have decided to learn flash on my own. The good news is that after you've learned 3 computer languages, then the rest seems to come a lot easier. I think this will put me at 11 computer languages, but who really is counting at that point? I have found a link to a webpage that gives an overall view of all the components of Flex, and thought I should make note of it. (0) Comments 08-06-2009 - Exim Catchall Account Why would someone want an exim catchall email account? For me I wanted to automate search features and different functionality via text messages and emails. I looked and looked for a really good tutorial. I finally found a good example that worked correctly. A good hint for auto-processing is the use the .forward file in exim to run a custom script or program. I still have to find a way to filter and ignore all the spammers out there. I can't imagine the load on my server I'll get if I don't filter the weasels. (2) Comments 07-31-2009 - Recovering Old Archive Files A couple months back my my boss Eric handed me some 3.5" diskettes and said that there were files from Lila on them. Lila was the founder of the company I work for. Lila has been passed away for sometime now, so recovering the files has a certain irreplaceable value to it. So I open up each disk and only see one file on each disk. They all take up the majority of the disk. The files are labeled CC90921A.001, CC90921A.002 and CC90921A.003. Good gravey! This didn't start out very easy. So I open up one of the files in a text edit to see if the header of the file can expalin anything. Tada! I found the following: NORTON Ver 1E After just a little search engine help I discover the following webpage explaining MSBACKUP and MWBACKUP. This is great, but neither program runs on XP these days. A custom DOS installation on a beater machine seems to be the best choice without causing problems with my main desktop machine. I was able to create a DOS 6.22 boot disk from bootdisk.com. On another diskette I copied the MSBACK62.EXE file from this MS-DOS resource page. It's self extraction file the unpacks a bunch of other files onto the c: drive. From there I was able to run msbackup.exe and start the ancient ms-dos program. The most important part to remember is that some catalog file is needed to recover. Make sure to use the last disk of the backup to rebuild the catalog file. There was talk about some spacing problems between DOS 6.2 and 6.22, but I was lucky enough not to experience those problems. (0) Comments 07-10-2009 - New Disease Fighting Idea With the stock market constantly down, and the world seeming to be falling apart... sometimes there is an idea that stands out with a shimmer of hope. After watching this video at TED I decided after months of nothing on my blog, it was definitely news worthy. It was worth the 2 minutes of my time. (0) Comments 04-23-2009 - UTF8 and Your Database Most people reading my blog probably are scratching their heads now at this entry. What the crap? UTF8? Well, let me explain. There has been a problem that has crept up with the postgres database that I've been using. Somewhere along the way they switched from UTF16 to UTF8. What is means is that the extra character set isn't compatible. Extra characters such as the ' at the end of cafe'. Typically, the ' is more tilted to the right on the end of cafe'. This is isn't available in UTF8. I found this php link that helps filter out non UTF8 characters. http://us3.php.net/utf8_encode (0) Comments 03-26-2009 - PHP Charts Class I found this pcharts class for php and had to make note of it. It looks like they provide the code for a class to make it easy to integrate graphs and pit charts into your website. Rewind that, dynamic graphs and charts. It was important enough to make not of it to come back to someday. Hopefully soon. (0) Comments 03-18-2009 - denyhosts and fail2ban For a quite a longtime now there has been a non-stop flood of ssh brute force attacks all over the world. To try to stay on top of security, I came across denyhosts and fail2ban. Denyhosts ending up being my preferred choice, because it said the was sometype of collective feature like a blacklist where if an attack was detected on 1 machine, then it updated the blacklist for the IP. This seemed to mean you could automatically block someone before they even attempt to access your machine. I thought it was important enough to make a note about it on my blog. (0) Comments 02-20-2009 - Multiple Domain Email Server For a while now I've been using squirrelmail. It's been great, but the question had been asked years ago "Could I setup a server to handle multiple domains"? That question had nagged me for years. Today, I finally found a walk through that someone explains the steps for multiple domains. I thought it was important enough to make note of it for me to revert back to someday, and for the rest of the world to see. (0) Comments 02-12-2009 - Polybius As much as I've been into computers most of mylife, I had never heard of the Polybius urban legend til today. It seems in Portland Oregon back in 1981 there was a tempest style type of video game that appeared in only a couple arcades. It was said there was psycological effect from playing the game. The best part is where men in suits show up and don't care about the coins, andjust want data from the machine. (0) Comments 02-10-2009 - Interesting Copyright and Government I was looking through public records and came across how some County Recordes give information away for free and others charge a fee. Anyhow, I was shocked where I saw this message for Salt Lake County: Attention: The compilations of materials on this website are copyright property of Salt Lake County. From my understanding, 90% of government data is public domain. Except for national security stuff. In fact I knew someone that was trying to print NASA photo's on T-Shirts and that is what brought up the debate. It makes sense that you already pay for the government data through taxes, so it typically belongs in public domain. To sum it up I was shocked to see a government agency copyrighting material and information. (0) Comments 01-27-2009 - 93 Year old man freezes to death, with my own twist This here (MARVIN E SCHUR). Here is the ironic part, from what I can tell, the state of Florida had some money for him in relation to FLORIDA POWER AND LIGHT COMPANY. Even though he was living in michigan, it was a different power and light company. (0) Comments 01-09-2009 - VW stock and what happened I while back I remember hearing something about VW stock and tons of people shorting it. What I missed was how tons of money was won and lost. I found an excellent article that explained it in detail. To sum it up, porsche spent 3 years buying up VW stock. Speculative investors thought that VW stock had no place to go but down, so they started shorting the stock. This means betting the price will go down. Anyhow, porsche kept on buying the stock until there was almost nothing left. People that shorted the stock lost big. My summation doesn't do the article justice, so you must read his version. (0) Comments 12-17-2008 - ImageMagick html2ps and pixelating problem Lately, I've been trying to add .pdf automatic generation to one of my websites. The steps I had been taking was:
convert -density 350x350 test.ps test.pdf (2) Comments 12-12-2008 - www.iTrackmine.com A friend of mine works over at www.iTrackmine.com. He was telling me about the system and I thought I should write something about it. It's a system that tracks basically anything with a barcode. A good application would be if you manage a DVD collection. You would be able to track which friends or family memebers you lend you videos to. When he first mentioned it to me I had something called a catscanner that I had bought off ebay for $5 for a different project from years ago. I have to laugh looking back cause I was looking all over the house trying to find anything with a barcode to scan in. I was shocked to see how very few things had a problem. I think some cheap dollar store funny glasses with fake mustache was the only thing that it hiccuped on. Anyhow, if you are looking for something to manage your collection of almost anything, then I'd take a couple minutes to check them out. (1) Comments 12-12-2008 - Being Thankful this Christmas Season With all the mad dash to make sure the kids don't go without, you can lose focus. I came across this article yesterday about the only person to escape from the given Noth Korea Prison. It was a very sobering story. My life didn't not seem bad at all compared to his. You must read the whole article to get the full effect. Just to whet your whistle, he had a finger chopped off for dropping a sewing machine. He witnessed his mother hung and his brother shot to death. Shin was guilty by family association of what some uncles of his conspired to do. I promise you have a 99% chance of being thankful for what you have after reading this story. (0) Comments 12-09-2008 - Asterisk monitor sox audio command It all started with wanting to add monitor to and asterisk box. When I finally figured out that AGI does not allow access to Monitor from everything I tested, I added it to the extensions.conf file. Tada, it worked. Oddly enough there ended up being two audio files. One for each end of the phone. Then I found the m feature which combines the two files after the call finishes. Somehow it wouldn't work though. I tried doing it by hand on the command line and kept getting the error "unknown file type auto". What the huh? After some digging I decided to just add a couple packages by using the following commands: apt-get install sox apt-get install libsox-fmt-all From what I could tell the audio formats are installed seperately. Kind of feels like a no brainer to include them all together since it's soo small, but I can only guess it affects things I don't know about. Hopefully this helps someone on the internet as well. (0) Comments 11-26-2008 - Asterisk rxgain and txgain For a while now I've been having feedback that the audio is to quiet for people to hear on our PRI. From what I can tell the zapata.conf file has two values. The rxgain and txgain. To gauge how well the adjustment is going you can use the command: /usr/src/zaptel/ztmonitor 1 -vv Make sure you define that channel you are monitoring correctly. In the example above I used channel 1. I haven't finished making the adjustments, but I thought I should atleast make note of it in my blog so I can reference it in the future. (1) Comments 11-11-2008 - Missing Server Memory Recently I discovered that my server wasn't using all 4 Gigs of memory. It was only using 1 Gig. Using the free -m commmand I was able to see that only 885 megs of memory was showing up. So I drove to the co-location and opened up the server. 4 Gigs were still in the server, but only 1 Gig was being used by the operating system. In my pursuit, I came across this link on Got more than a gig of RAM and 32-bit Linux? Here's how to use it. I suspect this is the problem. Now for the dangerous part. It requires me to recompile the kernel. I've only done this once before, and only on a development machine. Never on a live. Pfhewww, that was quick. I used the apt-get command to install a new pre-compiled kernel and it worked flawless. Less then a minute later I rebooted the machine. The correct memory showed up and my database was tons faster. (0) Comments 10-31-2008 - Patents and Trolls For a long time now. I've thought that the patent system was broken. How could a Troll charge an inventor, when the Troll isn't adding anything of value to society? Well, there was a court ruling recently that greatly limits software and business method patents. It must meet one of two criteria. #1 - it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus - or - #2 - it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. In other words, pure software or business method patents that are neither tied to a specific machine nor change something into a different state are not patentable. Even thought the article states that it still can be appealed to the supreme court, I think it's a good start to correct things. (0) Comments 10-31-2008 - How secure is your password? I came across this password security brute force time tool moments ago and thought I should definitely make note of it. With all the brute force attacks on ssh these days, I thought I would just test it out. At first I thought "There is no way I am putting my password into the tool", but then I noticed it just asks general information about it. I was shocked to see that just by adding 1 capitol letter, it boosts the time quite a bit. What did we learn from this boys and girls? Use at least 1 uppcase letter, a couple numbers and a special character... and make it longer then 8 characters if you can. (0) Comments 10-03-2008 - James Randi explains homeopathy For those of you that don't know who James Randi is, then you should look up the Nova 25th anniversary that James Randi was in. It was a much fascinating episode. In fact it was that episode that convinced me Nova had some really interesting things to offer. Anyhow, James Randi spends his time debunking all the bogus theories in the world. Today I found a 15 minutes video on him explaining Homeopathy. It's a must watch if you have 15 minutes to spare. (0) Comments 09-20-2008 - Atari 2600 Games Recently, I started thinking I might want to start collecting old Atari 2600 games. I remember seeing a couple old ones when I went to clear some stuff out from my parents house. Also, Tasha and I talked about how we remembered Montezumas Revenge when we were kids. Sidenote, my wife is a robo-babe. Here is a short quick list of why
(1) Comments 08-15-2008 - Funny Gymnast Mr. Nathan sent me this one also. It definitely got to be a comedy routine on the bars. (0) Comments 08-15-2008 - Guess Accent Game I just got this from Mr. Nathan. It's a game where people speak in english and you guess what country they are from. I only scored 20 points. How well can you do? (0) Comments 08-04-2008 - Hydrogen / Water Conversion With high gas prices these days, it's peaked my interest in reading about Hydrogen and Electrolosys. On wikipedia it states: Hydrogen has been called the least efficient and most expensive possible replacement for gasoline (petrol). This typically made sense til I started doing the calculations. I found a briefcase solar panel over at ebay for roughly $80. It was 13 Watts at 12 Volts that roughly gives you 1 Amp. Now at google answers it states: 16.5 Kwatt-hours of energy are needed to convert 1 gallon of water to hydrogen. Here's where it gets a little dicey. Back at google answers it also states: The approximate amount of hydrogen produced from one gallon of water (at 1 atmosphere pressure and at 32 degrees Fahrenheit) is 1250 gallons. Did I read that right? 1250 gallons of Hydrogen from 1 gallon of water? It would take us a whole year to use 1250 gallons of gas in a car. Let's rewind for a second and say we only want one gallon of hydrogen. That would be 16.5 Kwatt-hours / 1250 = 13.2 Watts. If our data is correct, then our 13 Watt briefcase solar panel could make us 1 gallon of hydrogen per hour. I'm sure there has got to be something wrong in my data, but it sure does make one speculate. (2) Comments 07-29-2008 - Cheap Motorcycle Parts We all know that motorcycle shops charge an arm and a leg for parts, but is there a place online that sells motorcycle parts for cheap? After looking though a couple dozen results comparing prices, I was convinced that Cheap Cycle Parts is the cheapest you will find parts for Yamaha dirt bikes. My wife and I purchased a couple dirt bikes recently. I know I'll have to be doing some repairs, so I thought I'd make note of a good place to get cheap parts. (0) Comments 07-27-2008 - Man shoots lawnmower with sawed off shotgun I saw this on news.google.com and just had to post something about it. He shot his lawnmower with a sawed off shotgun. I was shocked to see that he could get over 6 years in prison for the incident. It got even better when I saw he had been drinking. It got really good when it said he lives with his mother. (0) Comments 07-09-2008 - TFTP I was doing some work with a TFTP server and wanted to make a note of some information. Here is the link on tftp that I wanted to save for myself. (0) Comments 07-06-2008 - Citizenship Test I found this citizenship test over on Nates message board, and found it interesting. I cried myself to sleep when I only scored 60%. Some were stupid mistakes, others I really had no idea what the answer was. They seemed to have picked some of the harder questions. Check it out and post your score in the comments so everyone can compare. (4) Comments 07-01-2008 - General Hammond (Don S. Davis) Dies Raise your hand if you watch Stargate SG-1? K, now put your hands down. Remember general Hammond? He just died a couple days ago. I remember hears that the reason they picked him is cause he was the stunt double for Pete on McGyver. The writers liked the interaction between McGyver and Pete, but Pete had died in real life, so they offered it to Don S. Davis. Thanks for helping save planet earth from the Gould. (0) Comments 06-30-2008 - Espresso Book Machine For a while now we have heard about how companies are having a hard time competeing against Amazon. I was sent this link to something called an Espresso Book Machine. It can print and bind a book in about 7 minutes. There is an actual video link towards the bottom that lets you see the machine in action. If this thing takes off, then it would appear Amazon has something to worry about. Wait, the Kindel is an electronic version of a book. Maybe Amazon won't have to worry. (0) Comments 06-25-2008 - Monsanto Video aired in France-Germany I found this documentary on Monsanto. It talks about Round-Up. Even though it's an interesting technology, I'm still afraid of any company that genetically alters the food supply. I didn't have enough time to watch the Monsanto Documentary so I made note of it here on my blog. (5) Comments 05-27-2008 - Shocking Unclaimed Property Seizues Dang! I had no idea what I would find when I started reading about unclaimed property. ABC has a segment on Not-So-Safe-Deposit-Boxes. This is one of those things that goes on behind the scenes that most people don't know about. (2) Comments 05-26-2008 - Give it away and pray business model Over at tech dirt the have an article about Give it away and pray. This is where you completely give your product away and pray that people will give you money. I've been curious about this business model recently. I was going to run a test of my own. Interesting enough they have some expected figures that I was shocked by. It mentions 1 out of every 1,750 downloads (0.057%) left some money. He talks about giving the infinite goods away for free, but the scarce goods to charge for. I suspect he was talking about something such as give the software away for free, but charge for the support. It can be taken a couple different ways, but I think we get the jist of it. (1) Comments 05-26-2008 - Levis Droideka My son levi made this driodeka out of cardboard scraps and tape. He was sooooo proud of it. He wanted to take a picture and post it online... so I told him I would help him, and we would post it on my blog. Here is a picture of it for your viewing pleasure.  (2) Comments 05-24-2008 - Daily Keyword Search A couple years back there was a tool at overture that allowed you to see how many searches were done on a specific phrase for a given month. Unfortuately, they quit supporting this tool... and it went bye bye. A month ago or so I cam across a similar tool at wordpress that lets you do key phrase searches for the prvious day. I see this as a blog worth item to refer to in the future. (0) Comments 05-20-2008 - Unclaimed Property I got a call from my mother today. She said there was a message left on her answering machine about unclaimed property. She gave me the number of the guy, so I called it. It appears it is related to a FHA loan I had before I got married and sold it. I told the guy I wanted to do some of my own research to understand what happened. I fished around on the utah.gov site for 5 minutes before I realized that I might be in the wrong place. Then I found this government website that allows you to do your own searches for unclaimed property. Low and behold my name turned up with a case#. I called the number, and they said they would mail me the form. Something was mentioned about getting it notorized. I don't know the process, since I'm doing this for the first time. I'll post more after I send the form in... to see how difficult it was. On a sidenote, the company that contacted me wanted 34% for their assistance in recovering. At this point I am shocked that more people aren't in business to hunt people down to assist them in recovery. (0) Comments 05-12-2008 - Online Font Shop Over a year ago I was looking for a ttf font without royalties or the headache of being sued if the project ever got big. Today I came across a website that lets you edit and post fonts you've design yourself through their interface. It's actually an interesting/neat site. (0) Comments 05-08-2008 - Randy Pausch last lecture The guy giving the lecture is dying from cancer and only has a couple more months left to live. Typically I thought this was going to be on death, but it ended up being a lecture on life. My wife sent it to me saying that it was blog worthy, and I agree with her. Go ahead and take the time to watch it. You won't regret it. (0) Comments 05-08-2008 - Injection Molding For months Brooks and I have been trying all sorts of ways to get some little plastic parts manufactured. I had no idea that it was going to be this impossible. The cost of an injection mold itself can run as much as $20,000+. We also looked at CNC routers, but the parts were too small for the machine. It seems that all the companies cater to large business, and that it's almost impossible to get your foot in the door without some type of serious financial backing. Anyhow, onto the great part. After looking and looking I came across this website with a hand operated injection molding machine. It's really primitive, but it'll definitely get us past our first run. The base price is around $1,500 which is about the cheapest price of a used/broken large scale machine on ebay. I called the phone number on their website and got a live person within just a couple rings. Dave was very helpful and knowledgeable. If you are struggling with getting a small plastic product out the door, then this is definitely the place to go. (0) Comments 05-07-2008 - Open Source Story Time I had heard this story years ago, but I couldn't find it anywhere... so I rewrote it as a fairytale for your viewing pleasure Once upon a time there was a programmer that was working on a LISP project. A medium side company saw what he was doing with it and asked if he would share his code with them. He said yes and politely shared it with them. A couple years passed and once again the medium sized company and the programmer came in contact. The programmer was thrilled to see all the improvments that were made in ref to the LISP project. The programmer asked the meduim sized company if they would share their code with him. They said "No". This angered the programmer. So he came up with a licensing agreement that basically states "I'll share my code with you, if you share your code with me". That children is why open source exists. (1) Comments 05-06-2008 - no-follow rule actually gives some credit? Maybe? After tons and tons of reading, I found a test on the nofollow rule someone did about the nofollow link rule. Basically, this guy, Alfred Fox posted comments on blogs for 20 minutes a day. Within 3 months he was ranking within a couple of the top spots on search engines. I had constantly heard that the nofollow link rule prevented you from actually getting an link juice from links like this. After reading about the test he did, there must still be some partial credit given. You might be thinking "Why are you writing about this? and aren't you worried about people figuring this out?". Actually, no I'm not worried. No one really reads my blog other then my wife and a couple friends. Lol. (2) Comments 05-01-2008 - Google Page Rank Wahoo! I've been running tests recently with trying to boost my pagerank on this website. After some postings to google groups and using the Webpage Validator I think I've found a puzzle piece. This webpage use to rank at 2, but the crawler came through today and my page rank boosted to 3. Even though they say not to worry too much about your pagerank, since you can have a lower pagerank list higher on google then a higher pagerank. I still think it makes a difference to their overall equation. Fixing all of the trivial webpage html errors definitely helped. Update - Over the weekend I had a conversation with by brother-in-law about website ranking and PR. His perception was that the PR is only related to actual incoming links to your website. The only conclusion I can draw is that there is conflicting information about SEO in the internet world. On a sidenote, about a week ago I had a friend mention that he paid $300/month for a specific term on adwords. He said he saw his actual ranking on the search engine move him to #1 over time. After he quit paying for adwords his site started to drop mysteriously lower and lower. I verified a similar experience with another person unrelated. This wight be one of those unwritten rules to the equation where you have to pay google through adwords to get your URL to get into the top listings. (0) Comments 05-01-2008 - Speech on Middle Class I found this speech on the middle class of america today. It's rather lengthy, so I had to leave it running in the background and listen to it while I worked. This was by far a very interesting speech. From what I could tell it was given at Berkley by a lady from Harvard Law. If you don't watcht the while thing, at least watch the part on where the money is being spent for families. (0) Comments 04-27-2008 - Belle Ame Jewelry For a while now I've been helping a friend of mine with a website that sells handmade jewelry. This isn't your run-of-the-mill online jewelry store. It's meant to appeal to the female audience... and the website only displays one piece of jewelry a day. I think part of this is to prevent people from getting overwhelmed with too much selection possibly. Plus it keeps people coming back everyday to see if there is a better deal the next day. Check it out. Even though I helped with it, I still think it's one of the more quality jewelry sites out there. Please tell your friends if you like it. (0) Comments 04-25-2008 - New Acquire Board Game? I just found out that there is a new Acquire Board Game foming out in June 2008. This really caught me off guard. I seriously thought it had been remade so many times it was going to end up being a dead title. I like the idea that monopoly isn't the only board game that has been remade over and over. (0) Comments 04-25-2008 - Searchme? I was checking my logs this morning and found the company Search Me. I had never heard of this search engine before. It's interesting cause they use adobe flash as their base. This reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend a while back. He was trying to come up with a reason to not use flash for more in depth web stuff. Javascript was laced with browser incompatability problems. Anyhow, onto searchme. It was an interesting concept to try to make searches more visual. It came across as more of a novelty, but still an interesting way to get attention. In the bio section Randy Adams and John Holland are the founders. Interesting enough Randy Adams was the Director of Engineering for Adobe. I didn't recognize the company that John came from, but he seems highly competent. If you are reading this, I'd recommend just checking their website out. It's interesting enough you might be a little bit entertained. (0) Comments 04-24-2008 - Roundup and Monsanto Over the past couple weeks I've seen articles popup about the company Monsanto and the dangerous genetic games they are playing. From now on I think I will personally be checking manufacturer labels before buying. On a side not it was Monsanto that was pushing the agenda of GBH in milk. Be affraid, be very affraid. (0) Comments 04-19-2008 - Hylafax and IAXmodem Today I was trying to figure out how Hylafax and IAXmodem works. There weren't a lot good examples out there, but I was lucky enough to find a couple Semi-good examples here and here. I wanted to make note of it, so that I can eventually make a walk through for someone using debian. (0) Comments 04-07-2008 - Government Contracts Between the Lines Today there was a story about a $3 billon project went bad where tax payers foot the bill. Their final conclusion? Use paper. It mentions the following: In my experience, the primary reason for large IT failures is a lack of clear business objectives -- or a lack of agreement on those objectives," he told the E-Commerce Times. I think they are only giving the partial story. Years ago I got a hair-brained scheme to sell spider traps door-to-door. To try my idea out, I talked my 15 year old cousin to go down one side of the street... while I went down the other side. I came back with nothing sold. 20 minutes laster he came back with all sold. Then he took my share out and sold them as well. I was really perplexed. Why had he sold them all and I sold nothing. My uncle had sat and watched this happen. With him being a salesperson his whole life, he finally explained it to me. Two things had happened. #1 - Friends buy from friends #2 - Cute and cuddly kids/teenagers will always out sell a man in his mid 20's door-to-door #1 is where I want to come back to now. Friends buy from friends. Just because you work for the government doesn't mean you won't buy from a friend. I tried putting myself in that person's shoes a while back. Once anyone has been through layoffs, you tend not to forget about it. So it makes sense to build your network of friends for a rainy day when you're out of work. What can be done? That is a good question. I've been reading "Wealth of Nations" recently looking for answers, but I haven't found the answers for this. If you have any answers, feel free to post it as a comment. (0) Comments 04-04-2008 - Public Service Commission What is the Public Service Commission? Let me start from the beginning. Back in October of 2007 we requested to get a T1 put into the new school that the company I work for built. With it being April 2008, the T1 still isn't installed. We were lucky enough that I thought ahead and my gut was telling me something weird was going to happen. So we used VOIP, and a couple other techniques to wing it til the T1 was put in. Here is where it gets interesting. We ordered the service through McleodUSA. They only provide the dialtone. For my understanding Qwest provides the actual connection to what they call the DMark. It's the box outside of your house where the phone line comes in. For some reason something has been preventing Qwest from providing the actual physical line. Typically you would think "Call Qwest"... so I did. After dialing a bunch of different numbers to Qwest and getting nowhere. I finally got a hold of tech support at Qwest. My call got elevated like I was hoping, but then I hit a dead wall. The supervisor told me it was illegal for them to talk to me since I was not a customer of Qwest, and that Mcleod is who should be calling Qwest. My mind is boggled at this point. I live in America, but I felt like I was living in a 3rd world country. No service for 6 months? Mcleod is stuck at Qwest. We are stuck at Mcleod. I was at a loss. I told this to my boss and he mentioned the Public Service Commission. What the heck is the Public Service Commission? I've never heard of them before. So I found their website and on their front page it reads The primary responsibility of the Commission is to ensure safe, reliable, adequate, and reasonably priced utility service Further down it also reads Complaints filed with the Public Service Commission are the last resort in the complaint process. I knew that there were certain laws that utility companies have to abide by, since they have a monopoly on the utility lines themselves. But I'm no lawyer and have no idea what they are. Anyways, there you have it. A last resort if you're ever stuck with problems with a utility company. I'm still going to wait just a little longer before filing a complaint. I really want to make sure it really is our last resort. (0) Comments 03-24-2008 - Justice Approvel Sirius buyout of XM This is a long time in the waiting. By what? a year and a half? For those of you new to this, Sirius and XM satellite radio companies started looking at their business plans and realized if one doesn't buy the other and consulidate... both could very wll go out of business. So Sirius propsed to buy XM. Then people waited, probably 18 months. I didn't think I would see that day, but it go approved today. The share prices didn't jump nearly as much as I thought it would, but the game still isn't over. Once again, we sit, wait, and see. (0) Comments 03-20-2008 - Intersting Crayon Physics Game I just had this sent in from Dean. Thanks Dean. It's a youtube video of an interesting Crayon Physics Game. It definitely something unique that I really haven't seen before. (0) Comments 03-12-2008 - Asterisk and AGI I've used Asterisk for a couple years now, but I hadn't used AGI until recently. For those of you asking "What is Asterisk"? It's an open source PBX. For those of you asking "What is a PBX"? Go to PBS Kids and play a game. For those of you asking "What is PBS Kids"? Lol, enough joking around. Back to Asterisk. Anyhow, AGI allowed me to link a phone system to a database... and my database is linked to a front end website. So it allowed me to do all sorts of weird stuff with a phone system. I've been tempted to make a cheesy game that you can access via the phone, but haven't had the time to do it yet. Just think of what it took for those credit card and bank companies to build their voice automated attendant. Now it's possible for the little guy using open source. (0) Comments 02-26-2008 - Speed up Squirrelmail A handful of years later after an installation of squirrelmail, it seems to affecting multiple people in my office... including me. From what I can tell it is related to having billions of email messages in the inbox... or saved in a folder somewhere. After some searching I found a small tech gem on speeding up squirrelmail. The sad part is you will have to search for it. It is about 2/3rds down labeled "4.7. Config SquirrelMail" The menu's have probably changed a little, but let me try to sum it up for you. 1. Domain = Your Domain I think this prevents DNS lookups that might slow it down. 2. Imap Settings -> Server software = courier You might have to install courier-imap. I vaguely remember installing it a long time ago when I first was learning about squirrelmail. From what I can tell this allows courier-imap to help with the next two options 3. General Options/Allow server thread sort = true I suspect this just allows the server to create extra threads to help with sorting the email. 4. General Options/Allow server-side sorting = true When I saw this I was surprised. What did they mean by this. Was the sorting done by the client? Even though it probably eats up processor speed, my gut tells me this is the huge factor. After making the suggested changes, I saw a huge difference in performance. Instead of waiting 10 seconds for squirrelmail to come up... it's back to instantaneous. (1) Comments 02-15-2008 - Google Webmaster Tools I came across Google Webmaster Tools recently. It seemed like an interesting enough tool to make mention of it. After setting all of it up, it allows you to see some really valuable information with search phrases relating to your site. Granted making the sitemap was a little bit of a pain, overall I was pleasantly surprised with their tools. (0) Comments 02-01-2008 - Jim Rogers Speaks I read the book "Hot Commodities" by Jim Rogers a couple years ago. Today I came across an article the quotes him quite a bit. He talk about the recession coming. This is scary stuff. I remember how bad it was when the internet bubble burst. I was one of the very few of my friends that was able to find employment. I basically had to beg for a 1/2 decent job. Everyone else I knew collected unemployment while they weathered it out. I just hope Jim Rogers isn't right, or we are going to see some serious changes. (0) Comments 01-18-2008 - French Price Fixing? Over at slashdot the have an article posted about how Amazon.com is being fined by france for free shipping. It says france has a law that doesn't allow you to sell a book 5% less then the publishers recommended price. They really do things differently over there. I remember a couple years ago how they made it so a company couldn't lay off anyone under the age of 26. The unemployment rate shot through the roof, cause businesses didn't want to be forced to hold onto a dead wood employee. I definitely support peoples rights, but there has got to be a balance somewhere. (0) Comments 01-18-2008 - Bobby Fisher Dies It's a sad day. I just found out the Bobby Fisher has died. What was definietly a chess icon. They even made a movie called Searching for Bobby Fisher. My experience of chess what much different then Bobby's. I use to think I was good. He really was. I remember for years I rarely lost while playing random matches over time. When I was 26 I decided to try to join a small chess tournament. They put me in the group of 6-8 year olds, since I wasn't ranked. I laughed thinking I would squish them. I would sit there concentrating on my moves while they played tag and pushed buttons on the vending machines. I knew I had one of them sweating when he actually stopped playing for a minutes to watch his moves more closely. I ate humble pie at the end of the day. My 15 minutes of fame came when I thought I'd go to one of these speed chess tournaments. They put me up against a guy by the name of Zoltan. From what I remember he was the highest ranked there. 1/2 way into the game I could see he was going to completely clobber me. So I decided to ignore his moves and go for broke. To my surprise it worked. He stood up somewhat agitated and said "What rank are you"? I told him I have no rank. He told me I was a liar and walked off. Little did he know it was just a fluke that I won. On a side note, I'm still eating humble pie to this day. (0) Comments 01-03-2008 - SSH Secure Tips I've heard by word of mouth about securing SSH login by various tweaks. Today I actually found someone wrote a Bullet Proof your Server article. It was a short article, but had enough information that I foudn it important enough to make note of it. (0) Comments 12-28-2007 - Startup Tips I just found this list of Start up Tips and wanted to keep note of it. So I posted it on my blog. About 1/2 way through they had a list of conferences recommended. I'm still looking for prices, but my gut is telling me they are cheaper then Comdex and possibly more effective. Depending on what stage of business you're in. (0) Comments 12-21-2007 - command write(10) took - conclusion After fighting the battle on tryong to find the solution for the VMware error: command write(10) took I finally decided to take a different direction. VMware wanted to charge me a bunch of money to look at it. I can understand that, except I had guarantee that they could. As I had already spent numerous hours searching their forums for an answer. In the end I just decided to look at purchasing a dedicated machine. I bought a HP/Compaq DL380 (AMD version). Holy crap! That might have been one of the best decision I have ever made. I was surprised at how fast it ended up being. It helped to purchased the BBWC and Raid 10, but I still think it would be fast without it. I'm 100% convinced never to buy a Dell server again... and only purchase HP/Compaq servers. (0) Comments 12-21-2007 - Samba and Microsoft protocol documentation This was a really odd one that I just don't understand. Somehow the samba development team in unison with another foundation paid microsoft 10,000 euros. In return microsoft is providing protocol information about how to be better compatible? I thought this was crazy when I read it. Why would Microsoft want samba to be compatible? (0) Comments 12-09-2007 - Age Of Mythology With 5 kids and money being tight. My kids and I play old cheap-o games that aren't the latest and greatest. The most recently we have been playing is Age of Mythology. It's capable of running of computers that some of my friends have already tried to throw away. Some of those friends inquired about wanting to play also, but for some reason if the game is being hosted across the internet, only the LAN people can connect. this has been a persistent problem. At least until today. I found some information about something called an Override Address setting. My guess is that it was an after thought when they were developing the game. I guess at least they game us a work around. Unfortunately, this work around didn't work either. :( (0) Comments 12-02-2007 - ACT Database Errors I had a client recently ask me to help them with their ACT database they recently purchased. I really dragged my feet on this one. I called ACT and they wanted to charge me $$$ to even start looking at the issue. No basic questions at all. Pfffttt! I'd rather take my chances on the internet first. I searched and finally found a webpage that had a list of way to resolve shared ACT database issues. It seemed straight forward with it's possible answers. I find it interesting that over the years I've seen users completely crippled by their desire to use an ACT database for something they should be using a different tool for. One example is where they wanted to import online transaction information into their act database. (0) Comments 12-01-2007 - Corporate Personhood I just read this article about Corporate Personhood. It was an awsome article. It talks about how the railroads (big business) tried and finally successfully became recognized as citizens. Resulting in being protected by the Bill of Rights. They even went as far as to arguing it was unconstitutional for them to pay taxes. It's a must read for anyone. (0) Comments 11-20-2007 - Solar Power Stocks I've been watching solar power stocks for a while now. SPWR has been the best performing stock in my portfolio. I feel this was good for a newbie. Anyhow, I noticed the dipps in the stock market recently. I thought I'd fire-up news.google.com and see if I could find out what is going on. I came across an article about how Don't Count on Spain for Solar Success. I thought it was interesting at the end where he talked about how it's the end of the solar revolution and not the beginning. I have mixed feelings on this. With oil prices up, alternate power sources should start to be more appealing. As far as the soalr revolution goes, I remember heard Clayton Christensen speak almost 2 years ago. He talked about how the next innovation in solar power will probably come from a place we least expect it. Possibly Mongolia? (0) Comments 10-19-2007 - BlockHosts and Fail2ban Have you ever check your /var/logs/auth.log file? Have you ever found any of the following entries: Illegal user test from 207.7.102.123 Illegal user info from 85.233.67.54 - POSSIBLE BREAKIN ATTEMPT! Well I have. Usually these entries are related to something called a Brute Force Attack. There are a couple of programs that can help with this. BlockHosts is one. The other is Fail2ban. I haven't installed either yet. From what I can tell both can be installed using the apt-get command. (0) Comments 10-10-2007 - Detecting Mobile Browser I've been wondering for some while how to detect a mobile browser as opposed to a desktop browser. Microsoft has an article on how to detect their mobile browsers, but what about other non-microsoft? It appears someone at Experts Exchange posted some regular expression in PHP that seems to detect almost all mobile browsers. The million dollar question is now "How does Google detect it"? (0) Comments 10-08-2007 - Color Blend For a while I've thought there must have been someone that had created a color blending tool, but until now I hadn't found it. Color Blend was exactly what I was looking for. Yeahooo!!! I didn't have to program one myself. It seems to do a really good job of picking 6 compatible colors. (1) Comments 09-29-2007 - VMWare Error #2 After searching endlessly for repairs for the error: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command WRITE(10) took 2.044 seconds (ok) I couldn't find a good repair that worked. I went back to square one and decided to check the /var/log/messages on the main server. I came across the error: [ 8546.803754] rtc: lost some interrupts at 512Hz. Holy crap! This has been happening tons of times every second for the past couple months since I set it up. Yikes! I hope it didn't ruin my hard drives. Anyhow, I was finally able to find a vmware fix that works. Thanks Jack! Much appreciated. Now for the downside :(... It didn't stop the SCSI0:0. :( (1) Comments 09-25-2007 - VMWare Error: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command WRITE I've stumbled upon an error in vmware that I've been looking for answers for a goo week now. The exact error is: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command WRITE(10) took 2.044 seconds (ok) I did finally stumble upon a comment on vmware message board that seemed like it might work. I've found two ways to work around it. 1. set noacpi as a host kernel boot option 2. set the scaling govenor to performance and put a load on the host machine. I run a do nothing shell script at nice 19 to provide a load to the machine while running vmware, since turning off acpi breaks too many things. I still need to do some testing, but I think there might be something to his comments. I'll post again when I find more conclusive evidence. (1) Comments 09-19-2007 - Alan Greenspan Sunday night there was an interview with Alan Greenspan on 60 Minutes. I remember learning a little bit about Alan Greenspan in an economics class years ago. Other then that I only remember a remark a friend, in the mortagage industry, had made about "No one should have that much control". Anyhow, back to the interview. After watching the interview I decided I liked the guy. He seemed genuine and trying to do the right thing. I like his comment he made about Gerald Ford, where he said something about how they were talking about the economy. Gerald turned to him and said "Putting all this a side, What is the right thing to do for the economy"? Even though Nixon and Clinton are very smart people, maybe what makes a good president is just being able to do the right thing... at the most inconvenient times. (0) Comments 09-19-2007 - eudcedit What is eudcedit? It's a free cheap-o font utility that comes with windows. I remember seeing it a year or so ago, but never made a book mark of it. Now I came searching for it, and took me forever (10 minutes in internet land) to find it. So I place it in my blog as a bookmark for me to find another day. (0) Comments 09-17-2007 - McleodUSA Outages Last week on Thursday we had a massive telephone outage across all our locations that are serviced my McleodUSA. I've been periodically scanning internet news to see if any information has sufaced as to why. The only link I found was a McleodUSA email. It seems I didn't get the memo, but it doesn't say much. (0) Comments 09-11-2007 - Gangrene and Comcast Demand I just got an email back from the people at the Gangrene Film Festival. They said that there is a good chance it will show up on Friday. (0) Comments 09-11-2007 - Murrays Film I just got an email back from Murray Tripplet. It appears that he didn't sumit a film to the Gangrene Film Festival this year. :( (0) Comments 09-11-2007 - Open Source Video Surveillance For a couple years now I've considered setting up a video surveillance system at my home. Mostly due to car breakin's and vandalism that occurs every couple years. I've hesitated because of the cost. I've tired x10 stuff, but it's soo cheap that I've had to replace cameras every couple. years. I stumbled onto the open source project Zone Minder. It seems like it might work. They have support for tons of cameras. especially the AXIS IP cameras. When I eventually start/finish with the system, then I'll let all of you 5 reader know how it ended up. Before I forget, there was a software install tutorial that will be helpful. (1) Comments 09-11-2007 - Burning Salt Water? It appears there has been a discovery of burning sea water with radio frequencies. Sounds like a great idea since we're at war over oil. I think the downside is that large competeing businesses probably wouldn't allow solutions like these to mature and grow. Would you if it were going to put you out of business? (0) Comments 09-11-2007 - Gangrene Film Festival Last Friday my Wife and I... and some friends (BWashburn and his wife) went to the Gangrene Film Festival. This was my 3rd year running. We liked the "25 ways to be happy" and "Learning by Jep Jepperson". I could of sworn I heard that it was supposed to show up on Comcast on Demand, but I've been watching and I haven't seen it show up. I've emailed the guys at gangrene and am still awaiting a reply. I regret that I didn't stay for the late viewing. I plan on showing up next year, but taking the day off work and sleeping the whole day. That way I can stay til the end. They didn't have programs this year. They only had voting slips. Unfortunately, they did reveal who the director was until they showed the film. I've emailed Murray Tripplet to see what he submitted this year, because he didn't show up in the 1st half... and I left in the 2nd. By all means, it's a different type of audience they appeal to, other then your standard movies. I still think it's refreshing to see something different then your rehash/remake/push-the-sex-violence-envelope movies that you see in standard theatres these days. (0) Comments 09-08-2007 - Gardening Tip I've had an ongoing problem with morning glory. A while back I overheard that if you spray for morning glory right before the first frost, then you have a better chance of getting rid of it. Something about it taking the poison to the roots. Today I was looking for some information on when the first frost is and found this National Frost Dates estimation chart. After looking at it I realized that I should probably spray today. (0) Comments 08-27-2007 - Whiteboard Friday Today I came across something called Whiteboard Friday. They do a video every week on youtube that explains good information about SEO optimization. From the couple videos I looked at they seem like they know what they're talking about. Btw, some of the stuff they talk about I haven't seen anywhere else. Oh, and the main guy looks a little like Matthew Broderick. (0) Comments 08-27-2007 - Who really makes money off of google adsense? Does anyone really make any money off of adsense? I've often asked this questions many times. Sure, there are probably many big sites that rake it in, but what about a site you've never heard of? Well, check this out. Here is a picture of a check from google. If you're checking your eyes then your in the same boat as me. Yes it reads $132,994.97 for a website I've never heard of. (0) Comments 08-24-2007 - Who is John Galt? Do you know who John Galt is? Well, maybe it's not a person, but more of a company. At least in New York it is. It appears the company hasn't done much of anything since it was incorporated in 1983. (0) Comments 08-03-2007 - Chungs Dry Cleaning Case Mark and I have been following the Chungs Dry Cleaning case where a judge was trying to sue them for $54 million for false advertising over a pair of lost pants... later returned a day or two later. The Judge seems to be in trouble of losing his job. Interesting. Very Interesting. (1) Comments 08-03-2007 - VMware and timesync problems I've finally figured it out. For some reason if I installed the vmware tools on most of my virtual servers, then the timesync error problem would go away. There had always been one server that the timesync seemed to be off though. Anyhow, if you have problems with timesync and installing the vmware tools didn't work... check to see if you have a dual or quad processor. To fix a different issue, I enabled both processors for a specific virtual server. I noticed within 30 minutes that the timesync problem came back. Tada!!! I'm sure some type of ntp install will probably fix/help it, I just have done it yet. I've only read about ntp, but haven't spent enough time implementing it. One might ask why I post this information that 99% of people that read my blog won't understand. Well, I've received speckles of emails around the world where someone would thank me for the info on the fix. With 6.7 billion people in the world, there are probably 1 or 2 that are working the same problem as me. (0) Comments 07-27-2007 - Hello Kitty Humiliation System I saw this Hello Kitty Humiliation and thought "No Way"!! This is for all those people that like to dress up their pets for fun. It is complete torture, but you must see. (1) Comments 07-23-2007 - VMware Time Problem Recently, I had a friend recommend VMware for a project I've been working on. Considering VMware server is free, I decided to take the plunge. The whole VMware idea was foreign to me. What do you mean run multiple operating systems on a single server? After the installation I noticed that there seemed to be a time drift problem. I would set the time at night and then the next morning it would drift back about 8 hours. I did notice that the Windows Install seemed to stay current though. Then I remembered installing the VMware tools. This is where I developed the theory that a VMware tool installation would correct this. The Windows VMware tools install went really easy. The linux one was a little more difficult. On the linux one, you have to recompile the kernel. This was a pain for someone who hasn't been ambitious enough to try this yet. Or at least I haven't needed to until now. The VMware tools install instructions seemed fairly straight forward and simple, but when I came to compiling the kernel I had to reference these Debian Kernel Compile Instructions. The great part was that it seemed to have worked. The time doesn't drift anymore. Update - If you're not careful you can compile your kernel, but it can have problems booting. From what I experienced, it can be related to sometype of boot image. You you'll have to create the image you need using: mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22 2.6.22 You'll also have to edit the /boot/grub/menu.1st for the change. (3) Comments 07-21-2007 - Linux Kernel Re-Compile Even though only 0.001% of you will ever need this information... I need it to refer to in the future. So neener neeners. Raise your hand if you have ever had to compile a linux kernel. That's what I thought, no hands. Raise your hand if you have ever needed to re-compile a linux kernel, but could never find a really good walk-through help file? Well, I'm raising my hand so the rest of you (search-bots) will have to suffer. After looking and looking I finally found help for Kernel Recompile for Debian. Unless you are a closet nerd, anything I could write about it would be dry so I will stop here. (2) Comments 06-11-2007 - Board Game Manufacturer I did some follow-up work and called Inland Press. I spoke to a sales guy that was totally cool and gave me the number to a company that did the manufacturing of gameboards. The company was Wright Brothers Paper Box Company. I was able to get right through to a sales person. They seemed very professional and we're able to answer all my questions. I was told the price quote would take a couple days. Considering the fact that it's been really hard to locate a gameboard manufacturer... a couple days is no big deal. (1) Comments 06-09-2007 - Inland Press/Book #2 :( No more then 15 minutes later I get this bounced email Returned mail: Over quota It just maked me laugh. I'm trying to throw money at someones door and they don't even know it. Lol (2) Comments 06-09-2007 - CNC Router VS Plastic Mold Injection It talked to someone of the phone today that had persistent network issues. They said they had been having problems with network communication to their CNC Router. This peeked my interest, cause I usually don't get to work on large equipment like this. In fact the only cool large machine I've worked on was a laser engraver... oh yeah, and I worked for an overhead crane company for a year+, but thats a different story. Anyhow, the network communication problem was because of the virus protection software loaded on the machine. My heart went out to the other couple guys before me, cause it's kind of a weird problem. Anyhow, now to the good stuff. The machine was awsome. It was almost as wide as a small trailer home. It used vacumes to suck the material down, before it did it's machining. It's input was 3D CAD drawings. I was filled with awe by the time I left. He tried to pay me for my time, but I could have cared less about the money. I inquired about machining the game pieces for my Fork It Over game. This was due to the frustration I recently experienced with a manufacturer from China. I was amazed to find out that he said he could probably machine to pieces much cheaper then what I was quoted from a manufacturer (injection molding) from China. And I don't even have to front the cost for the Molds. I am way excited. I'll definitely post on my future experience. (0) Comments 06-09-2007 - Inland Press/Book I was seaching for a manufacturer to print our board game Fork It Over and read an article about a book printing company that shifted gears and started printing board games for a current customer. Immediately I went to their website and sent them an email. Now lets see what happens. Oddly enough, about 70% of the time when I am looking for manufacturers for large quantites... the potential sales person is flaky. This even happens on phone calls also. I would have thought numbers of 30,000+ would have been enough. I guess I was wrong. That why I write Lets see what happens. Hopefully they come through, and I can write really good things about them. :) (0) Comments 06-07-2007 - The Dreaded ^M Today I was trying to program in php-cli. I kept on getting tons of strange errors such as : bad interpreter: No such file or directory Then I remembered something about windows putting ^M characters at the end of every line. Linux doesn't need them. Anyhow, I found this great search/replace example and had to take note if it. (1) Comments 05-25-2007 - Word Tracking and Search Engines In recent months I noticed that the Yahoo/Overture tool has quit updating information. It is still left on January 2007. It is almost a hobby of mine to watch trends year-round to see certain terms perform differently at different times of the year. In my quest for a replacement I stubled across Googles Sandbox Estimator. It seems fairly straight forward. I guess only time will tell. (1) Comments 05-24-2007 - Dying Technology Over at Computer World they have a Top 10 list of dying technology. The one I found interesting was Cobol, Cold fusion and CNA. I found Cold Fushion interesting cause I had someone ask me within the past year or two if I would/could program a project in Cold Fusion. I was surprised that Cobol wasn't dead yet. I picked up a book from years ago about it... read for 10 minutes... and decided it was definietly a dying language. (1) Comments 05-01-2007 - Supreme Court and Patents Ruling Today I noticed an article about the recent ruling of patents. It appears the supreme court discourages obvious patents. I've tried giving this some real thought about how this would effect businesses. Patent Trolls are probably the worst hit. And it should be that way. I have no respect for someone who camps on an idea, charges other companies for patent licensing, with no intention of manufacturing the product. I will admit, some viable businesses rely on patents to protect themselves. Especially, for a small temporary time when it enters a new market. In my opinnion of capitolism, the best product should win out. Due to other factors, this is not always the case. Over the long term, it may be harder for a company to rely on merit, but maybe that is how it is supposed to be. (1) Comments 04-28-2007 - Dow 13,000 Today I read about someones explaination about why the dow hit 13,000. My gut told me that there was some truth in what the article said. In addition, I want to mention that a couple years ago the feds lowered interest rates to boost the economy. My gut at the time told me that it was just a band aid to the problem. It only bought more time. (1) Comments 04-27-2007 - VMware and Debian Etch I have been trying this week to get VMware to install on Debian Etch. With no avail I ran into a problem with error while loading shared libraries: libXt.so.6 I looked everywhere and could not find the answer anywhere. After trying all sorts of apt-get install commands, it dawned on me. The following are the commands you need to install the missing .so files: apt-get install libXt-dev apt-get install libXrender-dev On a sidenote, these apt-get commands are an extension of another Vmware install walk through. (1) Comments 04-26-2007 - Link Building Secrets Today I came across this article about Link Building Secrets. There were nine secrets to choose from. The one that stood out the most that I did not know about was The secret to high rankings is links from .edu based sites Unfortunately, they do not go into depth about how to convince someone to link to your site. (3) Comments 04-16-2007 - Chad Vader I had someone inform me about Chad Vader. They have done 7 episodes and you can see they get better at producing them over time. The idea behind the episodes is way funny. If you've never seen or heard of Chad Vader, then you must check it out. (1) Comments 04-11-2007 - Sharebuilder Wahoo!!! About once a year sharebuilder.com Gain/Loss tracker seems to go haywire. I am not 100% sure why. What I do know is I get to pretend to be rich for about one hour every year. Last year it said I made $60,000 off the stock market. Sell!! Sell!! Sell!!!. Today it pretends to say I made $6,000 off the stock market. In reality I am probably down -3%. I tried refreshing from time to time this morning... to try to get above $6,000. Sadly enough that is as high as the slot mahcine would pay out. Check out the screen shots I made. Screen shot #1 Screen shot #2 If you think I am lying then lets take a reality check. Why would Sirus Radio be trading so high? I rest my case. If you are thinking this guy is no good at the stock market. Yep, it is not my strong point at all. (2) Comments 04-03-2007 - Stock tip, lesson learned About a year ago I decided I wanted to learn more about the stock market. So I setup an account at sharebuilder.com. Here is where the tip and lesson was learned. Delta went into bankruptcy. Their stock became really cheap. I thought what a great deal. Then I learned that when a company emerges from bankruptcy it can restart its stock under a different symbol. Thus making the current stock worthless. Delta plans on doing this. Thus lesson learned. Do not buy common stock in a bankruptcy company. (0) Comments 03-16-2007 - Contest #3 K, this one hits at the heart of all programmers. I've never seen sooo much passion in a nerds eyes as I have over this issue. So here it is (dun dun dun)... Where do the brackets for scope resolution belong in reference to a function? -- Old School -- function MyFunction(docrap){ int garbage = 0; garbage = docrap+1;} -- or -- -- New School -- function MyFunction(docrap) { ย ย ย ย ย int garbage = 0; ย ย ย ย ย garbage = docrap+1; } On a side note... if you're asking What is a function? Then really... no I mean really... this blogs not for you. (7) Comments 03-16-2007 - Contest #2 Winner There was such a good response to the Wookie/Tribble contest that we will announce the winners early. The comments about tribbles being edible and having hair on the inside was really good, but alas... the winner is **Captain Kirk**. Once again, we chose him based on simple mathematics. He has more letters in his name then Wookie or Tribble. It also helped that his best friend is a Vulcan. (1) Comments 03-13-2007 - Vs Contest #2 K, this one is for all you smart alecks. Which has more hair? A Wookie? or Captain Ki.... oops... I mean or Ten Tribbles? If you do not know what hair is, then you really should not be reading this blog without your parents permission.
(13) Comments 03-13-2007 - Contest #1 Winners The winners of the first ever iWestDev contest was a close one. Both sides of comments really held a good debate. Unfortunatley, no one mathematically supported their facts. Here is the conclusion I came to. If you sequentually assign a value for each letter in the words DeathStar and BorgCube then you will see DeathStar = 96 BorgCube = 73 So the winner is the DeathStar. On a sidenote I saw Return of the Jedi over the weekend. Towards the end the DeathStar was blowing up a couple large ships like they were nothing. At that moment in time it was apparent to me who the winner was. (2) Comments 03-09-2007 - Universal Health Care Seconds ago I just saw a story about Massachusetts universal health care. My guess is that everyone is watching to see what happenes. This seems like a touchy subject in public discussion. I have heard the argument that someone doesn't choose to have a kidney defect of cancer. Other arguments I have heard are about "There are no free lunches". The sad part is that I think there will be unintended consequences. Sure, on the surface free health care for everyone sounds great, but only at a price. Eventually someone has to pay for it. Now raise your hand if you want to pay for it? I hear crickets. (5) Comments 03-07-2007 - Looking for inbound links? I just found this Tagspage.com minutes ago. The idea was very similiar to Million Dollar Home Page, but it's done with links. Anyone looking to boost their website ranking knows that inbound links are very important. Interesting enough is that they had a free section for us cheapies. (0) Comments 03-06-2007 - Website Directories While looking for SEO tips I came across a great list of Website Directories. It had the handful of ones I knew about with a handful of others that I did not know about. (0) Comments 03-05-2007 - Diebold and Electronic Voting Changes? I just read recently that Diebold has possbily moved electronic voting machines to low prority. I guess bad PR can make a difference. After watching the HBO special Hacking Demorcracy my faith in the system was taken down a peg or two. Does my vote really count anymore? When I read that Diebold is possiblly putting electronic voting on low priority for the company... I was amazed. There still is the million dollar question though. What really did happen? What is the full truth? (0) Comments 03-02-2007 - Magic Boots of Escape What does Dungeons n Dragon and Cops have in common? Nothing unless you are the TV show Reno 911. I have never watched it before, but my friend Chance mentioned it recently. From what it sounded like it was a spoof on Cops. Anyhow, I went onto youtube to see if I could find the clip about Magic Boots of Escape. It was way, way, way hilarious. I don't want to spoil it all for you, but it starts out with two guys dressed up playing dungeons n dragons... and they get in trouble with the cops. (4) Comments 03-01-2007 - User/Submitter What is User/Submitter? Apparently, if you're having a hard time getting your submitted story on Digg to move up, then this is the service to turn to. It's $20 to register and $1 for each digg. How do I know about this? I read about someone using the service to move up a lame story on digg. Kind of interesting to see that people are still gaming the system. (2) Comments 02-28-2007 - Deathstar vs BorgCube K, I'm starting a new game for all 5 readers of my blog. Here's how it works. I post a battle between two **things** and you defend your position in the comments. Todays battle is... Who would win in a battle between the Deathstar vs BorgCube? If you're asking yourself what is a Deathstar?... or what is a Borg Cube?... then this is probably the wrong blog for you to read.
(13) Comments 02-28-2007 - Oscars On Sunday, I went over to a friends house for an Oscars party. Most interesting enough I watch the Oscars for other reasons. Back in 1999 The Cider House Rules won two Oscars. I had never heard of the movie before and it sounded interesting. I rented it... watched it... and I was totally disgusted by the end of the movie. At that moment in time, if a movie won an Oscar award... then it was a strike against the movie in my eyes. Here's where it gets really funny. This year while watching the Oscars I noticed a movie called Pans Labrynth. I thought it looked like a good wholesome family movie... with the possibility similar to something Jim Henson would produce. Lol, oh wait! He did produce a Labrynth. Anyhow, an employee I work with told me it was rated R. What to huh? So I looked it up. Rated R for graphic violence and some language. This totally kills me. I avoid rated R, these days, for myself, let alone for the kids. So there you have it. How about we start a trend to watch the Oscars... so we can see what movies to avoid. (0) Comments 02-28-2007 - Amazing Grace Last weekend my wife and I... and some friends went and saw the movie Amazing Grace. I was very very impressed with the movie. It seems sooo many films these days try to sell themselves on Violence, Sex or Poo-poo-Pee Pee-Fart-fart humor. Amazing Grace will be a great movie because of story and acting. There were no big star names to carry the movie. Yet, I did recognize many well yet undiscovered actors. Thomas Clarkson is one that stood out. For the life of me I could not remember what else he had been in. After looking up on imdb I realized his real name is Rufus Sewel. He played in the movie Dark City... which could have been awsome, and somewhat is... yet lost my respect for the senseless grime that they put in it to get the R rating. I was only able to recognize Albert Finney as being in Oceans Twelve. I laugh cause it's uncredited. Just to get back to the point... if you're looking for a good movie to see, then I suggest this one. (0) Comments 02-22-2007 - College Sense of Humor When I found this image of a college test I thought it was way hilarious. Today when I looked at it again, I noticed it was the professor that did all the red ink stuff. You must see. It totally rocks. (1) Comments 02-12-2007 - TV Advertising Just when you thought TV advertising was wayyyy too expensive for your business... then there came Spot Runner. I was able to adjust the price to as cheap as $400. The downside is that the ads seem to run only in a limited area, and who know what time they run at. On the flip side, it may not be a million dollar ad on the superbowl, but at least it's affordable. (0) Comments 02-09-2007 - Poverty Lessons Have you ever been a college student trying to survive on zero income? Well, I have. I remember right before I left to college I asked a good friend of mine... What does food cost per week? His response was... Are you talking about a normal person or me? For me it's $20 a month. A normal person is $20 per week. I saw this post today about How to eat for $10.71 per month. The post was great cause I remember doing one of two of the things in it. (0) Comments 02-09-2007 - 419 Scam and Spanish Prisoner Raise your hand if you've ever seen the movie The Spanish Prisoner. What does it have in common with a 419 scam? Actually more then I ever thought. Today I received an email from an employee asking me what I thought about certain email. The email consisted of them winning a million dollars. It definitely had the smell of a 419 scam. I went locate a link from wikipedia, so they could read more on iut if they desired... and then I noticed something. In the section Variations of Fraud, it mentions that The Spanish Prisoner scam is one of the earliest forms of advance fee frauds. It dates back to as far as 1588. Let me post a small section for your viewing pleasure In its original form, the confidence artist tells his victim (the mark) that he is in correspondence with a wealthy person of high estate who has been imprisoned in Spain (originally by King Philip II) under a false identity. The alleged prisoner cannot reveal his identity without serious repercussions, and is relying on the confidence artist to raise money to secure his release. The confidence artist offers to let the mark supply some of the money, with a promise that he will be rewarded generously when the prisoner returns both financially and by being married to the prisoner's beautiful daughter. However, once the mark has turned over his money, he learns that further difficulties have arisen, requiring more money, until the mark is cleaned out and the game ends. Check out wikipedia for the rest of the information. By all means, it's very interesting how this scam has evolved over the centuries. I laugh cause I always ask, what did people do without the internet. Lol (2) Comments 02-06-2007 - Sign of the Times I found it very interesting that is begining construction on sacred ground. Sacred to both Israel and Palenstine. The tension in the middle east has really got to rise over this. I rememeber reading somewhere about this being foretold in the last days. (0) Comments 02-03-2007 - Van Halen and David Lee Roth This just in... Van Halen and David Lee Roth are getting back together to go on tour. I was a huge Van Halen fan back in the 90s. I saw them in concert when Sammy Hagar was still with them. They put on a good show, but I still have to admit Duran Duran put on one of the best show evers. Anyhow, it will be interesting to see if they come up with some new songs, or just play the old ones. (0) Comments 02-03-2007 - Marketing Advice Most marketing and PR articles are vague these days. Some write ups are a little bit better then others. I came across one that is slightly better than others. Most of all I just posted it here for me to reference in the future. (0) Comments 02-01-2007 - Courtney Love does the Math I remember reading this article on Courtney Love and the Record Industry back in 2000. It just surfaced on Digg today. Here it is, seven years later, and I still remember it being a good article. By all means, I'm not a fan of Courtney Love, but what she has to say is really interesting. (0) Comments 01-31-2007 - Tigers Nest Monastery The Tiger's Nest Monastery is supposedly the most famous. The pictures are a must see. I'm still trying to figure out how they built it so close to the cliff. (0) Comments 01-30-2007 - Mortgages vs Renting A coworker and I had a disagreement today. The questions was "Is it better to rent or pay 30 years on a home"? Then the question changed to "What percentage of the population is mortgage free"? I searched for an answer. It seems I couldn't find the exact answer, but I did find something close. Whereas, in 1989, 54 percent of homeowners in the 55 to 64 age cohort were mortgage free, by 1998 that number had declined to 39 percent.. So there you have it. Only 39% seems a little sad. I can see how life problems such as unexpected medical expenses, unemployment, frivilous credit card debt, business ventures gone bad, divorce, etc... could set someone back a number of years. (0) Comments 01-04-2007 - Lame Super Hero List This superhero list is awsome. I laughed for hours over it. Check it out and see if you recognize a couple? I think the wonder twin what the only one I had heard of. (0) Comments 01-04-2007 - Startup Business and VC I have no idea how I wondered to this website, but they had an awsome very personal write-up on Startup's and VC's. If no one else reads it, at least, I myself be able to read it again in the future. Wait, this kills me. I just found another article Paul Grahm did on software patents that I commented on almost a year ago. (0) Comments 12-28-2006 - Real Genius 2? For those of you from the 80's might remember "Real Genius". It was definitely one of Val Kilmer's best preformances. His other great role was Mad Mardigan in Willow. He also played Doc Holiday in Tomstone... which in turn my favorite line from the movie is "Obviously, you're not very good at poker. Shall we have a spelling bee?". Enough of these tangents. Now for the real news. The movie "Real Genius 2" is in the works. No schedule for filming has been made, but at least there is talk. (0) Comments 12-27-2006 - Writing Better Tutorials? Have you ever wanted to be able to write a better tutorial? Well, now you're in luck. There is article over at tutorialized.com that show you how to write better tutorials. I really just posted it here for myself for later viewing, but you're welcome to sniff around. (0) Comments 12-26-2006 - Inkless Pen? I found this Inkless Pen recently and thought it was way cool. Where does the ink come from? To solve the mystery you must check it out. (0) Comments 12-15-2006 - Web Conferencing Most companies seem to use WebEx for web conferencing. Web conferencing is where you share your desktop with someone else across the internet. It seems there is a free solution from Yugma now. (0) Comments 12-15-2006 - Cure for Diabetes Will the human race ever find a cure for cancer? Maybe, maybe not. It looks like we might find a cure for diabetes. This one is for all my friends that have diabetes. (0) Comments 12-15-2006 - US-Mexican Border? The heading of this article was way hilarious. US-Mexican Border Fence Building Firm Busted for Hiring Illegal Workers. (0) Comments 12-12-2006 - Pretexting Illegal I just read right before the 109th Congress wrapped up its final session will outlaw pretexting. Originally I thoght it had to do with telemarketing, but after reading about pretexting at Wikipedia it's more about lying on the telephone to obtain personal information. I vaguely remember seeing a 60 minutes episode where someone at HP was accused of using pretexting to find out who was feeding the press information from their board meetings. (0) Comments 12-11-2006 - Invention Video When I first saw this video on an invention I thought "Is this really an invention"? Then I saw the whole thing through. It was definitely worth watching to the very end. I bet you can't guess what he is going to do with the cardboard. (0) Comments 12-07-2006 - ODBC and PostgreSQL I was looking ofr a good example of how to install a postgresql odbc driver on a linux box and found a great example of installing odbc and postgresql. The file paths are a little of since people like to move things around in the linux world, by using the command locate I was able to find what I was looking for. I'm probably the only person that will reference this in the future, but I'm ok with that. (0) Comments 12-02-2006 - Almost Never Cry I almost never ever cry. Movies, songs, relationships. Never. When I read and saw this inspiring story/video I cried. It's definitely a must see. (0) Comments 11-24-2006 - PhpBB and SEO I just found this software for $20 that improves your SEO on PhpBB easily. I made entry more for me than anyone else. Since I get almost no traffic anyways. (0) Comments 11-22-2006 - Poetic Justice Check out this forum about Poetic Justice. Some wanna be online scammer gets caught in the act of trying to rip off someones account. I love the ending, and I think you will too. (0) Comments 11-22-2006 - Fortelling the tech future I read article from time to time that try to predict the future of tech-no-land. Usually they seem a bit unrealistic and off beat. This article on Don't Bet Against the Internet seemed a bit more realistic. Their theories supported in the article seemed a bit interesting to me. (0) Comments 11-22-2006 - Extended Warranties I've often wandered why there is such a big push on extended warranties when you are checking out. Some just wrote an article about If Companies Believed In Their Products.... I found it interesting to read it from their perspective. (0) Comments 11-20-2006 - Housing Market For the past year I've been speculating on the housing market in Utah. I have some friends still in the construction business and I've been curious on what will happen. Today I read a report on the housing market. It seems Salt Lake City is still strong while many other cities are seeing a decline in house prices. (0) Comments 11-17-2006 - Tenure Over the past couple month, off and on, I've thought about tenure. What is tenure? It's basically where a school will have a really really hard time firing a teacher. I do find it odd that almost no other industry has an equivalent. Where did tenure come from? I gathered that after WW2 there were quite a bit GI's returning to college after the war. There was a shortage of teachers. It seemed to me that tenure was used to entice people to become teachers. So there you have it. (0) Comments 11-15-2006 - Chlorians Online Murray Tripplet sent me a link today. The link is for all those out there that wanted to see Rehash of the Chlorians, but never had a chance. It's worth your time to check it out. It was one of my more favorite films from the Gangrene Film Festival. (0) Comments 11-06-2006 - Hacking Democracy Last week HBO aired the film Hacking Democracy. I watched it and was very saddended by it. It seems Diebold didn't want it to air. The odd part is that Diebold was responding about a different film other then Hacking Democracy. After watching the HBO special and reading the artcile, I still have one question left. What is the name of the movie that Diebold mistook Hacking Democracy for? and where can I rent it? Lol (0) Comments 10-28-2006 - Oil Prices Who made a profit off of the high oil prices? Well, the large oil companies did. some made records profits and others made second best record profits. Granted I've heard that the reason gas prices hit so high was due to the commodities market. Some investors we expecting another hurricane Katrina season... and didn't get it. So they dumped their shares as fast as they could. This resulted in the drop in gas prices. This is just what I've heard though. (0) Comments 10-25-2006 - Really Funny Picture I know. I know. I haven't posted forever. Sorry to the 2 people that read my blog. Anyhow, I found this picture really really funny and thought I would share it with you. Happy viewing. (0) Comments 09-11-2006 - Gangrene Film Festival 7 Last Friday was the Gangrene Film Festival. I like it how they started it off with amature professional wrestling. It definitely got me in the mood to laugh. There were some films that definitely did better then others, but Rehash of the Chlorians was by far my favorite. They mentioned all the special effects were done by Scott Halford. The director was Murray Tripplet. Last year he did Death by Dating, which was another film that definitely stood out last year as well. I'd like to give honorable mention to Weird Ribs are Swell by Andy Bailey. For those of you that have never been, I'd recommend it to you for next year. It's definitely a different movie experience from the standard movie theatre. (0) Comments 09-05-2006 - A Weird Dream I had a weird dream the other night. It was sooo funny that I had to share it with the world. Hans Solo and I were on Earth. Somehow all machines took a life of their own and started trying to kill us. We fled for our lives and took refuge in the country. That's where we grew beards and pot guts to disguise ourselves from the machines. I gathered food while Hans Solo tried finding a way to get us off planet earth. Then I woke up. Ah man, I never got to finish it. If I ever do, I'll definitely post it for your viewing pleasure. (0) Comments 08-13-2006 - Random Number Generator Is there such thing as a true random generator? Well, no and yes. I say no cause the standard number generator in a computer isn't really a true random number generator. Or at least that what I learned about when reading the story about the guy who beat keno. On the other hand there is another method that makes it a more of a true random number generator. It's based on the half life on a radioactive element. This is where the excitement for this blog entry comes from. Someone by the name Jared Bouck came up with a DIY random number project using parts that could be purchased at Home Depot. I liked how he made it simple using a webcam and a fire alarm. (0) Comments 08-03-2006 - Cool Stock Research Tool Recently I read the book Hot Commodities. It had some really good insight into the stock and commodity market. I looked into purchasing the index Jim Rogers had created, but at a $10,000 bare minimum it seemed a bit pricey for this poor-boy. My wife was kind enough to bring home a book from the library written by Ben Stein on investing. On a side note, we went and saw Ben Stein speak last year at the U. It was thoroughly enjoyable. Anyhow, I decided to check my portfolio to see which stocks had a high dividend yield. Yikes! Only one did. It was campbells soup. Me being a tech-no-man, I was drawn to techie stocks like SIRI and IRBT. From what I can tell, the tech stocks don't usually payout dividends and the old schools usually do. So how do we find out what is an average dividend... wait, why not find out the the highest paid dividend is? Well, I searched and found this neat tool that lets you search for various criteria like this. It seems that RHA has a dividend yield of 616.7%. Holy crap-o-rama batman. What's the deal with this? It seems when the stock price falls, the dividend ratio goes up. I read somewhere that this can also be a warning sing that the company is going to fail. So basically you want to search for consistentcy also. Please remember this is all said IMHO. (0) Comments 08-02-2006 - Work Friendly? I found this Work Friendly website hilariously fascinating. I've known people that work in enviroments that frown upon an internet activity. Well, this work friendly website was definitely written for you. (0) Comments 07-28-2006 - Siege Test Results I ran a siege test on my el-cheap-o server recently. The results were really interesting. For instance I had no idea how much a database can slow down your server. I also found it interesting that converting a webpage to just standard HTML had a huge effect. Oddly enough, there was only a slight difference between HTML and PHP. Here are the results from the 3 tests. Please ignore the fact I stopped the database test in the middle of it cause it was taking forever and bogging everything down. // Database backend // ** siege 2.61 ** Preparing 25 concurrent users for battle. The server is now under siege... Lifting the server siege... done. Transactions: 66 hits Availability: 100.00 % Elapsed time: 50.24 secs Data transferred: 89496 bytes Response time: 15.01 secs Transaction rate: 1.31 trans/sec Throughput: 1781.37 bytes/sec Concurrency: 19.72 Successful transactions: 66 Failed transactions: 0 Longest transaction: 23.21 Shortest transaction: 9.48 // Converted to html // ** siege 2.61 ** Preparing 25 concurrent users for battle. The server is now under siege.. done. Transactions: 250 hits Availability: 100.00 % Elapsed time: 7.29 secs Data transferred: 205500 bytes Response time: 0.01 secs Transaction rate: 34.29 trans/sec Throughput: 28189.30 bytes/sec Concurrency: 0.23 Successful transactions: 250 Failed transactions: 0 Longest transaction: 0.02 Shortest transaction: 0.00 // Converted to php // ** siege 2.61 ** Preparing 25 concurrent users for battle. The server is now under siege.. done. Transactions: 250 hits Availability: 100.00 % Elapsed time: 8.20 secs Data transferred: 205500 bytes Response time: 0.01 secs Transaction rate: 30.49 trans/sec Throughput: 25060.98 bytes/sec Concurrency: 0.38 Successful transactions: 250 Failed transactions: 0 Longest transaction: 0.06 Shortest transaction: 0.01 One thing I am curious about is if I ran the database part again on a beefed up server with tons of memory... how much difference would it make? (0) Comments 07-28-2006 - Encrypt to look like spam? I ran across this site that lets you encrypt an email message to look like spam. I thought it was so cool I had to post it. (0) Comments 07-14-2006 - Siege Stress Test Program This Siege Stress Test Program seems fairly impressive. I'm going to try it out this weekend. It seems to give some fairly impressive data about problems you might have with the program you wrote for the web. (0) Comments 07-14-2006 - Asterisk Zaptel Problems For all of you out there that is getting the error /usr/src/zaptel-1.2.6/zaptel.c:384: error: syntax error before "zone_lock" /usr/src/zaptel-1.2.6/zaptel.c:384 ...then you're in the same boat I was in. It seems that someone accidently added an underscoe in a .h file that wasn't needed. Anyhow, the talk about the fix in this asterisk forum. Basically, they tell you to #1 - edit the file spinlock.h #2 - Then goto line 407 #3 - Change this line from : #define DEFINE_RWLOCK(x) rw_lock_t x = RW__LOCK_UNLOCKED To: #define DEFINE_RWLOCK(x) rwlock_t x = RW__LOCK_UNLOCKED Then you can revert to your zaptel build instructions. This has seemed to have made the build error go away for me. Good luck to anyone reading this. (0) Comments 07-12-2006 - Click Tale What is click tale? It seems to easily integrate into your website, that allows you to go back and watch your customers patterns of moving the mouse and clicking buttons. This sounds great if you're trying to narrow down usability issues on your website. (0) Comments 07-12-2006 - Identity Theft I've heard that identity theft is the fastest crime on the rise. What I've been curious about is what are the chances of it happening to me? Well, I found this Top 10 Victim cities list. Salt Lake City is #7. Crap-o-rama!!! That hits way too close to home. (0) Comments 07-10-2006 - Film Scrubbing What is film scrubbing? It's when a rated R movie has content removed to make it a PG or PG-13 movie. Scene's removed would be such as Sex, Violence, Language, etc. The has been an industry created now, mostly in Utah, where they will edit and sell or rent the movies to customers. When they ruled against the editing companies recently, they did it on the basis of copyright. IMHO, I think this ruling was wrong. I say this on the basis that when the movie production company get's it's $10 from selling the video... then it no longer owns that given product. Does this mean if I write a book and someone decides to blackout the text and resell it then it infringes on copyright also? I vaguely remember something about the book Jawbreaker having this done to it. I think there is and was a time for copyright, but I think it's being used for the wrong purpose sometimes. My right of only viewing partial content in a movie has been taken away. Oh well, it only affects me a little bit. My TV viewing has gone way down within the past couple years. As the same for movies. A friend told me once "Vote with your dollars. If you disagree with a certain product then don't buy it". This makes sense, cause if enough people stop purchasing then eventually it will make a difference. (1) Comments 07-10-2006 - OpenDNS What is OpenDNS? It's a company that will let you manage your DNS records... and filter out the bad spam guys along the way. This can be convenient for people in need of a DNS service without having to pay for a server to do it. Sure, some hosting companies will have a similiar service, but not all. What is the price? Free. What? Free? Nothing is free! Well, here's a snip from their website OpenDNS makes money by offering clearly labeled advertisements alongside search results on error pages. OpenDNS will provide additional services on top of its enhanced DNS service.. (0) Comments 07-07-2006 - SEO Tips I recently posted an SEO article I wrote 6 months back. I pollished it up today and posted it. Basically, it gives and overview of what I learned about SEO optimization over the past year. I'm sure there are a couple other tricks out there, but overall this will probably cover it. (0) Comments 07-07-2006 - Nano Solar? You've probably heard of Nanosolar over the past couple months. It's a company that is trying to make strides in the solar power industry. Back in 2002 the founders of google invested in the company. It looks like a fairly promising company. A couple months back I thought I would look at purchasing one of these solar panels. So I went to their website and called the number. It rang and rang and rang. No answer. I can only assume that they are in the development phase and nothing is for sale at this moment in time. (0) Comments 06-26-2006 - DDR Video This Video or a kid doing DDR is way cool. I've some kids get involved wtih really dancing on it, but nothing like this. (0) Comments 06-23-2006 - USB Missle Launcher This was just sent in. A USB missle launcher. I really thought I had seen everything, but this one came out of no where. You can launch soft foam missles at your buddy in the cubicle next to you. I thought it looked so fun I had to post it. (0) Comments 06-22-2006 - Network Vulnerability Scanner I found this Network Vulnerability Scanner just moments ago. It was voted #1 network tool of 2006. I plan on using it to scan for security holes, but currently don't have the immediate time... so I posted it to come back to it. (0) Comments 06-15-2006 - Web Server Stress Test I was in the need of doing a web server stress test on a project I've been working on. I came across this page full of lists testing software. Some of it is open source. Some of it isn't. There were a couple that were as much as $1000 and I figured for that price I can look around a little bit, but I haven't fully evaluated and decided which ones I like the best, so I'll just leave that open ended for now. (0) Comments 06-14-2006 - Nichebot I found this nichebot site recently. They haven't been around very long. Maybe 6 months. It appears they make the money on selling their books. Anyhow, I found the tools a bit interesting. It seemed less bogged down then some of the other sites I use to find niche market data. I'm not sure if they just crawl the other sites like overture or wordfinder, but they've done a fairly good job of putting it all in one location. Good luck to anyone reading this, cause we all know the competetion is tough. (0) Comments 06-14-2006 - Enforcement law postink software? The other day I was looking for niche markets and came across "enforcement law postink software". What the huh? is posink a misspelling? With 17618 searches done last month and only roughly 600 results I had to know what it was. So obviously to my amazement the first couple pages were really vague. I thought "Odd"? After some sifting around I realized that postink isn't a misspelling. Postink is a real company. I seems that it's a law enforcement software that helps police officers with their job. Oddly enough there isn't any real product information on their website. "Home" only has some flash object that explians a little. "Opportunities" is just a monster listing about employment. "Contact us" has contact information and a form to submit. "About us" talks about how they were acquired by EBay back in 2000. So it must be one of two things going on here. It's vaporware and nothing was ever released or they are very secretive about what they are selling. Now for the real questions... will I get any noticeable traffic from this lame publicity stunt? Lol (0) Comments 06-07-2006 - Government ADA and Laws Are you talking about the American Dental Association? No, it stands for the Americans with Disabilities Act. John Stossel of 20/20 went in to investigate problems with it. The intended purpose was to help people with disabilities get jobs. They talk about the Valdez spill and substance abuse... wich by the way is covered by the ADA. By the end of the article, I can see how companies can get sued both directions. If they discriminate they get sued. If they hire someone like in the Valdez/Exxon case they get sued. No matter what they get sued. So they turn a blind eye to disabled and say the position has been filed. It seems this is a law meant to protect, but it creates unintended consequences. France is having similiar problems right now also. Currently they are trying to repair the problem with companies not being able to fire/lay-off people under the age of 26. Once again this created huge unintended consquences. Companies avoided hiring people under the age of 25 and the unemployment rate shot up to 22%, but I've heard it was even more. After long conversations and thought about the best policy for both the employer and employee... I think when either side tries to get something for nothing, then it starts to throw the system out of whack. Whether it be these laws intended to help disabled people or companies trying to increase revenue by price fixing... both fit into the something for nothing. On a side note, you might ask "What about the Jail the Hero" incident in Mississippi? This was where after Hurricane Katrina hit, John Sheperson decided that he would borrow enough money to buy 19 generator and rent a U-Haul and go sell the generators for double. It ended up they sent him to jail and took his generators. Everybody lost in the situation. Was he trying to get something for nothing? I can see how some of you would say "Yes". In this case I lean towards "Not really". He took a chance on borrowing money, buying generators, renting a U-Haul and driving to Mississippi. Was he guaranteed to sell all the generators? No. It sounds like he did it on a hunch. Do I feel compassion for the victims of hurricane Katrina? Yes. The question that still goes through my head is "How else would they get generators down there so quickly?". Governments and Large Business take too long to move things around. In a perfect world, people would do it just through the kindness of their hearts... but since this isn't a perfect world I think plan B has to take place. IHMO. (0) Comments 06-06-2006 - Section 115 Copyright Act Sounds like something sneaky is brewing in copyright land. It seems this bill will cause problems with the Internet Fair Use law. I'm pretty sure this is trying to be pushed through by the people that support copyright forever minus one day. I still find it amusing that they try to push on this since "copyright forever" is against the constitution. (0) Comments 06-06-2006 - EBay Henchmen When I read about this guy trying to pull a fast one on ebay... I couldn't believe my eyes, what the seller ended up doing. This was by far an enjoyable true life story to read about. (0) Comments 06-05-2006 - Ballmer unable to rid PC of spyware How times have we heard that if you have viruses/adware/rootkits on your computer that a rollback or restore will repair the problem. Currently, the only way to guarantee to rid yourself of this crap is a complete re-install. Unfortunately, with XP home edition you're limited on the number of reinstalls that you can do. Also, the last couple Dell computers didn't ship with CD's. It came with the drivers sitting on the hard drive. For non-techie people you're pretty much screwed. Well, it seems Steve Ballmer of Microsoft sits in the same boat. After 2 days of trying to rid his friends computer of crap... He lumped the thing back to Microsoft's headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate. Looks like it's not a perfect world. (0) Comments 06-04-2006 - Amazing Hole In One I couldn't believe my eyes on this one. I don't think I've ever seen a hole in one in golf, but this golf shot really catches you off guard. (0) Comments 06-03-2006 - Really Cool Interactive Periodic Table This Periodic Table is really cool. It provides more information then the standard tables I've seen. I liked the explaination of what the element is currently is used for. (0) Comments 06-01-2006 - Vonage Stock IPO Recently Vonage had it's IPO. Not much after their stock started dipping. I remember reading information about the company. It was mentioned that they really didn't know when to expected to make a profit. This stood out as a huge red flag to me. (0) Comments 06-01-2006 - AMEX says no to porn? I had no idea that back in 2000 American Express quit accepting payments from porn websites. I think this was a bold move on their part. This adds one more reason why I would prefer AMEX over Visa or Mastercard. AMEX also gives you 60 days to dispute charges, while from my understanding the others only allow 30 days. (0) Comments 05-31-2006 - The First Ammendment It appears that your first ammendment rights are limited if you're on the clock. They Claim... that it will protect governments from lawsuits filed by disgruntled workers pretending to be legitimate whistleblowers For some reason I'm reminded of 2 phrases. #1 - You're only as sick as your secrets. #2 - The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off (0) Comments 05-31-2006 - Bogus Suit What is Bogus Suit. It's a blog where some guy scours the internet looking for information on law suit to comment on. Sometimes I come across interesting lawsuits such as Nike vs Beaverton, Oregon. (0) Comments 05-25-2006 - Emery County Utah and Diebold It appears that Emery County seems to be in cahoots with Diebold. When Bruce Funk asked computer security expert Harri Hursti to inspect 2 of his 40 Diebold touch screen voting machines... he was forced out of office for doing so by Diebold, in collusion with Lt. Governor Herbert's people and the County Commissioners. It's sounds like to me someone is trying to pushing some voting machines through for either a kickback, or be able to change results. IMHO nothing is secure. Some friends and I had a conversation over this at lunch. One of the guys was saying the security is weak, that anyone can open the files with just Micro-soft Access and change the results. It blows my mind that a company wouldn't even implement encryption for such a device. I vote to leave things in the voting world for now until all politicians are honest. (0) Comments 05-25-2006 - Looking for Venture Capitolist Money? If you're interested in starting your own business and plan on talking to venture capitolists then you definitly need to read this article on someone personal experience. It shows a perspective on what to look out for... and even the 5 main questions you will get asked. (0) Comments 05-24-2006 - What is Quantinetics? Most of you out there have noticed a dip in the stock market. Well, I decided to take a look around to see if there were any computer programs that might help me manage the risk. I started my search at Source Forge since I'm a tight wad. I sifted around and found AI Stock Bot. It was a little short on conclusive information. I think they are still developing it. I think I'll have to download it and test it for myself to get the overall information I want. I also came across a commercial program called Quantinetics. It seems a little more professional, but at a steep price. $990/year? Wow! It had better be really good at that price. The didn't seem to have any trial for me to see how it functions. There was a one day $25 price... so it seems if I really want to know the universal stock market answers, then I'll have to cough up at least $25 up. They also do private coaching for $495 for 30 minutes. At that price you would think they live in Manhattan. From running a whois they live in Tennesse. I'll post about it after I pay my $25/day membership and try to totally milk it. (0) Comments 05-20-2006 - AboutURL? What is www.abouturl.com? Someone has put together a bunch of useful tools to help you with information on your website. It has a SEO section that I found semi-interesting. I also found the readability tool a bit intersting. The link populatiry tool let's you see how popular your site is, or in my case "the lack thereof". Lol. (0) Comments 05-19-2006 - HHO and Water Power I just had this video on HHO just sent in. You definitely have to see it for your own eyes. It's a video clip of a news broadcast from Fox26 news. From what I can tell it's based in Medford Oregon. In my pursuit to find more information I did a search. I found more information from an RV Magazine article on Denny Kline. Ah ha, I found the website of the company. From what I can tell you can only purchase the welder/generator for $6,995. Too bad he doesn't have a vehicle unit for sale. Now I'm confused... the company website says they are located in Clearwater, Florida. Oh well. (0) Comments 05-19-2006 - Mauri Povich in Hot Water Looks like Maury Povich could be going to court. Looks like his personal life is similiar to his daytime talk show. It will be interesting to se how this one turns out. Three votes for Ricktoria. (0) Comments 05-18-2006 - Justice Department vs Abbot Bad bad bad Abbot. Ouch. The Justice Department is accusing Abbott of fraudulent drug-pricingscheme. It seems it cost government health programs more than $175 million over 10 years. Now we know why the cost of drugs seemed too high. (0) Comments 05-18-2006 - Newspaper Clipping Generator I saw this on the mover/shaker list over at alexa.com. It's a Newspaper Clipping Generator. They did a really good job at making it look authentic. Try it out, you might be impressed. (0) Comments 05-16-2006 - Patent Trolls take a hit IHMO patent trolls are really worthless. They produce nothing for the economy and sue people that do produce something. Well, they took a big hit recently. It seems they will have a harder time in court if they don't produce anything related to a given patent. (0) Comments 05-11-2006 - Way cool mirage I had a friend send me this link that show a mirage on the ocean in China. I thought it was way cool to see. The article says that this happens when explained that a mirage is formed when moisture in the air becomes warmer than the temperature of sea water. It was because of this effect which made it known as a dwelling place of the gods (0) Comments 05-11-2006 - Help for troubled teens If you are a parent and you notice that your teen is having problems, then there is help. I've seen some really great things happen at Alpine Academy. They treat for things like depression, bipolar and borderline personality disorder. So bascially, if you need help with your troubled teen then check them out. (0) Comments 05-05-2006 - XM Radio vs Sirius I've been watching the war between XM and Sirius for a while now. It's been really hard to figure out who will win the battle. XM is in the lead, but Sirius is catching up. XM stock price is 3 to 4 times more then Sirius, but both have taken a hit in price over the past month or so. Then today I came across a posting about CEO of XM sold 99% of his shares. Incidently there is a lawsuit over it. I also remember reading Sirius will turn a profit by the end of this year, but I can't seem to find the link. Analysts have seemed to strengthen their position in buying. My gut tells me that Sirius is going to win in the end. (0) Comments 05-04-2006 - Cingular and AT&T It appears that AT&T is spending 2 billion dollars to change Cingular to AT&T wireless. There must have been some huge compelling reason for AT&T to do this, cause my wife and I both consider Cingulars logo and marketing to be one of the best is the last couple years. (0) Comments 05-03-2006 - Copyright and Fair Use I was helping my wife the other day and came across this article about the Copyright and Fair Use on the Internet. Even though it doesn't state specific laws, it does seem to give some easy to understand guidelines. (0) Comments 05-03-2006 - First person on TV dies The first person ever on television died recently. What makes this interesting to me is that it was in Bountiful, Utah... which is geographically close to me. (0) Comments 04-20-2006 - Adsense Calculator I came across this Adsense Calculator. It seems fairly straight forward, but my guess is that it's not 100% accurate. It'll just let you know a rough ballpark you will make with advertising on your website. (0) Comments 04-19-2006 - Are you an Inventor? If you're an inventor and you keep on getting turned down, then the bottom part of this article about the MP3 inventor is for you. I had no idea the author of Harry Potter Books was turned down by another publisher. Or even the Beatles were turned down also. (0) Comments 04-17-2006 - PHP and Scaling Issues On digg.com there was talk about PHP and scaling issues. What are the real pitfalls to build a website to support millions of hits a month? Well, I came across an article about PHP and scaling issues. To sum it up, most of it is related to the data and database issues. It slightly touched comparison with JAVA and scalability. As a side note, I have personal preference to stay away from JAVA, cause of issues with really weird errors in the past. Using Java for cell phone games would probably work, but I would bet the farm on writing a huge web application in Java. (0) Comments 04-17-2006 - Silly Images I was just told about an image of a bunny with a pancake on it's head.The cat with the lime on it's head is a personal favorite of mine. (0) Comments 04-17-2006 - #1 spot on Highest 300 paying At #1, as of today, is chicago personal injury lawyer at a whopping $78.30. Holy crap-o-rama batman. For the average american, only a couple clicks a day would allow them to quit their day job. I found it even more interesting that #2 was just a slight variation with chicago personal injury attorney at $73.01. What is it that makes Chicago personal injury lawyers willing to pay more for leads then anyone else? I'd be interested to see the payout for cases related to other cities. (0) Comments 04-17-2006 - Freakonomics What is Freakonomics? My wife and I just learned about it over the weekend. 20/20 did a show about it. I found it interesting yet shocking about his theory of the crime rate going down in new york in relation to the legalization of abortions. I like the way it ended with how inherantly most people are honest. Steven D. Levitt is the autor of it. (0) Comments 04-16-2006 - Another Star Control Game? It appears there are rumors about another Star Control Game There is still skepticism about it being able to sell in the current video game market. The are asking you to send emails if this is something you would like to see. IMHO it is in the top 10 best video games ever made. (0) Comments 04-10-2006 - A Summary of Software Patents Paul Graham does a great job of explaining his point of view on software patents. I found it interesting on the advice to gives to start-up companies. (0) Comments 04-10-2006 - File Upload and AJAX Progress Bar This framework for an Upload Progress Bar looked really cool. For those of you who program, it can be painful to find the right secure way to upload files. (0) Comments 04-09-2006 - 16 Blocks I went and saw the movie 16 Blocks yesterday. I have been wanting to see it for a while. Unfortunately I waited too long and it ended up only being left in one theatre... down in Provo. So I drove all the way down to Provo to see it. Other then a little swearing and the F-bomb being dropped a couple times, I really liked the movie. IHMO it had the perfect ending. It is definitely blog worthy and I'd recommend it to anyone to go see it. (0) Comments 04-07-2006 - Starwars Kid Settlement It appears that Starwars kid lawsuit has been settled. It says they settled out of court. (0) Comments 04-05-2006 - What is Mesothelioma? What is Mesothelioma? Mesothelioma is an uncommon form of cancer, usually associated with previous exposure to asbestos. Why am I writing about it? This CyberWyre guy posted result of the top 300 higest paying Internet search keywords. Mesothelioma seemed like a good one on the list to catch peoples attention. The top phrase of Mesothelioma pays $58.25 per click from what I can tell. Sheesh! 2 clicks a day and I could quit my day job. I've heard that for smaller sites Yahoo's adword equivalent service pays tons more then Googles adwords service. I think it's part related to what I've heard rumored that Adsense reserves the expensive adds for the larger websites while Yahoo reserves the expensive adds for the smaller websites. I still have my reservation as to if this is true of not. (0) Comments 04-04-2006 - Independant Films I came across this link for The Top 50 Independant Films. I was surprised to see some of the movies on there like "Slackers". I remember renting the movie and shutting it off within 10 minutes. There were some other that I was really impressed with. Movies such as "The Terminator" at #3 and "The Usual Suspects" at #8. "Momento" #13 I've heard is really good, but I just haven't made the time to watch it yet. (0) Comments 03-24-2006 - Real Life 6 Million Dollar Man The 6 million dollar man is not longer science fiction anymore. Jesse Sullivan is living proof. He was working as a lineman for the power company when there was a huge electrical accident. I'm surprised the guy is still alive. (0) Comments 03-18-2006 - Better Rules to Google Ranking Have you ever wondered how to boost your website ranking? Well, I have. This morning I came across an article that brings a little bit more light to the surface about how to boost your google ranking. It includes a link to a paper written by someone at Stanford (0) Comments 03-17-2006 - Atkins Diet There was a woman that strictly stuck to the atkins diet for a month... and ended up in the hospital. Years ago I remember reading about the Atkins Diet and ketosis. My gut was going off that you need to be very cautious about the diet. Plus, hearing about the weird tastes in your mouth didn't sound appealing. (0) Comments 03-16-2006 - PI to the 8,784 place Years ago I had some friends that thought it was cool to recite PI to the 100th decimal place. When I saw that a high school student recited PI to the 8,784 decimal place it brought back memories. Who knew this would be a top trophy among nerds (0) Comments 03-14-2006 - Atlas Shrugged I've been reading the book Atlas Shrugged and I came across a speech about money that I found very interesting. No, it's no the 50 page speech. It the one Francisco says to rearden. Is starts with So you think that money is the root of all evil (continued...) (0) Comments 03-01-2006 - University of Utah Student busted for Hacking There was a student at the University of Utah that got busted for hacking and trying to change his grade. This news stood out since it hits so close to home. The University of Utah is one of the closest universities to where I live. (0) Comments 02-23-2006 - Open File Security Warning The Open File Security Warning for XP SP2 can be a frustrating thing to get rid of. After searching the internet intensively I finally found the solution: #1 - You must be logged in as the administrator or someine with adminsitrator rights. #2 - Start the Group Policy Editor by clicking Start - Run and then type gpedit.msc and press OK. #3 - Go to User Configuration section Navigate the tree down this path: Administrative Templates - Windows Components - Attachment Manager #4 - Double click on the "Inclusion list for low file types" #5 - Click the radio button to ENABLE this feature Type the file types you don't want to be warned about in the box (for example: .exe) Close the Group Policy Editor then try to run again the .exe file again (0) Comments 02-21-2006 - Trademarks and Expiration I was looking through the US Trademark website and came across something interesting. Hasbro has seemed to let The game of life expired. I find this odd cause I just saw it on the shelf at a store this weekend. Even though there are probably windows that allow you to renew. I still find it odd that it had expired. December 4, 2005 is fairly recent. Battleship has expired also as of November 14, 2005 After closer examination G & S: entertainment services, namely, production and distribution of motion pictures, television programs, television game shows and cartoon series; television programs in the nature of children's game and entertainment; providing interactive computer games by means of a global computer network It seems they might just be shift things around cause this The game of life trademark seems to shows that they still retain computer games program. (0) Comments 02-21-2006 - Parallel Path Electro Magnetics Flynn Research is experimenting with Parallel Path Electro Magnetics. From what I can tell, it's a way to increase efficentcy of magnetic motors. It claims in some cases more the 100%. I'm probably sceptical like everyone else. I think it is the second law of thermodynamics that says energy is only transferred... not created nor destroyed. I've heard the rule being different in quantum physics. Anyhow, if Parallel Path does work, then it does change the way we perceive things. (0) Comments 02-20-2006 - Prevent SSH Dictionary Attacks If you run linux and you have looked in the auth.log file then you would notice a tons of dictionary attacks trying to get SSH access. Someone has finally written something called DenyHosts to prevent this. (0) Comments 02-20-2006 - DIY KeeLogger This is a way cool write up on How to build your own key logger It has the schematics and software you'll need. The only problem you might run into is the Atmel programmer. (0) Comments 02-18-2006 - 100 Fastest Growing Companies There is a list I came across recently that shows you the 100 fastest growing companies. I only had enough time to sort through 25% of the list, but it was impressive enough to post here. (0) Comments 02-17-2006 - Color Combination Web Design There is a Color Combination Guide that helps teach you to pick complimentary colors. The author briefly talks about websites that make you puke. I'm of the opinion that you need your bad website to help make the good ones stand out. I also came across 2 valuable tools while reading comments on the article. Color Blender and Color Scheme Tool. Both are web based, but seem to do a great job at helping choose a color scheme. (0) Comments 02-15-2006 - MythTV Walk Through If you have ever wanted to setup MythTV... well, here's your chance. Jarod Wilson has put together a MythTV walk through. He seems to have been fairly throrough on the setup process. (0) Comments 02-14-2006 - 419 Scam Justice This came as a surprise to me when I read it today. 419er jailed for 376 years. It just goes to show eventually something happens when you try to get something for nothing. (0) Comments 02-07-2006 - WC3 Webpage Validator So you think you're a whiz at programming webpages? Well, now you can run this webpage test to find out. Don't feel too bad if it picks up errors. I ran it on a couple big sites... which ended up in numerous errors. Google - 51 Errors Ebay - 249 Errors Yahoo - 268 Errors Another odd thing I found was that if you set the id= a number instead of characters then it barks at you. Oddly enough I ran into a problem with firefox months ago that only wanted numbers in the place of the id. Go figure (0) Comments 02-06-2006 - Nation Master Statistics I found this Nation Master Statistics today. It seems like a highly interesting site. I think the numbers can be skewed a little since I think some countries don't retain accurate information and others just report inaccurate information. Overall I think it's a helpful site. One thing that did strike me as odd is the Economic Account Balance. As you can see the US is at the bottom quite far in the negative. (0) Comments 02-02-2006 - Round-About-Seo-Test Mike Davidson has written an exceptional article about Search Engine Ranking. His tests really give valid round-about information on what will boost your site ranking. Too bad you probably can't just register a .edu or .gov domain. (0) Comments 02-02-2006 - 145 Year Old Technology Is Put To Rest Western Union quit supporting the Telegram and Commercial Messaging Services. Until now, I had no idea it was still being used. If I had only known I could have sent one as a gag. I also found this interesting: 1884: Became one of the original 11 stocks tracked by the Dow Jones Average. (0) Comments 02-01-2006 - Mailbag Just when I thought my viewership was really low, I had this emailed in lastnight I was google'ing around tying to find a solution to my Debian/Exim problem (Exim wouldn't deliver mail to a local, private network) and ran across your posting at http://www.iwestdev.com/index.php?newsid=86. So yes, it did help someone some day. Thanks ;-) Med venlig hilsen / Best regards RUNE LYNGE IT-afdelingen Thanks Rune! (0) Comments 01-30-2006 - Javascript Minimizer JSmin is a cool little program that strips away comments, white spaces and other non-functioning code. This way youyr .js libraries can be as much as 1/2 the original size. Sounds like a good way to speed things up. (0) Comments 01-27-2006 - C++ vs Java vs Python vs Ruby This daveh guy does a comparison of different programming languages. It was interesting to see the statement that Python/Ruby are slower than Java. It makes sense now that I think of it. I've heard the rule of thumb is that complied always runs faster then scripted. That still doesn't change the fact that I've heard development times in Ruby is way fast. Whatever the case, be sure to read it for yourself (0) Comments 01-26-2006 - An interesting set of islands I somehow stumbled into a place called Fort Jefferson. It sounds like a cool place to go visit. It's 70 miles west of Key West off the coast of florida. (0) Comments 01-20-2006 - More On GoDaddy Yesterday I posted about the story at digg on GoDaddy and extortion. This morning I received an email from GoDaddy. I suspect the guy that wrote the story was a spammer. Even though GoDaddy didn't give me any specific details on the case, they gave enough to let you know their point of view on the incident. I will still continue to recommend GoDaddy as a good company to do business with. I have posted the email for your viewing pleasure. Dear West, Thank you for contacting the Office of the President. We appreciate you bringing this matter to our attention and recognize your concern. Our office is familiar with the referenced URLs and opinions shared therein. While maintaining the integrity and privacy of the associated party, we are confident that we have handled the matter appropriately and professionally. When one of our customers violates our Terms of Service, our Abuse Department contacts the offenders with a warning about the violation and provides a warning. If the violating actions continue, we suspend the service and include a service charge. You can read more about our Abuse Policies here. Please accept our apology for the lack of additional details about this specific situation. Let us know if you have further questions about our services or policies in general. Kindest regards, Noah Plumb Office of the President President@GoDaddy.com GoDaddy.com 14455 N. Hayden Rd. Suite 226 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 (480) 505-8828 Phone (480) 275-3975 Fax -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Inquiring about odd fees From: wanderson@youthvillage.org Date: Thu, January 19, 2006 11:09 am To: president@godaddy.com Let me start by saying I've been with godaddy for years. I've referred hundreds of people to godaddy also. Your wait times for customer support are excellent. The support people are knowledgeable. I personally have never had a problem with godaddy. Now onto my questions... At digg.com there was a post about Godaddy charging $199 to someone, because he posted something on a message board and someone contacted GoDaddy saying it was spam. http://digg.com/technology/GoDaddy_Blackmailing_Their_Customers_for_$199_ http://download.8008135.org/godaddy/index.html?year=2006&monthnum=01&day=16&name=blacklist-blackmail-even-godaddy&page= I felt like I was only getting one side of the story. So I thought I would try to contact godaddy about the issue. I called in and talked to Chuck White. He was very helpful and said if I wanted more information to contact president@godaddy.com. Is there a $199 spam abuse charge? Is the guy in the article a blatant spammer? Or does the $199 spam-charge happen just if someone reports someone else as a spammer? Also, there was mention of a $50 fee if you want to transfer a domain name to another registrar. Is there such a fee? Is it $50 for each domain name? By all means, I'm happy with my service at godaddy. That is why I am writing in to hear your side of the story. West (0) Comments 01-19-2006 - Kelo vs New London I don't know where I've been, but I just caught wind of this case. Sometimes it's hard to understand the jargon... so here is an easy to read article about it. This is weak if you ask me. Corporations can use the goverment to exercise eminent domain to boot people from their homes? Still wondering what the ruling was? ...that the mere promise of additional tax revenue justified the condemnation. (0) Comments 01-19-2006 - Great Fishing Video Ever have bad luck fishing? Well, this video is for you. I couldn't believe my eyes... how fast those fish started jumping into the boat. You'll have to watch to understand. (0) Comments 01-19-2006 - Go Daddy Blackmails for $199? On Digg there was a posting about Go Daddy Extorting a possible spammer. I'm a bit torn. I've used GoDaddy for years and even referred hundreds of people to them. I don't think I have the whole story. So I called customer support at godaddy. The hold time was only a couple minutes. The support person said he had never heard of a $199 spam charge. He also said in the past year, he has worked there, he had never heard of a $199 spam charge. He gave me the email address to someone higher up that might be able to answer my questions better. Stay tuned to find out what GoDaddy's response on this will be. Just a side note. I would never recommend NetworkSolutions to anyone. If you have been around the internet for quite some time. Then you probably remember how bad things got in 1999. Hold times for many hours. Issues not being resolved. Overworked reps would hang-up on you if they got frustrated. The clencher is they somehow weaseled their way into being the only way you could register a domain name. I remember paying somewhere around $70/year to register a domain name back then. Obviously times have changed, and you can register a domain name many places. NetworkSoultions might have changed their business pratices since then, but it was such a bad experience back before 2000 that I wouldn't be inclined to do business with them again. (0) Comments 01-18-2006 - Mad Science and Black Holes It seems that Horatiu Nastase is doing experiements with similarity to a black hole. If you ask me it sounds very dangerous. I think I saw a Stargate SG-1 episode like this last night. (0) Comments 01-15-2006 - Mount your linux partitions under windows Now you can mount your linux partitions under windows. It talks a bit about dual boot partitions, but it looks like it can work with any input. Whether it be CD-Rom or 3.5 floppy or even hard drive. (0) Comments 01-12-2006 - Dracula for office? I think we've all known a couple fruit cakes in our life. Well, just when you think you've seen it all then... something new appears. A man by the name of Jonathon is running for Governor in Minnesota. His campaign takes a twist where he hides nothing about his evil side. This is also the state where Jesse Ventura, the pro-wrestler, ran for office and won. (0) Comments 01-08-2006 - What someone learned at MIT Phillip Chu has written about lessons learned at MIT. These lessons are more about working with others and not reinventing the wheel. (0) Comments 01-04-2006 - Comedian Bengt Washburn Bengt Washburn is back in town on January 12, 13 an 14 at Wiseguys. If you have never heard of him before, then you must watch samples from his website. He is a way funny guy, and still is able to stay clean. (0) Comments 01-04-2006 - Bruce Carver By word of mouth, I was told recently that Bruce Carver passed away. He one of the guys that started Access Software. They began in the Commodore 64 days, starting with Neutral Zone and carrying them into the year 2000 with the Links game franchise. I met him a handful of times as a small kid... since he lived down the street from me at one point. He influenced my decision into programming computers for a living. (0) Comments 12-30-2005 - Almost Hacked Yesterday, I had some friends have a little fun with my website. You might have noticed Weird Images or Bizarre javascript popups... if you here yesterday. It was a great learning experience. It opened the doors to learn about vulnerabilities I didn't know about. Today on digg was posted an article about The anatomy of hacking a network. This shed even more light on how networks are compromised. I was very impressed with the 1==1 trick with the database. I can see how a lot of web servers are vulnerable to this type of tactic. I plan on finishing up on closing the new found holes down this weekend, but time will only tell if my website is secure. (0) Comments 12-28-2005 - Economic Media Myths Someone sent this link today on Top 10 media myths. I found it news worthy and interesting. Number 10 really sparked my interest. 10. America should follow French fashion in business (0) Comments 12-22-2005 - Infinity Space Game This Infinity Space Game looks quite impressive. After looking though the site, I think only one guy is programming it, with a little help for others. Quite impressive for a one man show. (1) Comments 12-21-2005 - MySQL Help Recently, I needed some help with setting up a mysql database. I found this helpful MySQL tutorial and had it up and running in minutes. It seemed worthly of sharing it with the world. (0) Comments 12-21-2005 - PHP Security Pax Dickson has written a great PHP security overview. I was amazed at some of the creativity of these security holes. Such as the SQL section or trying to generate errors on the server to learn more about a possible security hole. If you program PHP, then you must read this article. (0) Comments 12-19-2005 - Digital Voting Hackable? In the news for a coupe years now have been stories about states moving from punch-card to digital voting. For anyone who has been in the computer scene for many years... they know nothing is secure. Recently there were election results altered undetected. Kind of makes you wonder if your vote will count for even less someday? (2) Comments 12-16-2005 - Free offer? or not? We've all seen them. These offers for a free mac-mini's, ipod or even a nintendo DS. Is it too good to be true? Hardy Menagh recently wrote about the hasseles of free programs. It sounds like it's a pain to track and some of the companies that you're forced to buy stuff from will just ignore you. Most of all you will end up with crap that you never wanted in the first place. The only positive is that if you're patient and persistent that you'll finally get the desired item. Yet it will take you many months. (0) Comments 12-15-2005 - Interesting Block Game If you frequent my website then you probably have played the Brain Teaser Numbers Game. Well, I found another game just as challenging. Basically if you enjoyed the nubmers game then try to give this one a shot. (0) Comments 12-14-2005 - New Web Font Technique Have you ever been frustrated when programming a webpage and being limited to only to use the fonts that are installed on the clients computer? Well, worry no more. There is something called sIFR. This Mike Davidson guy has written an extensive walk through on sIFR (0) Comments 12-14-2005 - PHP Debugging For most longtime programmers debugging PHP is fairly easy, but ocassionally PHP does something that you don't have a clue what is going on. There is a PHP Debugging walk through that starts out simple and ends thoroughly complicated. For most of us the echo command is all we need, but it talks more in depth about PHPEclipse. PHPEclipse is a debugger for PHP. (0) Comments 12-12-2005 - Finance and Investment I found this very useful website. It the main website for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Basically if a company is listed on the stock market then they are listed at the SEC website also. (0) Comments 12-12-2005 - Rootkits Last week on Friday someone was infected with a virus at my office. After a couple different scan it seems that the virus still hasn't been detected. I spent the weekend causually looking for answers. I suspect that it's a Rootkit. From what I can tell rootkits are fairly new. One of the only rootkit scanners I could find was Rootkit Revealer. After reading about how sneaky and underhanded rootkits are I've come to the conclusion There is a special place in hell for someone who programs rootkits The IP address that the program seems to be trying to talk to is: 207.150.170.70 It looks like it's a place that does dedicated servers and co-location hosting. My guess is that someone setup shop there to handle all the processing. It seems they've been shutdown since a web request doesn't seem to work anymore. (0) Comments 12-09-2005 - Sober Worm I've been reading bit and pieces lately about Sober Worm. It is supposed to start running on January 5, 2006. The impressive part is that it has some algorithm that calculates a URL for a given day. This way the guy can register a domain in advance and only on that given day will the worm try to access and download the desired program. After reading about this it reminds me about the Michaelangelo virus back from 1992. (0) Comments 12-09-2005 - Fermat's Last Theorem It took over 350 years to solve this math problem. Nova ran an episode on Fermat a couple years back. The most interesting thing I got out of it was the process that Andrew Wiles used was not the same that Fermat used. It was suggested that Fermat had a shortcut. (0) Comments 12-07-2005 - ErnieBall and Linux This was a great linux success story about a company that made the conversion to linux. It was also interesting to hear that not all computers have a web browser installed. Which in turn drastically reduced the number of hits to ebay. (0) Comments 12-07-2005 - HTML to PDF Have you ever wanted to create a .pdf file from a html page? Well, now you can with this HTML to PDF conversion script. It written in php, but it sounds like an asp version is on it's way. I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but I plan on it. (0) Comments 12-03-2005 - Tornadoes I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine. He mentioned something intriguing about tornadoes. He said the US receives 90% of the worlds tornadoes. I decided to do my homework and look it up. Nova did a story on tornadoes. It seems it's more close to 75%, but that data could be skewed by lack of reports of tornadoes from other countries. I did find a 1973 map of tornadoes highly interesting. (0) Comments 12-01-2005 - PHP Session Fix For those of you that have tried changing the session timeout from 24 minute(1440 seconds) then this one is for you. Initially I tried using the php function session_cache_expire( [int new_cache_expire] ); Amazingly enough it didn't work as I had thought it would. After searching around for a while I found posts about setting the session.gc_maxlifetime using ini_set: ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', 28800); It appears this was not working either. After taking a closer look around it seems Debian made a fix for this cause of problems with the way session.gc_maxlifetime was implemented. After some investigation I found the final solution. It is found in the file /usr/lib/php4/maxlifetime How does it work you ask? It all starts at the file /etc/cron.d/php4 It is told to run roughly every 30 minutes. Then it runs the command [ -d /var/lib/php4 ] && find /var/lib/php4/ -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php4/maxlifetime) -print0 | xargs -r -0 rm This reads the max value (defualt 1440) from the file /usr/lib/php4/maxlifetime I'm not quite sure what setting the limitations of this to a value above 1440 will do, but I would proceed with caution. My guess is that the longer you set the max timeout, the more memory will be used up. If you set it too high then you might hit a wall of no resources. If you want to watch real-time of what is going on with your resources, then you can use the command top (1) Comments 11-29-2005 - Time Management Service Have you ever had a problem managing timeoff or scheduling employees? Hour Doc seemes like a good fit. Years ago I was anti-asp(Application Service Provider) not to confuse with Microsoft .asp files. Anyhow, I think that ASP turnkey solutions have a chance of being the wave of the future. There have been some ASP's that price themselves out of the market, but HourDoc seems fairly reasonable. There are other programs out there that do similiar things such as SelecTrax/SelecTime. The downside of running software local is that things get complicated if you have additional remote facilities. With ASPs there is no installation of software nor worrying about backups. (1) Comments 11-29-2005 - End of Copyright? Digg had this End of Copyright posted from yesterday, but I found it so interesting... that I had to add it to my collection of blogs. It takes an intersting perception. It also references the Constitution Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; Arts I don't know what the future holds, but one thing is for sure. The world is complex. (1) Comments 11-29-2005 - PHP not just for web anymore It appears there is something called Win Binder that allows you to program a native windows application in PHP. I'm not 100% sure on how extensive it goes. Such as 3D or network, or even how fast it processes. In this clock demo you can see that you can access window events. I found it a bit impressive. (0) Comments 11-28-2005 - Geo Magic Over the weekend I went to get my oil changed. Inside one of the magazines I came across something called Geo Magic. One of their products is software that can scan an object in 3D. This sounded like it would go hand in hand with emachineshop.com. This way you could scan the object and have it replicated. From what I can gather the Geo Magic Studio costs around $1,500. I tried calling a sales rep, but only got voice mail. (0) Comments 11-23-2005 - Chris Searle A couple posts back I talked about a Debian Exim Error problem. In the middle of me pounding my head against the desk to try to figure it out... I ended up emailing the original guy (Chris Searle). Usually, when you go randomly emailing people they just ignore you. Chris responded fairly quick. He was even willing to go through old backup tapes to find the response he got back. I just wanted to make mention, my gut tells me, he is one heck of a great guy. (1) Comments 11-23-2005 - Board Game Broker I as approached by my friend Brooks a couple months back. He wanted to know what it would take to get a board game published. After some digging around I found a Board Game Broker located in... I think it was Las Vegas. You could order in amounts as small as 1500. Which is very reasonable for someone starting out. I haven't done business with them yet, but I plan on it. (0) Comments 11-22-2005 - Debian Exim Error Today I ran into a problem with a server. I kept on getting the error: all relevant MX records point to non-existent hosts An identical question was asked back in June on a Debian mailing list. No one responded. After digging around this morning, I found the answer. Either in /etc/exim4/conf.d/router/200_exim4-config_primary or exim4.conf.template there is the variable ignore_target_hosts that has an entry of 192.168.0.0/16. Removing this entry will allow you to send email to other machines on your local network. I hope this can help someone someday. (0) Comments 11-21-2005 - Bad Programming Techniques This guy is brutal. He's written tons of bad programming tips to insure that no one can maintain source code to your projects easily. This way you can never be replaced. It's way brutal. After reading through it, I really felt like it crossed the line. Sure, everyone wants job security, but this was down-right brutal. (2) Comments 11-17-2005 - Recover XP admin password This method allows you to recover your administrator easily, if you ever forget it. It's a fairly simple process, only involving the XP installation CD. I haven't tested it yet, but I plan to. This is a must read for anyone who repairs peoples machines frequently. (0) Comments 11-16-2005 - Blackhole Numbers Game Over the past couple weeks I wrote this Blackhole Numbers Game. It was written as a demo in Javascript to add to my portfolio. Try your luck. See if you can finish it. Check out the highscores to see how you rank. (1) Comments 11-16-2005 - Video Game Industry It appears only 80 games a year will succeed. The cost will go from $3-$6 million to $6-$10 million. That is way crazy. Looks like the video game market is a tough place to be. (1) Comments 11-14-2005 - Tinfoil on head It appers someone at MIT did research on if putting tinfoil on your head will protect your from aliens reading your brain. I liked it so much I thought I would share it with the rest of the world. (1) Comments 11-08-2005 - Who owns the source code? There is a case in the news about a guy who worked for a company, but somehow kept them from being able to alter the program after he left. He said it was ok if they use it, but don't alter the program. The question I have is on whose time was this being developed? Was he on contract? It appears the upper courts won't even hear the case. Usually I cheer for the underdog, but in this case the guy seems a little fishy. Maybe I just need more detail to make a conclusion (1) Comments 11-08-2005 - Adsense CTR boost What is CTR? It is click through rate. This is how online advertising usually makes a profit. Well, there is a way to boost your CTR. The idea is to use non-boring images. There is speculation as whether this hurts the advertising model or not. You be the judge. (1) Comments 11-02-2005 - Think your LCD Monitor is dead? Well, if your lap LCD is cracked you're still out of luck, but if your LCD monitor backlight is fading... then you have a chance of fixing it. (1) Comments 10-28-2005 - Purchase an acre on the moon Have you ever wanted to purchase land, but the prices were to high? Well, here is your chance. It seems that you can purchase land on the moon starting at $30. Dennis Hope found a loop hole in international law, that allowed him to claim and sell land on the moon. He didn't just stop there either. You can purchase land on Mars, Venus and Jupiters Moon - IO. I still can't believe that it's legal. (1) Comments 10-27-2005 - More on Warren Buffet I was reading about warren buffet not to long ago. The interesting thing I found was he doesn't offer free stock tips, but if you go to a message from Warren Buffet on the main webpage of berkshirehathaway then you will see him suggesting you to buy Geico insurance to save money. This made me laugh cause Berkshire Hathaway is the company he owns and Geico is an insurance company that Warren Buffet has had involvement with for many years. As far back as 1943. (0) Comments 10-27-2005 - Search Engine Results Have you ever wondered what the top searches on search engines are? Well, I did. Google has a webpage dedicated to this questions. It's called Zeitgeist. They do the breakdown into different categories. They even have a history that you can look up old statistics. On a side note I thought I'd check out alexa to see the top 100 list. How did the IP address 202.108.11.168 make it to #60? My only guess is spam. If you go there now you get an error 404. I tried checking the cache at google. It appears it's just the default page for an apache webserver installation. Anyhow it brings me back to the theory of spam. (1) Comments 10-23-2005 - A good overview on patents I found this patent article to be very good. I think it does a good job on overall view on what is currently happening with intellectual property. It also stresses the point that people don't just file patents just to sue other people or liscense, but to protect themselves as well. I recommend you read it if you are interested in starting your own business in the technicial world. When a I find a good write up on how to file your own patent I'll be sure to post it. (1) Comments 10-21-2005 - How to verify an online scam How do you verify an online scam? Try snopes.com. They seems to be getting smarter by changing the text a little each time so that snopes can't catalog it as easy. A good rule of thumb on the internet is if it's too good to be true, then it probably is. (1) Comments 10-20-2005 - Dowsing / Paranormal I was approached recently about an electrical dowsing rod system. I was quite skeptical at first. I hooked the equipment up to an oscilloscope to meause what the equipment did. The amplitude knob didn't seem to do anything to the wave. After a bit of reading and research I came to the conclusion that there still is a possibility that some dowsing might be somewhat real. I say this because it's been around a long time and that there had to have been a couple event is history that it worked, but couldn't be explained. To what extent, I can't be sure. While digging around I came across the James Randi Educational Foundation. It appears there is a million dollar prize to whoever can show evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. It started with him putting up a $1000 of his own money in 1964 and it grew to $1,000,000. For $1000 you can dine with him on Friday, January 27th, 2005. If you haven't seen the Nova Episode with him, then I suggest you do so. It's very insightful. (0) Comments 10-18-2005 - Water as Fuel? Years ago I heard something about a catalyst for water that would make it combustible. It appears there is a James Robey's Water Fuel Museum in Lexington. Someone recently wrote an article about it. I speculate on how valid the concept is, but it's something that I definietly to take a look at when I'm in that area. Along similiar lines by word of mouth I heard about people converting their diesel car to run vegitable oil. I was told the conversion is fairly simple and that Mcdonalds throws out old grease every night. (1) Comments 10-14-2005 - 419 Scams In my search for truth about Phishers I came across 419 scams. I think we have all received an email about someone in Nigeria needing help to transfer funds from their country to the US. From what I have read it is named 419 because of the Nigerian law that it relates to. If you have been taken, don't expect any money returned. I think I read 1000's have been investigated. Only 17 have been convicted. I remember hearing about someone who tried reversing the role by have the scammer paint a red circle on their chest and send pictures back. I think he took the stance that it was a religious symbol. To the life of me I can't find the website that actually had the pictures. What I did find was an interview with the guy that did it. I found it hilarious when it was said DC: They found the website. He wrote me as Mrs. Abacha, saying, "I can't believe you've posted out correspondence on the website, you've broken my heart." When "she" wrote this, I wrote back and blamed it on my houseboy Kwan, saying he was mad at me and he's trying to ruin my name. "Mrs. Abacha" wrote back saying, "I forgive you, do you still love me? I love you!" (0) Comments 10-14-2005 - Crazy Newspaper Clipping I had this newspaper clipping sent in from nPawn over at Evolving Worlds. I hope this lady isn't for real. Who in their right mind would suspect their child of doing drugs from licking toads? (0) Comments 10-14-2005 - Newsletter for Mall23 I have posted a writeup for the newsletter plug-in for Mall23. Check it out if you like. Hopefully I gave enough detail on the writeup. (0) Comments 10-14-2005 - iWestDev Changes There are a couple changes I have made around here. The biggest is you can now leave comments on what I post. The great part is that for now you don't have to register or anything. Just click on the comments link to see everyone else's and add your own. I thought I would try to be a little different and see how well it works. Or at least til someone takes advantage of it. I guess we can only wait and see. (0) Comments 10-13-2005 - Phishing Scams A couple days ago a lady I work with was victim to a phishing scam. They cleaned out her bank account. It was hard to hear the tears in her voice. Since then I decided to read more about phishing scams. The Honey Net Project appears to be one of the best resources to explain how they work. They do a great job explaining phishing techniques. In a detailed analysis, Redhat Linux 7.3 seems to be a hot target. Last year I had a beater server used to host iwestdev. I really didn't maintain anything. It was compromised. From what I could gather it was through a brute force attack. Something to do with buffer overflows. They tried using it as a relay for some e-bay phishing scam. There was a foreign character set installed. I think something like cana. I traced the IP address back to Japan. In the end I just copied my 4 webpages, 2 graphics and formatted the machine with Debian. Since then, being consistent with the 'apt-get update' command keeps things more secure. I wish it was easier to track people down that do phishing scams. (0) Comments 10-13-2005 - More Frvade Level 35 and 36 It appears the BeDark had posted help for level 35 and level 36. I quit playing Frvade a week or so ago, but I keep getting questions on it so here is a reference for you. (0) Comments 10-12-2005 - Blogging and First Amendment It appears that the Free Flow of Information Act of 2005 is in the news lately. There is talk about how blogging will not be protected. I had always thought that the First Amendment protected all freedoms of speech. In my pursuit for more answers I found a timeline of the first amendment. It is very informative. It talks about the origination with the Magna Carta to the case of Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. I remember it being the case about the gay scout master. I tried finding where the limitations of the first amendment was pushed. Looking through it though it seems that most cases fall into retaining the freedom of speech. Slander, Libel and Defamation of charater seems to be laws that push the limits of the first amendment. On a side note... I once was told that the best defence again slander is the truth. As funny as it sounded to me, according to Wikipedia there is more to it. Here it is! The case that might protect bloggers. Gertz v. Robert_Welch. The Supreme Court ruled that a plaintiff could not win a libel suit when the statement(s) in question were of opinion rather than fact (0) Comments 10-12-2005 - Just when you think no one is watching Over the past couple days I've really been amazed. You say over what? I've had a couple phone calls in reference to my website. Joe Cronin over at Mailwise called to thank me for what I wrote about Mailwise. Mailwise provides a spam filter service. Also, Chris over at Digit Networks called to ask me if I could add a comments feature on my blog. Digit Networks sells phone equipment for Asterisk, the open source PBX. Then to top it all off, Bob over at Web Pro Solutions gave me my first donation of $20. Bob was refered to me recently, due to him having problems with some PHP code. I told him I'd take a look at it. It didn't take long to fix and I felt compelled not to charge him. In the end he still clicked the donate button. I just wanted to say thank you. I really didn't think anyone was reading my site... and to make things even sillier... I started my blog just to archive what I found interesting, cause for some reason book marks bug me. (0) Comments 10-11-2005 - A great copyright reference Alfred Hitchcock's movie Charade just went into public domain. This sparked my interest in copyright law once again. Ever since my Acquire for GBA project I've taken an interest in copyright. While looking around to find more on the internet I came across a great reference on copyright. In the past I had heard about someone using NASA images to create T-Shirts, but I didn't know the reference of the law they were under. This article talks about Works by the U.S. Government cannot be copyrighted. It also references a case I had also heard about, years ago, with Mad Magazine in reference to Parody. Obviously, you should probably talk to a lawyer if you are in need of legal advice, but it still makes for a great reference. (0) Comments 10-10-2005 - More On Zombie Computers A while back I wrote about Prolexic. It's a company that specializes in protecting against Denial of Service attacks. There is an article posted about what happened to Ivan of Russian (0) Comments 10-06-2005 - PostgreSQL Support Recently I found a company that seems to give training and support for PostgreSQL. Of all places, it was in the Google Advertisements on my website. Typically I am supposed to not say anything about the ads, but I was so impressed with how professional they seem I had to mention it. I will post more about the company when I use them in the future. A quick note about advertising. Despite articles that talk about tons of money being made from blogging... It is a far shot. A good analogy is to multi-level-marketing. I think it is less then 0.5% of the people involved make enough to quit their day jobs. (0) Comments 10-06-2005 - Funny Nerd Joke Dean at Mall23 sent me this funny phrase about microsoft. To ease the pain of clicking the link: Microsoft Windows: A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition (0) Comments 10-05-2005 - Spam Stock Tips I found it interesting that this guy would track spam stock and see how much money they would make or lose if they purchased them. After looking at his test run, I still stick to thinking spam is the worst form of information and news. (0) Comments 10-05-2005 - Sun Eyes PostgreSQL It seems that Sun is looking at PostgreSQL as an option for databases. I originally started using PostgreSQL 3 years ago, cause MySQL did not support some of the functionality that I wanted. I think MySQL supports it now, but it is 3 years later. I've heard that MySQL SELECT is close to what Microsofts SEQUEL server would do, but the INSERTS are painfully slow. It looks like I needs to run a test of my own and post the results. (0) Comments 10-05-2005 - Frvade 16-25 at czarism blog Czarism has posted solutions for levels 16-25. It looks like he is creating an archive of all the levels. It seems that this Bedark guy has completed the game and also has information on finishing it. He mentions that they are changing some of the answers and also adding levels. (0) Comments 10-03-2005 - Top 400 Rich List Forbes has a Top 400 Richest Americans List. Just at a glimpse the Wal-Mart fortune is split beteween 5 people. Something that strikes me as odd is that the Mars Candy company fortune is big enough to be split between 3 people and still make the top 25. (0) Comments 09-29-2005 - More on Frvade This Frvade game is semi-addicting yet irritating. After getting stuck on the level 5 I decided to turn to the internet for answers. This Czarism guy seems to have levels 1-5 and 6-10 posted on his blog site. After finding out the answer to #5, yeah the picture of Wesley Snipes, back to the answer... balance.htm. I was not quite sure how it came together. The pictures name is 69screen.jpg. You could take it as a ying-yang for balance, but I am not 100% sure. After taking the cheats for a couple more and trying #7 for a couple hours I decided to turn to the Czarism again. What the? how do you get orange/rice.htm? What I do know is that they are altering some of the programming on the website, cause before you could just click the links on the Czarism site, but now it tells you it is unavailable if you click the link. If you type the url in yourself then you're fine. Digg had some comments before it got taken down. I have looked through my history to provide you with a link to level 22. I did a bit of searching on this, but could quite figure it out. Silly enough I did a search on the images on google to identify the bird. Then I realized that the image name is oriole.jpg. Duh!! If you view the source then you get a poem that is named Ulysses by Lord Alfred Tennyson. I tried seeing if there might have been a name of a poem that he also wrote that contained an oriole in it, but I came up empty handed. I also found this forum that had a ton of help on it. Good luck (0) Comments 09-28-2005 - The fruit doesnt get any cakier Have you ever head of Archimedes Plutonium? Well if you haven't then definitely click on the link I provided for your viewing pleasure. Here is just a small segment sample: Plutonium was long observed on the campus of Dartmouth College, where he rode around on a bicycle and wore an orange hunting hat and a homemade cape decorated with atomic symbols in Magic Marker. (0) Comments 09-28-2005 - Search Engines I went to Alexa recently to lookup internet traffic details on a website I forget now. Anyhow, they had an article on the main page about Tenatious Google Bomb. I also checked out Wikipedia to see what they had on it. The interesting thing is that if you go to Google and search for Failure... George Bushs Biography shows up as #1 and Michael Moore shows up as #2. It appears this isn't the first time something like this has happend. (0) Comments 09-26-2005 - An odd online game Frvade is an odd online game. For instance the first screen has a gif image that if you wait long enough it tells you to change the URL. So you go and change the url to screen2.htm. Somewhere around level 3 or 4 you need to go online and lookup information on brail.. in reference to dominos. From what I've read there was another game like this a year ago or so named Not Pron. Very few people have solved Not pron and none has solved the Frvade game. I've seen postings as high as level 71 on Frvade. This leads me to the conclusion that there could be at least 100 levels on this game. (0) Comments 09-23-2005 - A new tool for lawyers Legal Metric is a company that give you the information you need to help win court cases. It gives you data on the history of how a specific judge has ruled in the past. It has other tools as well, but since I'm not a lawyer... I didn't fully understand all of them. (0) Comments 09-22-2005 - Advertising at its finest I thought I had seen it all... and then I read this. It's about a guy who started some internet company and wasn't quite sure how he was going to advertise with almost no money. (0) Comments 09-19-2005 - PSP Knock Off From what I've heard, someone created a knockoff of the PSP called the POP. Rumor has it that it was sent out from one of those scams where you refer your friends to signup with some spam service and try to get them to buy something. Here is a link to the video that shows you all the cheap functionality of it. (0) Comments 09-16-2005 - Bill Gates and Napoleon Dynamite This is a funny clip with Bill Gates and Napoleon Dynamite. I don't know how someone snuck a camera in and recorded it, but they did. I've heard that it isn't going to be released to the public until the end of November. (0) Comments 09-15-2005 - Patents and who the losers are This article talk about patents. It goes into detail about the bio-medical industry. Typically you would think that all information funded by the government is public domain. It appears this is not always the case. (0) Comments 09-14-2005 - DNS Arctecture Problem I came across this video clip this morning. To sum it up... Microsoft make a mistake a couple years ago. They changed the Time to Live entry for their main domain to 2 hours instead of a day or week. This put a huge load on the Root DNS servers. There are only 13 root servers currently. The theory is to send a bot attack on the Root DNS servers for a full day. Then the DNS cache would expire for most websites and it would bring the while internet down. Personally I think they could just filter the packets at the firewalls or even routers to help prevent the effects of the attack. (0) Comments 09-13-2005 - Thinking outside the box This article really caught me off guard. They record the sound of what a keyboard makes when being typed on. Then they take the sounds and run an analysis on it. Supposedly it's 96% effective. With passwords it was a little different, but they still came up with a list of passwords it could possibly be. A very impressive read. (0) Comments 09-11-2005 - Security Article Slashdot posted this article recently and I was so impressed with it that I decided to post it on my website also. Even though I've been in the computer scene for 10+ years I still found somethings that I have never heard of or thought about. (0) Comments 09-08-2005 - Religion and New Orleans In the Bible it talks about the last days and how there will be more frequent occurances of natural disasters. Other things like plagues and wars and rumors of wars is mentioned, but that's not where I'm headed on this. Typically you would think that god will destroy a city when it gets too evil. Marty Grass happens in New Orleans every year and I theoretically thought this might be the reason. I think I'm wrong now. I have heard that New Orleans murder rate is 8 time more then the national average. Once again I am wrong. According to this news report it's 10 times the national average... and increasing. The article was written on Aug. 18, 2005. Hurricane Katrina hit new Orleans on August 29, 2005. So roughly a week apart. (0) Comments 09-06-2005 - Nintendo vs PSP I wouldn't have believed it. Today I found this webpage that displays the sales of DS units to PSP units. Sure, you can't believe everything you read on the internet, but it definitely looks valid. (0) Comments 09-04-2005 - Patent Searching With patent and intellectual property infringement on the rise, you need to protect yourself. I came across this government website that lets you look up patents issued. I tried using it and it looks like it will take some gettng used to. (0) Comments 09-04-2005 - Lexmark Tries Again Earlier this year I read about how Lexmark was trying hide behind the DMCA to prevent competetion from manufacturing print cartridges for Lexmark printers. From my understanding Lexmark lost. Now they are taking things from a different angle. They are putting writing on the packages of their ink cartridges that are recycled. Read here for info. I have mixed feeling on these business practices. I can understand how a company would want to protect itself. If you take Atari for instance. The old Atari is no longer in business cause they couldn't control the manufacturing of cartridges for the 2600. Quick note: The name Atari was purchased by InfroGrams so that they could use it. Back to my thought, companies need to protect themselves. On the otherside of the coin, it's the consumers that lose in these hazy monopolies. I say this since there is no direct competetion to keep the prices down. I can see how indirect competetion might do it though. You see this with Nintendo and Sony lately. Both companies try to control the markets they've created with their consoles. Nintendo seems to be loosing it's share. Not to mention Microsoft is sure trying to widdle in with the X-box... soon to be 360. It's cases like the Lexmark's ones that need to be tried because until then it was a grey area. I tried asking around earlier this year about companies hiding behind copyright law to prevent other people manfacturing their own cartridges/CDs for any given console. No one wanted to test this ground, but no one really knew what the outcome would be also. There were similiar case such as one with Sega where they embeded copyright text in the cartridges to prevent people from manufacturing their own. Anyhow, it seems were getting closer and closer on what is legal and not. (0) Comments 08-31-2005 - Currency Conversion Investment I went to dinner at my parents on Sunday. I overheard my brother-in-laws talking a little bit about currency conversion. I've also read things about China wanting to become a world economic power. I was a bit curious about currency conversion rates between the US china. I found this XE Universal Currency Convertor on the internet. So I decided to put it to the test. XE allows you to check the history of currencies. I did a lookup of all US conversion and found the China Entry from a year ago CNY China Yuan Renminbi 8.2816 Then I found the current rate 1.00 USD United States Dollars = 8.09980 CNY China Yuan Renminbi After doing the math, the profit you could have made from the conversion is 2.24% in a year. I came to the conclusion that there has to be something to invest my retirement in that has a better return then 2.24%. (0) Comments 08-29-2005 - What a great sign It's pictures like this that definitely make me laugh. When someone is pan handling for money it sure makes a difference if you're unique about it. I don't want to spoil it, but Darth Vader spoofs really are the greatest. (0) Comments 08-26-2005 - Flipcode It appears that flipcode.com has closed it's doors. This really caught me off guard since I personally ranked it as probably #3 for game programming resources. #1 - gamedev.net #2 - gbadev.org #3 - flipcode.com #50 - gamasutra.com I use to visit Gamasutra.com a while back. I really liked the articles, but when they started forcing you to register to read the articles I was turned off by it. So, I never went back. (0) Comments 08-24-2005 - Online Machine Shop I came across this online machine shop recently. They seem to provide some really cool services. Injection Molding, Milling and Laser Cutting are just some of the services provided. It's seems the pricing could be competetive, but only in large quantities. This site is a must to keep bookmarked. (0) Comments 08-22-2005 - Patent Reform I just about an new patent reform. It seems the first main highlight is Changes the current "first to invent" standard to "first to file," which means patent rights go to the first inventor to file for a patent who can provide sufficient evidence for a claimed invention (ยง3). I think this is weak if you ask me. What stop someone from just registering everything they can think of without physically inventing anything? I think this is called squatting. It'll be interesting to see how this balances out. (0) Comments 08-22-2005 - Base 64 Encoder/Decoder Someone at my office received an email with an important document attached. For some reason it couldn't be opened. It appeared that the attachment had been converted to base 64. So I chopped the email down to the attachment in my favorite text editor. Then I uploaded the file to this base 64 encoder/decoder site. It seemed to work perfect, but it sure was something your basic user wouldn't understand. I found more information here on base 64 and MIME (0) Comments 08-22-2005 - Phone Finder Ever get a call from someone and wonder where they were calling from? With this free website service you can reverse lookup a phone number to find the carrier (city and state) that controls the number. (0) Comments 08-22-2005 - MD5 Hash Cracker I would have never believed it until I saw it. Let me fill you in on what MD5 is. From my understanding it's a hash that you can't find the original key used to create it. It's the base for a lot of encryption. It appears someone is databasing all Key and Hash values. This way you can enter a hash and find out what the key is. I took it for a test spin and seemed to get good results on simple words. On more complicated words and phrases, it seems to come back unknown. (0) Comments 08-16-2005 - Natural Language Translator I was snooping around the internet to see if I could find what types of open source translators there are. Then I came across this link. From what I can tell babelfish and googles translate services use the similiar base libraries. I found this quite interesting and thought I'd share it with all of you in internet land. (0) Comments 07-20-2005 - USB oops It appears the reason that it took 9 minutes to copy the 532Megs was because I hadn't updated the driver to USB 2.0. It was still at USB 1.1 which transfers data at a rate of 12 Mbps. No wonder it was so slow. Well, I updated the driver and it definitely copied in less than a minute. (0) Comments 07-18-2005 - USB 2.0 versus Firewire Recent I purchased an enclosure for a 2.5" hard drive. I decided to test it out and try to copy an .iso image 532Megs in size. It took me about 9 minutes to make the copy. I had read how USB 2.0 speed is 480 Mbps and Firewire is 400 Mbps. Oddly enough I also remember hearing that firewire was faster then USB 2.0. Luckly I came across this article. It seems that firewire is faster, but it's because of it's arcitecture that make firewire faster. Considering that I need to be able to copy 15+ gigs of data on a regular basis the firewire solution seems more appealing. Only at a price though. You can get a USB 2.0 enclosure starting at $10, but the firewire enclosures start at $50. I guess you have to ask yourself if the speed is really worth the price? (0) Comments 07-14-2005 - Advertising and Disney I was reading this marketing article and came across something about disney I did not know. The article says "Disney is one of the most successful brand builders of all time". Which make me understand one step closer of why they would fight tooth and nail the keep/extend the copyright. (0) Comments 07-13-2005 - WayBackMachine Lawsuit Roughly 3 months ago I posted something about a Way Back Machine that let's you see the history of webpages. Well, someone is trying to sue the company. It has something to do with the robots.txt file telling the search engines not to crawl. I guess we find out if robots.txt is legally binding or not. (0) Comments 07-13-2005 - A fun video to watch Someone I work with sent this link to me. I found it quite amusing. I don't want to ruin everything, but I did like the part where he pulled a hat out of a rabbit. One part I found very interesting is that I'm not quite sure what country it came from. The squarish text on the webpage and the 3-letters in the upper left corner of the video still didn't help me much. (0) Comments 07-12-2005 - SGADE new release I used the SGADE to program Acquire GBA. It looks like there is a new release located here. The documentation can be located here as well. Currently, I'm interested in seeing what new features are added. The only things I remember it missing was some sound functions and multiboot. Other then that it seemed rather complete. I can understand how multiboot would have been something a lot of people wouldn't use. I do want to point out that the graphics library seemed rather complete. I only had one problem at all and that was with a graphics routine, but when I realized that I needed to manage my display memory in a different way... then it fixed itself. I do say this is probably one of the best, if not the best, GameBoy Advance libraries out there. (0) Comments 06-29-2005 - Email and spam bots Who hates spam? Well, I came across this simple, simple demo page on how to hide your email address from spam bots, but also be able to show it normal to users. I haven't fully pulled it apart yet, but it seems interesting since it uses javascript. (0) Comments 06-20-2005 - Declining Tech Jobs I found this article moments ago. I'm am a bit concerned about it because I'm in a tech/programming position. For those of you who are also I recommend on reading the article as well. I know for me I went through some tough times. Some of my other friends went through tough times also. There seems to be a lot of .NET jobs posted. I was told once that there will always be a demand for technical people. It's just what you will be doing is a different story. (0) Comments 06-16-2005 - Site Ranking Article I came across this article recently. It explain a little bit about how Google is cracking down on spam. The article gives you suggestions of what to be aware of if you are cutting corners to make your ranking higher. (0) Comments 06-15-2005 - Can Darth Vader read your mind? NPawn sent this to me. To sum it up... you think of an object... then Darth Vader asks you a bunch of questions and tries guessing what it is. It was rather enjoyable to play. I think it learns from every interaction to make it more successful the next time that specific item comes up. (0) Comments 06-10-2005 - How to get a publishing deal After writing Acquire GBA I discovered that getting a publishing deal isn't as easy as I thought it would be. I thought any publisher would be crazy for not taking a fully finished product. Here's an article explaining in a little more detail of how the game industry operates. A chart displaying your chances of getting a publishing deal. His data seems to be a little rough, but I checked his resume out and he seems to have the experience to back up what he says. (0) Comments 06-09-2005 - Rakkar Network Engine It seems that there is a network engine gaining popularity. Check it out here. It appears to have all the bells and whistles. Plus it freely available. It's about time someone did this. I suspected the industry needed this 10 years ago, but I just couldn't seem to finish mine :(. (0) Comments 06-07-2005 - Recent Cold Fushion I've always been interested in cold fushion. It seems that some researchers in Calfornia might have done it finally. Check this article out. (0) Comments 06-05-2005 - Replicating Robot If you watch Stargate SG-1 then you might be familiar with the replicators. Maybe Star Trek replicators is more like it. Well, I came across this article that talks about a soon to be fair inexpensive replicating machine. I'd actually be interested in purchasing one... if they ever make it to market. Check this article out to learn more. (0) Comments 05-26-2005 - More Disney Copyright I've always been a firm believer in what goes around comes around. It appears that Walt Disney ran into copyright issues early on in his career. I came across this article that talks about Walt Disney's loss of Oswald the Rabbit, but inspired him to do Mickey Mouse. I can kind of see now why people will fight tooth and nail for a copyright. (0) Comments 05-18-2005 - Mr. T Trivia I would have never guessed it until I read it, but Mr. T got his start on Sesame Street as Mr. Doo Doo the Clown. Check out this link if you don't believe me. (0) Comments 05-17-2005 - Acquire GBA writeup After extensively trying to get the Acquire game I programmed for the GBA... I decided to write an article on it. I explain the hurdles of trying to get a game published after the game is programmed. (0) Comments 05-06-2005 - Spam Solution For sometime I had been looking for a really good anti-spam solution. Since there are over 100 email accounts that needed to be filtered for spam... no desktop software solution would work as good as a server side solution. I found Mailwise to be a good solution. All we had to do is send them our email and they send it back to us filtered. It took less then a day to setup. No setting up of new software or equipment was needed. We still have false positives from time to time, but Mailwise's interface makes it really easy to manage all the email. (0) Comments 05-05-2005 - Printed Circuit Boards I'm always looking for companies that can fit my circuit board needs. I came accross Pad2Pad a couple days ago. The process seems really simplified. The only downside was their prices seemed a little high. I haven't used the service yet, but I will soon. I'll definitely let all of you readers out there know what my experience is like. (0) Comments 05-05-2005 - Denial of Service Help From time to time I've heard about DOS and DDOS attacks, but I've never experienced once. Recently I stumbled onto this article about a Denial service attack and extortion. It's a great read if you have the time. Anyhow, some of the people went into business afterwards and create the company Prolexic. I'm convinced that it's the best solution out there if you're ever under a denial of service attack. (0) Comments 05-03-2005 - Interesting point of view on Copyrights My interest was turned towards Copyright Laws after someone mentioned to me about how Mikey Mouse's Copyright was about to expire. I read this article relating to the subject. I found a Tomas Jefferson quote in the article very interesting. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. What a strong statement. If you find that interesting then you must read this on wikipedia. It mentions "Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever", but that since she was "informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution", Congress might consider Jack Valenti's proposal of a copyright term of "forever less one day". From what I've read, Copyrights have been extended many times. At one point, it was only 14 years after the death of the author. I'm still a bit curious of what event in Tomas Jefferson's life led him to this conclusion. Whatever the case, it is thought provoking. (0) Comments 05-02-2005 - How to Speed up a Database I ran into a performance issue with the database PostgreSQL. I found it such an interesting conclusion after trying so many things found on the internet that I decided to make a full article about it. (0) Comments 04-25-2005 - Way Back Machine Have you ever gone looking for a webpage and then found out that the server is down? down for good? Then this Way Back Machine is for you. You can see what webpages are posted at certain given points in time. (0) Comments 04-23-2005 - Game Park Portable This has got to be the coolest portable game unit ever. At $200 it's feasible to buy one someday. With classics like C64, NES, SNES and some I've never heard of... it definielty gives all the other hand helds a run for their money. The downside is that you'll probably never see it on the shelf at a store. (0) Comments 04-22-2005 - Backup System For a while now I've been trying to find a good backup system at a fairly inexpensive price. We've had non-stop problems with ArcServe on Novell for the past couple years. I started looking at something from Cybernetics called an IAppliance. Then I got the price quote... roughly $7,500. Ouch. Not just that... it just runs ArcServe. Then someone mentioned RSnapshot to me. It's a perl script based on rsync. As for command line setup, it was fairly easy. Then I ran into a problem. How do I backup remote machines? It would give me a password prompt when the backup would try to access a remote machine? After some digging around I found an article from O'reilly that explained quick logins with ssh client keys. Since the rsnapshot seems to run on linux... but it uses ssh to access remote machines... in theory if a Novell or Windows machine has SSH access with rsync then I could backup almost any machine. Hmmm. When thinking about it... the price of a backup tape on the IAppliance is roughly $150 and a new 200GB hard drive is about $150. I'm starting to think backup tape systems might become a thing of the past. Anyhow, it fits my purposes for now. (0) Comments 04-20-2005 - WiFiME Just recently this guy by the name of Aaron Rogers has somehow found a way to upload DS programs to you Gameboy DS over wifi with something called WiFiMe. I am way excited, but a little disappointed also. I say this cause I already ordered and received a couple days ago my PassMe card. He also seems to have a DS enviroment setup for any of you who are interested in programming for your Gameboy DS. (0) Comments 04-09-2005 - IO2Technology I've been watching IO2Technology closely for the past year. Their only product seems to be a Helio display. It displays images in the air without a backdrop. It has a laser detection type system that allows interfacing with your hand pointing and waving over the images. At a whopping $18,000 most of the public won't be purchasing one. It's going to be on display at the Next Fest in June. (0) Comments 04-06-2005 - First Entry Finally, the website is up. Man, I sure did take my time on this. Well, hopefully I don't have any other problems. After using different flavors of linux... such as Redhat... then Debian. I'm sold on Debian. The apt-get command makes life a ton easier. No more downloading and installing rpms. It also does most of the configuration for you. The only problem I had was setting up the email server with MailDir. After tons of reading, it all fell into place and started working. (0) Comments |
