Ramblings probably only important to myself. A scratch pad for ideas and projects that can be wherever I am (as long as I have net access).
Late last night, 27 days before its officially scheduled retail release, an allegedly complete version of Microsoft's upcoming first-person shooter Halo 2 was leaked to the Internet. The pirated release, said to be a PAL version of the game with French-language dialogue, is currently making its way around various Usenet newsgroups and peer-to-peer networks.
"Microsoft on Tuesday, October 12th published 10 software security advisories, warning Windows users and corporate administrators of 22 new flaws that affect the company's products."
The USB (Universal Serial Bus) is a peripheral communication port used on most modern computers. It was designed to replace the old 'legacy' communication ports like the RS232 port and Parallel port.
The primary advantages of the USB port are simplicity, size and the ability to supply a modest amount of power to remote peripherals. It's this ability to supply power that is so badly abused in this low grade project of incredible vulgarity.
MSN fighting Messenger difficulties from a virus Monday according to a CNET story. I know I couldn't access Messenger for hours on Monday morning...
I thought I'd better give FireFox a try. I've been a die-hard Opera fan for a couple of years now. It seems FireFox (through the use of "extensions") is gaining a similar feature set. It also seems to have sped up considerably over the last few months. When I tried it before it seemed bloated, slow, and fairly unfeatureful (if that's even a word).
I ran across the Hack-a-day website recently and it's full of interesting tidbits. I just hope they can keep the material fresh. They list neat things you can do with (somewhat) ordinary things you might already have around. There seems to be a tendency to want to make things do what they weren't designed to do (which can be cool). Check it out.
Check out WinPlosion. It's a neat little knock-off of OS X's Exposé. Basically it lets you (with a modest system) set hot spots in the corners of your desktop (or via hotkeys), that will instantly zoom out all your open windows into your desktop so you have a bird's eye view of them all. Then you can click on the one you want to use and it will pop back to regular size and have the current focus. It's very easy to get used to this. My description does their flash demo no justice though. Watch it and see what I mean.
I ran into an interesting problem at work today. I needed a way to neatly/easily run a VNC server on-demand with a different display that would be unique to the user without them needing to remember it. Rather than arbitrarily assigning display numbers, I thought I would try to do something based on the uid number.
The "id" command spits out output like this:
[sean@myhost]$ id
uid=500(sean) gid=500(sean) groups=500(sean)
What I'm interested in is the "500" from the "uid=500". The command I'm hoping to accomplish is something like this:
vncserver :4 -geometry 1024x768 &
so I came up with the following command that I tucked in a script:
id | awk '/uid/ {print "vncserver :"substr($1,7,1)+4," -geometry 1024x768 &"}' | bash
This takes the output of the id command, pipes it to awk where it takes the 7th character (all I'm interested in, we're a small shop) and adds 4 to it (for reasons I won't go into here, suffice to say it isn't required), plops it into the middle of a string, then pipes that string to bash which in turn executes it like a string.
So without the | bash on the end, it would simply print a valid vncserver command as I'd wanted, but it wouldn't execute it. This little exercise helped me get a little more familiar with substrings in awk and piping to bash which are both handy tricks
This is a good picture of Michael, McKenzie, and Maggie. This was taken the morning of McKenzie's first day of school. Does she look excited???
I'm also checking out Linux LiveCD Router for my dad's machine. Until I get the replacement power supply I'm stuff gathering things to test.
I'm trying out StatCounter to track web activity. Not sure if it's worth the effort but maybe I'll at least see if someone else is viewing my stuff.
If you have a decent graphics card and a broadband connection, you should check out NASA's World Wind 1.2. You can zoom from a planet view, to a neighborhood view with only your mouse wheel. You have quite a few different modes to view (aerial photo, Landsat, topographical, elevation mapping, etc). Very neat stuff. I looked up where I used to live in Kentucky and could navigate around town as if I was in an airplane.
It's a 250MB download and requires broadband. If you can, I highly recommend checking it out.
I thought I'd take a shot at building a firewall/router out of an old machine my dad had sitting around. It doesn't take much of a machine to do that.
Here's the hardware we've got for it:
An old Pentium Pro 200
a 3GB hard drive (that seems such an odd size)
128MB of ram (made from 4 32MB sticks!)
an old Toshiba CDROM
my old Farallon NIC (a forced purchase while living in Family Housing at UofO)
and a relatively new US Robotics Courier v.Everything v.90 56k modem
Unfortunately, the modem shipped with a dead power brick. Since the modem was made in '94, I suspect it wasn't really "new" but "like new". I bet they had a closet full of the boxes the modems came in and the modems themselves were probably pretty hands-off. They pulled them out of the box, plugged them in, and never touched them again. The guys selling them (from downsizing dial-up ISPs) probably dusted them off, blew them out, slid them back into the pristine boxes, and sold them on ebay.
Anyway, here's the plan. Try out a few Firewall/Router Linux distros.
I have the latest versions of: Mandrake MNF, SentryCD Firewall, Linuix, and IPCop
With any luck, one of them will work. I think the Mandrake one looks promising. It states a minimum requirement of a 300mhz machine which might be a problem. There's no need for a GUI interface on the actual machine. I hope to have it be completely remotely driven via html configuration (like a "regular" router). It seems to have the fanciest interface out of the four (although that's not necessarily important).
I'm looking at a week down-time waiting on the replacement power supply though. This might be a good time to install MythTV on my dad's other machine I'm working on. I expect this to go smoothly, but we'll see... that's another story altogether.
Links of interest:
Mandrake MNF
SentryCD Firewall
Linuix
IPCop
This blog is just a test to see if I find blogging to be useful. I would like a transportable scratch pad that I can jot notes into and have available to be wherever I go. My main homepage is pretty much my bookmarks list, so this can be my notepad. If I stick to it (and anyone besides me reads this) you'll find ramblings about my interests. Computers, learning more about Linux, Xboxes, movies, videogames, scouting (Cub Scouts currently), and general family activities (not necessarily in that order). If you read this blog, please leave me a note/comment to let me know. I have no idea if anyone else even uses my bookmarks...
--Sean
Visit my bookmark page.
